At Birds of a Feather, a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, a man wearing a mask brandished a gun in the crowded dining room and grabbed two phones and a watch from three men at a table near the front door. The perpetrators fled on a moped. The stickup took less than 40 seconds. It was one in a string of similar robberies in and around some of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan’s in-vogue establishments in the past month. In each case, the perpetrators have swiped luxury watches from diners, including a timepiece worth $100,000, reports the New York Times. Such crimes are unusual in affluent neighborhoods. They have received the kind of outrage that everyday crimes in New York’s poorer neighborhoods do not. The thefts have caused grousing that the city is slipping into lawlessness.
The robberies follow the same pattern: Two men, one carrying a gun, steal belongings from restaurant patrons before fleeing, often via moped or dirt bike. Marlow and Sons, an oyster bar, was hit in the early evening on May 31. A man approached a 38-year-old man and a 40-year-old man outside the restaurant with a gun and demanded their watches. He took a Rolex and an Audemars Piguet, worth $40,000 collectively, before fleeing on a “two-wheeled vehicle” with another person. About three weeks later, a similar heist was reported outside Carbone, an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. There, two men robbed a 39-year-old man of his $100,000 Patek Philippe watch at gunpoint. No. arrests have been made in any of the robberies. "We haven’t had crime like this penetrate the neighborhood in a very long time,” said Allyson Stone, a board member for the North Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, who attributed the trend to the area’s relative wealth. The median household income in two neighborhoods involved is nearly $100,000, about 27 percent higher than the citywide median. The crimes have put North Brooklyn on high alert.
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