by Dan Bilefsky
It was a typical cloudy and rainy London day. Collins had activated the windshield wipers in the white van. The fresh air, daylight, and drizzle assaulted their senses after so many hours stuck in the cavernous, dimly lit, dusty basement, drilling. Daylight also brought with it a sense of reality that had been absent in the vault and once again the fear of getting caught intensified, at least for some members of the gang.
Collins, the only one who was well rested, drove Perkins and Jones to their homes in Enfield. Then Collins drove Reader to Collins’s house on Bletsoe Walk in Islington. From Collins’s house, Collins’s brother-in-law, Lincoln, drove Reader to London Bridge station, where Reader took a train back home to Kent. It was morning rush hour as Reader slid his senior citizen pass through the turnstile at the train station.
It turned out that human will had its limits, at least for one old man. In the hours after leaving 88–90 Hatton Garden, Brian Reader did something the others thought unimaginable: he abandoned the heist, deciding that it was too risky to return to the scene of the crime. Jones and Perkins would later express how they had felt exhaustion, disbelief, and anger that Reader was abandoning them when they needed him most. Of the gang, Collins was the most sympathetic to Reader, whom Jones and Perkins resented. But Reader had made up his mind. He was out.
Perhaps the years he had spent in a jail cell flashed through his mind. He had a lot to consider. He wasn’t the spring chicken he once had been. There was his ill son, who had high blood pressure. His dead wife. Perhaps he couldn’t face another day behind bars.
The others were now bereft of the Master, both the chief strategist and curmudgeonly cheerleader. And they were irate that he had pulled out, angry at his cowardice and unwillingness to follow through on what they had started. Following the bungled burglary, Jones, in particular, was intent on going back in, convinced that they could infiltrate the vault, if only they could get a stronger battering ram to push over the cabinet.
Rather than return immediately to Hatton Garden, the remaining members of the gang decided to go home to gather their strength. Collins went back to his wife, Millie, at his home in north London, and, one imagines, took a nap. Carl Wood, ailing and perennially irritable, was, by all accounts, feeling skittish and nervous.
Jones returned to his north London home where he kept his drilling videos. At that point, there were no television reports of the break-in. Did that mean it was safe to go back? As for Reader, his decision to walk away meant that he could now be cut off from any booty. But the rest of the gang needed to make sure that Basil, Reader’s associate, and the one with the keys and codes to get into the building, didn’t ditch them. They proceeded to lobby him not to give up. “I’ll tell you something now, if we never proceeded me and you, Basil would have walked away,” Jones later recalled.4 The remaining team members decided to plod on.
Meanwhile, Reader was at home in his country-style manor in Kent. His last big job had imploded. He was out of the game, but at least he remained a free man.
Vinnie Jones on a Mission for Power Tools
They were an eccentric duo: the athletic fabulist who imagined himself as a would-be soldier and the pot-bellied senior citizen who made a killing selling smuggled cigarettes. But Jones and Collins were nevertheless united by a common adventurous zeal, a love of their canine companions, whom they both talked to, and a determination to finish what they had begun.
So it was that on Sunday, the day after the first bungled burglary, the two men used Collins’s Mercedes to go shopping and buy another hydraulic pump. First, they set out for D & M Tools, a tool store in the affluent west London suburb of Twickenham. Wearing a gray-hooded sweatshirt and no disguise, a jovial-looking Jones entered the store and casually asked the woman at the cash register about the store’s inventory of pumps.
When D & M didn’t have the model of pump they were looking for, they went next door to Machine Mart, another tool store, where Jones paid about £100 ($140) for a new red Clarke pump ram and hose. He used his last name for the invoice but with the initial V for his first name, which the British media would later breathlessly conclude was a reference to Vinnie Jones from the 1998 heist film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Less glamorously, it was a reference to his long-standing partner, Valerie Hart. A store attendant recalled that Jones, appearing calm and relaxed, had put his own street address on the invoice.
