Thieves Tunneled Through Three Layers of Brick Into Adams Morgan’s Le Liquor and Took More Than $100,000 in Gold

Someone spent the night of August 20, 2024, opening a hole through three layers of brick between a vacant restaurant and Le Liquor at 1776 Columbia Road NW in Adams Morgan. Owner Tam Le, who has run the shop since about 2014 after earlier years under the Lee Jewelry name, said the crew ignored the bottles and went straight for the gold. The AEGIS Alliance left this file open because Metropolitan Police circulated a masked figure on camera and then went quiet. Two years later the quiet is still the story.

Le put the loss above $100,000 in gold and watches. The Washington Post cited a police figure closer to $86,000. FOX 5 DC and NBC4 Washington aired the tunnel, the empty cases, and Le standing in the wreckage. The job ran in a roughly three-hour window after close. Heineken cases and whiskey bottles sat in the frame of the local-news graphic. None of that inventory appears to have been the point.

A Shared Wall Is a Floor Plan, Not a Mystery

Adams Morgan storefronts on Columbia Road share party walls the way row houses share joists. A vacant restaurant next door is not an abstract risk. It is a room with a brick face that nobody is watching after midnight. The crew did not come through the front glass on a busy nightlife strip. They came through the wall that faces a dark interior. That choice tells you they had time, tools, and at least one look at how the block is built.

Le’s shop is a hybrid that only makes sense if you walk the neighborhood. Liquor in the front. Gold and watches in cases that a tourist might miss. For a decade the combination has been a way for an independent owner to keep the lights on when one trade slumps. It is also a way to put six figures of metal behind a lock that was never designed to stop a crew with a hammer and a whole night in an empty dining room. The camera that caught a masked figure moving through the hole is the reason this page exists. The absence of a named defendant is the reason the page is still being rewritten.

MPD opened a burglary case. Detectives asked the public for help. The stills look like every other mid-Atlantic smash job except for the architecture. Tunnel jobs are older than the city. Banks used to worry about them. Jewelry stores in mixed-use buildings should worry about them now. A glass door has an alarm. A shared wall in a vacant bay often has neither.

What the Numbers Do and Do Not Say

Le’s $100,000-plus figure and the department’s $86,000 figure are not a contradiction so much as two ways of counting. Replacement value, melt value, and insured value diverge on gold. Watches add brand premiums that a police property sheet may not carry. For a small shop, either number is a season. Inventory that sits in cases is working capital. When it walks out a hole in the wall, the owner is financing the city’s clearance rate with his own float.

No public arrest or charging document tied to this Columbia Road job had been posted through early September 2026. That sentence is not a claim that detectives did no work. It is a claim that the public record still has a hole the size of the wall. MPD has announced other burglary lockups in the same period, including a September 2024 task-force arrest of a man wanted on a Burglary Two warrant from a separate Northwest job. Those notices do not name Le Liquor. Readers should not collapse every Northwest burglary into this one. They should also not pretend a two-year silence is a solve.

Adams Morgan is not a quiet precinct. Nightlife, a business improvement district, and a constant churn of restaurants create both witnesses and noise. A vacant bay next to a hybrid liquor-and-gold shop is the kind of detail a neighborhood blog should have been yelling about before the bricks came down. After the fact, every camera is a documentary. Before the fact, it is a maintenance problem.

Why Tunnel Thefts Belong on a Crime Desk, Not an Oddities Reel

Television loves a hole in a wall. The picture is ready-made. The AEGIS Alliance is not interested in the picture as a curiosity. A tunnel job is a planning crime. Someone cased the vacant restaurant. Someone tested whether the wall was three wythes of brick or a single decorative skin. Someone picked a night when Columbia Road’s bar traffic would cover sound. Someone knew the gold was in that shop and the liquor was a decoy. That is a crew, not a desperate smash-and-grab kid with a rock.

Similar jobs have hit jewelry counters in other cities by coming through adjacent salons, empty offices, and drop ceilings. The method travels because the architecture travels. Mixed-use corridors built a century ago were not wired as vaults. Independent owners cannot buy a federal response. They buy a camera and hope a detective has time. When the detective does not produce a name, the owner boards the hole, reorders stock if the insurer pays, and tells the next reporter he is lucky nobody was in the store.

Related theft reporting from The AEGIS Alliance includes the Santa Maria Valley AirTag mail-theft case, the Quarkslab RFID backdoor in access cards, and the rest of the Crime News desk. Physical security and digital security fail in the same way. The weakest adjoining system is the door.

What a Live Case Should Have Produced by Now

Two years is long enough for a charging document, a photo array, a plea, or a closed-case note. None of those items is in the open file this desk can see. Gold is not anonymous once it hits a refiner with compliance staff. Watches have serials. Pawn and melt shops in the Mid-Atlantic are supposed to keep tickets. If those tickets were pulled, the public was not told. If they were not pulled, that is its own finding.

Le has not been a daily presence in national coverage since the first week. That is normal. Local television moves on. Owners go back to standing behind the counter. The AEGIS Alliance is not local television. A six-figure hole in a shared wall, a masked man on tape, and no defendant is a status, not a resolved anecdote. Readers who live with small-business inventory should treat it that way.

There is a second neighborhood fact. Adams Morgan’s commercial strip has taken other hits on camera, including a later dispensary robbery a few blocks off 18th Street that local stations also ran. Different shop. Different method. Same question about whether the District’s property-crime units can close a case that begins as a pretty picture. The AEGIS Alliance does not staple those jobs together. It notes that the cameras keep working after the detectives go dark.

The File as It Stands

Overnight August 20-21, 2024, a crew broke through a vacant restaurant wall into Tam Le’s Columbia Road shop, skipped the liquor, and took gold and watches. MPD opened a burglary case. Newsrooms split on $86,000 versus more than $100,000. A masked figure exists on video. No public arrest has been attached to this address. The hole was a wall that should have been treated as a door.

The AEGIS Alliance will keep Le Liquor on the crime wire until a name, a charge, or an official close-out appears. Until then the clip that remains is a man in a mask moving through a hole that should not exist in a shared wall. That is not a solved story. It is a building condition that paid out in gold.

See also The AEGIS Alliance reporting on the US News desk and the broader theft-and-extortion file for how property crime now runs through both brick and cable.