The Last Job

by Dan Bilefsky

  The log noted that he was wearing a beige jacket and sitting in the driver’s seat. The radio was turned to LBC, or “Leading Britain’s Conversation,” a talk radio station that was a kind of poor man’s BBC and was prone to vehement political discussions and uplifting soft rock ballads from the 1980s.

  Over the din of the radio, always played at a loud ear-splitting volume befitting senior citizens whose hearing wasn’t what it used to be, two of the key suspects were admitting they had committed the crime. The trap was yielding results. But Turner and Johnson were waiting to make a move. They wanted the criminals to become their own grave diggers—and they had now dug out about three feet of dirt.

  It was old-school reconnaissance of the type the elderly gang themselves had used to stake out the Garden. Only this time, the gang didn’t realize they were being watched and recorded, their every taciturn glance or reckless confession transmitted to the good men and women of Scotland Yard.

  Eavesdropping on Reader and his cronies without being detected was hard enough. But the good men and women of the Flying Squad also faced perhaps an even greater challenge: deciphering the rapid-fire East End Cockney rhyming slang with which the men peppered their speech. The seemingly endless stream of “fucks,” “arseholes,” and “cunts” was much easier to parse.

  “It wasn’t always easy to understand what they were saying,” Jamie Day recalled, noting with a chuckle that Reader and his team offered him a crash course in Cockney, which some scholars say originated in the East End of London in the nineteenth century as a code used by criminals precisely so the police wouldn’t understand them.3

  While Cockney is inextricably bound up in the identity of London, a 2012 study of two thousand adult Londoners commissioned by the Museum of London found that many Londoners were baffled by the famous east London slang, finding it increasingly incomprehensible in a throbbing multicultural capital where a babel of foreign languages has transformed modern usage. “OMG! Cockney Rhyming Slang Is Brown Bread,” the British news agency Reuters intoned in mock horror at the time, using the Cockney rhyming slang for “dead.”4

  The survey found that about 80 percent of Londoners did not understand that “donkey ears” was Cockney rhyming slang for “years,” and that “bacon and eggs” meant “legs” while they also struggled to parse “tommy tucker” (supper) or “spending time with the teapot lids” (kids).

  Champions of Cockney, however, were relieved that, at least, many seemed to grasp that “apples and pears” meant “stairs” and that “tea leaf” meant “thief,” while “porky pies” (lies) was the most commonly used expression. At the same time, experts noted that adolescents had developed their own Cockney lingo for text messaging, with David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University, telling the Daily Telegraph that some were using “Barack Obamas” instead of “pajamas.”5

  Whatever its elusiveness in the age of Twitter, Cockney rhyming slang appears to have captured the imaginations—and lexicon—of the “tea leafs” Danny Jones and Terry Perkins, who spoke it with such abandon that the Flying Squad officers—and prosecutors—studying their speech sometimes consulted with colleagues from the East End of London to make sure they didn’t miss anything.

  Following the Villains

  In the weeks after the heist, beginning in early April 2015, dozens of undercover officers working in small teams and driving in unmarked cars tailed the men. Johnson was determined to gather enough evidence to ensnare them, even if that meant waiting months for an arrest. By the beginning of May, the surveillance officers had acquired a strong sense of their daily routines. They followed them to the pub and to their other favorite haunts, which betrayed a middle-class aspirational swagger worthy of aging thieves who had traded jail cells for handsome homes and took relish in enjoying the good life.

  While Perkins appeared to be a fish-’n’-chips man through and through, the gang—save Reader—had embraced the national obsession with Indian food and chicken tikka masala. So they repeatedly returned to the Delhi Grill, a canteen-style Indian restaurant plastered with Bollywood posters on a quiet street in Islington.

