The Last Job

by Dan Bilefsky

  As the Mercedes slowly made its way toward the pub—Collins was a slow and meticulous driver—and the car passed by a lane, Jones suddenly recalled that he had once been pulled over there by a police officer, a “Chinese bloke.”

  “I got fucking pulled right here, I did,” he said. When the police officer asked him why he had an army backpack in the car, Jones recalled, he told him that he was in the military, special forces. “I went, well, I teach squaddies how to survive in hostile territory. I said, ‘I’m flying out actually today.’ ” Then, he explained, the police officer let him go.5

  “What age can you come out of the army?” Collins asked, sounding impressed.

  “You can be in it up to 50,” he replied. “I mean some of them SAS officers they are in at 55, 60 as they’re advisors,”6 he added, referring to the Special Air Service. Jones appeared to idolize the elite unit, which had conducted daring covert missions during World War II against the Nazis and which was still regarded by Britons with awe. Successful SAS recruits had to pass extreme fitness tests, including marching cross-country against the clock followed by jungle training in Belize, Malaysia, or Brunei. Its motto, “Who Dares, Wins,” could’ve been Jones’s credo, and in his mind, it seems, he was an SAS man. In fact, he had never been a member of the unit—and his runs were largely limited to suburban London with his dog, Rocket, in tow.

  The conversation suddenly and incongruously turned to the Christmas holidays. Collins had noticed that the Sunday papers had been full of ads for Christmas cruises, the day before.

  “They are fucking relentless,” Jones agreed.

  With Collins’s sluggish driving, the drive must have felt like an eternity. But at 9:19 a.m., on that Tuesday in May, he and Jones finally pulled up to the Wheatsheaf pub.

  “That’s the Old Wheatsheaf,” Collins said. “You might think the car park is round there but it ain’t, it’s round here,” he added, apparently referring to the area in the back of the pub.

  There was just one problem: there was no parking space available outside the pub. A sign said DISABLED ONLY.

  “Shall I park there?” Collins asked.

  “Well, you’re disabled, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I got a badge. It ain’t a disabled special person is it?” Collins muttered. “No, it ain’t, no,” he answered himself.

  Collins parked the car and the two walked to the back of the pub where Hugh Doyle had his workshop. Around the same time, after having bought a newspaper, Bill Lincoln arrived in his black Audi at the pub. He was wearing a bright red hooded coat. The three men moved toward the entrance of the plumbing workshop, out of view of a nearby CCTV camera.

  As they strolled toward the workshop, the police surveillance team suddenly heard a disturbing sound. Collins’s dog was panting, whining, and moving friskily in the back of the car.7

  The Trap Is Set

  As the gang approached the pub, Turner and Johnson could see them on one of the three large flat computer screens arranged next to one another in the control room at Flying Squad headquarters. The screens showed footage from CCTV cameras that had been surreptitiously installed at several locations. One screen showed Perkins’s house on Heene Road, and the second showed a grainy image of Terri’s house on 24 Sterling Road.

  The house, part of a row of attached houses on a sleepy residential street, had a brown front door, and short brick wall in the front—the kind of nondescript exterior that would not attract notice. Inside it was decorated with cheap furniture. There was a flat-screen television and children’s toys in the cramped living room, which had a striped rug. Among a stack of DVDs and books were David Beckham’s biography and an episode of Friends. Framed family photographs, including several of Terri’s young daughter, were set on the fireplace mantel. One was a wedding picture of Vicky and Spencer at the beach. There was a small kitchen table at the back of the apartment, where the gang planned to sift through the gems and where they had taken out latex gloves to complete the task.

  Back at the Flying Squad offices, Turner and Johnson sat next to each other. Two radios gave the commanding officers a play-by-play of what was happening in real time. One channel was turned to the officers near Sterling Road. The second was tuned to the team charged with arresting Brian Reader.

  “Suspects have entered the car park,” a voice on the radio suddenly blurted out, an edge of anticipation to it.

