by Dan Bilefsky
The Great Train Robbery ringleader Bruce Reynolds, an armed robber with a long rap sheet and a love of jazz, had wanted to become a journalist. He had worked in the accounting department of the Daily Mail, a tabloid newspaper—before he became bored and turned to petty crime. Nicknamed “Napoleon” by his fellow thieves because of his authority, he and his cohorts were pursued by a detective with another memorable name: Jack Slipper.22
“It was something I had been looking for all my life, the big one. As a career criminal, you reach a pinnacle and that was it,” Reynolds recalled decades later, an old man using his infamy to raise money for charity to help fix a leaky roof. “Plus it had those elements of fantasy. I was brought up on Butch Cassidy and Jesse James. Other crimes have got their points, but for the audacity of it and the way it captured the public imagination it’s up there.”23
Inspired at least in part by the robberies of railways in the heyday of the American Wild West, Reynolds assembled a team to intercept a Royal Post Office train carrying millions of pounds in cash in Buckinghamshire, a county in southeast England. The robbery began on Thursday, August 8, 1963, when a gang of fifteen men wearing ski masks changed a signal to red before ambushing a traveling post office train that had left Glasgow Central Station at 6:50 p.m. the day before and was on its way to London’s Euston Station, where it was scheduled to arrive at 3:59 in the morning.24
After boarding the train at around 3 a.m., a masked thief grabbed the train’s driver Jack Mills from behind and soon men wielding clubs and pipes swarmed all over him.25 Then they targeted the train’s high-value packages carriage, grabbing about 120 bags of cash containing £2.6 million in used bank notes—equivalent to about £50 million (about $65 million) today.
The robbers then sped to their hideaway, Leatherslade Farm, a ramshackle farm about thirty miles from the scene of the crime. The men were so giddy after the robbery that they stopped to play a game of Monopoly, reportedly using real bank notes from the heist. It would prove a fatal error, as fingerprints left on the Monopoly board would later help lead police to the culprits. Money used in the Monopoly game by the gang later sold at auction for about £400 ($600) in 2015.26
It didn’t take long before the Fleet Street media and the public at large were captivated by the sensational hit on one of the country’s most dependable institutions—Her Majesty’s Royal Post Office. The first member of the team to be arrested was Roger Cordrey, who was apprehended living with a friend above a flower shop in Bournemouth, a seaside resort on England’s southern coast. The landlady, a policeman’s widow, had become suspicious when her tenants paid three months of their rent in advance in ten-shilling notes. The rest were eventually apprehended and eleven of the men were each sentenced to between twenty and thirty years in prison.
At their sentencing, the judge, Justice Edmund Davies, keenly aware of the British public’s fascination with the case and the idealization of the villains, sought to play up the violence of the crime and the toll it had exerted on Mr. Mills, the train’s driver, who never recovered from his injuries and died six years later at the age of sixty-four of pneumonia.
“Let us clear out of the way any romantic notions of daredevilry,” he told the court. “This is nothing less than a sordid crime of violence inspired by vast greed.”27
Nevertheless, the culprits of the Great Train Robbery were celebrated as national folk heroes. It was a lesson that was, perhaps, not lost on Reader and his aging gang as they set out to outdo the Great Train Robbery.
Chapter 4
The Target
The Garden and the Criminal Underworld
LONG BEFORE READER AND HIS AGING COCONSPIRATORS decided to pull off an improbable heist that would thrust “Hatton Garden” into headlines around the world, the area had occupied a special place in the popular imaginations of Londoners for centuries. To local jewelers, the street, which is also used synonymously as shorthand for the surrounding jewelry quarter, is known affectionately as “The Garden.” The area was named after Sir Christopher Hatton, a handsome and debonair chancellor of the Exchequer, in the sixteenth century, who attained his post after he came to court to attend a masked ball, and Queen Elizabeth I admired his elegant dancing.1
The neighborhood hosted prosperous merchants in the eighteenth century, and later became popular with Jewish diamond traders who sometimes sold rough diamonds in local kosher restaurants. Today, more than fifty jewelry merchants and jewelers operate in the area, which borders the City of London, the capital’s financial center. A magnet for intrigue, criminals, and law enforcement, Hatton Garden was the fictional setting where James Bond—in Ian Fleming’s Diamonds Are Forever—trails diamond smugglers to the “neat white portals of the London Diamond Club.”