  On Friday, April 12, at 12:37 p.m., Reader was photographed, appearing tired and ruddy faced, as he sat with Collins on the terrace outside Scotti’s Snack Bar on Islington Green. It appeared to be his favorite café in north London; it had first opened in 1967 and had barely changed since, offering dependable bacon fry-ups—that is, bacon, sausage, eggs, and coffee—and a vision of a 1960s Britain frozen in time. Surveillance officers noted that a man wearing a brown suit and carrying a Waitrose shopping bag had shown Reader and Collins its contents.6

  On May 1, Perkins and Jones were surreptitiously recorded at the Castle pub, their favorite watering hole before moving on to the upmarket Bonnie Gull Seafood Bar in nearby Exmouth Market. A map on the blackboard showed where all the fish had been caught in England and Scotland, which appealed to men of their generation.

  Collins, an avid dog walker who often did the grocery shopping for Millie, seemed to pass aimless hours wandering in parks in north London and stocking up on medicine at the pharmacy. On Friday, April 24, surveillance officers spied on him as he met with Perkins and Jones at Ye Olde Cherry Tree pub in Southgate, in north London, and then, later that day, feasted with them on steak at the Highland Angus Steakhouse on Cannon Hill.

  Collins offered a particular challenge for the young surveillance officers due to the sheer monotony of his daily routine. Throughout April and early May, he was tailed as he went to take a “black and white dog” for a walk, talked in a hushed voice on his black Nokia flip-style phone, and frequently purchased medication for his arthritis.

  “I could see there was a blue disabled badge displayed in the windscreen of the vehicle,” one of the undercover officers following Collins wrote in his report, meticulously detailing the movements of Collins’s white Mercedes with the registration CP13BGY, and observing its distinct black roof and black alloy tires. “I saw that John Kenneth Collins was wearing black rimmed glasses whilst driving,” he added in a report dated Friday, April 17, 2015. Another officer noted that he had a gold bracelet on his right wrist.7 The officer snapped photographs with a Nikon digital camera. No detail was too small. No meeting too inconsequential.

  Meanwhile, during the first two weeks of May, Perkins was followed as he took his grandson to the doctor, put a large and suspicious-looking black bag in the trunk of the Saxo, and when he stopped by himself at 6 p.m. sharp at the counter of the Blue Mermaid fish-and-chip shop near his home in Enfield. Despite having a wife and four daughters, he seemed to like to spend time on his own when he was not with his old pals—perhaps a hangover from all those long hours spent in a jail cell. He was trim and wiry and didn’t finish everything on his plate, the surveillance officers observed.

  The surveillance operation was painstaking. “We were trying to get a sense of their lifestyle, who they met with, what they did on a daily basis,” as Johnson described it.8

  Turner, the Flying Squad chief, added that following the gang required a lot of patience since they were, after all, senior citizens, and continued performing the domestic chores of people their age. That meant that officers sometimes had to endure their endless squabbles over where to have lunch, their slagging off of relatives and neighbors, their deliberations on whether to buy granola or porridge at the supermarket. At least their expletive-laced discussions about their wives and children did provide some relief from the banalities. The officers did not follow the men twenty-four hours a day, Turner explained, in order to ensure that the surveillance operation wasn’t compromised.

  “It could be very tedious to follow these guys around—we were not interested in observing them doing their shopping. You have to pick your moments,” Turner said. “But we observed them closely and by doing so we could see when they were doing something out of the ordinary that didn’t fit with their usual pattern. In that sense, every clue could help us.”

  A special
police unit also monitored their phone calls, as they called one another with more and more frequency, shifting between boasts and chats about when and how they were going to cash in their booty. When the others called Reader, who didn’t have a cell phone, they called his son Paul, who passed his father the phone. His phone, too, was being monitored.

  “We followed them around for weeks, without being detected, which is not easy,” said Day.9

  One false move could blow open the investigation. Undercover officers had to blend in without being exposed. And while the gang was behaving with foolhardy exuberance, they were also experienced criminals who were used to being followed by police. Danny Jones, in particular, was an avid reader of crime books, and was very careful to constantly check whether he was being followed. At one point, in the middle of the surveillance, he left for a preplanned vacation, a walking trip in the English countryside with his sister.

