by Dan Bilefsky
But they would soon discover that solving the Hatton Garden heist would require looking far closer to home.
Meanwhile, a rumor was circulating among the criminal fraternity that the Firm had been hired by the Adams family, a feared north London crime family, to hit Hatton Garden and remove an incriminating murder confession, supposedly hidden in one of the safe deposit boxes owned by John Palmer, a rival gangster known as “Goldfinger.” Palmer, who had been involved in the plot to launder Brink’s-Mat gold in the 1980s—the same plot Reader was implicated in—lived in a sprawling mansion in an affluent suburb of Essex, outside of London, and had fallen out big-time with the Adams family.
In the weeks after the Hatton Garden heist—on June 24, 2005—Palmer, age sixty-four, was assassinated while at home, despite the mansion’s high security that made it an impenetrable fortress. His bloodied body, shot six times, was discovered by police, and the perpetrator escaped, suggesting a professional hit. The circumstantial evidence linking him to the heist was compelling. Scotland Yard dismissed the theory as “nonsense.” The contents of the tape have never been publicly disclosed.
For Johnson, only one thing was for certain. He needed to solve the crime and to find the perpetrators who had committed it. After all, it was the biggest burglary in the history of England.
Chapter 8
An Investigation Takes Shape
THE FLYING SQUAD FACED THE DAUNTING TASK OF investigating the crime, while also trying to tame the very understandable anxiety of the Hatton Garden jeweler community. Dozens of jewelers in the area had stored millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds, gold, and jewelry in the safe deposit over the weekend. They were desperate to get access to their boxes in order to see what had been stolen. Many were despondent and had broken down in tears during their police interviews. The human toll of the burglary was beginning to sink in, and Johnson was determined to hold the culprits, whomever they were, accountable.
Johnson and Craig Turner, the Flying Squad chief, quickly assembled a team: six Flying Squad officers led by Jamie Day, who would handle the day-to-day investigation. Johnson would effectively run the operation. They also put together a small brigade of about two hundred surveillance and forensic officers—including undercover cops and a deaf woman who read lips. The men and women of the Flying Squad would work day and night to solve the crime. Weekends off were not an option.
With his piercing blue eyes and stocky athletic physique, Turner looks like he could’ve been a wrestler or a professional rugby player if he hadn’t chosen a career in policing. He and Johnson had worked together for more than a decade and risen together in the Flying Squad’s ranks. As younger detectives they had been on the Flying Squad’s special projects team in London, they had hunted Colombian drug cartels, managed hostage negotiations, grappled with Irish contract killers, busted drug smuggling and gun trading rings, and solved their fair share of sensational armed robberies.
A chatty extrovert, Turner, a family man, oozes authority and swagger. He was born at the Port of Tilbury in Essex, a county northeast of London that became synonymous in the 1980s with a generation of brash and aspirational hungry young men whose parents had planted roots in new towns of south Essex after World War II and had gone on to prosper. These self-made men, who came of age during the heyday of Thatcher’s economic liberalism, are known, fairly or not, for working in the City of London’s financial sector, voting Tory, driving fast cars, going to the gym, and being a bit scrappy.
Outgoing and ambitious, Turner likes working out and playing rugby, but he defies the easy stereotype of the “Essex Man.” He is friendly but enigmatic. The only thing he offers about his family is that his father was a businessman who worked in The City, London’s financial sector, while his mother worked as a secretary.
For all of his well-cultivated mysteriousness, a necessity of the job, Turner is the public face of the elite unit, and, like Johnson, he wears the swooping eagle of the squad with obvious pride. He travels periodically to Washington, DC, to compare notes with colleagues at the FBI. But he retains the easy informality of a beat cop, signing his e-mails “Craig.” He offers to get coffee when guests come to see him. He is not without vanity, befitting a man who runs one of the most prestigious police units in the world. “I’m the one who goes on television to take the pressure off of the other guys on the team,” he says, explaining the public relations aspect of his job. But it was ultimately Johnson who was running the investigation.
