by Dan Bilefsky
Once inside, the gang ransacked 268 safety deposit boxes, walking away with valuables estimated at more than £500,000 ($1.2 milion)—worth about £7 million ($9 million) today, at the time Britain’s largest bank robbery. They left a mocking message scrawled in graffiti on the walls of the bank vault: “Let’s see how Sherlock Holmes solves this one.” (Reader, through his lawyer, has denied having anything to do with Baker Street and was never tried for the crime.)
During the heist, an amateur radio enthusiast accidentally overheard the gang’s every word, spoken on their walkie-talkies. He called the police, who initially did not take him seriously, according to Tony Lundy, a former Scotland Yard detective who was on duty in London’s West End during the robbery and was called to the scene.2 When the police eventually responded, they descended on 750 banks in the area, including the targeted Lloyd’s bank. But Lundy said the thieves initially remained undetected. “We visited every bank. But all were sound-proof and all the vaults were locked and on timers and couldn’t be opened until Monday at 9 a.m. I was part of the team that went to Lloyds. But not one bank showed signs of breaking and entry.” On Sunday, the thieves fled, and the heist was discovered the next day, unleashing a media frenzy.
To this day, unsubstantiated rumors swirl that Reader and his gang of outlaws were hired by MI5, the domestic intelligence service, to rob the vault because it contained in a safe deposit box compromising photographs of the late Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II, in flagrante delicto. Perhaps even more insidious, a former member of the Baker Street gang said Reader and the others had discovered in a safe deposit box photographs of a Conservative politician sexually abusing children, and had purposely spread the photographs on the floor of the vault in the hopes that police would find them. If they did, they were never exposed.
The audacity of the Baker Street robbery arguably surpassed even the surprise attack on a post-office train during the legendary Great Train Robbery of 1963. The crime was later immortalized in the 2008 film The Bank Job, featuring a car dealer, like Reader, who commits the crime as part of an elaborate setup. In real life, four men were eventually arrested, but not Reader. Had he been involved, he had been too wily to get caught.
Reader’s luck finally ran out in 1985, when he was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in helping to launder stolen gold from another brazen caper, two years earlier, at the Brink’s-Mat security depot at London’s Heathrow Airport during which roughly £26 million, or about $36 million, worth of gold bars had been spirited away. Along the way, he was also implicated in a string of commercial burglaries and—in an episode that would irreparably mark him—accused of the murder of an undercover police officer. But after having been released from prison in 1994, he was living a quiet life. Or so it seemed.
Neighbors next to his home in Dartford, Kent, say they seldom saw him leave the house. The house is bordered by a brick wall, a fence, and dense row of bushes that seem calculated to defend against the twitching curtains of nosy neighbors, of which there were plenty. A sign on the house’s incongruously small wooden front door says NO ENTRY. It is a comical flourish for the home of a man notorious for his breaking-and-entry skills.
Occasionally, neighbors would see him playing with his grandchildren through a crack in the vast hedges that obscured part of the front of the building. But in his middle-class suburban neighborhood—whose one famous native son Mick Jagger had long since left—Reader was a low-key and enigmatic figure. No one seemed to know who he was, or about his past, or about what he now planned to do. He appeared to cultivate anonymity after decades of being known for the wrong reasons.
“Dartford is a place you came to raise children and a family outside of London, and want a quiet suburban middle class life,” said a neighbor. “I always thought it strange that they lived in one of the nicest houses in the neighborhood, but they never seemed to work. No one knew where he got the money,” she said. “They never mixed with the other neighbors. I always felt like something was happening behind closed doors.”
The Making of the Guv’nor
Reader’s storied criminal career began in 1950 at the age of eleven when he was arrested for stealing a can of fruit at a corner shop, according to police records. In the decades that followed, his name would crop up in some of the most headline-grabbing burglaries of the era. His specialty: breaking and entering and later laundering stolen goods such as jewelry and gold.
