by Dan Bilefsky
Among the victims were dozens of Jewish traders, who had been working in Hatton Garden for decades, and some of whom were storing their jewels in a box first rented out by their great-grandparents after World War II. Many didn’t have insurance for their stored valuables, believing, as one embarrassed box holder put it, that “the use of the safe deposit was my best insurance policy and that they would be safe.” One trader whose family had survived the Holocaust and had come to Britain with nothing but smuggled diamonds hidden in their clothes, woke up to discover his box had been targeted. He was devastated. Rick Marchant, an insurance loss adjustor who had seven clients who had lost more than £2 million ($3 million) worth of gems stored in the vault, told the BBC that it had mainly been small family-run firms that had been ruined by the heist. He warned them that the chances of ever recovering their gems were very limited. For some, the theft would bring bankruptcy and financial ruin. “We are dealing here with mainly small businesses and they are not making huge profits,” he said. “These aren’t extremely wealthy people, for a lot of them their livelihoods have gone.”10 The media might applaud the audacity of the criminals, he added, but the lives of many lay in ruins.
They had been lulled into a false sense of security every time they entered the safe deposit, walked through two metal gates, into the imposing-looking, seemingly impenetrable Chubb vault, with its two combination locks and motion-triggered alarm system. The burglary also proved devastating for the Bavishi family, owners of the safe deposit company, who quickly became objects of derision, fury, and little sympathy. A visibly shaken Mahendra Bavishi, at home in Khartoum, told the British media that he believed the heist was an “inside job,” given that the thieves seemed to know which CCTV cameras were not working in the building. He said the police had called his son Manish, who had been in Sudan at the time of the burglary, and had asked him to return as soon as possible to London. “The police want to know from Manish if he suspects someone inside who could have contact with a gang,” he explained. “There must be suspicion on everyone who worked in that building.”11
Mr. Bavishi was furious that the police had not responded to the alarm, and complained that the safe deposit, which was already struggling financially, would likely go into bankruptcy, which it soon did. Manish Bavishi would later tell the police that the burglary had cost the company an estimated £401,000 (about $601,500) in lost annual income, never mind the damage done to the premises and the irreparable damage done to his family’s—and company’s—reputation.
“To many this robbery is like something out of a Hollywood fiction film, but to my family it is a tragedy,” he told the Daily Mail. “It is the end of the business my son has worked so hard to build slowly over the last seven years.” After pumping money into it and taking out loans, he lamented, “Now business is finished. Who will trust their valuables with us after this?”12 The answer was no one.
As the brazenness of the heist became the talk of the town, and Britons everywhere asked who could be responsible, John O’Connor, a former head of the Flying Squad, joined the loud chorus of law enforcement professionals, amateur sleuths, and conspiracy theorists calling it an “inside job.”
“You’re gonna have to have a detailed layout of the whole of the business. So clearly they got that from somebody on the inside,” he told Sky News. “You’ve got a major strong room, there’s no sign of a forced entry, they’ve apparently been able to abseil down the lift shaft to get access to the vault—I just find it astonishing that it was that easy. The fact that there is no sign of forced entry, what does that mean? That someone left the door open? That someone left the windows open? It smacks all the time of inside aid, all of the way through it. This doesn’t look to me like a genuine sort of smash and grab raid by determined criminals, this looks like they’ve had accomplices on the inside. You wouldn’t go to attack a building like that unless you knew you could gain access.”13
Suspicions also were aroused by the fact that days before the heist a fire had raged in the High Holborn area, just a few blocks from the vault, causing power outages. Fire experts said the blaze had been caused by an electrical fault in the underground Victorian tunnels near Hatton Garden. But O’Connor was just one of many who speculated that the fire may have been set by wily thieves to distract from the raid, or perhaps in an attempt to disable the alarm. “Yeah, I think that probably was deliberate,” he told LBC, a popular talk radio show that was a favorite of Jones’s and Perkins’s. “I’ve never heard of an outage of electricity like that causing a fire that lasted as long as that. That seems to me as too much of a coincidence.”
