Data show the number of restaurant burglaries in Los Angeles is up significantly from years prior. Joel Grover reports Sept. 21, 2023.
At 3:32 a.m. on a Friday, a gang of four masked thieves walked up to the locked front door of Jar restaurant on Beverly Boulevard and smashed it open with crowbars.
Once inside, they quickly found the restaurant's safe and tried to smash it open with those crowbars, but when they couldn't, they just stole the whole safe, with $2,000 inside.
Within hours, at least four other nearby restaurants were broken into and burglarized.
"They just come in, they smash open your cabinet. They have no regard for anything, no regard for anything that you work for," said Jar's owner Suzanne Tracht, one of America's most accomplished restauranteurs, once featured on the show "Top Chef." "It's scary, this needs to stop right away."
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Gangs of thieves are now targeting restaurants across the LA area, putting employees and sometimes customers at risk. Data show these restaurant burglaries are up significantly from previous years.
Home State Kitchen in Sherman Oaks has been hit by thieves seven times since last December, when they shattered the glass doors and stole the safe. Down the street, on just one night last April, five restaurants say they were hit, including Marmalade Cafe on Ventura Boulevard, where thieves broke in and first disabled the security cameras.
"The thieves were sophisticated enough that they cut all the wires to our security camera system so nothing would get recorded," said Marmalade owner Selywn Yosslowitz.
Yosslowitz owns seven branches of Marmalade Cafe, and three of them have been burglarized this year.
"There's definitely a deterioration of law and order in this city," Yosslowitz told NBC4.
The I-Team examined LAPD crime data and found that burglaries at restaurants citywide are up 103% in 2023, compared to 2019 year to date.
The gangs of thieves are hitting both well-known restaurants and also small mom-and-pop places, like Fu's Palace on Pico Boulevard, where burglars broke in last month and stole $5,000 from the office.
"That's a lot of money for a small restaurant like ours. We've been at the same location 28 years and this hasn't happened," said owner Margaret Fu.
Most of the crooks target restaurants in the middle of the night, but that wasn't the case on two occasions at legendary Casa Vega in Sherman Oaks, which has been hit by crooks 10 times in the last three years.
Owner Christy Vega says two of those incidents involved thieves breaking into customers' cars to steal items while they were eating a few feet away.
"It happened at 7 p.m. and we had our valet parkers running after them [the thieves]," Vega told the I-Team.
Vega now pays $100,000 a year to employ an armed guard outside her restaurant during business hours.
And at Jar restaurant, owner Tracht now arms her employees with pepper spray, in case they encounter someone suspicious leaving the establishment.
"The city is looking the other way and pretending this isn't happening," Vega said.
Restaurant owners like Vega want to see the LAPD do more to protect them, perhaps forming a task force to combat restaurant crimes the same way they did with the recent spate of retail store smash-and-grab robberies.
In fact, some at the LAPD wonder if the gangs targeting restaurants are the same ones targeting retail stores.
"The brazenness with which they're breaking the law in this manner has some similarities," said LAPD Commander Gisselle Espinoza, of the Valley Bureau.
While there is no dedicated task force yet focusing on the rise in restaurant burglaries, Espinoza told NBC4 the cops are sharing information about these break-ins to their divisions across the city.
But she says the LAPD needs more officers to tackle these crimes.
"That will increase our presence ... it will increase the hours that we can put into making sure we're conducting our job the way that we should," Espinoza said.
She also added that when the LAPD catches these crooks, prosecutors need to go tough on them.
"When they [the suspects] go through the judicial process and they are prosecuted and sentenced, I believe that people should serve their minimum sentencing. I don't believe that we're seeing that," Espinoza told the I-Team.
Some restaurant owners agree that the justice system needs to get a lot tougher on thieves who target businesses like restaurant and retail stores.
"Even if they get caught, they don't always go to jail, or they get out the next day," said Jar owner Tracht.
With restaurant burglaries on the rise, many establishments are no longer accepting cash from customers, like Home State and Casa Vega in Sherman Oaks.
"It just makes us less of a target. That's really the number one reason for going cashless," Vega told the I-Team.