  “Let them go. Stay back as much as possible,” Johnson calmly replied, determined that the Flying Squad not accidentally tip off the gang when arresting them was finally within his reach.

  Johnson recalled that the small group of officers gathered in the control room were excited, but also composed and very much in control. Even after nearly two decades of observing arrests in covert operations, he said his heart was racing a little. The stakes were high. The money. The intense national media scrutiny. The global headlines. The embarrassment that police had missed the alarm in the first place. The scrutiny of the top brass at Scotland Yard. The chance to bring amoral crooks to justice. Listening to the bugs had made him realize just how petty and malicious these diamond geezers were. He wanted them to pay. He wanted their retirement to take place behind bars. The operation needed to be seamless. One error and weeks of meticulous surveillance would be for nothing. It would be a disaster.

  “This was the culmination of weeks of work. But you try not to get too excited in case something goes wrong,” he said. The sense of suspense was heightened since the Flying Squad had expected some members of the gang to show up at the Wheatsheaf pub by 8:30 a.m. But all were late. “We were a bit annoyed,” Turner said.8

  With Flying Squad detectives monitoring their every move, Jones, Collins, and Lincoln stood in the parking lot of the Wheatsheaf pub when Doyle suddenly emerged. Whatever he said, he quickly sped away in an Associate Response plumbing van.

  At 9:41 a.m., Collins drove his Mercedes into the parking lot, its trunk visible to a nearby CCTV camera. The men loitered until Harbinson’s taxi arrived, four minutes later. Harbinson, who was wearing a dark jacket with a white stripe down the arm, then exited the car and opened the passenger seat’s sliding door. Jones removed a bag filled with diamonds, gold, and cash and transferred it into the trunk of Collins’s Mercedes. Lincoln then removed a smaller bag from the taxi and put it in the Mercedes. He left the parking lot on foot.

  Unfortunate for the crew, Noel Sainsbury, whose company, Archers Financial Services, is next to the pub and borders the parking lot, had been vandalized in the past by local youths who had sprayed graffiti on his company’s window. After the incident, he had installed four CCTV cameras facing the parking lot. As the men stood there making the exchange, the cameras captured it on film. After they left, two Flying Squad detectives quickly appeared and asked if they could examine the footage. Mr. Sainsbury complied. It was yet more evidence for the Flying Squad as they closed in. It was also more evidence of the Firm’s carelessnesss, given that the CCTV cameras were visible to anyone who bothered to look.

  “When police came by and later watched the CCTV footage, they were shocked when they saw the tape,” Sainsbury recalled. “They initially didn’t tell me what it was about. But I knew it had something to do with Hatton Garden as the Wheatsheaf pub owner Phil Rice had been questioned by police. The two coppers told me, ‘We are waiting for your neighbors. Those guys rent the place and there is something going on there.’ One of the police was bald and excited, his name was PC Alex, and he told me that, ‘So and so in the video has 20 years in jail.’ He used my computer to send a still image to police headquarters. Police were here for seven or eight hours. I told my staff that this was something big, I knew it was Hatton Garden, it had been in the papers.”9

  After the exchange had taken place, Perkins and Jones then drove to Terri’s house. The decision was made by the Flying Squad not to tail them to avoid attracting attention.10

  Meanwhile, on Sterling Road, a team of unarmed Flying Squad officers was already mobilized. Jon Warr
en, a neighbor whose backyard overlooks the house of Terry Perkins’s daughter, Terri Robinson, said an officer rang his bell and “rushed to look out the back window” at Terri’s house. “We didn’t know what was happening. The police were discreet. They spent about ten minutes surveying the house. There was no chopper,” said Warren, a retired engineer. “I didn’t know who the Perkins were—I had never heard of them. I don’t know of any crime families in the neighborhood. I thought they had all moved to Essex.”11

  Back at Flying Squad headquarters in Putney, Turner and Johnson were staring intently at one of the screens in front of them when suddenly they saw Perkins and Jones arriving at Terri’s house, carrying large black carrier bags filled with jewels. It was around 10 a.m. Once inside, they gathered the bags near the dining room table and looked at the glittering contents. Some of the jewel boxes were stuffed in yellow and blue supermarket bags from Lidl, the discount chain.