  Boozing and Lip-Reading

  In their arsenal of methods to ensnare the gang, the police also had another secret weapon: a deaf woman named Gillian Hadfield who was as adept at reading lips as she was at analyzing hand gestures. She had been helping Scotland Yard solve crimes for some forty years. Now she was hired by the Yard to decipher what the men were saying when they weren’t in their cars and were being secretly watched. It was a classic combination of the Flying Squad’s use of high-tech and old-school techniques to crack a case wide open.

  Gillian Hadfield was born with her hearing but became slowly deaf in her teens. By the time she left school at age sixteen, she relied entirely on lip-reading, and at twenty-two, she could not hear anything. But because she was born with her hearing, she had a residual sense of speech, and spoke like a hearing person. Her hearing was also buttressed by a cochlear implant that allowed her to hear some sounds. She did not use sign language. Her ability to read lips was so acute and nuanced that she had often been used by both prosecutors and defense attorneys as an expert witness. In one case, a woman who didn’t have a voice box and couldn’t speak, witnessed a murder. Hadfield was brought in to read her lips and become her voice.

  Racing against the clock to gather enough evidence to prove that the gang was behind the heist, the Flying Squad employed Hadfield to examine the audio evidence. Her ability to read their lips became a valuable asset, even though she was the first to admit that lip-reading was an inexact science. Context, facial expressions, small gestures, and body language were all needed to sort out words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like “tied” and “tide” or words that look the same on lips such as “quip” and “whip.” Such challenges were made all the more difficult when observing a group of old-timers, who spoke in machine-gun bursts and used East End slang, peppered by expletives and outmoded Cockney rhymes from a different era.

  But when Hadfield sat down at Flying Squad headquarters in May 2015 to watch a DVD showing video footage of the men from the Castle pub, the triumphant boasting and gesticulations were so animated that it didn’t take long before she managed to decipher at least part of what they were saying. Old infirm men, some of them hard of hearing themselves, were outwitted by a deaf woman.

  On a trip to the Castle pub at the beginning of May—about one month after the heist—Perkins and Collins sat hunched over beers in the corner, as they reminisced excitedly about the moment they finally broke through the concrete vault and used their power drills to make three large and adjoining holes. Reader was also there, appearing less grumpy than usual, sitting on the opposite side of the table as the two men filled him in on what had happened after he had abandoned the burglary. As usual, he remained seated, and it was Perkins who went to the bar to order another round of beers, taking out a wad of cash to pay.

  Unaware that they were being secretly filmed by a Scotland Yard operative, Collins and Perkins recalled the thickness of the wall and how they used a hydraulic pump to force the cabinet down, after realizing it was bolted to the floor. Then, with a flourish worthy of a Charlie Chaplin slapstick comedy, Perkins mimicked the furious motion of the pump. The video shows him thrusting his right hand up and down in a pumping motion as he hollered, “Boom! Boom! Boom!” The men cackled appreciatively.

  Watching the DVD, Hadfield noted that the three men were sitting in the pub in the back, trying to appear inconspicuous, if not entirely succeeding. She wrote, “Male wearing open neck white shirt with glasses” made “pumping actions and is making what looks like an explosive sound.” “There is general hilarity,” she added in brackets.10 The jovial grandpas appeared completely unconcerned about the possibility that they were being watched.

  Later, as they drove around London in Perkins’s Citroën Saxo, Perkins and Jones patted each other on the back for the “bottle”—the Cockney term for “courage”—that had moved them to not walk away, even when the burglary seemed hopeless. Jones, ever the exhibitionist, was especially pleased by all the media coverage.

  “Have you seen the headlines?” Jones bragged. “We are going to be famous! I tell you something now, if we never proceeded me and you, Basil would have walked away.”

  “Yeah, he would have,” Perkins replied.

