The Last Job

by Dan Bilefsky

  While the robbery was daring in its plotting and execution, the criminals were foolhardy. They quickly began to spend the money, including on lavish homes. McAvoy, full of misplaced bravado, named his Rottweiler guard dogs Brinks and Mat. Robinson’s and McAvoy’s clumsy transactions were being monitored by Scotland Yard and they were soon arrested.

  But not before the thieves helped set in motion an operation to smelt the stolen gold, with the aid of a then little-known petty criminal named Kenneth Noye and his pal John Palmer, a notorious gangster, who ran a Bristol-based gold dealership called Scadlynn. The company was used as a cover for the gold-smelting operation with the end product being sold on the lucrative scrap market. But the duo needed a middleman to help launder the gold—someone who was adept at being inconspicuous and who had contacts in the deeply secretive world of Hatton Garden.15

  While in Spain, Reader had read about the audacious Brink’s-Mat heist in the London Times and his appetite was already whetted. So when Noye approached him to help fence some of the gold, he readily obliged. Reader and Noye were united by their upbringing in working-class southeast London and by their love of money and the finer things in life. At one point, Noye kept a pet lion, and his home doorbell played the theme song from Goldfinger.16

  Reader’s role was to help spirit some of the gold bars to Bristol in an elaborate and sophisticated scheme during which the bars were melted down and mixed with copper coins and brass to try to disguise it as scrap gold, before it was resold. He was eventually caught and sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in laundering the gold.

  After Reader went to prison, Duncan Campbell, the Guardian’s veteran crime reporter, interviewed Lyn Reader, whom he recalled as being intelligent and possessed of a sharp sense of humor. Lyn lamented that being the wife of a man on the run had taken its toll on her and the family. “People think it sounds glamorous, but it was awful changing homes all the time,” she said. “I used to get plants and flowers whenever we went to a new place, to try and make it look like a home.”

  She said she had been harassed by Britain’s feverish tabloid press, for whom Reader—then a handsome young cad—had become an enigmatic but fascinating antihero. According to Campbell, she recalled that, during the Brink’s-Mat trial, one paper had offered her £1,000 ($1,440) for a photograph of Reader drinking champagne. She declined. The British media had also breathlessly reported on the trial, describing how she had reacted to the verdict by crying out to her husband, “I’ll wait for you darling!”

  “I think if I’d actually said, ‘I’ll wait for you darling,’ ” she told Campbell, “Brian would have jumped out of the dock and punched me on the nose.”17

  Chapter 3

  The Making of the Firm

  Planning and Pubbing

  This being England, the idea for the Hatton Garden Heist was hatched at a pub amid diners downing pints of beer and eating plates of fish and chips. During the three years leading up to the crime, the four old friends met at the Castle pub on Pentonville Road in Islington, north London, a conspicuously bright green gastropub with an outdoor terrace that was popular with locals and tourists alike. The aging thieves were not there to discuss their backaches and joint pain, although they were talking about a form of retirement. They were focused on pulling off one last heist that they hoped the world would never forget—and that would get them out of the crime game once and for all.

  “That could be my pension!”1 one of the gang members, the birdlike Terry Perkins, later exclaimed. The Firm’s many meetings, which Scotland Yard say began as early as 2012, took place most Fridays at the pub in an area that had long since gentrified. The pub, about a fifteen-minute walk to Hatton Garden, was a fitting place for the men to meet and plot—a diamond ring logo adorned the door of the women’s bathroom; a GO TO JAIL sign was on the gent’s. At their table near the back, they could be inconspicuous. Or so they thought.

  A blackboard on a wall listed specials alongside the regular dishes on the menu, such as treacle tart with vanilla ice cream, an impossibly sweet and beloved British pudding, and wild boar and apple sausages. Another sign advertised the rooftop terrace upstairs, which the pub boasted, with typical British understatement, was “possibly the finest roof terrace in Angel.” The bustling and noisy pub, thronging with tourists and young professionals from the neighborhood, was decorated with lamps made with globes, which appealed to its well-traveled clientele. Old-school criminals though they were, the men seemed to like the good life: Angel was the surrounding bourgeois neighborhood in the north London borough of Islington, which has hosted, among others, former prime minister Tony Blair, Salman Rushdie, and the former London mayor-turned-foreign-secretary Boris Johnson. It was the kind of place where you could find French gourmet cheese shops, Bauhaus furniture stores, and the flagship restaurant of the star chef Yotam Ottolenghi.

