by Dan Bilefsky
EVANS, A FORTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD barrister, was used to big cases. He had defended serial killers and sports stars accused of corruption and he had prosecuted sensational murder cases.
He studied at Cardiff School of Law and Politics—not Oxford or Cambridge—and wears that distinction like a badge.
“I am a state school boy,” he noted proudly, using the British term for a government-funded school. His wife is also a barrister, and had “taken silk” two years before, meaning she was appointed a Queen’s Counsel, the highest-ranking position of a senior barrister in the British legal system. He had not yet achieved that distinction, and wanted it badly. Hatton Garden could only buttress his chances.
A former semiprofessional rugby player and an accomplished pianist, he was “head boy” at his British high school—analogous to being president of the student council in the United States. He plays the trumpet, shoots clay pigeons, and likes to bike from London to Paris for exercise when he isn’t too busy prosecuting rapists, money launderers, or robbers. He speaks with the steady confidence of someone who has seldom lost a case.
The prosecution team—Evans and Philip Stott, his junior colleague—were transfixed by a section of the Flying Squad’s audio recording of the gang in which Jones and Perkins boast about having undertaken the greatest jewelry heist in the history of England, blissfully unaware that they were not alone in Perkins’s Citroën Saxo.
“When we heard them talking and bragging about what they had done, there was an element of humor and some relief,” Evans said, recalling the moment with the pensive smile of an English prosecutor schooled to not take too much joy in the downfall of the criminals he is prosecuting, at least outwardly. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit stupid that you are talking about what you have done so openly.’ I suppose they didn’t realize they were being listened to. From a prosecutor’s point of view, I thought, ‘that’s bloody good evidence. What on earth are they going to do now?’ ”
As he studied the CCTV footage, Evans said he also realized they had a smoking gun. “You can see the men leaving the burglary and the moment where Wood realizes the door is locked when the rest of the gang come back to complete the job, and he decides to leave, exiting stage left,” he recalled. “It was a key moment.”5
The guilty plea of the ringleaders had deprived Evans—and the public—of the show trial they craved. It was a smart decision. Beyond the fact that a guilty plea would win them a reduced sentence, they could also get released early for good behavior. They could get as little as four years in prison. Then maybe go and recover their stolen loot. If they pled not guilty and were convicted anyway, they could die behind bars.
As the trial began, the fact that the crime was a nonviolent burglary rather than an armed robbery nagged at Evans; he knew that there were limits to the conviction he could secure. The gang had purposely decided to commit the crime over a long Easter weekend, when they likely wouldn’t run into anyone—or end up in a potentially violent skirmish with a security guard. The maximum sentence for a commercial burglary was ten years, and by pleading guilty, that was automatically reduced by one-third.
“The issue that it was a burglary rather than a robbery was an important one,” Evans explained. “They had made sure that there would be no one in the building over that bank holiday weekend, so that they wouldn’t be placed in a position to need to threaten violence to complete the crime. I supposed that added to the romantic nature of the crime they had committed as everyone says, ‘Well, they didn’t hurt anyone.’ ”6
But the accomplices all pled not guilty to conspiring to steal gems and gold at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit. There was Wood, who had chickened out before the burglary; Lincoln, who had helped store the goods; Doyle, the plumber who had given the gang access to his plumbing workshop; John Harbinson, a cab driver and relative of Lincoln accused of helping to store and transfer some of the jewels in his taxi; and “Billy the Fish” Lincoln, who served as getaway driver and recruited Harbinson, his nephew, to help conceal the booty. As a result of their nonguilty pleas, the trial focused on them, even as it provided the prosecution the opportunity they desperately craved to rebrand the ringleaders in the public mind as cruel, nefarious old men.
Philip Evans, the Barrister
While seemingly every young and ambitious lawyer in London had lobbied to get the case, Evans’s name had come up because he had worked closely with Ed Hall, a senior prosecutor at the Crown Prosecution Service, who had been charged with the case, and admired his tireless determination. The Crown Prosecution Service, known as the CPS, is the main prosecuting authority for England and Wales, and decides what cases should be prosecuted, what charges should be filed, and, significantly for Evans, which lawyer should litigate the case in court.
