by Dan Bilefsky
During the Security Express trial, Connell was asked to write Perkins’s application for bail, since he was the junior lawyer. He said it was a “lost cause”; Perkins had been linked to the scene of the crime, and he didn’t have an effective alibi. After Perkins was sentenced to twenty-two years for the robbery, Connell recalled that he and another lawyer went to see him in his cell in the Old Bailey. When asked whether he needed anything, Perkins, unhappy but not unbowed—asked if he could have a cigarette. Perkins displayed remarkable composure for a man who was about to go to jail for the next two decades.
“I barely had a shilling in my pocket, and when I pulled out my cigarettes and gave him the pack, which was almost full, he replied, ‘Thank you, Mr. Connell.’ He was not very demonstrative. He had just been sent down. But he was a professional criminal and he knew the score. Perkins and his like just accepted long sentences like death or paying taxes because it was an occupational hazard that they tried to avoid. He was part of that generation of old school criminals who knew that if you did the crime and got caught, you did your time, and didn’t complain. They gambled big and if you won, you won big. If they were scared, their code wouldn’t allow them to show it.”11
Danny Jones, the Fabulist
Perkins’s sidekick was Danny Jones, a fifty-eight-year-old marathon runner with white hair and a macho demeanor. The two had known each other for two decades, having met at Blantyre House, a prison for longer-term offenders located on the outskirts of Goudhurst in Kent. But while Perkins was old school and understated, Jones was far more flamboyant.
An experienced burglar, Jones was also an avid fortune-teller, who excelled at picking locks. “Danny is an eccentric, for sure, but don’t believe everything you hear about him,” warned Valerie Hart, his common-law wife and the mother of his two children, a trim and chic woman who looks at least twenty years his junior. “He is definitely eccentric.”12
Hailing from Enfield like Perkins, Jones had a rap sheet as long as it was varied. His police records show four decades’ worth of burglaries beginning in 1975, at the age of twenty, including stealing £80 (about $175) from a butcher shop in 1980 and £92,000 ($202,400) worth of jewelry from Ratner’s jewelers in central London for which he was sentenced to five years in prison in 1982. He also did time for robbing a pawn shop with a shotgun.
While in prison in the 1980s, Jones came under the tutelage of an old-school burglar called Gerald Edward who took him under his wing, advising him that he was better off eschewing violence and instead doing burglaries since they typically generated more money and less prison time. It was an exhortation he seems never to have forgotten.
By the time he was fifty-eight, Jones had spent so many years in jail that he referred to 5 p.m. as “bang up,” the slang used by prisoners to describe when a cell door is locked. After 5 p.m., he would rarely see friends, avoid picking up one of his four cell phones or accept guests at his house in Enfield. With its gabled roofs, richly decorated facade, large windows, and dark wooden and leather interior, his house looked every bit like a nineteenth-century Swiss chalet and reflected the vanity of a man who loved material objects, even as he led a somewhat Spartan life. The floors of the house were covered with Persian carpets, the expansive oak rooms filled with dark brown leather chairs, modernist sculptures, large ornate crucifixes, china plates, stuffed owls, and antique grandfather clocks. A replica of a skull adorned the banister at the end of a grand staircase. Befitting a man who prided himself on his athleticism, his closet was crammed with dozens of pairs of sneakers, and a tool shed near the back of the house overflowed with scuba gear and gardening tools; a black mountain bike hung from a hook.
Yet for all the outward signs of respectability, Jones misspelled words like a ten-year-old (one old friend said he used to ask others to read to him in prison) and could barely write a grammatical sentence. Proud of his physical prowess and clinging to the myth that he was in the army, he liked to boast that he offered survival training sessions to officers who wanted to learn how to survive in hostile territory.
His passion for physical fitness was matched by a love of crime and crime stories, and he enjoyed writing hilariously bad short stories and poetry in a diary labeled “The Master Thief,” dated December 1994 and signed “Danny Jones.” “Stroking the storage room door it gently opens. His heart beats like a small child as before him the diamond sparkles,” the story reads. “He would caress them in some strange manner. Closing the storage door as he leaves. Why doesn’t he take the booty and with a cat-like smile he says, because I am the master thief.”