A CCTV camera outside D & M also recorded video footage of the two men, along with Collins’s distinctive black Mercedes with its white roof and black alloy tires. Collins, apparently giddy with excitement about the prospect of going back in, called Perkins to update him on the purchase. Then he called Wood. Returning to the scene of the crime was fraught with risks. But if they were nervous, they managed to overcome it, and decided to proceed.
Returning to the Scene of the Crime
When the remaining members of the gang returned to Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd—a full forty-eight hours later on Sunday, April 4—Perkins’s sixty-seventh birthday—they found that the fire exit door at the back of the building, which they had left unlocked, was now engaged. Lionel Wiffen had stopped by his office on Saturday with his wife to prepare for a visit by an electrician the next day. After noticing that the fire exit door on Greville Street was unlocked and ajar, he locked it, and went to his offices. He had a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. He was the only person to visit the premises on the weekend. Most of the neighboring businesses were, as the criminals hoped and suspected, closed for the Easter weekend. Wiffen then checked the door leading from the courtyard into the basement. It had been bolted from the inside after Basil had left the building after the first night. After cleaning his office, Wiffen departed the building at 9 p.m.
At 9:17 p.m., Collins left his home in north London, and with Jones, Wood, and Perkins, drove his white Mercedes to Hatton Garden to check out the area. They got out of the car and walked carefully toward the fire escape door near Greville Street. They looked around. The coast was clear. Satisfied with their preliminary reconnaissance mission, the men left Hatton Garden before returning, around 10 p.m., only this time in the white van.
It is not clear how the others had convinced Basil to return to the scene of the crime, but he did. As the men waited for Basil to go to the front of the building, unlock the door from the inside and let them in, as he had done on the first night, this time Carl Wood got cold feet as he tried to open the locked fire escape door at least two times. The others were already fed up with Wood, a whiny man beset by illnesses and debt, always complaining. They were also probably calculating in their heads how much Wood’s departure would enlarge their share of the loot. Collins nevertheless urged him to stay.
“He thought we would never get in,” he later told Jones and Perkins. “The cunt I said, ‘Give it another half hour; fuck, we’ve done everything we can do; if we can’t get in, we won’t be able to get in, will we?’ ”5
Evidently spooked, Wood scuttled back up the stairs near the fire escape and fled on nearby Leather Lane, “His arsehole went and he thought we would never get in,” Collins added.
They were now down two men. With Wood and Reader out, only three remained. It was half the crew they’d planned for, but Jones, Basil, and Perkins remained steadfast. They wanted what they’d set out to take. And when you want something strongly or for long enough, it can begin to feel like it’s already yours.
After Basil let them into the building, the gang returned to their posts inside the vault. The men carried their equipment, including several wheeled trash cans, back into the safe deposit. Jones carried a black Nike bag and the new pump and hose, enclosed in a red box that matched his shoes. Collins, for his part, returned to his lookout post at 25 Hatton Garden, this time determined not to snooze.
As Collins scanned the empty street below, Basil, Jones, and Perkins set about dislodging the cabinet, anchoring the new pump with metal joists on the wall opposite the vault.6
Once again, Jones said, “S
mash that up!” Jones began pumping aggressively. This time, the pump did not “ping” back. The men were urging one another on.
“It’s fucking working!” Perkins cried out. “It ain’t ping back. It ain’t fucking come back.” He egged on his friend as Jones continued to pump. The pump hissed violently and suddenly there was a loud bang.
“We’re in! We’re in!”7 Perkins hollered, abandoning his usual calm. They had succeeded, at last.
“It was hissing, that pump, bang, didn’t it?” Jones would later recall. The noise, he complained, had given him a massive headache.8
Jones slithered through the narrow figure-eight-shaped hole in the concrete. It was just as well Collins was the lookout man; he was portly and would’ve struggled to wiggle through. Once inside the vault, Jones used heavy cutting equipment to jimmy open 73 out of 999 safe deposit boxes to ransack them. The usual method to open a safe deposit box was for the box’s owner and a security guard to individually turn two separate keys clockwise at the same time. But in the absence of keys, brute force could do the trick.