Whatever had caused the fire, the feverish speculation offered cold comfort for the hundreds of box holders. Most, but not all, had meticulously recorded the contents of each box, which they would later relay to the police. But some had hazier memories, presenting a difficult challenge for police trying to assess, catalog, and value what was stolen.
Among the long lists of stolen items given to the police by dozens of Hatton Garden traders was an eighteen-carat gold antique pocket watch heirloom that had belonged to a grandfather; a gold bangle worn by a box holder’s great-grandmother at her wedding one hundred years ago; an art deco green emerald and diamond broach valued at about £7,000 ($10,500) that had been worn by a box holder’s now deceased mother; a rare Distinguished Flying Cross Royal Air Force medal that had been awarded to a box holder’s father-in-law; a flip-up silver matchbox belonging to a great-uncle, long since departed; an eighteen-carat enameled pocket watch by Thomas Grignion, the celebrated eighteenth-century French clockmaker, handmade in 1784, with a fusee movement; and a silver enameled Edwardian butterfly brooch from 1910 valued at about £30 ($45); hundreds of blocks of gold; and as much as £1 million ($1.5 million) worth of rough diamonds of the type used in diamond-tipped power drills such as the one the gang had used to penetrate the vault.
Then there was the inventory of gems, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, and currency—stacks of pounds, euros, dollars, Krugerrands, sovereigns, and half-sovereigns, and a 1908 American Indian head $2 gold coin among them, now valued at about £200 ($300).
One jeweler, who rented five safe deposit boxes, lost more than £1.5 million ($2.25 million) worth of valuables, including 1,000 gold bars from the United States, Britain, China, Switzerland, and Canada; more than 1,000 gold coins; and dozens of pure platinum bars. A third-generation immigrant Indian family that ran a jewelry business at Hatton Garden lost nearly £3 million ($4.5 million) worth of valuables, including fifty-eight pearl necklaces and earrings, diamonds, packets of sapphires, and mounted stones. But there were also sentimental objects, including fake gold bracelets, that prompted a police officer to scrawl on his report next to one box: “Primark crap!” referring to a retailer selling kitsch costume jewelry. Nevertheless, police initially estimated that about £14 million ($21 million) worth of valuables had been stolen, an amount that was eventually determined to be much higher.
Most of the safe deposit box holders had saliva swabbed from their mouths so that Scotland Yard could check that their DNA didn’t match any traces potentially found at the scene of the crime, and they could be eliminated as suspects. Police interviewed box holders who were no longer using their boxes, including one former jeweler, who gave a police statement via e-mail since he had moved to the United States. He had emptied his box of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry a few weeks before the heist. “I have not had any of my property stolen as a result of this offence,” the statement said.
As is often the case for safe deposit boxes, where depositors eschew a bank in search of more privacy and anonymity, the safe deposit had also attracted black money. One box is said to belong to a well-known north London drug lord and contained a million dollars in thousand-pound notes. Another box was rumored to contain a taped murder confession of a crime boss, spirited away and held in a rival gangster’s box for extortion at some future date.
One Jewish jeweler, elderly and ailing
, had kept a safe deposit box at 88–90 Hatton Garden for decades. He told police that fifteen years ago, he had remortgaged his home to raise £100,000 ($150,000) in loans to help keep his jewelry business afloat. The capital on the loan was due in 2016. “Because of my age and infirmity I have become semiretired,” he told police, evidently shaken. “The jewelry in the safe deposit represented my life savings and I had intended to use it to repay the mortgage loan in 2016,” he said.
The widow of an Indian jeweler had meticulously stored away her gems in an Indian sweet tin and a chocolate tin in the shape of a heart. The gang had taken more than £230,000 (about $345,000) worth of her jewelry. She told police she was devastated since “all the items have memories” and she had treasured the jewelry since much of it had been designed by her late husband.
