by Dan Bilefsky
THE LAST JOB
The “Bad Grandpas” and the Hatton Garden Heist
Dan Bilefsky
For my parents,
Judy and Ralph Bilefsky.
We done the best bit of work of the whole century.
The whole fucking century.
—Terry Perkins
Contents
Prologue
Just Another Retiree on a Bus
Chapter 1
The Inspiration of a Botched Crime
Chapter 2
The Making of a Master Thief
Chapter 3
The Making of the Firm
Chapter 4
The Target: The Garden and the Criminal Underworld
Chapter 5
The Firm Plots
Chapter 6
The Heist: Pills, Fish and Chips, and Concrete
Chapter 7
Paul Johnson: A Modern-Day Sherlock Holmes
Chapter 8
An Investigation Takes Shape
Chapter 9
A Game of Cat and Mouse
Chapter 10
The Art of Snooping and Waiting
Chapter 11
The Flying Squad Is Listening
Chapter 12
The “Cut Up”: Laundering the Jewels
Chapter 13
To Catch a Thief
Chapter 14
The Trial
Chapter 15
Who Is Basil?
Chapter 16
The Chatila Heist: Hatton Garden Redux?
Chapter 17
Life Behind Bars
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustration Credits
Index
Prologue
Just Another Retiree on a Bus
THE LARGEST BURGLARY IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND began on a bus.
On the Thursday evening before Easter and Passover, April 2, 2015, as the sun began to set, Brian Reader, a baggy-eyed seventy-six-year-old pensioner, boarded the No. 96 bus near his grand redbrick home in Dartford, Kent. His house was about twenty miles away from central London and more than an hour by public transportation. No matter. Reader decided to take the bus. A career thief with a ruddy face, a quick temper, and plenty of cunning, taking the bus would give him a chance to catch up on the papers and the time to think. Time was something that was not in short supply these days since he was semiretired. He had likely calculated that driving his own car to a jewel heist was probably not a good idea. And if London’s ubiquitous black taxi drivers were able to memorize twenty-five thousand streets and twenty thousand landmarks, they could surely remember his world-weary face. Besides, he hated to waste money, and taxis were expensive.
For those harried fellow commuters who saw Reader on that double-decker bus, he must’ve looked like just another ordinary pensioner with a sullen permanent scowl. If only they knew that what he was about to attempt was anything but ordinary.
Just hours before Reader had stepped on that bus, the jewelers of Hatton Garden had been arriving in droves at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd., at 88–90 Hatton Garden, to store their goods over the long Passover and Easter holiday weekend. Many were immigrants, including Jewish Holocaust survivors. Many trusted the safe deposit with their life savings and kept their inventory there, without insurance, believing the boxes and the Chubb vault that protected them to be impenetrable. The neighborhood, London’s jewelry district since medieval times, has more than three hundred jewelry stores, including De Beers. The safe deposit company, which marketed itself as a reliable fortress, was the favored place to store valuable gems.
The handsome seven-story building itself hosted some sixty tenants, a majority of whom were in the jewelry trade and stored their precious valuables in the basement safe deposit. The safe deposit had been a fixture in the neighborhood stretching back decades—and its current owners were a Sudanese family of Indian heritage called the Bavishis. Mahendra Bavishi, the sixty-nine-year-old, pot-bellied family patriarch and director of the business, lived in Khartoum and had ceded the daily running of the company to his two sons, thirty-eight-year-old Manish and twenty-nine-year-old Alok. All three men had a 25 percent stake in the firm, along with Mahendra’s wife, Aruna.
Manish was on a one-month vacation in Sudan with his wife during that long weekend, and so Alok was looking after the business. As it was, Manish had a number of businesses, helping his father import electrical goods to Sudan and exporting the hibiscus flower from Sudan to Europe and South America. He typically only dropped by the safe deposit once a week.
