Send in the Clowns.

[HTML1]

As armed robberies go, wearing a mask is kinda to be expected. Even dark glasses and a wig is considered passé. Walking in wearing clown outfits and brandishing guns – not so much. So when a high-end Denver jewelry store was held up by a couple of clowns, well let’s just say that things didn’t go the way the Bozos planned, and in the end, the yuks were on them.

Jewelry stores get robbed all the time, just like banks and other places that handle fungible items. Armed robberies are par for the course, as it were. So while getting held up probably didn’t come as a huge surprise to one Denver jeweler, the whole clown makeup thing was something of a shock. Fox 31 in Denver picks up the story from there:

The two robbers, who were both dressed in bizarre costumes and wearing white face paint, pointed guns at employees and customers while they cleared the cases of jewelry.

“They came in with their guns drawn,” says store owner Mark Allen.

Surveillance video tape shows the robbers cock their guns as they enter the store.

Their faces are covered with heavy white makeup and their lips are covered in black. One is wearing a scraggly black wig, the other a long blonde wig.

“It’s surreal … they came in with clown makeup on,” says Allen. “They were, like, in costume.”

The surveillance video also shows the robbers pointing their guns at the heads of three employees and two customers as they force them to lie on the ground behind one of the counters.

After making off with a large haul of baubles, bangles and bright shiny beads, it would appear that the jokers got away with it. After all, Denver Police are still looking for the provocatively painted perps. But as we mentioned in the lede, the jokes on the jokers. Seems that what they scored was pounds and pounds of fabulous fakes.

Sonny’s Rocks Jewelry Store, like most jewelry stores, no longer displays real jewelry, a change the store made when the price of precious metals and gems started going up a few years ago.

The clowns’ take?

They didn’t get any real diamonds. Instead, they made off with garbage bags of fake gold, platinum and cubic zirconium.

“It’s not real,” Allen says. “It’s totally worthless.”

Now of course, you can argue that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it’s only because the supply of diamonds worldwide is kept under tight controls that diamonds are even considered a ‘precious’ gemstone. Were that not true, diamonds would be both cheap and plentiful. For those that worry that by making off with fakes, the clowns (should they be aprehended) would get off on a lesser charge, the armed robbery charge should put them away long enough that they’ll be needing something more stable than some oversize clown shoes to shuffle down to their parole officer’s HQ.

No word yet, on if the clowns drove a Prius for their getaway. Of course, that would almost be redundant.