At street level are dozens of jewelry shops, like New York City’s West 47th Street, many of them family owned and marked by kitsch neon signs offering discounts on gold wedding bands, diamond engagement rings, and watch repairs. For decades, coming to Hatton Garden to buy an engagement ring was a rite of passage for Londoners of a certain class, a place to win over a recalcitrant heart with a glittering diamond. Oasis’s Liam Gallagher bought Patsy Kensit her wedding ring here.2 The quarter also hosts the workshop of famed silversmiths Smith & Harris, who design Ascot trophies, rings based on sculptures by Anish Kapoor, and, perhaps most famously, a life-size eighteen-karat gold sculpture of the supermodel Kate Moss, called “Siren,” that is thought to be the largest solid gold sculpture ever made.
In the Garden, the real wheeling and dealing takes place behind closed doors in gray Victorian buildings with labyrinths of small rooms that are off-limits to most casual customers, or on the bustling trading floor of the clubby London Diamond Bourse at 100 Hatton Garden.
Hidden London, which chronicles the streets and neighborhoods of the capital, notes that after the last Hatton descendant died in 1760, the area—with its handsome mansions and quiet streets—became a desirable place to live by the city’s upper classes. But it has always lived in the shadow of the criminal underworld and its neighboring gritty streets became the backdrop for the petty crooks and miscreants of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, according to Rachel Lichtenstein, whose parents and grandfather worked in the district. Fagin resided in a slum near Hatton Garden next to the river, and Oliver was tried at a police court at 54 Hatton Garden after being falsely implicated in the theft of a handkerchief. (Dickens knew the Garden’s streets intimately; at age fifteen, he did a stint as a clerk in a lawyer’s office in Holborn in central London prior to becoming a writer.)3
During the Elizabethan era, Clerkenwell—the long-since gentrified commercial area of which Hatton Garden is a part—was outside the jurisdiction of the city’s Puritanical rulers and consequently attracted, among other things, dilapidated tenement houses, beggars, brothels, and taverns. The area has such a rich history of criminality that in the eighteenth century there was a nearby prison where officers would tie prisoners to the railings and throw them in the River Fleet, where they would drown.4 Hatton Garden also includes Ely Place, a sleepy street with its own gatehouse and beadles, which was privately owned by the bishops of Ely and part of the Diocese of Ely in Cambridgeshire, about sixty miles away. Despite its London location, it was a refuge for criminals over the centuries since it was not under the jurisdiction of London police. As a result, thieves fleeing robberies at Hatton Garden would sometimes hide out at Ye Olde Mitre, a tiny pub founded there in 1546 and all but hidden in a narrow passage, to escape detection and avoid arrest. London’s Metropolitan Police would then have to ask the landlord’s permission before they could enter and handcuff the wily villains.5
In Diamond Street, Lichtenstein describes Hatton Garden in the early part of the twentieth century as a mix of mercantile dynamism, criminality, and poverty. “There would be a setter in one room, a polisher in another, an engraver in another and if you opened a door sometimes a rat would run out.”6
The district was long populated by so-called Frummers, o
rthodox Ashkenazi Jews, who learned the craft of diamond cutting in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. The first wave arrived in the nineteenth century, fleeing pogroms. Another wave brought their skills with them when they fled Hitler in the late 1930s and early 1940s, including Jewish jewelers from Antwerp, at the time the global center of the diamond trade, who fled Belgium after Nazi occupation in May 1940. Refugees from Antwerp, some of whom escaped with their precious gems by sewing the diamonds into the lining of their garments, set up the London Diamond Bourse in 1940 on Greville Street, inside a restaurant called Mrs. Cohen’s Cafe. After 1945, an influx of Holocaust survivors arrived, swelling the Bourse’s ranks, which eventually moved to several buildings on Hatton Garden, where it still resides today.7
Over time, the Jewish traders were joined by Indian diamond merchants, some of whom send their uncut diamonds to Gujarat, India, for cutting and polishing, and have used the economic advantage of lower labor costs to expand. Jewish cultural influence over the trade remains profound. When a diamond deal is completed, the two traders, whether Indian or Jewish or African, utter the word “mazel,” or luck, to seal the deal. There is no paper, and no contract. It is a tight-knit community of jewelers, diamond traders, and watchmakers that operates on trust and where everyone knows one another.