  But while the men sought out discretion toward the back of the pub, they could be easily seen as they sipped their beers and bantered. Their idea of discretion seemed to be studiously avoiding the Castle’s Tuesday Quiz Night, or special evenings such as “National Talk Like a Pirate Day,” when the Castle regular with the best pirate outfit got his or her second beer free.

  Perkins, who was then in his early sixties, had only recently been released from prison, having been sentenced to a twenty-two-year stint for a sensational £6 million ($9 million) robbery in 1985.

  Reader, seventy-six at the time, was known by his cohorts as “the Master” or the “Guv’nor,” the would-be chief executive of their “Firm.” He had joined forces with Daniel Jones, the eccentric fitness freak with a wiry frame, who clocked in at a sprightly sixty years of age, and John “Kenny” Collins, a pot-bellied fireworks salesman with a rap sheet dating back to 1961, whom Reader knew from prison. Collins was seventy-four years old at the time.

  The cumulative age of the four men was 277 years when the caper took place in April 2015—that is, if you don’t include Basil, a technology wiz and alarm man with a red wig who was in his fifties. Reader had known Basil for at least two decades and recruited him to help with the planning. His identity was shrouded in mystery.

  While Reader was the one who gave orders, the others, including Jones, were the “laborers” who obeyed, albeit sometimes grudgingly; they thought him smug and condescending.

  While Perkins dreamed of using the loot from the heist to buy a house for each of his four daughters, and Reader also wanted to support his family, the men seemed to be motivated by a mix of ambition, adventure, and the urge for one last great hoorah. Jones also had other ideas of what to do with his share, including raising his partner Val’s weekly allowance by a “fiver” to £125 (about $190). Perkins was more generous and noted that he gave his “old woman” a weekly allowance of £150 (about $225). Jones also told the others he wanted to buy a Volvo with a big back seat for his beloved dog, Rocket.2

  Perkins hadn’t been impressed: “I’d get rid of that dog!” he chided him. “I wouldn’t let him in that fucking motor, that’s for sure!”

  Collins and Jones would later muse while they were driving in Collins’s white Mercedes that holding down a regular job just wasn’t enough to eke out a living, enjoy the Christmas holidays, and go on vacation. Why work for a living when you could come by millions with the spin of a power drill?

  “If you have to work for a living—you know, an ordinary job, not a good job, how you manage to get by during Christmas and then start fucking take the kids on holiday. Fuckin’ hell!” Collins said to Jones.

  “You get a straight man who goes to work for £25,000 a year. That’s the average, ain’t it?” Jones asked.

  “I suppose they get a bit more now but I would say £25,000 ’cause a lot of them get fucking worse,” Collins replied.

  “My Matthew works for the dust, he brings home £260 a week,” Jones said, plaintively, referring to his son’s job as a street cleaner.3

  OVER THE MONTHS OF planning, after discussing the relative challenge
s of different targets in central London, the gang eventually set their sights on 88–90 Hatton Garden. The reason was simple: hundreds of millions of pounds in diamonds, jewels, sapphires, gold bars, rare coins, and cash were stored there.

  But the debates had sometimes been fraught. The building had been at the center of London’s jewelry district since the 1940s. Reader knew the neighborhood and safe deposit company from his decades operating there as a professional fence and grifter and he had been casing out the seven-floor building for years. Yet perhaps because he was conditioned by his years in jail and was no stranger to the intoxication of greed that had led to past follies, he was deeply cautious. Hitting such a well-policed area could end in disaster and land the men behind bars. The rest of the gang were no strangers to prison, either.