The company had been losing money for years. To try to attract new customers, Manish had recently upgraded the monitoring system for the alarm and CCTV cameras, advertised the safe deposit in the Indian press, and created a new website, replete with spelling mistakes. But the seven-decades-old vault remained largely the same and the explosion in customers he and his father had dreamed of never came. As a result, on that long holiday weekend, only 562 of the 999 safe deposit boxes were in use. Some customers, who had defaulted on their payment for their boxes, hadn’t checked their boxes in fifteen years and white stickers with the words “RENT OVERDUE” were sporadically taped to boxes in the cavernous basement space.
These being hard times, the number of security guards at the safe deposit had shrunk from five to two, while the building had done away with a full-time night watchman. Nevertheless, Alok was confident that his longtime security guards, Kelvin Stockwell, a slow-moving and white-haired sixty-year-old who had worked for the company for twenty years, and Keefa Raymond Kamara, who had worked there more than a decade, had things under control.
As the two security guards were preparing to leave for the night, Reader paid his bus fare with a special travel pass for senior citizens—registered to his longtime alias, Mr. T. McCarthy—and then began an eighty-minute journey to Hatton Garden. As the 96 bus edged its way through the city, the tree-lined streets of Kent soon gave way to the capital’s urban sprawl. If Reader and the gang could pull off the caper, his children and grandchildren would never have to work again. And he would go down among the London criminal fraternity as “the Master” his contemporaries grudgingly revered.
The enormity of what he and the others were about to attempt must have been flashing through his mind as the streets of London rushed by the bus’s windows. There had been three years of due diligence; things had already been set in motion. The others were counting on him and there was no turning back now.
After arriving at London’s sprawling Waterloo East Station, Reader exited the station at 6:31 p.m. It being the evening before a long Easter weekend, the station would have been thronging with people, and it took another half hour until Reader was able to transfer to the No. 55 bus. He boarded at 7:02 p.m. For someone who had been accustomed to the solitary confines of a jail cell, it must have been a relief to escape the crowds. He got off at St. John Street, in the hip neighborhood of Clerkenwell in central London, an area peppered by architecture studios, designer lofts, tech start-ups, and gastropubs, many of them spilling over with Guardian-reading media types. As Reader walked briskly on St. John Street in the direction of Hatton Garden, he passed by converted warehouses inside of which dozens of twentysomethings would spend their days hunched over their sleek Macintosh computers. It was a fitting contrast for a villain about to commit the last great analog crime of the digital age.
Reader had long suffered from migraines, according to friends, the product of his fall from a roof on a burglary job decades earlier when he had fractured his skull. He also suffered from a host of ailments, including back pains and arthritis. But on that day he was surely feeling sprightly. He decided to walk the final few blocks to his destination.
This was going to be a big
night.
THE LAST JOB
Chapter 1
The Inspiration of a Botched Crime
IN LATE AUGUST 2010 ON THE SUNDAY OF A BANK holiday weekend, four men wearing high-visibility jackets arrived via a white van to Chatila, a glittering jewelry boutique on Bond Street, in London’s posh Mayfair district. It was 9 a.m. After lugging their equipment out from the van—including a diamond-tipped drill and rolling trash cans—the thieves, disguised as maintenance men, used scaffolding outside the store to climb to the roof. From there, they broke into the building and deactivated the alarm. Then, they climbed down a disused elevator shaft. Once inside the vault, they used a diamond-tipped drill to try to break into a safe containing about £40 million ($61 million)* worth of gems. To try to cover their traces they stole one of the company’s CCTV hard drives.
Chatila was a daring and attractive target. The company, which has its headquarters in Geneva and has been owned by a Lebanese family for 150 years, also has offices in Riyadh and Doha; its tony London branch caters to Hollywood celebrities, Saudi sheiks, and Russian oligarchs. It famously created the 171-carat heart-shaped sapphire and diamond necklace inspired by the Coeur de la Mer necklace Kate Winslet wore in the blockbuster film Titanic. Its vaults have also housed some of the world’s most priceless and rare gemstones, including a flawless 87-carat diamond dubbed the “Hapsburg,” one of a mere fistful of the world’s known red diamonds, and an oval-shaped 62-carat ruby called “The Burmese Excellence.” More recently, the jeweler made the carefully crafted pearl and diamond earrings Amal Clooney, George Clooney’s wife, wore to her wedding.