  Johnson recalled that when he and Craig Turner saw the men with the bags, “Craig and I turned to each other and smiled. We knew we had them.” Now, all that was left was to arrest them, without making any errors that could compromise the prosecution, or cause the aging gang to flee. Even if they did, they would likely not get far, given the small army of police officers who had been mobilized.

  At the Flying Squad, there are three commands to officers in the field to indicate that they should close in and arrest suspects. “State green” means an investigation is ongoing, evidence and intelligence is still be gathered, and “do not arrest.” “State amber” is an authorization from a commanding officer to arrest the suspects. “State red” is the actual moment when the presiding officer on the ground enforces the order to arrest the suspects.

  When Johnson saw Perkins and Jones close the door, he picked up his phone to the officer on the ground, Mark Bedford, and said firmly and loudly, “State amber! State amber!”

  Seconds later, an unarmed team of officers with a battering ram bashed down the door. When police breached the door, Perkins and Jones were sitting on a sofa. The element of surprise had proven effective. Johnson recalled that the gang, experienced criminals though they were, appeared shocked and ashen-faced. “They looked very disappointed,” he recalled.

  Jones, a one-time marathon runner, sprinted to the garden. But he didn’t get far. The two, along with Collins, were arrested. At the house, police found vast quantities of sapphires and diamonds, earrings, necklaces, bangles, and brooches and a brown leather bag stuffed with Rolex, Breitling, and Omega watches. Heat-resistant porcelain pots and tongs used for smelting gold were discovered hidden in a washing machine. Police also found a set of electronic scales. There were latex gloves on the table.

  After the men were arrested, Johnson and Turner shook hands. Johnson, usually self-contained, was grinning.

  Meanwhile, separate teams simultaneously raided ten other addresses in north London, as well as Brian Reader’s house in Kent. A visibly annoyed and surly Reader affected surprise when ten police officers broke down his door after peering through a window and spotting him sitting in a chair in his living room. His son Paul, who had allowed his father to use his cell phone during the plotting and aftermath of the burglary, was also arrested.

  Sitting on a table at Reader’s house was a diamond tester and a book on the diamond underworld. Police also discovered the distinctive red scarf he had worn to the burglary, picked up by surveillance cameras near Hatton Garden. Reader also had not discarded the subway pass for senior citizens he had used to get to the heist—an omission that an old associate of his said was shocking, given his risk aversion and attention to detail. Had he been reckless and forgetful in his old age?

  “I think he really thought he had got away with it, the elderly hoodlum,” Johnson recalled, chuckling. “He knew full well what it was about but he didn’t know what we had on him. He had walked away before the job was done, and he seemed very surprised he had been caught red-handed. He didn’t resist arrest, but he was very uncooperative and resentful.”

  Bill Lincoln, unaware that the police had finally sprung, was arrested behind the wheel of his black Audi A3 in the middle of a busy road in north London while waiting at a traffic light. As several police cars surrounded his car, he suddenly bent down, and pivoted toward the passenger seat, where he began to frantically tear up a piece of paper upon which he had written the address for the Old Wheatsheaf pub, where the jewel exchange had taken place. An unarmed officer, thinking he could be grabbing for a gun, smashed his car window and tackled him. After he was led away, police found the ripped up paper on the passenger seat floor. While in custody at the police station, Lincoln was so overcome by nerves he wet himself. Police would later put the note back together with tape.

  For Johnson, just weeks away from retirement after a long career, the arrests were a particularly sweet moment. “You are only as good as your last job,”12 he said.

  A Bungled Crime

  While the plotting and planning of the Hatton Garden heist had been masterful, the execution was amateurish bordering on stupid, and the aftermath disastrous. Reader, long an able recruiter, had helped to assemble a team of elderly and grizzled cohorts who appeared to have been caught out by their age. The gang’s decision to drive one of their own cars to the scene of the crime and to communicate by phone in the weeks following the heist had made them easy prey for the Flying Squad. Their inability to refrain from boasting and the eagerness with which they returned to their favorite haunts like the Castle proved to be a fatal error.