Turner and Johnson were effective foils for each other. Turner was the natural-born schmoozer, the extrovert, the leader respected by his officers for his ability to get things done. Johnson was the focused lieutenant, the one who ran the Hatton Garden investigation—but largely from behind the scenes. While Turner was wired and energetic, Johnson was decidedly caffeine-free. “Craig is great at networking, he is a people person, who knows how to work the bureaucracy at Scotland Yard and get things done,” said Johnson. “Officers like him because he weighs risks but is not too risk averse.” He added mischievously, “He usually has an orange tan.”
Rounding out the team of Hatton Garden detectives was Jamie Day, forty-one, an amiable Flying Squad officer with the reserved demeanor and sharp mind of a would-be physics professor. With more than a decade of experience as a detective, Day was admired on the force for his strict adherence to logic and deductive reasoning. He was free from emotional flourish or grandstanding. He pieced together clues quietly and methodically like a would-be Hercule Poirot. Like Johnson, he was man who played it by the books. Colleagues say his evidence reports are as meticulous as they are thorough. He doesn’t cut corners. He is the opposite of flamboyant or speculative.
“We follow the evidence, and see where it takes us,” he explained, with typical understatement, carefully choosing each word. “Everything you handle may be given to another officer so you want to get things right the first time. So that anyone can rely on that work, no matter how small the detail.”1
The Investigation’s First Big Break: The Anatomy of the Crime Scene
The Tuesday after the burglary—a full forty-eight hours after the gang had fled with wheelie bins stuffed with gold and jewelry—Jamie Day was the first officer to arrive at the crime scene. Like his bosses, he wore the swooping eagle of the Flying Squad with pride. He was dressed, as was the custom of Flying Squad officers, in civilian clothes. He knew this was going to be an important case, but he betrayed neither nerves nor excitement. He had that same feeling he always got when he was about to visit the scene of a crime: he had a problem to solve. And his commander Johnson wanted results—and fast.
After surveying the sprawl of tools on the floor of the vault and scrubbing for evidence, it didn’t take long for him to realize that it was a professional job. There wasn’t a single trace of DNA. Whoever had committed the crime knew what they were doing. Or so it seemed.
“I was the first person in the building,” Day recalled. “When I opened the door of the safe deposit company, it looked like an explosion had gone off. The inside of the building was completely ransacked. From the doorway of the corridor leading to the vault, you could see discarded items, including tools strewn on the floor and the contents of safe deposit boxes.”
The team of about twenty police and forensics officers worked meticulously to gather evidence without disturbing the crime scene. It was slow, painstaking work, Day recalled, as the officers swept for fingerprints, tried to determine the point of entry, what had been taken or been left behind, and to reconstruct with as much precision as possible what had happened. The forensics officers of the Flying Squad were acutely aware that the crime had reached the top of the chain of command, and that each hour that elapsed was another hour for the criminals to get away. But if they rushed or were clumsy, they risked spoiling evidence or missing a vital clue. They needed to tread carefully.
“Crime scenes are very sensitive and you don’t want to disturb any evidence,” Day said, recalling the patience Scotland Ya
rd needed to survey a crime scene that only days earlier had tested the patience of the cranky, but determined, drill-wielding geriatrics. “There weren’t lives at risk. You don’t just charge in and go and look at the vault. It took hours. You couldn’t say how much had been taken.”2
Narrowing down a suspect—or list of suspects—topped the list of priorities. Day spent several hours meticulously interviewing Kelvin Stockwell, the security guard, and Manish Bavishi, who was visibly distraught and had rushed home from Khartoum to survey the damage. At this stage of the investigation, no one could be ruled out. Could it be that the theft was an inside job hatched by the owners of a money-losing business? Given the family’s despondency, it seemed unlikely. But that could also be an act. Both Stockwell and Bavishi explained to Day, with no little embarrassment, that they had left the crime as it was unfolding because they had been convinced that nothing was amiss. Their sense of frustration was palpable.