Jones focused mostly on the boxes at eye level on the right-hand side. Dislodging one box would loosen the box next to it. But in a sign of his frantic state of mind or lack of experience, he chose boxes randomly, significantly slowing himself down and reducing the gang’s final booty. “The safety deposit boxes at Hatton Garden were the difficult ones—they were made in the 1950s,” a person familiar with the heist’s planning recalled. “In other places you could do a box per minute—or 60 boxes an hour. But then Jones was saying, ‘Oh, I’ll do that one, now I’ll do that one.’ So it took longer. That’s why they only opened about 70 boxes.” And of the 73 boxes they opened, about 29 were empty. Among the nearly 1,000 boxes, dozens were empty because they belonged to box owners who had defaulted on their rent, according to a statement the safe deposit company gave to police.
Nevertheless, the men quickly filled several bags and two large trash bins with jewels, gold, precious stones, and cash. The bags were so weighted down with jewels, that they struggled to carry all the loot up the stairs to the fire escape. As they emptied the boxes and stuffed jewels into wheelie bins, Perkins, at one point, nearly collapsed. Had his blood sugar gone too low? Wielding a drill while shooting himself with insulin had apparently taken its toll. But he was nevertheless elated and managed to bring several bags stuffed with jewels to the fire escape in the back of the building where Collins was waiting nearby in the van, its front lights on. Jones and Perkins loaded the trash cans into the van. The men, though exhausted, tried to work quickly. Greville Street was deserted, save two pigeons on the street, oblivious to the historic burglary unfolding before them.
Before they left, Jones brought the red pump he had bought earlier that day in Twickenham back to the van. He left behind the Sealy pump that had malfunctioned. Jones had apparently studied his copy of Forensics for Dummies, and the men scrubbed every inch of the safe deposit with bleach, ensuring that Scotland Yard wouldn’t find even a trace of DNA evidence.
At 6:44 a.m. on Sunday—more than ten hours after they’d entered for the second time, and more than two days after they’d initially broken in—exhausted and out of breath, the men sped away in the white van. Collins dropped them off at each of their homes. Later that day, William Lincoln called his nephew John Harbinson, a taxi driver, and asked him if he would be willing to collect some goods for him for storage. He did not say what they were.
The next day, Jones and Perkins met at Collins’s house in north London to take stock of the loot before Harbinson spirited away three bags stuffed with jewels in his taxi. It was a good haul. At least £14 million, or $21 million worth of gold, gems, diamonds, and cash, most of which was stored at Collins’s house. They would meet the next day to divvy it up.
It was more than they had even hoped for.
Chapter 7
Paul Johnson
A Modern-Day Sherlock Holmes
THE THEFT WAS DISCOVERED ON THE MORNING OF Tuesday, April 7, 2015—a full two days after the Easter weekend—when Kelvin Stockwell, the guard who had walked away from the building over the weekend, came to work at around 8 a.m. He looked at the door leading to the vault and saw that the lock was missing. He slowly ventured into the unlocked heart and soul of Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. There were tools and safe deposit boxes strewn all over the floor, along with piles of glittering sapphires and diamonds that had been left behind as the gang frantically fled the scene of the crime.
As Stockwell surveyed the vault where he had been coming to work for some twenty years, the shock was visceral and breathtaking.
“It was like a bomb had hit the place,” he would later recall, and no doubt he must have felt some of the explosion’s impact, as the company’s main security guard. He called the police immediately.1
It didn’t take long for the heist to make its way all the way up the chain of command. Later that day, Detective Superintendent Craig Turner, the restless and indefatigable forty-four-year-old chief of the Flying Squad, was sitting at his desk at Putney, the squad’s blocky headquarters in southwest London, when he received a phone call. Paul Johnson, one of his two deputies, was on the line.
At the time, Turner was preoccupied running “Operation Yena,” an operation that was closing in on a gang of dangerous armed robbers who had been hitting post offices in southeast London.