Born on February 28, 1939, in London Docklands, in the southeast of the capital, Reader came of age in an impoverished industrial area that has long attracted the criminal fraternity.3 The firstborn son of Doris, nineteen, and Harry Reader, twenty-four, Reader’s personality was formed during an era of food rationing and Nazi bombs, which inspired his dogged self-preservation. The Docklands hosted one of the biggest ports in the world, and local villains and villains-in-training would sneak in at night, pry open shipping containers, and steal whatever they could find.4
When he was a teenager, Reader’s father abandoned the family, forcing him to become the man of the house and to be independent from an early age, even if that meant stealing. As the eldest, he also took on the role of breadwinner, and was close to his two sisters and brother, for whom he became a father figure, according to a childhood friend. He left school at the age of fifteen, and did a number of menial jobs, including as a butcher and shoveling coal for the railway.
At the age of eighteen, he faced his first judge at London’s storied Old Bailey Criminal Court on attempted burglary charges. Shortly after, in 1958, he was conscripted for military service and joined the Royal Engineers, where he went through basic training and learned how to handle a gun. His army salary was a pittance but a friend from that period recalled that he used part of the money to buy a motorcycle.
After leaving the military, he worked as a driver for a while and, hungering to be his own boss, bought his own truck and started to transport goods such as fruits and vegetables and industrial supplies across the country.5 At the age of twenty-four, Reader, just a couple of years out of the army, met Lyn Kidd, four years his junior. She was pretty, a horse lover, with a quick wit and inner toughness he recognized in himself. The two married in 1963 and soon had two children. Desperate to earn some real money to support his young family, Reader came under the tutelage of Bill Barrett, an experienced thief, who was about a decade older, and tutored him on the finer points of breaking and entering, how to choose a target, how to break open a safe, and how to disappear into the shadows. Soon, Reader joined a gang of canny cohorts, among them Micky “Skinny” Gervaise, a burglar alarm expert who in 1980 disguised himself as a policeman and robbed a security van carrying £3.4 million (about $7.7 million) in silver bullion; John “The Face” Goodwin, an expert safe breaker,6 and “Little Legs” Larkins, an expert locksmith known for his diminutive stature.
Paul Lashmar, a veteran crime reporter and investigative journalist who worked for the Observer, recalled Reader from those heady days as being part of a band of East End burglars hitting banks and security companies in the city. “Their big thing was doing warehouses, and jewelry production places,” he said. “They liked to hit places around Hatton Garden.”7 This was an era before surveillance cameras when factories or commercial properties or security vans were easy targets.
Reader was also part of a now nearly extinct generation of old-school professional thieves in London, who operated with a well-defined code of honor: they abhorred violence, valued their breaking-and-entering skills as if a lost art, loved their wives and families, did prison time without complaint, and looked down on gangsters of that era like the Kray twins or the Richardsons as little more than professional thugs, whom they ridiculed as “poncy”—overpriced, over styled, overrated.8
The Krays dominated the East and later the West End of London, while the turf south of the River Thames was under the control of their rivals, the Richardson family, led by Charlie Richardson and his brother Eddie. The Richardsons and the
ir associates ruled with menace—electroshock treatment, bolt cutters, bare-knuckle punches—and made money from the scrap metal trade after the Second World War, eventually added gaming machines, mines, parking lots, and pornography to their portfolio in crime.9
While Reader, a professional thief, eschewed the limelight, the Krays owned nightclubs and mingled with politicians and prominent entertainers, such as Frank Sinatra, Diana Dors, and Judy Garland, and relished being splashed on newspaper front pages and interviewed on television. Not Reader, however, who inhabited the London “underworld” of fellow criminals, bent cops, and solicitors, but craved the outward signs of middle-class respectability. While he avoided clubs and discos, he and Lyn adored jazz and American crooners Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra and even attended one of Sinatra’s London concerts, according to a longtime former criminal associate.
