Thieves Used a Vacant Adams Morgan Restaurant to Tunnel Into Tam Le’s Le Liquor and Take More Than $100,000 in Gold
Sometime after closing on August 20, 2024, and before Tam Le opened Le Liquor the next morning, someone spent hours opening a hole through the party wall between a vacant restaurant and his shop at 1776 Columbia Road NW in Adams Morgan. The bottles stayed. The gold and the watches did not. Le, who has run the hybrid liquor-and-jewelry store since about 2014 after earlier years under the Lee Jewelry name, told local stations the loss was north of $100,000. The AEGIS Alliance left the file open because Metropolitan Police put a masked figure on camera and then stopped talking. Late September 2026 is still a file with a hole in it.
Neighbors on the 1700 block told NBC4 Washington they started hearing banging around 2 a.m. The entry on camera lands closer to 5:30 a.m. That is a three-hour job, not a smash-and-grab with a brick through the front glass. Le said the crew came through two to three feet of brick, three layers, and that the vacant restaurant next door was under renovation. Sledgehammers and crowbars were part of the mess. NBC4 reported that tools appear to have been taken from the closed job site and used on the wall. When the figure in the hoodie finally comes through the hole, crowbar in hand, he looks up at the camera for a moment and ducks. Heineken cases and whiskey sit in the news graphics. None of that inventory was the point.
The Building Was the Accomplice
Columbia Road storefronts share walls the way row houses share joists. A dark restaurant bay is not an abstract risk assessment. It is a room nobody is watching, with a brick face that faces another room full of metal. The crew did not test the front door on a nightlife strip where people are still on the sidewalk after midnight. They used the interior. That choice says they had time, a look at how the block is built, and a reason to believe the gold was worth a night of labor while the liquor was not.
Le’s floor plan only makes sense if you walk the neighborhood. Liquor up front keeps the lights on. Gold and watches sit in cases a tourist can miss. For a decade the combination has been how an independent owner survives a bad season in one trade. It is also how six figures of working capital ends up behind a lock that was never designed to stop a person who already owns the room next door for the night. The camera is why this page exists. The absence of a defendant is why it is still being rewritten. FOX 5 DC and NBC4 aired the tunnel, the empty cases, and Le standing in the wreckage. He told reporters the shop, in one form or another, had been on the block for decades and that there had been recent attempts before this one succeeded. He said the walls would be reinforced. Reinforcement is a receipt. It is not an arrest.
$100,000 and $86,000 Are Not the Same Sentence
The Washington Post cited a police figure closer to $86,000. Le’s number sits above $100,000 in gold and watches. Those are not a contradiction so much as two ways of counting. Melt value, replacement value, and insured value diverge on gold. A watch adds a brand premium that a property sheet may not carry. For a small shop, either number is a season of inventory. When it leaves through a hole, the owner is financing the city’s clearance rate with his own float while he waits to learn whether an insurer will argue about the count.
MPD opened a burglary investigation and asked for the public’s help. No charging document, photo array result, or plea tied to this Columbia Road address had been posted through late September 2026. That is not a claim that detectives did nothing. It is a claim that the public record still matches the wall. The department has announced other burglary arrests in the same era, including a September 2024 task-force lockup on a Burglary Two warrant from a separate Northwest job. Those notices do not name Le Liquor. Collapsing every Northwest burglary into this one would be a mistake. Treating two years of silence as a solve would be a larger one.
On September 24, 2026, the Jewelers’ Security Alliance, a trade group that has tracked jewelry crime since 1883, was still carrying the Adams Morgan tunnel on its alert wire, dated to the original August 21, 2024, loss and still describing more than $100,000 in merchandise. A trade bulletin that old is not a news flash. It is evidence that the industry file never received a name either. Gold is not anonymous once it hits a refiner with a compliance desk. Watches have serial numbers. 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.
A Planning Crime, Not a Curiosity
Television loves a hole in a wall because the picture is finished before the reporter arrives. The AEGIS Alliance is not interested in the picture as an oddity. A tunnel job is a planning crime. Someone cased the vacant restaurant. Someone learned the wall was multiple wythes of brick rather than a decorative skin. Someone picked a night when Columbia Road’s bar noise would cover a sledgehammer. Someone knew which room held the gold. That is a crew, or at least a person who had done the homework, not a passerby with a rock.
The method travels because the architecture travels. Jewelry counters in other cities have been hit through adjacent salons, empty offices, and drop ceilings. Mixed-use corridors built a century ago were not wired as vaults. An independent owner cannot buy a federal response. He buys a camera and hopes a detective has time. When the detective does not produce a name, the owner boards the hole, reorders what the insurer will pay for, and tells the next reporter he is glad nobody was inside.
It is worth separating this job from the smash-and-grabs that have kept hitting the same metro area. In late June 2026, Bowie police asked for help identifying three masked people who used hammers on display cases at Gold USA Jewelry on Emerald Way and were gone in minutes. That is a glass-front crew with a clock. The Columbia Road job was the opposite clock. Hours of masonry, a borrowed tool set, liquor left on the shelf. Different method, different shop, no public evidence they are the same hands. What they share is a regional market for gold that can be moved before a detective finishes the overnight report. Readers who want the wider property-crime pattern can start on The AEGIS Alliance Crime News desk, including the Santa Maria Valley case in which a resident used an AirTag because the official trail had gone cold, and the access-card research that makes the same point about adjacent systems. The weakest wall is the door.
What Two Years Should Have Produced
A live burglary with a face on tape, even a masked one, should have produced a charging document, a closed-case note, or an honest “we do not have a suspect” from the department. None of those sentences is in the open file. Adams Morgan is not a quiet precinct. A business improvement district, a constant churn of restaurants, and a block full of cameras create both witnesses and noise. A vacant bay next to a hybrid gold shop is the kind of detail a neighborhood should have been loud about before the bricks came down. After the fact, every camera is a documentary. Before the fact, it is maintenance.
Le has not been a daily presence in national coverage since the first week. That is normal. The AEGIS Alliance is not local television. A six-figure hole, a man who looked at the lens, and no defendant is a status. Later crimes on the same strip, including armed robberies of other Columbia Road businesses that MPD did close with a name, show the department can move when a case starts with a gun and a chase. A quiet masonry job that pays out in metal is easier to leave in a queue.
The File as It Stands
Overnight on August 20 and 21, 2024, a burglar or a crew broke through a vacant restaurant wall into Tam Le’s shop, skipped the liquor, and took gold and watches. MPD opened a case. Newsrooms split between about $86,000 and more than $100,000. A masked figure exists on video. Tools from the renovation next door appear to have done the work. No public arrest has been attached to this address. The Jewelers’ Security Alliance was still describing the loss in September 2026.
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 a shared wall made possible. That is not a solved story. It is a building condition that paid out in gold. See also The AEGIS Alliance US News desk and the broader theft file for how property crime now runs through brick and through cable, and how often the public is left with the picture instead of the defendant.