In another undated diary entry he wrote what appeared to be a letter to his young son, urging him to be strong as he was apparently leaving somewhere, perhaps heading off to prison: “Put your head on my shoulders, don’t you shed a tear as cowboys don’t cry. Pull yourself together give me a cowboy smile as cowboys don’t cry. Be strong for mummy now daddy is gone and think of me and that cowboy song.” He concluded with bravado: “Pull yourself together and you will become a man.”13
John “Kenny” Collins, the Sleep-Prone Getaway Driver
Every heist needs a lookout man and getaway driver and that task fell to Kenny Collins, an old prison mate of Reader and a break-in expert from Islington who sold tickets for football games and imported contraband fireworks and Russian cigarettes. His Staffordshire terrier, Dempsey, was never far behind him.
Burly with a florid complexion, Collins was an incorrigible blabbermouth; he was also going deaf and becoming increasingly forgetful. His sluggishness and inability to fend off the need to snooze would later prove a handicap.
Kevin Lane, a former boxer and bouncer who spent eighteen years in prison on murder charges, met Collins at Belmarsh Prison, a maximum security prison in southeast London. At the time, Collins was in jail for fabricating passports. Lane recalled Collins as a resilient and stocky character who was not easily phased, even when he was confronted with being “locked up with a couple of assholes,” including a six-foot-seven-inch “geezer” who was threatening him.
When Collins told Lane about his tormentor, Lane said he offered to help. “I was 27, and he was a squat 50-year-old man. So I said to him, ‘I’ll sort them out.’ I was the tough guy. You know what happened?” He added, “Kenny wrapped up the geezer no problem. He beat him up. He’s a sturdy little fellow.”
According to Lane, Collins was a family man, who had been married twice and had a grown son with Down syndrome from his first marriage, whom he adored. Apparently his son liked to drink and Collins, rather than reproaching him or coddling him, “used to let him drink two or three cans. He was a good father, who cared about his family.”14
Danny Jones and the others liked to mock Collins for not being all that bright—Jones described him as a “wombat-thick old cunt.” But the truth was that Collins was no dummy. In fact, he was a successful criminal—more dodgy businessman than burglar, his friends say—who had made millions by scalping sports tickets and selling stolen cigarettes. He lived well with his amiable and doting wife, Millie, in a leafy and posh part of Islington.
In 1975, Collins was arrested for handling stolen goods and received an eighteen-month sentence for stealing thirty-one dresses and two skirts. Another time he was arrested for trying to break into a shoe shop—a target that his friends Perkins and Jones found laughable. “He could not break into a shoe shop. The cunt doesn’t know the price of anything!” Perkins once mocked him to Jones. “Fucking idiot, cunt.”15
Carl Wood, an Extra Pair of Hands
The least popular among the gang was Carl Wood, age fifty-eight, an unemployed and married father of two adult daughters. Lanky and strong but heavier on brawn than brains, he was to be an extra pair of hands during the heist. Wood, who had grown up in the poor neighborhood of Hackney, in east London, was mired in huge personal debts, living on welfare, and he needed money. He also suffered from Crohn’s disease. He had become friendly with Danny Jones—both fanatical about fitness, they used to enj
oy running together before Wood’s illness became too debilitating.
With his receding brown hair, furrowed brow, and eye glasses, he looked like a librarian, albeit a menacing one. And indeed he could be a nasty piece of work. In 2002 he was sentenced to four years in prison for his involvement in an extortion racket with two corrupt cops. He had teamed up with them to help Robert Kean, a veteran criminal, recover £600,000 ($900,000) from a money launderer who owed him the money. The plan was to beat up the fellow and shove him into the trunk of a car. But undercover anticorruption police were secretly monitoring the operation and Kean and Wood were overheard saying that they planned to rough up the man and put his body in a car crusher if he didn’t hand over the money.
