Cannes jewel heist Stung: Lev Leviev and Petra Ecclestone. If the emails flooding into John Shaw's inbox are to be believed, there are plenty of people who know the whereabouts of the £90 million ($154 million) worth of jewellery stolen from the five-star Carlton hotel in Cannes three weeks ago. A loss adjuster contracted to Lloyd's of London, Shaw is overseeing their million-euro reward for anyone who can offer information that leads to the culprits; and since publishing an ad in the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday, he has been getting "hundreds" of responses. "About two-thirds are from fantasists, about a third vaguely credible, and possibly a handful have information that warrants further inquiry," says the Scotsman, who runs Paris loss-adjuster firm SW Associates. The former paratrooper started his loss-adjuster career 30 years ago, investigating bogus burglary claims in Glasgow's tough Gorbals district, but now specialises in high-end jewellery claims. It's a time-consuming process, and we have to find out what they know, while making it clear that nobody will get any money until the goods are produced. In recent weeks, it seems, quite a lot of new "goods" have come on to the market, most of them courtesy of heists that even a scriptwriter might find fanciful. The Cannes robbery, which targeted an exhibition being put on by the London billionaire Lev Leviev, was the biggest-ever jewel snatch carried out in France. Yet it was done in the space of a single minute, when an armed robber walked in off the street and encountered just three private security men, rather than the usual phalanxes of armed French police. And if that operation was a real-life version of Gone in 60 Seconds, a sting in London on the formula one heiress Petra Ecclestone appears to have been inspired by Borat, the fake Kazakh television reporter. Last week, it emerged that a conman pretending to be a "Kazakh millionaire" made off with nearly £500,000 of Ms Ecclestone's jewellery after posing as a buyer for her £32 million Belgravia home. The man, who arrived in a chauffeur-driven Bentley, apparently spoke with such a cod East European accent that some of his other victims, who include a string of wealthy Surrey home owners, have told police that he reminded them of Sacha Baron Cohen's comic character. Suspicion over the thefts has once again focused on the so-called "Pink Panthers," the elite gang of Balkan jewel thieves whom Interpol hold responsible for about 100 high-level jewel robberies since 1999, many of them on the French Riviera and in London. The group, whose tactics have included donning wigs to raid Harry Winston's jewellers in Paris, using a speedboat to escape a heist in St-Tropez and gassing shop assistants in Tokyo, is now the subject of a British-made documentary film, Smash & Grab. Yet one key aspect of their "trade" remains a mystery. What, exactly, happens to the "goods" afterwards? Do they end up alongside stolen Picassos in the private collections of supervillains? "Only in 1970s James Bond films," scoffs Shaw. Do they end up dangling from the tattooed limbs of nouveau riche Moscow "businessmen" and their molls? "Sometimes," he says, though not as much as before the economic crash of 2008. Or, strangest perhaps of all, might they end up adorning the rings, wristwatches and necklaces of well-heeled but law-abiding members of the public? The last, surprisingly, is a possibility, according to many diamond dealers, given the growing ease with which stolen diamonds can be recut, re-certificated and sold back on to the legitimate market. "The Ecclestone diamonds will probably be out of the country already, and will not be the diamonds they used to be," says Vashi Dominguez, founder of Diamond Manufacturers, a dealership based in London's Hatton Garden. The robbers usually have some contacts with disreputable members of the diamond trade, and the first thing they do is get a cutter to change both the size and shape of the stones. Most diamonds have a minute serial number inscribed on them for identification purposes, but that can easily be removed. Then, unfortunately, there is no way that any expert can trace the new stone, and it can make its way back on to the market. Hence it is that while diamonds may still be a girl's best friend, they are a villain's, too, easily disguised and infinitely portable. While £100 million in bank notes or gold bullion takes up several large bags, the same amount in diamonds can fit in a small bag, making it easy to transit through airports. In a world full of fake bling, few customs staff can recognise the real thing easily, especially if they are first reset in cheap rings and necklaces, and then distributed among several different "mules" for transit. And while gold prices have dropped in recent years, diamond prices have more than doubled. These days, all diamonds of any real value - say, £10,000 or greater - are "certified" by experts, partly to combat theft, and partly to stem the trade in "blood diamonds" that fuelled wars in West Africa in the 1990s. Each stone is evaluated according to the International Diamond Grading System, which records the "four Cs" - colour, clarity, cut and carat. In addition, a 12-digit serial number - likened to a tattoo - will be inscribed by laser around the diamond's outer edge. However, the same technology that is used to inscribe the serial number can also be used to erase it. "In half an hour, you can remove the number and inscribe 'You'll never find me!' on it, if you want," Dominguez says. The jewellery pieces stolen in the Cannes robbery, which include two diamond-encrusted rings and an art deco-style emerald-and-diamond necklace, may also be cannibalised for their constituent diamonds, which in turn may be cut into smaller, wedding-ring sized pieces. Who exactly does the illegal cutting, nobody knows. Or, at least, nobody says they know. The diamond trade is a close-knit, family-dominated profession, where reputation is everything. Master cutters enjoy near-celebrity status, their skills hugely in demand from monarchs and movie stars. As such, "very few of them need to take backhanders," Shaw says. However, reshaping an already hewn and polished gem can be managed by anyone with basic skills. The Pink Panthers are believed to have developed contacts in Antwerp, Europe's main diamond market. A dilemma, though, comes with gems such as the huge, heart-shaped diamond pendant that was also part of the Cannes haul. A diamond's value is directly proportional to its size, and splitting it into pieces will reduce its value by up to 70 per cent. The temptation, therefore, may be to simply recut it rather than break it up, but the relative lack of disguise will require buyers who do not ask too many questions. This, though, is where the trail goes cold. Dominguez, who, like many London dealers, has been approached a few times by "fences," points to Dubai, which, he says, is "full of crooks." Shaw says some of his case work points to French-speaking Algeria, where the Arab fondness for jewellery and colonial ties to France make it a conduit for goods stolen on the Riviera. The one man who might know is "Mr Green," a Serbian former soldier who fences the Pink Panthers' swag. He tells the makers of Smash & Grab: "My biggest clients were Americans ... I also received information that al-Qaeda purchased diamonds." In recent times, only one major stolen gem has been recovered, thanks to the Gemological Institute of America, a non-profit body that created the four-Cs system in the 1950s. The GIA, as it is known, is, in effect, the CIA of the diamond world. A few years ago, while examining a batch of diamonds that had made its way from Europe to Israel to a US buyer, the GIA discovered that they matched records of those stolen by the Panthers from the Graff jewellers in London's Bond Street in 2003. The biggest-ever jewel raid in Britain, it also gave birth to the gang's nickname, after detectives found a diamond hidden in a jar of face cream in a suspect's home - a tactic used in the original Pink Panther film starring Peter Sellers. Those caught in the Graff raid were later jailed. But under the GIA's confidentiality rules, all it will say about the vendor of the stolen diamonds is that they reached a "private settlement" with the buyer. Would Mr Shaw be willing to come to a similar arrangement with those who now have the Cannes heist diamonds, were they to reply to the Herald Tribune ad? Shaw insists he always works in tandem with the police, and will never offer any bounty unless they sanction it first. Besides, he suspects the Cannes robbers may have bitten off more than they can chew. I think they are probably a couple of local lads who are bricking themselves right now. It will be very hard for them to find a buyer for that big gemstone, too. It's red hot.