This insularity and hypervigilance makes it a daunting challenge for a thief to snoop around unnoticed, and it influenced the decision by Reader and his cohorts to commit their crime over a long Easter weekend and in disguise. Even then, avoiding the prying eyes of the Garden’s many yentas would prove elusive.
Modern-Day Yentas
George Katz’s jewelry shop E Katz & Co Ltd occupies the ground floor at 88–90 Hatton Garden, home of the safe deposit that Reader and his Firm planned to target. Katz & Co was founded by George’s father Emiel, a jeweler, in 1947. A Czechoslovak Jew and refugee from Prague, Emiel fled the country in 1938, ahead of the Nazi occupation. He arrived in London penniless, with a few diamonds sewn into his clothes. His father quickly found work at Hatton Garden, working as an apprentice with another Jewish refugee. He sold the diamonds he had smuggled into Britain and used the proceeds to find a small apartment near Paddington, where George was born, and then he opened his shop.
George began to work in his father’s shop in the 1960s when he was a teenager. The Garden teemed with immigrants, a majority of them Jews, who peddled their diamonds and precious stones from the tables of corner cafés or even on the street. He has been working in the shop for the past fifty years. Today, he said, concerns about security made selling precious gems on the street impossible.
“Hatton Garden back then was a big center for jewelry trade and people came from all over the United States and Europe to buy antique jewelry,” he said. “Back then the dealing was very informal and everything was based on trust.”
Because of the culture of trust, strangers, interlopers, or thieves were hard-pressed to remain invisible in an area where everyone knew everyone and where people liked to gossip like those old Jewish women in nineteenth-century Eastern European shtetls, known as yentas, who would keep tabs on the Jewish ghetto, matchmake, scold, kibitz, and report anything—or anyone—that appeared out of place.8
Jacob Meghnagi, thirty-nine, an Italian Jew with dual Israeli and British citizenship, has worked in the Garden for more than a decade, and exudes the swagger of someone who seems to know everyone in the Garden. With a buzz cut, leather jacket, yarmulke perched on his head, and a noticeable gift of gab, the father of six divides his time between London and Tel Aviv.
Every day, he said, he sends tens of thousands of pounds worth of gems in sealed envelopes to clients on spec, with the implicit understanding that payment will be received in kind or the gems will be returned, if they aren’t able to sell them. But he added, unsold gems are always sent back; not doing so in the Garden means professional suicide.
“All we have in the Garden is words and trust. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone talks. Everyone borrows from one another. It is a very small village,” he said. “You can have the same query for a stone from four different people, and then realize they’re calling on behalf of the same person. The street is small. If someone is stung, it will soon make its rounds around the street. There is an expression here, ‘If you sting once, you don’t do it again, ’cause no one will ever do business with you again.’ ”9
The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company
As the Jewish community prospered, many of the diamond traders moved to enclaves in north London such as Golders Green and Hendon—suburban, tree-lined neighborhoods where they could raise families away from the commercial center. In the absence of a safe place to store their diamonds, many dealers would take their goods home with them in their long black coats.
After several jewelers were robbed on their way home from Hatton Garden in the 1940s, demand grew for the creation of a safe deposit in the area where jewelers could leave their gems and cash before going home for the day. The origins of the Hatton Garden vault can be traced to 1948 when a local jeweler, George Edward Gordon, who had a business at 88–90 Hatton Garden, realized that his fellow jewelers felt jittery about the threat of being attacked when they walked on the streets with their gems.