Leading the gang of jewel thieves on that day, according to Scotland Yard, was Danny Jones, a marathon runner, then in his midfifties, with a macho demeanor. Eccentric to the core, he obsessed about crime and sometimes slept in his mother-in-law’s dressing gown and a fez, accompanied by his dog, Rocket, according to friends. He was also an avid fortune-teller. An experienced burglar, his lithe physique, as well as his agility and strength, made him ideal for slithering through a hole in the wall or wielding a heavy drill big enough to bore through concrete.
One of his criminal associates, Carl Wood, a sometime burglar who had known Jones for years, compared him to Walter Mitty, the James Thurber character, who daydreams on an epic scale and variously imagines himself as a fighter pilot battling the Germans during the war, as a globally celebrated surgeon saving lives, and as a wily killer. Jones was not a violent man, but he had a similarly active fantasy life. He talked to Rocket, believing he could communicate with canines. He liked to sleep on the floor of his room in a military sleeping bag, and urinate into a water bottle.1
Possessed of a sweet demeanor but the vanity of a wannabe celebrity, Jones’s white hair was always impeccably combed. He liked to talk like a gangster, peppering his East End Cockney slang with enough “fucks” and “cunts” to make even the most hardened criminal blanch.
A fitness freak who never drank or smoked, he had a tendency to invent stories. Fellow thieves say he had a tendency to blab, and tell everything to his common-law wife, Val, which was considered a liability among the criminal fraternity—since a bust-up with the “missus” could lead to her loosening her tongue and then everyone would be in trouble. He could run twenty miles with a heavy army bag on his back. He liked to say to anyone who would listen that he was in the army, special forces, and offered survival training sessions to officers who wanted to learn how to survive in hostile territory. His physical fitness was such that he probably could.
While he was fibbing, he nevertheless had impressive skills that were handy in a burglary. He could contort his body with acrobatic virtuosity, hold his head under water long after it was advisable, walk with handstands down an entire city block, and run very, very fast.
But on that particular long weekend, Jones’s contortionist skills proved obsolete as he tried to drill into the safe before realizing that the drill itself was too short. Unable to get into the safe, the gang abandoned their initial plan. Instead, they ransacked a showroom and stole about £1 million ($1.5 million) in jewelry and precious stones, lugging it away in white containers and bags. Somewhere between 9 and 10 p.m., they fled.
Recalling the crime, whose perpetrators had remained elusive for years, Philip Evans, who went on to prosecute the case, would later observe at the Chatila trial that there were only a handful of thieves in London with the audacity to try to pull off such a brazen feat. “There can be very few people who have the necessary skills, experience, and preparedness to carry out a crime with this level of high stakes, high reward, and high risk,” he said. “Very few people who have the contacts to dispose of such huge amounts of high value property. Very few people who would even know how to begin the immensely difficult and complex task of burgling a highly secure jewelers such as this one.”2
Members of Chatila’s staff discovered the break-in on Tuesday after the holiday weekend, and Jones would later be connected to the crime via his DNA left on a glove at the scene of the crime. But as the men fled with less booty than they had hoped, the botched burglary had provided a cautionary tale. They had managed to spirit away about £1 million in jewels but it had been a fraction of what could have been possible. The burglary had provided several lessons including the virtue of breaking in on the Sunday of a long weekend when patches of central London were deserted. It also brought home the need to have the right-sized drill. But power tools aside, there was another big lesson: if you wanted to attempt a heist of this magnitude, a master thief was needed to help with the planning and execution.
* Currency conversions are in 2015 U.S. dollars, unless the event specified takes place in a different year.
Chapter 2
The Making of a Master Thief
A Restless Pensioner
It was around the autumn of 2012 and Brian Reader was feeling restless. Or, at least, it seems, ready for a change.