“Reader was the antithesis of the gangsters, who adored Warner Brothers B movies, Hollywood, and Cary Grant, wanted to be like Al Capone, drive Cadillacs, and wear cashmere overcoats,” explained Dick Hobbs, Britain’s leading sociologist of crime, who himself grew up on the mean streets of east London, and was a professor in the sociology department of the London School of Economics. “Reader would have known them and seen them in pubs and clubs, but he would’ve kept a distance. He wasn’t taken in by violence and he didn’t like drama.”10
Reader preferred a quiet life, and was almost unfailingly loyal to Lyn. The associate, who has known him for four decades, recalled that while Reader was handsome and popular with the ladies, he had only one dalliance outside of his marriage. “All the time I known Brian he wasn’t a woman chaser,” he said. “I only know one instance where he, he, whatever, had a blow job or a fuck or whatever and that was because it was put on his plate. He wasn’t a queer or nothing. He’d look at a woman and go, ‘oh yeh,’ but that was about as far as he ever did.”
He also wasn’t ostentatious. The Reader family behaved outwardly like a typical aspirational middle-class family, taking camping trips in the countryside near East Sussex, before graduating to a more bourgeois life of fine wines, French cooking, ski lessons for the children, sprawling suburban homes, and vacations on the continent. Eventually, the family moved to 40 Winn Road, an attractive four-bedroom house in Grove Park, in southeast London, and lived under the alias McCarthy.
According to old friends, Reader was good at cultivating and keeping friends, including friends from his childhood, a rare trait among thieves, who didn’t trust anyone. And even as his criminal career took off, friends say he remained proudly working class and leftwing, admiring Tony Benn, a pugnacious and outspoken left-wing member of Parliament known for his unreconstructed socialism.
In the 1980s, there was an armed robbery nearly every week in London, with vast sums taken, as thieves targeted security vans, security depots, or poorly guarded banks. But Reader studiously avoided violence if he could help it, recognizing early on in his criminal career that violence meant longer jail sentences.
Reader had long been attracted to Hatton Garden, and he tried repeatedly to make an honest living as a jewelry trader. But each time, the lure of quick money yielded from burglaries proved too alluring. Nevertheless, he held a series of legitimate jobs, which law enforcement officials say provided a cover for his more illicit work. For a time, he ran a jewelry wholesaler in Leather Lane Market, next to Hatton Garden, and acted as a middle man in the gold trade, buying large quantities of chains and bracelets, and then selling them to dealers.
He also dabbled in the art world, and teamed up with “Little Legs” Larkins, one of his gang of thieves, to buy seventeenth-century Dutch masters and resell them to collectors. He would hang out at a bar in Hatton Garden called Pussy Galore and eat lunch at a Jewish deli, frequented by gangsters and orthodox Jews called the Nosherie.11
“There was a jewelry boom—I think most young ladies will remember—about that time when people were buying bracelets and necklaces,” Reader later recalled when questioned about his life while he was on trial for his role in laundering gold from the 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist. “I was purchasing them from a wholesaler to sell to private persons. I suppose you could call it a bit of pin money,” he said, referring to a small amount of money to spend on nonessentials.12
The world of commercial crime in London had been turned upside down with the advent of the “supergrass” in the 1970s, criminal informants who ratted on their fellow criminals in return for reduced sentences. One theory is that the term “supergrass” originated in the nineteenth century when criminals in London sometimes used Cockney rhyming slang to refer to a policeman as a grasshopper, or “copper.” Others ascribe the term to the Virgil quote, “There’s a snake hidden in the grass.” Whatever its origins, the supergrass would prove a disaster for Reader.
One of the pioneers of the supergrass was Tony Lundy, a former senior member of the Flying Squad, dubbed “the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the Old Bailey” by his biographer Martin Short since he was so adept at catching thieves and would usually have three or four high-profile criminal trials going on at the same time. He later traveled to South America and worked with the FBI to help put the legendary cocaine kingpin Howard Marks behind bars.
