Police last week arrested a security guard who worked at the Los Angeles Lakers’ El Segundo headquarters in connection with the theft of two championship rings and more than $20,000 in gift certificates.
Eddie J. Monterroso, 23, an Inglewood resident, was arrested by El Segundo Police Department detectives as he left after working a night shift on morning of Dec. 10. Two days later, the District Attorney filed felony charges of grand theft and burglary against Monterroso, who’d worked a little less than a year for a third party security firm at the Lakers training facility on the 500 block of North Nash Street.
Police recovered the two rings — from the 2009 and 2010 championships — at Monterroso’s apartment in Inglewood.
ESPD Lt. Jaime Bermudez said fencing the rings must have proven difficult.
“Where was he going to unload these rings? Who is going to take two Laker rings not thinking they are stolen, from some guy on the street?” Bermudez said. “Luckily, we were able to recover them in his apartment.”
The rings are difficult to place a value on, Bermudez said, but the diamonds and gold alone are worth an estimated $5,000 to $7,000. The rings were stored in an executive’s office desk.
The suspect had already spent most of the gift certificates, which were redeemable as cash.
“He admitted he bought TVs, an iPad, I think he even bought an Xbox and some games,” Bermudez said. “He totally saw it as a shopping spree opportunity for himself.”
The rings were reported missing on Dec. 5, although Laker staff was unsure how long they’d been gone, which was one of the challenges in the investigation. But detectives, in an investigation led by ESPD Det. Glenn Delmendo, were able to identify the suspect by Dec. 9.
“We are not releasing how we found the suspect, but it wasn’t with video camera surveillance and not through an anonymous person that called us up,” Bermudez said. “They really did a great job of finding a way to i.d. this guy….Four days for something like this is fantastic. If we had waited a little longer, he would have succeeded in selling the rings — for a couple hundred bucks, someone would have bought them.”
The recovery of the rings received national attention. The Lakers organization, Bermudez said, was pleased that the small town police staff was able to move so quickly to resolve the case.
“I mean, we’ve got a bunch of detectives who are Laker fans — our whole detective division is Laker fans,” he said. “When we got the report, it was like, ‘We go to get on this.’ But we solve a lot of unnamed crimes a lot of times — this one happened to attract a lot of attention.”