His wife, Lyn, a former accountant’s assistant with wavy red hair and an easy sense of humor, had been the love of his life, the one person who centered him, even when he was living in a jail cell. A heavy smoker, she had died a few years earlier from lung cancer. Friends say her absence had left a heavy void.
Reader was a widower, living in his imposing £640,000 (about $1 million) house in Dartford, Kent, a county bordering London known for its apple orchards and tony middle-class contentment. After having orchestrated some of the most renowned crimes of the century, he had been reduced to selling used cars from the driveway. He had always had a taste for the good life. But he had been out of the crime game for a while, and, according to his friends, he complained that money was fast running out.
Handsome and rugged in his youth, Reader now had wisps of thinning white hair and had been recently diagnosed with prostate cancer. Even without the cancer, the effects of aging were already taking their toll. He was prone to sudden tantrums—at least in the company of his fellow senior citizens—and his patience seemed brittle at best. But he could also be courteous and kind to a fault—for example, when faced with police officers or defense attorneys, whom had been a fixture throughout his life.
A penchant for nighttime burglaries meant he had been a very present and devoted father and husband. His abiding love for Lyn, his two children, Paul and Joanne, and his grandchildren had been a crack in the tough emotional armor he had donned during years of operating in the ruthless and sometimes violent world of London crime. But Lyn was gone. Paul, who worked in his used car business, and Joanne, who worked for Goldman Sachs, were grown up. They had their own lives and families.
Asked what would motivate him to try one last job, a former criminal associate said he had been motivated by money and his children. “He was close to his kids. He would give all the proceeds to his boy and he’d have said to the boy, ‘look after Joanne.’ You know what I mean, I don’t suppose he was really into it for himself.”
Boredom also seemed to play a role. When not selling cars, he would meet ol
d cronies to talk about the old times. But there was only so much time a man could spend reminiscing about the past with other aging villains at a Monday club. In any case, some of his so-called friends didn’t actually seem to like him. While generous to his family, he never seemed to buy anyone a pint of beer.
“He sits in that cafe and talks about all their yesterdays,” his friend Terry Perkins, a fellow burglar with his own long rap sheet, said about Reader, grousing about his arrogance, his misplaced nostalgia, and his apparent stinginess. “Never bought a drink at the pub and that’s his intention there you know,” he complained. “Never buys fuck all.”
Danny Jones, a longtime acquaintance of Reader, was equally uncharitable about his old friend. “He’s a fucking know-it-all, that’s what he is and anything he knows he’s got wrong,” he said of Reader. “Every bit of fucking work we’ve been on, he’s fucked up.”1 Yet for all of their complaints, Reader was an experienced thief and strategist and had contacts for laundering gear that the other two lacked.
As the “firm” began to take shape for one last, ambitious career-topping caper, Reader was perhaps also possessed by a fearlessness borne of age. What was there to lose?
“Let’s See How Sherlock Holmes Solves This One”
When Reader was thirty-two, law enforcement officials and former criminal associates say, he was the leader of a gang of expert thieves known as the “Millionaire Moles” who pulled off a now legendary robbery on the night of Saturday, September 11, in 1971. At that time, London, a burgeoning financial center, was rife with burglaries, and there was an armed robbery every five days. This heist took place at 188 Baker Street, the northwest London street where the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes lived. To begin with, the gang rented a leather goods shop called Le Sac a few stores away from the bank. Then, using cutting equipment, they burrowed a forty-foot tunnel underground, passing under a chicken take-out restaurant, until the tunnel reached underneath the vault. The men dug over the course of three long weekends to avoid being overheard. On the day of the heist, they crawled through the tunnel, only to discover that the vault’s floor was protected by three feet of reinforced concrete. Undeterred, they used a thermic lance, and then explosives to blow a hole through it, barely large enough to wiggle through. All the while, one member of the group stood watch on a nearby rooftop, with a walkie-talkie, ready to alert the others if Scotland Yard showed up.