“I’ll just go smash, hit him straight in the head. I’ve got my blade. He ain’t going home,” Wood told Kean. “Don’t worry about that.” Surveillance equipment also picked Wood up boasting that he would “gouge out” the money-launderer’s eyes and “shoot him in the kneecaps.”16
More than two decades later, however, Wood was a shell of his former self. Married to his wife Paula for nineteen years, with two adult daughters, he suffered from Crohn’s disease since he was twenty-four, and was afflicted with chronic fatigue, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and mouth sores. “It’s like a mouthful of ulcers with a bottle of vinegar in your mouth,” he would complain.17 If that wasn’t bad enough, he was also depressed, having accumulated £20,000 ($30,000) in debts. He would do odd DIY jobs but they weren’t enough to scrape by, even with disability payments from the government. He needed money and he needed it quickly. Danny Jones would try to cheer him up by joining him for walks at a local garden center.
Jones appeared to feel sorry for him and recruited him even as he appeared to be skeptical of his old friend and his usefulness. He referred to him behind his back as a lunatic. When talking about Carl, “we say, ‘you cunt,’ ” he would say to Perkins. A “fucking yellow cunt,” Perkins would agree.18
Freddie Foreman, the Aging Heavy
In recruiting men for the job, toughness trumped age. Among those Perkins sought out was Freddie Foreman. A former enforcer for the Krays, the twins who had controlled swathes of east and west London, Foreman was eighty-two years old when Perkins came calling in 2014, he recalled.
Foreman said that in the summer of 2014, Perkins suddenly stopped by his son’s pub, the Punchbowl, in the posh London neighborhood of Mayfair, ostensibly to recruit him for the heist. The two men missed each other, and it is not hard to see why Perkins would have thought of his old friend—he had been a ringleader during the daring Security Express robbery.
“Perkins came by as they were getting the Firm together to do some work, and he wanted me to join them. I hadn’t seen him since Security Express. But we had broken bread together. We were mates,” he said. “Of course, I would’ve gone.”
Foreman recalled the Security Express job with no little pride. After overcoming one of the security guards when he went to get a bottle of milk at the entrance of the high-security building, Foreman tied him up, and forced him to sit at his desk near the safe to buzz the other guards in. To make sure he did as he was told, he added, he crouched under the desk and pointed a knife at his genitals.
“I held a knife at his balls,” he recalled. “The other guards had to walk across a big space to get to the building where the safe was. It took eight hours for all of the guards to arrive and we had to be patient. The phone kept ringing and people were asking, ‘Where the hell are you with the money?’ which was needed to replenish cashiers across London. I picked up the phone and said the vans were having mechanical trouble.”
When it was time to rob the safe at the company and none of the petrified guards produced the keys, Foreman said he put lighter fluid under one guard’s nose and took out a match from a box of Swan Vestas. That spurred the guards to open the safe, their hands trembling with fear. The cash was then spirited into a van, before the gang sped away.
Foreman stressed that no one was injured or beaten up during the robbery. “That was a good job. We gave them tea, we gave them cigarettes. No one got hurt—they could massage their legs—and no one ended up in the hospital. They were just tied up and gagged. No one was hit over the head. That was a good job.”
A squat man with dark darting eyes, a penchant for wearing gray jogging suits, and a fondness for red wine, Foreman grew up as one of five sons of a London black taxi driver and a housewife with Irish roots. His criminal career began in the 1940s at age sixteen when he lived in Battersea, in south London when he was recruited by a gang of female shoplifters known as the “Forty Thieves,” who, dressed in specially tailored “bloomers” and hats sewn with hidden pockets, raided Harrods and shops on London’s West End.
Following his shoplifting stint, he said he tried to do some honest jobs, working as a roofing scaffolder, as a porter at a cold storage facility for meat at Smithfield Market in east London, and trying a job on Southern Railway. But after holding up two people on their way to the bank to deposit money, Foreman said he was hooked by the thrill and the easy cash. Before long, he was as revered as he was feared in London’s shadowy underworld.
As an associate of the Krays in the 1950s and 1960s, his job was to “clean up any messes” that arose in crimes that included robberies, arson, protection rackets, and murder. He also accumulated dozens of businesses including pubs, betting parlors, and casinos in both Britain and the United States. “There was sex, there were birds, there was money,” Foreman recalled, adding, “I was a Mr. Fix it. The murder charges against me came from my time with the Krays.”