  But Reader saw an opening after the building’s management, in a moment of cost-cutting folly, decided to lay off its longtime caretaker, ensuring that it would be unguarded after working hours when the Firm visited the storied vault during the long Easter weekend of 2015.4

  Even in the unlikely event they were caught, they appear to have reasoned that they were getting old and, at most, would spend three or four years in jail, after which they could retrieve the loot. In the British justice system, those convicted of a crime typically serve only half their sentence in jail and the rest under supervised probation,5 a legal vagary that Reader and his men would have been well familiar with, given their many brushes with the law.

  While the vault in the basement required a four-digit pin code and was secured by two metallic gates, the Firm knew that the front door of the building was unlocked most of the day, that there now were no twenty-four-hour guards, and that the safe deposit boxes could be accessed, if only the gang could figure out a way of bypassing the vault, which was reinforced by twenty inches of concrete.

  To attempt such a brazen crime in Hatton Garden, a tight-knit community of jewelers heavily patrolled by police, Reader knew his Firm would need a crew with diverse skills, ingenuity, and, above all, fearlessness.

  The members of his crew were indeed getting on in years, and suffered from a range of ailments including diabetes, heart disease, and bladder-control problems. But among the men, they had more than enough experience picking locks, digging tunnels, cracking open safes, escaping from prisons, dousing guards with gas and threatening to light them on fire, melting down gold, and stashing loot. Reader and Perkins, the most experienced among the gang, had been involved in two of the most daring robberies of the twentieth century, and were no strangers to crimes that had turned violent.

  All had wives or long-term partners and children and—in the case of Reader and Perkins—grandchildren. Beyond the glory, the glittering headlines, and the chance to take a break from the monotony of retirement, their banter and boasting, which was later surreptitiously recorded by Scotland Yard, suggests they were mainly motivated by the one thing that drove most old-school criminals of their generation: greed, and piles and piles of cold, hard cash.

  The Crew

  Terry Perkins, the Pill-Popping Thief

  By virtue of his age—he turned sixty-seven during the burglary—and his conviction for one of the largest cash robberies in British history, Brian Reader’s number two in the gang in terms of seniority was Terry Perkins. He was a tough-as-nails career criminal, whose rough edges had been tempered somewhat by age, acute diabetes, and nearly twenty years behind bars.

  Perkins had a grandfatherly demeanor, with blue eyes and a ruddy face. He had been sentenced for his role in a notorious 1983 robbery at the Security Express company in east London, which netted about £6 million ($9 million) in cash. The burglary took place over an Easter weekend—in this case, Easter Monday. Freddie Foreman, one of the robbers on that job, and the self-described “godfather of British crime,” recalled in an interview that members of the hooded gang, which included a then thirty-five-year-old Perkins, wielded sawed-off shotguns and overpowered the lone guard at Security Express’s offices at breakfast time.

  During the robbery, the thieves poured gas over one terrified member of the staff and warned him that he would be set on fire if he didn’t hand over the cash and gold, according to Foreman.6 The gang loaded stacks of bank notes stored in the company’s vaults into several escape vehicles. At the time, the Security Express holdup was the largest cash haul in British history.

  Incredibly, Perkins did not serve the full twenty-two years for the 1985 Security Express heist. He simply failed to return to Spring Hill Prison in Buckinghamshire, about fifty miles southeast of London, in 1995 after a weekend visit approved by his probation officer. Instead, he remained at large for the next seventeen years. According to Scotland Yard and former associates, he had been living in a small apartment with his mother, and working as a bartender and cook at a pub called the Harlequin in Clerkenwell in central London that attracted aging thieves and was located in the same district as Hatton Garden. Collins, Reader, and other disreputable men liked to hang out at the Harlequin and it was there, among other places, that the men got to know one another and cemented their friendship.7

  After police received a tip-off in 2012, possibly from a patron at the bar, Perkins was suddenly recaptured. When police arrived at his house to arrest him, he smiled and exclaimed, “I’ve been expecting you,” according to Scotland Yard. Despite his ruse of having escaped from prison and all but living out in the open, he was released a few months later. After more than fifteen years in prison, he had done his fair share behind bars, and he was apparently seen as being too docile to be deemed a threat by police, even if his penchant for thievery had never left him.