Stockwell meticulously described to the Flying Squad how the safe deposit’s security systems and CCTV cameras operated and walked a detective through the premises to help the forensics team identify what the burglars had left behind and what had been damaged. He explained that one of the magnetic gates hadn’t been working properly and so the security guards had been using an emergency button to manually lock it. He also noticed that a small yellow-handled screwdriver was missing from a tool case near one of the gates protecting the vault. “I know it should have been there as I used it on Thursday, 2nd of April 2015 before I locked up,” he told the officer. He also observed that the number of new clients had been reduced to a trickle during the last year and that all members needed to provide a passport or driving license, a utility bill, a recent bank statement, and a personal reference.
But he also acknowledged that several nonmembers who had inquired about renting a safe deposit box had been given access to the vault. “I would say that I have only let four or five nonmembers into the vault in the last twelve months.”3
As investigators took witness statements from security guards, the building’s concierge, and maintenance workers and tenants who had access to the interior of the building, about a dozen forensics officers scanned the scene for fingerprints. Only two officers at a time could fit in the cramped vault area, substantially slowing things down. Day recalled that it took about twelve hours before he finally set eyes on the massive adjoining circles the gang had drilled through reinforced concrete. The hole resembled the figure-eight rings of the Audi automobile logo. Police also discovered markings on the wall that the thieves had drawn to indicate where to place the drill.
Meanwhile, the Flying Squad had to contend with angry, emotional, and, in many cases, elderly safe deposit box owners whose boxes had been emptied and were desperate to determine what had been stolen, but were not allowed to access because the box was now part of a crime scene investigation. By necessity, the investigation was shrouded in a secrecy worthy of the Garden itself, since the Flying Squad did not want to tip off the burglars about whether they were closing in. Even without that constraint, the vault door itself remained shut.
The safe deposit box owners “all wanted to know if their box had been broken into and we couldn’t tell them at this point, and they were frustrated as they couldn’t understand why we didn’t have an answer,” Day recalled. “The reality is that the vault’s door wasn’t open. The only access to the vault was the triple eight holes in the wall.” It was not something a doughnut-eating police officer could easily slither through, but, luckily, Day was slim.
It was Tuesday, April 7, at 9 p.m.—nearly half a day after they began to investigate the scene—when a small group of forensics officers, including Day, finally poked their heads through the holes in the concrete wall. “I had personally never seen anything like that,” Day said, laughing as he recalled the moment. “It is not an everyday occurrence. But the enormity of what had happened wasn’t yet clear to us: Had one box or 999 boxes been broken into?”4
Among the dozens of potential clues, the CCTV camera footage held a vital key to solve the crime, assuming, of course, the Flying Squad could recover it. So Day was feeling a bit anxious as he checked the 120-plus cameras in and around the building, several of which had been smashed by “Basil” before the gang had entered. Now the magnitude of the case was dawning on Johnson and his team.
For the young officers working under Johnson’s charge, botching things up on such a high-stakes case could prove devastating. As it was, the Flying Squad was a close-knit unit of type-A-plus personalities in which officers hungered for one another’s approval, even if sangfroid was as much a badge of honor as wearing the squad’s swooping eagle. Day invariably wanted a win. And solving the Hatton Garden case would be a win on an epic scale.
But he was also a creature of empiricism, not easily rattled, and, like Johnson and Turner, unflinchingly confident that the methodical approach of the Flying Squad would ultimately persevere. It had in the past. He just needed to be patient.
As journalists gathered outside the front of the building and irate safe deposit box holders lined up to give television interviews, Day went to the back of the building to check one last CCTV camera near the fire escape door. The natural point of investigation was the CCTV footage. The thieves had disabled most of the CCTV cameras in the building. But as Day approached the fire escape, his eyes widened. The camera there was completely intact. Somehow they had missed it. “Finding that CCTV camera was our first big break,” he admitted.