  “So they put the work down to me and you,” Jones recalled, displaying more than a little cockiness and once again reliving that sweet moment the drill had breached the wall.

  “And you said, ‘Smash that up!’ ”

  “Smash that up!”11

  Perkins, who had been distracted by his need to take his insulin shots during the burglary, nevertheless marveled at his role as cheerleader while Jones, the lithe athlete, got the job done. Now that the burglary was over, he nonchalantly informed Jones that he had been taking the insulin shots throughout the four-day heist, the whole time they were in the basement, a fact he seems to have previously neglected to tell the others.

  Noting that he had recently turned sixty-seven, he finally let Jones in on his secret. “Fucking 20 pills a day, think of it, three injections. I had it all with me my injections.”

  Jones reacted with equanimity, if not a little shock. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass his old friend.

  “You never . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Course I had to take them in there for three days.”

  “What were they in your pocket?”

  “Oh yeah, I had them in a proper pack in me bag, yeah.” Jones could not help but be impressed by his pluckiness and courage. It was one thing to have pulled off the heist at their age—and to have wielded that heavy drill. But to have done all that while injecting shots of insulin suddenly made Perkins a king among thieves.

  “And you’ve got Carl, whose been on massive bits of work, screaming like a pig!” Jones observed, referring to the hapless Carl Wood, at nearly a decade younger.

  “Yeah, if I don’t take the insulin for three days I could, you’d a had to carry me out in a wheelie bin!”

  “Fucking hell!” Jones replied.

  Perkins played it down. “You know like act drunk you know the side effects, well that never happened to me.”12

  Before long, Perkins’s mind wandered back inside the vault and focused on their unlikely moment of triumph. “Smash that up now, put that down, it’s fucking working cos you’re egging one another on, it’s working you got to take it off, it ain’t ping back. Remember me saying, ‘We’re in! we’re in!’ ” Perkins recalled. “And then you started pumping again. If I had been saying this ain’t going to work, Dan, you’re defeated you know.”13

  Jones seemed to relish the recollection. After all, it had been the pinnacle of their criminal careers.

  The men also listened obsessively to the radio and just as obsessively read newspaper coverage of the heist. They were lulled into a false sense of security that the police were off of their scent. All the reports said that police had no suspects, and Jones assured the others that he was hearing that Scotland Yard believed the heist had been committed by someone who worked at the safe deposit company.

  “That’s a good
thing if they think it’s an inside job,” Perkins told Jones during another spin in the Saxo to discuss their plans to fence the jewels.

  “They do, badly,” Jones replied.

  The police, Perkins mused confidently, would not put a lot of resources into investigating the crime if they thought the suspects came from inside the company. And they would surely never suspect that the culprits were a bunch of aging old men like them!

  “They will not put 100 percent into it, ’cause they’ll think, ‘you mugging us off you cunts, you want us running all around London when it’s fucking from the inside,’ ” he said.14

  Meanwhile, back at the Flying Squad headquarters in Putney, teams of officers were hunched over computers, reviewing CCTV footage and recordings and sifting through the evidence. Officers, including Day, had been retrieving CCTV footage from the shops and restaurants, grocery stores, and pharmacies where the gang stopped to meet. It was one of the biggest Scotland Yard surveillance operations in decades.

  The eavesdropping had yielded a wealth of confessional bravado, but Johnson wasn’t yet satisfied. He knew that the gang could shrewdly try to shrug it off as if all the boasting was just the musings of a bunch of aging and senile fantasists. What the police needed was hard evidence.

  Chapter 10

  The Art of Snooping and Waiting

  KNOWN FOR HIS IMPERTURBABILITY AND PATIENCE, Johnson was particularly skilled in surveillance operations. He had spent years running covert operations that relied on surreptitiously installing listening devices in the cars or homes of criminals and then pouncing when the moment was right. Hunting and outsmarting bank robbers was one of his specialties. “I have seen my fair share of jobs,” he says, quickly adding, “no more than anyone else.”1