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Closing down: the jewellers that was once at the centre of an FBI investigation
Store raided by Martin Luther King’s assassin is set to shut up shop after 100 years
WHEN a gunman burst into a Paddington jewellers just before closing time in May 1968, the plucky owners could not have possibly imagined it would bring White House detectives to their front door.
The stick-up artist was none other than James Earl Ray – the FBI’s most wanted man, whose name would come to be forever enshrined in American folklore for assassinating the civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
As the Praed Street store shuts its doors after more than 100 years as a jewellers, a dusty archive in Washington is all that is left to remember the part Maurice and Billie Isaacs played in bringing down the world’s most notorious fugitive.
When a Trilby hatted man barks “gimme the money” and pulls out a revolver, you would be advised to acquiesce.
But Mr Isaacs had different ideas. He was not one to have a gun shoved in his face by anyone, no matter how infamous.
The adrenaline spurred him on – and ignoring Ray’s gruff demands, Maurice instead grabbed the gun and punched the man in the face. His wife came running from the back room to help the charge and knocked him off balance into a glass cabinet.
In the tussle, Maurice managed to sound the alarm, and it was enough to rattle the raincoat-clad assailant. As he reached the door he turned and levelled the pistol. The couple ducked but the man never fired. He vanished, sparking one of the biggest man hunts in history.
The next day, newspapers hailed the couple as “fearless heroes”, but there was no indication of the gunman’s identity. Billie’s daughter Valerie, who took over the reins at the store shortly after the incident, remembers the episode vividly.
“My parents were shaken up but they still went to work the next day,” she said proudly.
“What they did was really brave for a couple of 60-year-olds. Dad just thought ‘Bugger that for a game of soldiers’ and attacked him. He could have got himself killed. They had absolutely no idea who he was. It was the whole aftermath was most surreal.”
Surreal probably doesn’t come close – the next day police told the shell-shocked couple who the man was.
Two months after the bungled robbery, the fugitive was arrested getting on a plane at Heathrow Airport. So as not to hinder his extradition for the King assassination, police asked Mr and Mrs Isaacs not to press charges and they forgot all about it.
Ray confessed to the assassination in 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years behind bars.
And so it was that the Isaacs’s could stake a claim to helping bring down one of the most notorious men in history. They identified him, gave a clue to his whereabouts and complied in not bringing a prosecution that could have hindered his extradition.
Ten years later, just as the whole chapter had been forgotten and Mr and Mrs Isaacs had returned to normality – stringing pearls, engraving silver and mending watches – a convoy of limousines arrived outside the store. It was the “men in black” wanting to take them to Washington.
“It was then that my parents realised they were caught up in something much bigger,” said Valerie. “They were both interviewed and identified Ray for the second time. My parents knew about Martin Luther King but it turned out he was wanted for a much larger conspiracy. They were linking Ray to the murders of JFK and Robert Kennedy as well!”
The Isaacs never went to Washington but they were interviewed by an agent from the grandly named Select Committee on Assassinations of the of the US House of Representatives. The transcript from the interview still exists in a back room filing cabinet in Washington.
Since then Valerie gave the store a makeover, “pulling it from the Dickensian era,” as she described it. She and her son Gary kept the business ticking over as Paddington struggled to shake off its down-at-heel image.
But despite the promised makeover, and the Basin redevelopment, landlords have slowly succumbed to the lure of bland high-street restaurants.
It was this that sounded the death knell for Paddington Jewellers. They have been flooded with letters urging them to reconsider, but all that is left are empty cabinets and a few sorry-looking Paddington Bears strewn across the floor.
The Isaacs are moving online, with the store set to be replaced by a sandwich chain. Valerie said: “It’s very sad but we don’t want [this] to sound like an obituary. There’s been a jewellery shop on the site since the 19th century. The fact is, independent stores are no longer viable and don’t have the support.
“We will keep doing what we do. We just won’t be in Praed Street any more.”
• You can still get in touch for repairs, engraving etc at paddington.jewellers@tiscoli.co.uk |
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