  Add to that their petty jealousies and internecine rivalries, and the speed with which they incriminated themselves and were then caught—some sixty days after the door to 88–90 Hatton Garden closed behind them—was head-spinning. Whatever time Jones and the others had spent reading and rereading Forensics for Dummies was worthless. They had been savvy enough to wear surgical gloves and to scrub their fingerprints away but, in the end, they had been handily outwitted by a couple of surveillance bugs, a team of determined Flying Squad officers, and modern-day police forensics. Their ruse may have worked in the 1950s or 1960s, but in 2015?

  “It is almost as if these guys have been locked up and then transported by a time machine to modern times to perform this crime,” mused Dick Hobbs, the eminent sociologist of the capital’s underworld.13

  Ed Hall was one of the chief prosecutors, charged with building the case against the four ringleaders. Burly and rumpled, with a love of horse racing and fine wine, he liked to wear a suit jacket with his tie undone. His office at the Crown Prosecution Service in Pimlico, an area of central London known for its garden squares and regency architecture, was cramped and brimming with files.

  In his two-decade career at the top of the Crown Prosecution Service, which is responsible for prosecuting all criminal cases investigated by the police in England and Wales, Hall has seen it all: Albanian human trafficking gangs; Chinese money launderers; a rapist who jumped from a five-story building and fled Britain, only to be arrested eight years later in Ghana.

  But when the Hatton Garden case came across his desk, he could barely contain his glee. “I realized as soon as it happened that it was a great story. Whatever it was, it was a hugely ambitious criminal endeavor. I saw it coming. I saw that it was going to be big,” he said. “The planning was brilliant. But they were sloppy and they made mistakes. It was the last great British heist. You see one of these every 30 years.”

  As Hall sifted through thousands of pages of evidence, including video and surveillance footage of the thieves at their favorite neighborhood bars, their statements to police, witness testimony, and their long and meandering criminal histories, he said he was struck by how close they came to getting away with the crime.

  “They got 80 percent of the job right but 20 percent of the job wrong,” he said.

  Smiling mischievously, he quoted from the 1981 film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, in which a seductive wife played by Jessica Lange and a rootless drifter played by J
ack Nicholson have a steamy affair and conspire to murder her husband and steal his money. “We can’t spend a dime of this for a year,” the Lange character says.

  “They should have slept on it for six months,” Hall said, smirking. “They should have used pay-as-you-go phones. After the heist, their age kicked in.”14

  For all their professed brilliance in solving the crime, the police, too, had made mistakes. The local police had failed to respond to the alarm on Easter weekend; Scotland Yard had initially wrongly estimated that more than $200 million was missing. But in the end, the Flying Squad had swooped in and solved the crime. It was one for the history books.

  In Custody: “No Comment, No Comment”

  Once in custody at the imposing redbrick Wood Green police station in north London, the gang of experienced thieves held fast. “They all had poker faces and were not looking at each other,” Detective Paul Johnson recalled, smiling. “They wanted us to think that they weren’t connected to each other. They still thought they could get away with it.” For the first few hours they were all in same airless room, before each one was interviewed for about seventy-five minutes. Each interrogation was recorded. Befitting old-school criminals who had learned long ago to remain silent when confronted by police, each interview was an exercise in studied evasion. No matter—Scotland Yard had spent weeks gathering evidence before waiting to spring, mindful that the diamond geezers would go quiet.

  The gang of four were whisked into a large custody area where they would see one another. It was a tactic calculated to unsettle them, but the men pretended not to know one another. “At various points they saw each other but as they waited to be interviewed they whistled and looked at the ceiling,” Johnson recalled. He said that when Reader—who had abandoned the heist—was brought in shortly after the other three, it must have dawned on the others that they were in serious trouble, and that police had pieced together the crime. “They must’ve been thinking, ‘What is going on here? How do they know he was there?’ ”15