During the Security Express robbery, he said the gang put on fake Irish accents and would refer to one another as Paddy, lest one of the guards remember their names. Perkins, he added, had been dependable and had not balked from conjuring the necessary menace to get the guards to open the safe.
Following the Security Express robbery in 1983, Foreman fled to Marbella, in southern Spain, where life in the Costa del Sol, or the “Costa del Crime” as it was known, was a welcome break from the pressures of the London criminal underworld. He and fellow Security Express robber Ronnie Knight, former husband of the actress Barbara Windsor, lived in Spain for more than a decade, soaking up the sun, sipping sangria, and “doing good business,” before they returned to London to lengthy jail terms. Reader was there at the time, too.
Foreman’s luxurious life in exile came to an abrupt end in 1990 after Ronnie Knight’s wife photographed him and Knight at a wedding in Marbella, along with several other of the Security Express robbers. When the photo was leaked to the British tabloids, he said, it caused an enormous public outcry and pressure for his arrest. He was detained and taken to a police station in Marbella, where he demanded to see his lawyer. Instead, he said, he was “kidnapped” and spirited out of the country.
“I was punching and kicking, and the Spanish police say that my teeth marks are still on the door at the Spanish nick where they kept me,” he recalled, referring to the jailhouse. “I remember seeing people sunning on the beach as I was being taken to the airport in a car and thinking that my life was about to change, that I was going back to face a terrible charge. I tried to smash my way out of the car, which was driving at 90 miles an hour. I remember the Gipsy Kings song ‘Bambeleo’ was playing on the car radio.”
Back in London, he was never convicted for participating in the Security Express robbery, but he was jailed for nine years for handling stolen property. Prison had been miserable, and that explained why the gang, all thieves of a similar generation and no strangers to prison, were determined not to use force. “It was mental torture. I was only allowed to associate with six prisoners. There was barbed wire. When you had visitors, there were two screws on each side of the table. They used draconian methods, they treated us like rats in a cage.”
He admitted that only a handful of people in Britain had the chops to pull off the heist Reader had in mind. “There aren’t many who can do it. Young guys w
ouldn’t do it. You need guys who are tried and tested, and who won’t grass you out if you get arrested, people you have broken bread with.” He added, “I admire them—they still had the bottle on their arseholes to do something like that at their age. You have to admire it,” he said.19
Career criminals like Reader and the gang were always on the lookout for the “Big One”—robberies like the Great Train Robbery of 1963 that would forever remain in the history books.
The Great Train Robbery: Villains Idealized
As Reader and the gang began their preparations for hitting Hatton Garden, the Great Train Robbery—the granddaddy of every bold heist that came after it—served as both an affirmation of the romance and glory of the high-stakes heist as well as a cautionary tale about the perils of getting caught. Reader had a particular respect for the crime—if not its violent methods—as he had grown up in Bermondsey, southeast London, the area where several of the Great Train robbers—including Bruce Reynolds and Gordon Goody, two of its masterminds—used to hang out. In the 1950s he would run into them at the Chop House restaurant in Clerkenwell, a former working-class eatery for local tradesmen, where they liked to congregate. They had several friends in common. Reynolds would later boast that the Great Train Robbery was “my Sistine chapel.”20
“For our generation, the Great Train Robbery was the one we all wanted to emulate and few have ever topped it,” Freddie Foreman explained.21
Reader and his cohorts were young villains-in-training at the time of the Great Train Robbery, and thieves of their generation regarded it with a certain awe. Its elements of success and—perhaps, more importantly, its overwhelming gaffes—also offered up several lessons for pulling off a heist that Reader appears to have internalized as a young man: the need for grand ambition, the importance of the element of surprise, the consequences of using force, and the imperative of remaining under the radar if you wanted to avoid arrest. It also showed the British public’s appetite for colorful villains who could be construed as working-class heroes, regardless of whether they were ruthless and motivated by greed.