Lundy was so successful at catching thieves that some critics questioned whether he had attained knowledge by illicit means. But he has never been charged with corruption, despite multiple police investigations. A former boxer and marathon runner, Lundy retired from Scotland Yard in 1988, citing stress, and has since lived in Spain. Decades later, he remains embittered by accusations he called “diabolical.”
Lundy excelled at getting robbers to confess their crimes, in particular during the 1980s when armed robberies in the capital were epidemic. Lundy’s “supergrass” was a notorious gangster called Roy Garner, whose fingerprints were on some of the greatest heists of the era. He also made a grass out of Micky “Skinny” Gervaise, Reader’s associate, who had been involved in some thirty commercial robberies, including the daring hijacking of ten tons of silver bullion on its way from London to East Berlin in 1980, then the largest-ever heist in England.
According to Lundy, Reader had been doing “cutting jobs” for years, East End slang for breaking into safes. He described Reader as a criminal of the old school, who wouldn’t cross certain lines—for example, shooting a policeman or hurting a bystander to a robbery. “For villains like Reader,” he said, “crime is like smoking cigarettes. They just can’t give up.”13
In 1980, Gervaise “grassed” to Scotland Yard that Reader had been on several commercial burglaries. Reader was arrested and questioned but released on bail. Eager to avoid jail, he decided to skip town in 1982 and go to the south of Spain—known among the British criminal fraternity as the Costa del Crime. It was a popular destination for English criminals since Britain and Spain did not have an extradition treaty at the time. Reader would later complain that being stitched up by Gervaise was “the most devastating time of my life.” During his European sojourn, he took Lyn and the family to Venice and a resort in France to learn how to ski. A photograph of Reader at the time shows one of Britain’s most daring thieves sitting on a plush couch surrounded by his young family in the lobby of a luxury Méribel hotel in France. There is an animal-skin carpet on the floor, and his face is tanned and relaxed. A bon vivant with a penchant for sailing and skiing, Reader had come a long way from his days as rough-edged criminal from southeast London.
“I was on my own recognizance and I decided that I had had enough and went abroad,” Reader later recalled.
It was a nice bourgeois life—traveling to southern France in the autumn, and the French Alps in the winter. The Reader family spent two years there—camouflaged as an expatriate English family—but returned to England in July 1984. The family felt restless and homesick, in particular Lyn, who hated being on the run and craved some stability. “I felt that I should come back to England and to sort things out,” Reader would later recall. “My family were being fed up being
away from home as well and we decided to come back home. I was also running.”14
After arriving back in Britain, Reader was arrested and received a twelve-month prison sentence for having absconded on bail. After getting out of jail, he tried to resume a quiet life, buying and selling jewelry at Hatton Garden and keeping a low profile. But it didn’t last long. He hungered to get back in the criminal game.
A Whole Lot of Gold
At around 6:40 a.m. on November 26, 1983, six armed men in balaclavas entered the warehouse of Brink’s-Mat, a security company, at Heathrow Airport. One of the men, Micky McAvoy, was wearing a trilby hat atop his yellow mask, giving him the appearance of a dapper thug. The robbers had been tipped off that there was about £3 million ($4.4 million) in cash and valuables in the vault. The men were armed, and McAvoy and his associate Brian Robinson gathered the petrified guards together. They tied them up and doused them with gasoline. They threatened to light a match if they didn’t hand over what they wanted. Thanks to Anthony Black, a Brink’s-Mat security guard who also happened to be Robinson’s brother-in-law, the crew knew which of the guards kept the keys and the combinations for the vault where the safe holding the gold was located.
But when the gang gained access to the vault, they could barely believe their eyes—or their luck. In total, there were seven thousand gleaming gold bars, packed into more than seventy cardboard boxes. About £26 million ($38 million) worth of gold. The crew’s van was so overloaded, its tires looked deflated as it sped away.