In another case, the dowry for a young Indian woman—collected since she was a young girl and stored in the vault—had been stolen by the white-haired thieves and now her family worried she would never find a suitable husband.
Yet another jeweler, this one of Greek heritage, who had worked at Hatton Garden for many years, told police that for nearly twenty years he received his bonus in diamonds rather than cash, so he wouldn’t spend it. He stored the diamonds in the safe deposit box to bequeath to his children for their future.
The family of one Danish box holder had been in the jewelry business for more than a century. After fifty years in the business, the box holder had decided to finally retire. Just months before the burglary he had sold the lease on his jewelry store back to the owner. All that was left was for him to transfer his remaining stock to the safe deposit, which he did just weeks before it was hit. He was so sentimental about his years in the trade that he had asked his staff to move the goods; he couldn’t bring himself to remove the jewelry himself from his company’s showroom. Each piece was like a child, and nearly half had been designed by his company, for which he meticulously and lovingly oversaw the workmanship. In total, he lost an estimated £550,000 (about $825,000) worth of jewelry, including platinum rings, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds. The financial loss threatened to unravel his retirement plans.
One box included thousands of pounds worth of gold ingots that belonged to a Ghanaian man, whose late mother was a tribal chieftain. When the family had tried to sell her ceremonial gold jewelry and was unable to find a seller, they melted it down into several small blocks of gold, which were meant to provide a financial lifeline to the family and had been stored at the safe deposit.
One British jeweler with Indian roots, whose grandfather had started a jewelry business in London in the mid-1960s, supplying fine diamonds and jewels from Belgium, Hong Kong, and India to diamond traders, said the burglary threatened to undermine his business. “The main ethos of the jewelry industry is integrity and trust which we feel has been damaged by this incident,” he said. His company had rented a safe deposit box from 88–90 Hatton Garden for more than forty years, and had lost diamonds, emeralds, and pearls.
Jacob Meghnagi, thirty-nine, the Italian Jewish jeweler who had been working in Hatton Garden for more than a decade and stored tens of thousands of pounds worth of diamonds and gems there, said the heist had reverberated across the Garden because the profit margins on gems were small, and dozens of dealers lost all of their stocks.
Meghnagi said he had long felt apprehensive that the safe deposit was vulnerable, since its alarm system was outmoded and it was unguarded in the evening after office hours. “People trusted Hatton Garden Safe Deposit. But I always had a bad feeling about that place that it could be robbed. I didn’t trust it,” he says. “But since it was across the street from our building I kept my stock there for the sake of convenience.”
On the Tuesday after the burglary, Meghnagi was on vacation in Tel Aviv, on the beach with his six children, when he received a call from a friend that the safe deposit had been targeted. “I was really nervous, I was going crazy,” he recalled. “It was Passover weekend and I was on holiday when a friend called and said, ‘Did you hear what happened at Hatton Garden?’ I freaked out. I called my wife and she told me to calm down since I was insured.” He also called his insurance agent, who assured him that he was covered up to losses of £250,000 ($375,000), and urged him to get back to his vacation.
“People who weren’t insured were morons,” Meghnagi said. “They thought it was impregnable and they were wrong. Now they are embarrassed to admit it, because a lot of people keep stuff in the boxes that they don’t declare on the books.”
When he returned to London after his vacation, he learned from the police that his box had fallen out of the cabinet when the gang’s pump pushed it over, and that it had landed on the ground, underneath another box. In the rush to loot the boxes, the thieves had missed it. Still, his diamonds and other stock were held by police for more than two months after the burglary, and he wasn’t able to do any business.
“I had diamonds, all my stock, all my livelihood in that box. I was lucky my box fell out and went to the other side and was hidden under his box, which also fell down,” he said, pointing to Boaz, his office mate. The two laughed. “But I couldn’t trade for two months. I had to buy some gear. It was a huge problem and I lost a lot of money.”
