by Dan Bilefsky
Perkins entered the compact interview room at 10:37 p.m. on May 20, 2015, accompanied by a lawyer. Wearing glasses and appearing nonplussed, he sat in a chair, a blank expression on his face. After the two Flying Squad officers informed him of his legal rights, the questions began in earnest. But as he had previously vowed he would do if he was ever caught, he played the clueless and doddering old man.
“Now it is going to be a fairly lengthy interview,” one of the officers began. “As you can imagine the serious nature of the offence. You’ve obviously been arrested for the conspiracy to commit burglary at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Vault over the period the 2nd of April 2015 until Saturday the 5th of April.”16
“No comment,” Perkins replied.
“Daniel Jones. Is that the person that you know?”
“No comment.”
“Is he an associate of yours?”
“No comment.”
“Mr. Jones drives a black Land Rover, registration HN08 UEU. Is that a vehicle that’s familiar to you?”
“No comment.”
“Now if you have any form of alibi or any form of defense that you may potentially rely on later, it’s your opportunity really to tell us now.”
“No comment.”
Perkins’s interview continued for more than an hour. The officers temporarily stopped the interview so he could take his insulin medication for his diabetes.
At around midnight, one of the interrogators, determined to crack Perkins, tried to play on his sense of shame. It didn’t work.
“There’s been various descriptions of this burglary out in the press,” he began. “Some people have likened it a bit to Ocean’s Eleven. But the bottom line is that we speak to the people that are the victims of this, and contrary to what people might have read in the paper, they are not rich people. There are some people that their family heirlooms were in there, things that are just precious to them and they wanted to keep safe. Some people had their entire pensions in there, they have all been taken. There was a guy that I was speaking to on the phone who said that his first wife died of cancer and he didn’t want his current wife to know that he’d kept their wedding rings, and those are among the things that were stolen in this offense. How do you feel about that?”17
“No comment,” Perkins replied.
“Do you feel any kind of remorse at all about it?”
“No comment.”
And so it went with each of the suspects, each of whom answered “No comment,” as the two detectives asked them if they knew one another. Then they slowly unspooled in forensic detail the three-day trajectory of the burglary, the precise movements of their vehicles, the heaps of stolen jewels found at their homes.
Each man was presented with the incontrovertible and detailed evidence of their involvement. Collins was informed that police had identified his distinctive white Mercedes, registered in someone else’s name, and the van he had driven during the heist.
Jones was told that he has been spotted with a walkie-talkie at the scene of the crime, that police knew his role was to wield the diamond-tipped drill and to climb through the drill hole in the vault, and that CCTV video cameras had filmed him when he went with Collins to Machine Mart to buy a new pump after the first pump broke down.
Reader learned that police knew about the senior citizen’s subway card he had used on his way to the burglary. In an apparent attempt to rattle him, the two officers interrogating him also played him a recording of Jones lambasting him as a “horrible man” and Perkins complaining that, among other things, he was stingy and never bought “a drink at the pub.”
A visibly shaken Wood learned that the police knew that he had chickened out of the burglary after the second night, and that Perkins and the others had mercilessly mocked him for his cowardice.18
“Do you feel like your credibility in the underworld or criminality or being able to stand tall amongst people that could do stuff like this, do you feel this has been affected?” the interrogating officer asked him.
“No comment.”
Jamie Day recalled the gang was aggressive in their contempt and resolute in their silence. Amazingly, even the incorrigibly loquacious Doyle uttered “No comment” no fewer than 222 times.
When it came to Brian Reader’s turn, he was stoic and didn’t even bother to utter “No comment.” He remained silent, only answering a solitary “Yes” when asked whether he understood his legal rights.
“Mr. Reader we’re investigating a burglary at Hatton Garden at 88–90 that took place in the basement where the vault and safety deposit boxes were kept. Do you have anything to say about that?”19
Silence.
“It’s been in the papers, it’s fairly infamous now and it was over the Easter weekend. Do you remember what you were doing over the Easter weekend?”
Silence.
“Did you put this job together; you’re the head of it?”20
Silence.
One of the officers played a recording in which the rest of the gang referred to Reader as “the Master.”
Silence.
But when police played the men snippets of their recorded conversations incriminating themselves and showed them the CCTV footage showing them at the scene of the crime, the officers watched as Perkins, Jones, and Reader grew deflated and began to sulk. Jones squirmed as the officers played the audio in which he and Perkins discussed cutting up the jewels and viciously slagged off Reader and Wood for backing out of the heist, halfway through.
“How do you think Carl Wood and Brian Reader were going to feel about you slating them?” one of the officers asked Jones.
Reader, for his part, was forced to contain his contempt and looked ahead, glassy-eyed, as the officers played an audio of a conversation in which Perkins insulted him for his ineptness as a thief. “The whole fucking 12 years I’ve been with him, three, four bits of work, he’s fucked up every one of them,” Perkins’s angry voice blared out.
“Have you known Mr. Perkins for 12 years?” the detective asked him. Reader declined to answer.