“The stakes were extremely high and we needed someone who could reasonably expect to win the case,” Hall noted.7 Hall specialized in prosecutions involving unruly street protests and demonstrations and he had prosecuted dozens of people during the summer riots of 2011 when thousands of people went on a looting rampage across the capital, one of the worst cases of public disorder in Britain since the Second World War. But he had also dealt with hundreds of murders and armed robberies during his decades-long career, and he relished the prospect of prosecuting geriatric thieves in a high-profile case. A natural storyteller himself, Hall had seen Evans perform in court and had been impressed by his methodical approach, brilliant grasp of forensic evidence, diligent work ethic, and ability to construct a compelling tale, which the Hatton Garden case now offered in abundance to a lawyer with a modicum of imagination. Evans was ecstatic when the career-making (or breaking) case landed in his in-box.
In the British legal system, lawyers are divided into solicitors and barristers, the former of whom typically provide legal advice and support for a client, and the latter of whom don a wig and gown in court, where they act as advocates and plead a case in front of a judge and jury. Some barristers prefer to stick either to prosecution or to defense, for fear of coming across as ruthless opportunists. But in Evans’s career, he had shown competence both as a defense lawyer and a prosecutor.
He was also no stranger to high-profile cases. In 2008 he defended the serial killer Levi Bellfield, who gained ignominy across the country after brutally killing and raping several women and girls, including Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old girl. He also defended Muhammad Asif, a Pakistani cricket star, who in 2010 fixed a match at Lords Cricket Ground by deliberately bowling no balls in exchange for cash. But before Hatton Garden, he had never taken a case that would get as much attention, turning him—willingly or not—into an overnight star on the ten o’clock news and making his every pronouncement in court potentially larded with Shakespearian meaning.
EVANS WAS FEELING nervous as he arrived in court the morning of November 22, 2015, to open the prosecution’s case. The scene at the blocky Woolwich Crown Court in southeast London only added to his nerves. At least half a dozen television trucks were parked outside. About fifty journalists from all the major upmarket and tabloid papers—the BBC, the Times of London, the Daily Mail among them—were already occupying all the press seats inside the court, forcing another 126 to spill over into another press room, where the trial would be transmitted live.
Presiding over the case was the unflappable sixty-four-year-old Judge Christopher Kinch QC, wearing a wig and red robe, and betraying little reaction to the frenzied scene in court number two. A judge with a long career adjudicating criminal cases, he had grown up in Bromley, Kent, not far from where Brian Reader has his imposing house. He was a circuit judge and Queen’s Counsel, a designation that marked him as one of the country’s best legal minds. Ruddy faced, matter-of-fact, and largely immune to irritation, he was the resident judge at Woolwich Crown Court, which hosted trials of some of the most notorious terrorists in the land, including the six men accused of the July 21, 2005, bombings on the London transport network. A gang of old-timer thieves in his courtroom was a rarity. A
nd while he was used to high-profile cases—he had been called to the bar in 1976 and served as a judge for six years—he was acutely aware that his every word was being scrutinized.
In a gallery above the court sat the families and friends of the defendants—among them, their old prison mates, wives, girlfriends, and children. A few of them waved at the defendants, who were seated in a glass enclosure at the back of the courtroom. Several of the men had arrived earlier through an underground tunnel that connects nearby high-security Belmarsh prison with the court house, allowing suspects and defendants to be whisked in and out of court without the need to transport them and risk anyone escaping. The prison housed men considered highly dangerous—terrorists and murderers among them. The fact that the bungling elderly gang and their accomplices were being held there underscored how the Crown Prosecution Service was determined to stress the insidiousness of their crime in the public imagination.
Doyle, out on bail and ever the charming and loquacious plumber, introduced himself and shook hands with the gaggle of assembled journalists sitting at the side of the courtroom. Sometimes he wore his plumber’s uniform to court, emblazoned with the name of his company, Associated Response. Each defendant had a small team of lawyers, and the legal aid bill for the defendants would eventually breach £660,000 (about $990,000), prompting outrage. One lawyer, Philip Sinclair, who represented taxi driver John Harbinson, sported a different fresh rose on his lapel every day of the trial—an apparent tribute to his late wife.