When he first heard about the burglary, Meghnagi said he was deeply worried about his stash of diamonds stored there, but was also impressed. “I laughed. They are fucking geniuses,” he said. But he was also angry at their disregard for the lives they ruined. “I work hard for a living. The margins in this trade are small. I don’t respect stealing. Fuck them. I thought, ‘They deserve to go to prison and pay for what they did.’ ”
Who Dunnit?
For Johnson and Jamie Day, the more junior officer charged with executing the day-to-day investigation under Johnson’s command, the new case wasn’t promising. The crime scene at 88–90 Hatton Garden that Tuesday offered up few obvious clues. There was not a single fingerprint. The building’s multiple CCTV cameras had been disabled, apparently smashed with a hammer. And as the officers surveyed the scene, several questions remained: Who had the savvy to pull off such an audacious crime? Had the thieves already spirited the jewels out of the country? And was the Flying Squad swooping in too late? Was it a foreign job? An inside job? A group of Eastern Europeans? A former Navy Seal? Who would have the swagger, confidence, and experience to hit a high-security vault with a motion-triggered alarm in the center of London?
The public was captivated. Whether inspired by the glamour of heist films, like the original and remade versions of The Thomas Crown Affair, or the die-hard fondness for the country’s original generous bandit, Robin Hood, Britons read the headlines with a mischievous smile. You had to hand it to whomever pulled this off. And that whomever quickly started to take many shapes amid a frenzy of speculation about the thieves’ true identities.
Scotland Yard’s telephones rang off the hook with members of the public calling in with tips pointing at wily Italian mafia leaders, Irish crime syndicates, and, above all, the Eastern European gang known as the Pink Panthers, a notorious group of Eastern European jewelry thieves who had been behind some of the most sensational heists of the past decade.
Others urged the police to focus on the Panama hat-wearing “Mr. Big,” as he was known, who drove to jewel raids in his Bentley and was one of two dapperly dressed men who posed as wealthy customers to rob a Graff Diamonds store in London in 2007.
At least initially, the absurd notion that the theft could have been the work of a group of homegrown and wily thieves with joint pain wasn’t even considered.
The Pink Panthers were once led by Zoran Kostic´, a chameleon of a man with dark brooding looks who has variously disguised himself as a prosperous banker in a suit and a chic woman to outmaneuver security systems at some of the most heavily guarded jewelry stores in the world, including the luxurious Place Vendôme in Paris, where some of the glittering jewelry brands such as Cartier have their flagship stores. Kostic´ was arrested in 2009 at t
he two-star Hotel Utrillo, a short walk from the Moulin Rouge in Paris, with a stash of gold Swiss watches. But that didn’t stop the rest of the roughly two hundred Pink Panthers, many of them with military and athletic backgrounds, from continuing their spree.14
They are believed to have snatched jewels worth more than $130 million in swift attacks that extend from Dubai to Geneva to Monaco. Their nickname was invented by British investigators when one suspect hid a $657,000 blue diamond in a jar of cream, a tactic lifted from one of The Pink Panther films starring Peter Sellers. Dozens of men connected to the Pink Panthers have been arrested, and police have tracked them to as far away as Japan, where robbers in suits and ties tear-gassed employees in a jewelry store in Tokyo in 2004, and then vanished, in a matter of minutes, with a sack of diamonds and the Comtesse de Vendôme, a 125-carat necklace of 116 diamonds. Then, in December 2008, suspicions were once again cast on the Pink Panthers when four men—three disguised as women with long tresses, sunglasses, and winter scarves—struck the fabled Harry Winston jewelry store on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and walked away with $105 million worth of emeralds, rubies, and diamonds.15
“When Hatton Garden was hit, the British media was rife with speculation that the Panthers had struck,” recalls Ed Hall, a leading prosecutor in the Hatton Garden case.16 If it was the Panthers, it would mean that Scotland Yard might have to mount an international dragnet—and, owing to the Panthers’s deftness at avoiding capture thus far, that didn’t bode well.