Recalling the interview, Johnson said Reader was the more shell-shocked among the gang since he had backed out of the crime, and thought he was safe from prosecution, only to discover, much to his horror, that his professed involvement in the heist had been caught on tape.
But even experienced pros have their breaking points. Confronted with the audio and images of himself entering 88–90 Hatton Garden, Jones, the narcissistic showman, eventually dissolved. He had initially tried to play it cool, stating his home address as “no fixed abode” and calling himself “retired” before unleashing a steady stream of “no comments.” But after listening to the barrage of evidence the Flying Squad had gathered, Jones looked up at the interviewing officer and said, “You boys have done a proper job on us here, a professional job.” Referring to the evidence, he added: “It’s overwhelming I suppose, init?”
“Yes,” the detective interviewing him replied.
“Anyway, I ain’t got nothing to say.”
“If you did have some stuff to say, then we want to listen.”
“I’m very stressed at the moment,” Jones replied. “You appreciate that, don’t you? It’s almost one o’clock.”21
But the men deflected police questions about the mysterious fifth man, “Basil,” whose red hair had been captured by the CCTV camera, but who had managed to evade arrest. All insisted they didn’t know who he was. It would emerge only later from Jones, never a reliable source, that Basil may have been recruited by Reader, and his identity purposely not revealed to the other members of the gang, in order to protect him, if they were caught.
Once the men were in custody, the Crown Prosecution Service, the main prosecution service for England and Wales, charged the gang with conspiracy to burgle Hatton Garden. As in the American legal system, the men had to decide whether to brave a trial in which the evidence was clearly stacked against them, or whether to plead guilty. Under the British legal system, their
careful efforts to avoid violence during the burglary meant that their sentences would be circumscribed if they pleaded guilty. In any case, in Britain, prisoners are typically eligible for parole after serving only half of their sentences. So faced with the overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence Johnson and his team had meticulously gathered over several months, Reader, Jones, Collins, and Perkins pleaded guilty. The Flying Squad’s methods had worked.
Johnson and Day were lauded as heroes, in a decidedly English and understated way—with pints of beer at the pub near Flying Squad headquarters, flanked by fellow officers. But the celebration was muted. The prosecution hadn’t yet begun. And the aging thieves had shown themselves to be adept at wiggling out of tough situations.
As the daring antics of the Hatton Garden heist grabbed headlines, Britons of all ages and classes marveled at the old men who had managed, like the Great Train robbers before them, to buck the establishment. And while the government of Conservative prime minister David Cameron was not rocked by scandal as in the days of Harold Macmillan during the Great Train Robbery, the occupant in No. 10 Downing Street was an Old Etonian “toff,” presiding over a country that remained deeply polarized by social and class divisions. That helped burnish the aging gang as working-class heroes akin to the Great Train robbers decades earlier.
For the dedicated men and women of the Flying Squad, the tendency of the media—and everyday Britons—to idolize the men was a source of deep frustration, since they had, in fact, stolen millions of dollars of valuables. Nevertheless, the crew quickly garnered fans throughout the country and across the world—including in France, where they were dubbed “Le Gang du Papys,” or the Grandads’ Gang.
Alan Ivens, a research scientist, and Ian Wick, an accountant, both of whom were born and raised in Enfield, have been drinking companions for the past sixty years. In the months following the burglary, the two were holding court at the Old Wheatsheaf, the century-old pub in Enfield, where the Hatton Garden gang liked to down a pint or two while they were plotting the heist and where several had gone before the ill-fated jewel exchange. The pub, with its wood paneling, warm ale, World War II memorabilia, Thursday “quiz nights,” and cricket playing perpetually on the television, was a hangover from a 1950s vision of England that hadn’t yet died in Enfield.
“When I heard about the heist, I thought it was just like the old times. It had a bit of style to it,” said Ivens. “They had no firearms. It’s like those old clever boys who tunneled under the ground to Lloyds Bank in the 1970s,” he said, referring to the robbery on Baker Street, connected to Reader, in which a gang had infiltrated a safe deposit after days of digging underground. “It’s amazing they are still getting to that kind of trouble at their age.” It was a sentiment repeated over and over again at pubs across the capital and among people of all classes. While working-class Britons could idealize the men’s success at fleecing safe deposit box holders perceived as wealthy denizens of the upper classes (in fact, many were immigrant success stories), Britons of all classes couldn’t help but be impressed by men who were rappelling down elevator shafts and wielding heavy drills when most people their age were quietly enjoying their retirement.
Chapter 14
The Trial
The Plumber, the Arsehole, and Billy the Fish
Once the news broke that a group of cunning pensioners were behind an old-school heist that even defense lawyers deemed worthy of Hollywood, Britons of all ages affectionately embraced the white-haired crew. The buzz about the burglary was everywhere—on social media, on radio call-in shows, in the back seat banter of London black cabs as they whizzed across the city. In newspapers and television bulletins, the men’s grizzled and wrinkly mug shots—ruddy faced, liver-spotted, and resigned—were shown over and over again.