The gang also hadn’t realized that Berganza Ltd, an antique dealer on Greville Street, which has one of the finest collections of medieval rings in the world and faces the back of 88–90 Hatton Garden, also had trained a CCTV camera on them. Berganza was undergoing construction at the time and Day quickly collected the film footage and downloaded it. It could help solve the mystery provided the thieves had let their guard down.
Day returned to Flying Squad headquarters in Putney, in southwest London, Tuesday night. After taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves, he began the arduous and seemingly endless task of scanning through the CCTV footage, minute by minute, hunched over his computer, trying to reconstruct the crime. Meticulously going through the footage, frame by frame, required patience and perserverence, a keen eye for spotting clues, and a very high tolerance for monotony. It was going to be a long night.
He began by working backward from the moment the thieves had left the building on Easter Sunday, in order to retrace their steps and establish a timeline of what had taken place. This was made easier by the fact that the time was marked in a dark rectangle on the bottom of the screen by the CCTV video recorder. But the scale of the task was enormous given that he was not only sifting through hundreds of hours of footage from the CCTV cameras that the thieves had missed near the fire escape but also looking for clues from the dozens of CCTV cameras that peppered the jewelry quarter’s streets. He was trying to determine how and when the perpetrators had entered the building and when they had fled.
Days turned into nights and nights turned into days as Day, running on adrenaline, trawled through the footage. Initially he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Johnson asked to be constantly updated. As Day zoomed in and out with a click of a computer mouse, the pressure for a break that could solve the crime grew intense.
That moment finally arrived on day three when, bleary-eyed and fatigued from lack of sleep, Day suddenly stopped the CCTV footage and froze the screen. Finally, he saw what he had been looking for: the grainy image of several men entering the building, with their faces covered, and then exiting. The frame showed two shadowy figures in fluorescent maintenance jackets.
“We were able to pinpoint what time the gang had arrived and the last person was inside. We could see that they had waited for the last person to leave for the long weekend before they arrived on the premises.” But the men’s faces were obscured. Who were they?
A CCTV camera had also captured in the darkness the team parking a car on Le
ather Lane, which runs parallel to Hatton Garden one block away. In a blunder, Collins had been undertaking reconnaissance in his own car around the neighborhood on the Saturday evening of the burglary. During the week, the street hosts a boisterous food, vegetable, and clothing market. But as it was the holiday weekend, it was largely deserted, making it easier for police to spot unexpected activity.
As the car’s lights flashed in the video, Day noticed something else. He froze the frame and saw a distinctive white Mercedes. Its license plate was not immediately visible. He paused, squinting his eyes. Then he tapped on his keyboard to close in on the vehicle, and examined the model. It was a white Mercedes E200 with a black roof and alloy rims. Day knew that white Mercedes were common enough. So that wasn’t a huge break. But a black roof and, more notably, black alloy rims—now that wasn’t common at all. Armed with this differentiating detail, he now had something to go on.
As the images played out, Day saw something else. By reviewing the time stamp on the CCTV and seeing the men in fluorescent maintenance outfits walking out of a white van and then leaving the scene, he was also able to deduce that they had spent three days in the vault during which they had left and returned to the scene of the crime. What audacity! What balls they must have had!
With the evidence strongly suggesting that the Mercedes belonged to one of them, Day and the surveillance team, taking advantage of the dozens of hidden cameras peppering Hatton Garden, studied all the CCTV footage within a one-mile radius of Hatton Garden during the seventy-two hours the heist took place. It took several hours until Day saw what he was looking for: A camera had captured the license plate of the car. A background check then determined that it was registered in Wales and insured in Herefordshire, in England’s west Midlands. But—nearly a week after the burglary had taken place—it still was not clear who the car belonged to. Finding the Mercedes, however, was a watershed for the investigation.