Safekeeping has a history going back centuries. But remarkably—given the hundreds of millions of pounds worth of gems circulating at Hatton Garden, there was, until the 1950s, no safe deposit there. After Gordon realized the gap in the market, he spent nearly £20,000—the equivalent of roughly $630,000 today—to build his vault, which included a thick, seemingly impenetrable door that its owner boasted was resistant to both bombs and burglars.10
George Katz recalled that when the safe opened its doors in 1956, dozens of jewelers, many of them Holocaust survivors, lined up to rent a box.11 People who had been very reluctant to part with their assets and livelihoods suddenly had a trusted place they could store them.
Nevertheless, Hatton Garden’s jewelers were an easy target, and some insisted on keeping their gems on them at all times. On February 28, 1978, Hatton Garden diamond trader Leo Grunhut was suddenly attacked by two men with sawed-off shotguns and shot in the back outside his home in Golders Green as he tried to flee. He was carrying more than £250,000 (about $487,000) in diamonds. He died three weeks later, and for twelve years his murderer’s identity remained a mystery until the Flying Squad, an elite unit of Scotland Yard that investigates commercial burglaries, arrested a sixty-one-year-old man named John Hilton in 1990 in a botched jewelry heist and he confessed to the killing.12 Grunhut’s murder only added luster to the mystique—and necessity—of the Hatton Garden vault.
But the security at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company had hardly changed since the 1940s, beyond the addition of intruder alarms and CCTV cameras.13 If members wanted to visit their box, one of the security guards would allow them in past two locked sliding gates. Once inside, a second security guard would log their visit in a book and escort them to their box, secured by a ten-ton door custom-made by Chubb. The door has two combination locks and two key locks. Two keys were required for box holders to get to their safe deposit boxes, and the keys would need to be turned clockwise simultaneously. Each box holder had his own key and the safe deposit guard kept the other master key. Even to this day, no thief has ever infiltrated the ten-ton door.14
But the Garden has long been a target for wily criminals and the scene of countless crimes, including sensational armed robberies.
As much as the vendors in Hatton Gardens would like to see themselves as a close-knit community of honest, trustworthy businesspeople, the Garden has hardly been immune to nefarious practices or criminal interlopers.
Roy Ramm, a former head of the Flying Squad, who was once one of Europe’s most renowned hostage negotiators and now works as a security consultant, recalled that the Garden was always awash with “shvartz money,” or “black money,” in Yiddish. “It is a pretty incestuous market. There are some very honest, very decent businesspeople.
But there are also dubious businesses. There are some heavy duty Israeli organized crime there. It is difficult for honest people to operate there and not be ensnared by it.”15
For decades, members of the criminal fraternity liked to hold court at 12 Greville Street, off Hatton Garden, a bustling Jewish restaurant called Nosherie, that served heaping plates of potato latkes, which doubled as a discreet venue for diamond trades and hosted an unlikely mix of Orthodox Jewish diamond traders, petty criminals, Italian mobsters, and local ladies who lunch. Among them was Brian Reader, who, according to law enforcement officials and veteran British crime reporters, was a regular at the Nosherie throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
The Garden of Villains
The Garden also has not been immune to violence. In late December 1778, in what was dubbed “The great robbery of Hatton Garden,” a gang of twenty thieves stormed a house on the street after pointing a pistol at the occupants. In a fate that has ensnared many a Hatton Garden thief, they were arrested two days later after trying to resell the goods they had stolen.16
Paul Lashmar, a veteran investigative crime reporter, spent decades investigating the Garden’s hidden underworld. Stolen jewelry flowed so freely through the Garden that in 1994, he observed that several items filched from Prince Charles at St. James’s Palace in Kensington ended up there. According to Lashmar, the jeweler who acquired the royal booty, Geoffrey Mann, thirty-nine, said he had bought the four pairs of cuff links and a tiepin within a few hours of the burglary, without realizing their origins.17 When he saw the items in a newspaper, he called the police, and they were returned to a thankful prince. The jeweler had paid £450 ($675) for £10,000 ($15,000) in stolen goods.18