Posh neighborhood thieves somehow skirt Wellington gates, private security company

Article Courtesy of The Sun Sentinel

By MICHAEL LaFORGIA

Published April 20, 2009

WELLINGTON — Sure, the lawns are manicured, the exits are monitored and the renters, sniff, are supposed to be rigorously screened.

But lurking beneath the slick facade of privilege and tranquility at Olympia gated communities, an ugly circumstance confronted Anil Mistry last month.

The morning of March 25 had begun smoothly enough. Mistry, a district manager for a chain of hotels, left his house and strode toward his 2008 Cadillac Escalade only to be greeted by a peculiar sight.

His tires, and the 22-inch rims to which they had been firmly attached, were missing.

Stolen wheels!

This was something you expected, maybe, in crime-ridden warrens of big cities. Times, after all, were hard. But here? In Olympia?

That's right, say residents and homeowners' association officials. Even in Wellington's bastions of taste and exclusivity, in places with names like Stotesbury, Danforth and Treanor, the lousy economy is driving people to desperation.

Mistry was dumbstruck.

Hadn't he paid $387,000, two years ago, for this 2,700-square-foot house on Dupont Place? And didn't he shell out a handsome sum each year for the services of a crack private security company?

What was the meaning of this?

"You live in a gated community for a reason, hoping that everything would be A-O.K," Mistry concluded wistfully. "Obviously it's a sign of the times."

The general alarm grew after Mistry discovered another homeowner was similarly victimized on the same night, not two miles away.

Like Mistry, Mark Carmel, an immigration attorney, walked outside on March 25 and found his blue 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe propped on paving bricks, its wheels absent.

Mistry said a guard from Wackenhut, the security company hired by Olympia to patrol its 12 neighborhoods, stopped by his house after the Cadillac was plundered, more to commiserate than anything else.

"He said, 'Yeah, this sort of thing is happening more and more,' " Mistry recalled. "I had to walk away from him just so I wouldn't insult him."

Wackenhut officials declined to comment for this story.

Mistry and Carmel's prevailing theory was that bandits somehow breached the community's walls to target their wheels, which cost a combined $10,000 to replace.

But Lee Goldman, homeowner director of the Olympia Master Association, said a more likely explanation was the men fell prey to their own neighbors.

"A lot of the stuff that happens in many of these communities tends to be caused by residents in the community," Goldman said. "There is a very, very stringent rental lease agreement. A lot of people who are renting have done so illegally through the local villages."

Many renters, he added, circumvent mandatory background checks.

This results, he said, in cases such as Carmel's and Mistry's, which he compared to similar incidents last summer.

As for the community's security force, which mans the entrances day and night and deploys a 24-hour roving guard - whose movements are tracked by magnetic tags on light poles - Goldman said they do a fine job.

"You're talking about 25 miles of road," he said. "It's an awful lot of ground to cover with one person in a vehicle."

Mistry and Carmel weren't convinced. Mistry thought back to his two children, ages 6 and 8, who were "mortified" by the missing wheels.

"They were like, 'How does that happen, Daddy?' " Mistry said. "What do you say?"

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