“There’s been a burglary at Hatton Garden, there are three holes in a wall, it looks like a lot of jewelry had been taken and we have no idea who did it,” Johnson told him, with little discernible sense of urgency in his Manchester-accented voice. “I’m going down to the scene.” As usual Johnson wasn’t fazed, and, if he was, he wasn’t showing it.
After decades of battling drug dealers, armed robbers, kidnappers, and contract killers, Johnson was no stranger to violence or menace. But the only violence here was three adjoining holes drilled into a wall. No one had been hurt. There were no dead bodies to contend with. And even if millions of pounds in jewelry had been stolen, he had seen what he considered more brazen crimes.
Johnson would eventually see the humor in the fact that the most high-profile case of his career—the one that he will always be remembered by—was the work of a group of seemingly harmless and hapless retirees. When he picked up the phone to tell Turner what had happened, he betrayed no particular sense of urgency or alarm. At this point he had no inkling that the plot of Sexy Beast, a British film featuring a cantankerous criminal who recruits a retired safecracker for one last job, had more or less landed on his desk.
“There’s no point in getting excited until you see with your own eyes what has happened,” Johnson recalled. “Everything sounds exciting at first. For me, it was just another job. I have seen violence and people shot and this was three holes in a wall. It was audacious what they did. But it was reputational risk to Scotland Yard more than anything else. No one was going to get hurt.”
Initially, Johnson thought Hatton Garden was going to be just another burglary in a long catalog of burglaries he had seen in the capital. He had been attending a conference on the future of the Metropolitan Police—presided over by the commissioner—when he excused himself from the room to take a call from one of his field officers, Jamie Day, who had been on duty the weekend of the burglary and had gone to the crime scene to investigate. “He was very matter-of-fact,” Johnson said, recalling the conversation. “He said, ‘There are three holes. It’s a complete mess.’ I thought it sounded interesting and I said ‘Let’s get on with it. It sounds like a good one for the Flying Squad.’ ”
Johnson, a lanky, laconic, and square-jawed fifty-six-year-old detective inspector with Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, has Hollywood good looks and the self-effacement of an undercover cop adept at being invisible. A native of Manchester, in England’s former industrial north, he is affable but somewhat intimidating. In a nation of stiff upper lips, his reserved demeanor stands out.
He had worked as a detective constable a
t Tower Bridge, in east London, and spent nearly two decades fighting crime across the capital—including leading a team of officers investigating drug dealers, armed robbers, kidnappers, and contract killers. He had also been an officer at the scene of the daring Millennium Dome heist of 2000, when a gang of thieves armed with a bulldozer had tried to infiltrate an exhibition center and steal nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of gems.2 The theft would be immortalized by a headline in the tabloid newspaper the Sun: “I’m Only Here for De Beers.”
Yet even after all of that, Johnson recalled that seeing the Hatton Garden crime scene with his own eyes for the first time made an impression. When he entered through the fire escape door of the seven-story building to see for himself what had happened, he knew immediately that this was no ordinary crime. To get to the vault, the thieves had managed to descend through an elevator shaft before drilling twenty-inch holes in the shape of a figure eight through reinforced concrete, suggesting a professional job requiring prodigious stamina and physical strength. A seventy-five-pound hydraulic pump lay in the middle of the floor. Empty safe deposit boxes were scattered about—on them were written the numbers 140, 141, 179, 182.
Local jewelers kept their jewels and most valuable belongings in the safe deposit overnight, and as police slowly counted the number of empty boxes—fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven—the magnitude of the burglary slowly started to dawn on Johnson. It would eventually become clear that as much as £27.5 million ($41.25 million) in gems, diamonds, emeralds, cash, and rare antique coins had been spirited away, along with family heirlooms and World War II medals. Entire life savings were wiped out.
In total, seventy-four boxes had been emptied. Johnson just stood there, confounded. How in the bloody hell had this happened? Why had the police not caught this before it was too late? Making matters worse was the fact that the alarm had been triggered during the burglary and then ignored by police, while the owners of the safe deposit and their security staff appeared to have been lulled into a sense of complacency by an errant insect that had set off the alarm months earlier.