  He was a “hard worker.” Freddie Foreman, who was an enforcer for the Kray twins, the legendary London gangsters in the 1950s and 1960s, recalled his old friend as a determined man, who never gave up and would never grass—or snitch. He said Perkins dressed sharply and had amassed a lot of money in real estate.

  During the robbery, Perkins was diligent and dependable and was not averse to being one of “the heavies,” if the situation demanded it. “He is not a leader,” Foreman said. “He likes to joke, he is one of the chaps, the one who will stay all night long at the pub, even after closing.” He added, “He is a good solid old boy, who keeps a low profile and does what he is told. He is a solid worker, a soldier. He wouldn’t leave you to die on the pavement.”8

  For all of his accumulated wealth, Perkins lived in a modest house in Enfield, a gritty north London neighborhood, with his long-suffering wife, Jacqueline. Terri, one of his four daughters, lived nearby with her family, and he saw her frequently. He was a grandfather now, and, having spent so many years away in prison, appeared determined to make it up to his family. During his long criminal career, he had bought and sold properties, including in Portugal, and he had made hundreds of thousands of pounds in cash. But judging by the frequency with which money came up in his conversations with the rest of the Firm, he hungered for more.

  He was a man of simple tastes—he liked fish ’n’ chips. He liked to laugh. He appeared generous to his children and sweet toward his grandchildren, though he didn’t hesitate to swear in front of them. He would drive his young granddaughter to her acting and dance classes, and fuss over his ill grandson. If he called you a “cunt,” you were halfway to being friends.

  Despite his harmless exterior, Perkins had a quick temper, and he could be competitive and jealous, especially of Reader, who was older than him, had accumulated an equally if not more impressive roster of robberies, and whom he resented for his bourgeois affectations and pretentiousness. Perkins was close to seventy. And he still wanted to be a player. Working class and seemingly proud of it, Perkins hated Reader’s smugness. He was determined to show that age hadn’t dented his thieving skills and complained to Jones that Reader behaved as if he was “past it.”9 grudging respect for the man the others called the Master. “But I will show him!”

  Reader sometimes wanted the Firm to meet early so they would have time fo
r lunch. But Perkins would have none of it, preferring to spend his free time with his family. “ ‘Let’s make it early,’ Brian said, the saucy cunt. ‘Lunch?’ I said, ‘fuck off I have got somewhere to go, I got something to do,’ I pick my daughter up and take her to work,” Perkins told Danny Jones in the spring of 2015 as they were driving in Perkins’s blue Citroën Saxo. “You go and have fucking lunch. Go where you want, you cunt.”10

  Despite a sometimes cantankerous manner, he was a man who kept a well-honed poker face, according to Tony Connell, a twenty-year veteran of Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, the main prosecution agency for England and Wales, who was once a member of Perkins’s legal team when he was a younger thief.

  A jovial Liverpudlian with a prodigious gift of gab, Connell was on Perkins’s legal team after Perkins was accused of taking part in the Security Express robbery of 1983. That heist had yielded so much cash, Connell recalled, that Alan Opiola, one of the convicted, complained that they had tried to count the bills in a bathtub at his house but when they couldn’t fit any more in the tub, they were forced to “squash” them into little squares.

  When Connell met Perkins in 1985, he was sitting in a cell in the basement of the Old Bailey. He described Perkins as physically unremarkable. “He’s not the leader or the strongman, more the guy who can carry the stash of goods to the van and drive away. In armed robberies, you need someone like that, someone you can count on not to panic.”

  Decades later, he recalled Perkins’s defense with an uproarious, disbelieving laugh. “He said he was too old and ill to have jumped over the wall during the Security Express robbery, and he gave us medical files to show that he had a heart condition.” It was eerily similar to the defense Perkins told the gang they should use during the planning of the Hatton Garden caper if they were ever arrested: that they were too old and infirm to lug heavy jewels, never mind wield a diamond-tipped drill that weighed eighty pounds.