AUDASE

An Armed Robber Finds an Easy Target Down Under the Plaza

By MICHAEL WILSON NY TIMES

No one at William Greenberg Desserts remembers seeing him come or go. Same with Billy’s Bakery and the Lady M Cake Boutique.

A waitress at the bistro Vin Sur Vingt didn’t even learn about what had happened here, one floor beneath the Plaza Hotel, until the next day. And three days after the fact, two servers at Olma Caviar Boutique and Bar said it was the first they were hearing of it.

These and some two dozen other purveyors of fine food are encamped in the Plaza Hotel Food Hall, a humming, high-end bazaar below street level at the historic building on Central Park South. Everything from a $410 dish of beluga caviar to the humble black-and-white cookie (if one allows for humbleness in a $3.50 black-and-white) can be found in this labyrinth — even another food hall within the food hall.

One outlet offers no food. It is that one that an armed robber quietly struck on Monday morning, committing a crime remarkable not only for its brazenness and ease, but also for its particular setting and circumstances, none of which was an accident.

The robber had done his research. At least twice in recent weeks, he had visited foreign currency exchanges, Lt. Marco Gonzalez of the Midtown North detective squad said on Friday as he stood in the food hall. Both times, Lieutenant Gonzalez said, the man had inquired about converting American dollars to euros. Both times, he had changed his mind and left empty-handed. And both times, he was facing a clerk standing behind a bulletproof-glass partition.

This time would be different.

It was about 11 a.m. on Monday when the suspect, tall, buttoned-up in a dark cardigan and wearing thick eyeglasses, entered the hotel through the door to the Oak Room, opposite the southern edge of Central Park and the clopping of passing horse-drawn carriages. He walked past a row of large photographs of celebrities — the Beatles, Sinatra, Marilyn — and descended the stairs to the food hall.

The robber then seems to have found a blind spot, undetected by the food hall’s video cameras, which detectives have examined. Did he eat? Unknown.

“We lose him for six minutes,” Lieutenant Gonzalez said.

The lunch rush was already starting at 11 a.m. Depending on his route, the robber may have strolled past a dozen or more booths and counters and sit-down nooks filling with tourists and hotel guests and office workers in suits.

“It’s busy then,” said Eva Haynes, a counter attendant at Greenberg’s, which is known for its black-and-whites. “You blend right in.”

After his six-minute sojourn through the hall, roughly the length of a city block, the robber arrived at the Travelex Currency Services office. It is unique in the Midtown Manhattan constellation of currency exchanges in a way that, for the robber, was perfect.

The Travelex office had no partition, bulletproof or otherwise. Just a desk, with a woman seated behind it. The man sat and asked for $500 in euros, and the woman opened a drawer and pulled out a box of cash in various currencies, including dollars. She had begun counting out euros when the robber pulled a pistol from an envelope he was carrying and demanded them all. She dropped them on the desk, and he scooped them, one-handed, into the envelope.

The woman screamed.

“Five guests are visible on the video, taking note,” Lieutenant Gonzalez said. The man calmly stood and walked past them, to an escalator where a security officer normally stands, riding up to a row of high-end shops — the jeweler Misahara, the perfumer Krigler — and beneath a chandelier and then walking out a revolving door onto West 58th Street, where he turned east, toward Fifth Avenue, and disappeared. He had opened the cardigan along the way, fanning it, exposing a dress shirt and necktie.

“Cool as a cucumber,” Lieutenant Gonzalez said. “There are aspects of the crime that are more organized than the act itself.” The police have distributed a picture of the suspect to other currency exchanges in the area, as well as to hotels where desk clerks keep small amounts of foreign cash on hand as a courtesy to guests.

The distance from the drawer of cash to the exit, and the sheer number of potential witnesses and heroes between the two, did not appear to give the man pause.

“No one in the area even noticed it until the police started showing up,” a clerk at Billy’s Bakery said. “They started, like, guarding the door.” By then, it was too late, and the man and 4,635 euros were gone.

“It didn’t stop the flow of traffic,” Ms. Haynes of Greenberg’s said. “People still buy cookies.”