It was part gangster film, part slapstick comedy, and the British public couldn’t get enough. At a time of bloody terrorist attacks, the tortured debate over whether Britain should leave the European Union, and the economic austerity of Prime Minister David Cameron’s government, the old-fashioned caper provided welcome romance, escapism, and relief.
“All I ask of the world is that elderly cat burglars be allowed to carry off enormous diamond heists in peace,” mused one mesmerized fan on Twitter.
Befitting a country that had long relished elevating the underdog, the general attitude was one of appreciation and awe. How could they . . . ? The men were portrayed as affable rogues, old-economy criminals from a different age, with names like “the Guv’nor” and “Billy the Fish,” and ailments like leaking bladders. Forensic play-by-plays of the heist dominated the front pages of London’s tabloid press, along with graphics of the men rappelling down elevator shafts, and recitations of their colorful criminal backgrounds.
“BAD GRANDPAS” read the giant front-page headline in the Daily Mail, the populist barometer of middle England. “DIAMOND WHEEZERS” screamed Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid the Sun, showing the astonishing photograph of the figure-eight holes bored into the vault’s concrete wall, the compromised safe deposit boxes visible behind them.1 “Combined ages of all nine suspects is 533,” noted a subhead on the front page, above illustrations of a row of diamonds, each emblazoned with the ages of the men. Even the stately BBC got in on the fun, filming its elegant home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford trying to wiggle his way through a hole in a makeshift concrete wall and hamming it up for the camera as he nearly got stuck.
Suddenly, Scotland Yard—and prosecutors—knew they were fighting a war on two fronts. In total there were initially nine men arrested in connection with the heist—the four ringleaders Reader, Jones, Collins, and Perkins and their four accomplices Lincoln, Wood, Doyle, and Harbinson, along with Reader’s son Paul, who was later released, apparently none the wiser what his father had been up to.
The four ringleaders had pled guilty to the burglary, effectively depriving the public and the frenzied media of the show trial they craved. The result was that the prosecution of the accomplices became a stand-in for their elder mentors. The British media was determined to turn the trial and a bleak south London courtroom into a sensational stage upon which to reenact the burglary.
“After the main protagonists in the burglary pled guilty, the interest in the trial might’ve disappeared,” Philip Evans, the lawyer who prosecuted the case, recalled. “But as soon as the media got wind of the case, it became an obsession, and the trial of the secondary guys became a sort of proxy for the whole gang.”2
Prosecutors knew they had to prove the guilt of the men in court while at the same time proving their guilt in the court of public opinion, which is more difficult. The jurors in the latter are more numerous and evidence takes a back seat to a classic underdog story, made all the more difficult when the perps look like doddering grandparents. The police quickly tried to change the narrative to focus on the hard truth that the men were malicious fiends, who had heartlessly targeted the life savings of men and women their own age. It was a hard sell.
While much of the media coverage was fawning and laudatory, there were two opposing narratives in public opinion. One narrative sought to present the men as would-be members of Dad’s Army, a wildly popular British television series in the 1970s that featured the misadventures of a group of endearing and elderly volunteer soldiers during the Second World War. The opposing narrative portrayed them as the cast of Ocean’s Eleven, the “nasty” gang of World War II veterans from the 1960 heist film, recruited by the dapper and wily Danny Ocean (Frank Sinatra) to rob five different Las Vegas casinos.
Evans and Scotland Yard were determined that the latter narrative would prevail. They realized they faced an uphill struggle in a country with a natural inclination to thumb its nose at authority. “The real nasty blokes with the previous convictions—Brian Reader, Terry Perkins, Danny Jones—weren’t in the dock,” Evans recalled. “But we had to make sure the jury understood the suffering these men had caused and the callousness of their crime.”3
Fan
cy a Spot of Tea, Judge?
During their first appearance on June 4, 2015, in Southwark Crown Court via a video link from HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London, officials struggled with a patchy video link between the court and the jail where the men were being held.
Seizing on the moment, Terry Perkins put a question to the court. “Could you ask the judge and yourselves to come down to Belmarsh and we can have tea together?” he asked. Bystanders in the courtroom roared with laughter.
As court staff scrambled to overcome the technical difficulties, the gang could be heard muttering that the proceeding was a “farce” and a “joke” and “this is fucked.” The judge Alistair McCreath, visibly frustrated, pressed on. But the broadcast cut out completely two minutes later. “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” he said, sighing.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
The prosecutor Philip Evans, who watched awkwardly as the scene unfolded, said that the men “were making a mockery of the court.” He believed “they were trying to be light-humored to give the impression that they were harmless old men.”4
The trial of the accomplices—a ragtag group of middle-aged and indebted men, including a plumber, a taxi driver, and several unemployed drifters—lasted nine weeks. Following the gang’s initial appearance via video link, the trial of the accomplices took place at Woolwich Crown Court, a maximum security court in southeast London next to Belmarsh prison that is usually used for terrorism cases. The building—sprawling, modernist, and grim—provided a prosaic setting for a trial focused on a sensational and brazen heist. The venue—reserved for some of the most dangerous suspects in the country—appeared calculated to puncture the perception that the Hatton Garden heist was the work of harmless old men.