A brazen burglar busted into a 12th-floor jewelry manufacturer in Midtown early yesterday and made off with $1.5 million in jewelry, police said.
Cops said the thief, who may have had an accomplice, entered Epsilon Jewelry Corp. at 70 W. 40th St. through a rear window sometime between midnight and 6 a.m.
As the alarm went off, the suspect looted the company of about 1,000 pieces of jewelry before escaping, police said.
“The burglary was like something straight out of a movie,” said a detective on the scene, noting how the suspect slithered up a rear stairwell, climbed through a window and broke open a vault.
Cops said they don’t believe it was an inside job.
The 21-year-old company sells its wares directly to the public as well as through department stores and other retailers, police said.
The jewelry, which included earrings, rings and necklaces, was discovered missing when employees arrived for work yesterday morning.
The losses were still being inventoried yesterday and could exceed the preliminary $1.5 million.
Epsilon officials declined to comment on the burglary, but a security guard hired to keep watch at the company last night said “everybody here is in shock.”
“It’s crazy to think that this happened here,” said a building doorman
The burglary occurred just hours before cops unveiled a new strategy for fighting burglars, during a meeting at the Police Academy.
And it occurred just two days after a Tiffany ring was snatched from a Queens museum.
The ring, filched from a display case at the American Museum of the Moving Image on 35th Avenue in Astoria, was part of a collection of Robert De Niro clothing memorabilia worn in the 1992 film “Mistress.”
And just last week, cops arrested at least 22 people on charges of selling and buying stolen property after raiding a dozen Manhattan jewelry shops, including three in the famed Diamond District.