As is the custom in British courts, the lawyers and the judge wore robes and horsehair wigs, a tradition going back to the fourteenth century. Anachronistic, itchy, and hot by all accounts, the wigs nevertheless help convey the sanctity of law and prevent juries from favoring a lawyer based on his or her dress, while also affording prosecutors some degree of anonymity from defendants out for revenge. Today, there are no strict sartorial requirements for lawyers arguing cases at the Supreme Court or in civil cases. But this being Britain, many barristers wear them, anyway.
When the moment to begin the trial finally came, the courtroom suddenly went silent and twelve members of the jury, six men and six women—including a hairdresser and a retired prison warden—shuffled in. One had taken his oath on a Koran. While the British legal system does not allow lawyers to individually vet members of the jury, Judge Kinch asked them whether they had any connection with Hatton Garden or the jewelry trade. None volunteered.
Evans, wearing glasses, his wig, and a black robe, stood in front of the jury. As he made eye contact with each member, he began to unspool the story of the heist, building a narrative that, he later recalled, he had spent more than a week honing and practicing to make sure the jury remained on the edges of their seats. The opening was typed out on several sheets of A4 paper. Evans had reread it so many times—on his way to work, while taking a bath—that he no longer needed to look at his papers.
Calling the Hatton Garden heist the “largest burglary in English history,” he began by noting that the four ringleaders ranged from age sixty to seventy-six and had brought in four men—the men on trial today—to help complete the audacious raid. The old gang, he added, was responsible for some of the most brazen crimes of the century.
“These four ringleaders and organizers of this conspiracy, although senior in years, brought with them a great deal of experience in planning and executing sophisticated and serious acquisitive crime not dissimilar to this,” he said. “Two of these men had been involved in some of the biggest acquisitive crimes in this country in the last century and the other two had for many years in their earlier lives been involved in serious theft.”
Warming to his theme, Evans described how the oldest man on the job, Brian Reader, seventy-six, was known as “the Master” or “the Governor,” and how the men had met on Friday nights at the Castle pub to plan the heist over several years. Once the Easter weekend raid was on, he told the jury, the men had maintained “radio silence” by using walkie-talkies. He meticulously recounted the evidence—how the men had disabled the elevator and then slid down into the vault; how they had wielded diamond-tipped drills to make three adjoining figure eight holes through eighteen inches of reinforced concrete; and how they had left the scene of the crime halfway through to buy a new Clarke pump and ten-ton hydraulic ram necessary to complete the job. Later during the trial the prosecution would bring in an exact replica of the holes in the drilled-through wall so the jury could visualize them.
Suppressing the desire to smirk, he added that police had discovered the book Forensics for Dummies at Jones’s house after the men were arrested. Jones had buried some of the stolen goods at a Victorian cemetery, he told the jury, while items including face masks, a drill, and cash were found at his home. The gang, he said, had opened seventy-three safe deposit boxes, twenty-nine of which were empty. At least $12 million worth of jewels, gold, and cash hadn’t been recovered.
Looking back on his opening, Evans recalled that the moment required a flawless delivery since much of the jury had likely already read about the case in the newspapers. “I dare say that in my career I have been boring on a number of occasions. But I didn’t want to be boring on Hatton Garden. On the morning of the opening I was feeling pretty nervous. In hindsight this was one of the most high stakes trials of my career. The material was there for someone with a bit of flair. In that sense it was a prosecutor’s dream, as you had compelling details in the narrative and a jury who really wanted to hear it. It was telling the story of this old heist, but also dispelling the myths, and making sure the jury clearly understands the evidence.”8
Nevertheless, before the trial had barely begun, the Bad Grandpas were already providing a distracting public spectacle, even from behind bars. On the second day of the trial, it emerged that Jones had tried to dupe police about where the loot was hidden, telling them that he had hidden one bag of the missing jewels under the gravestone of his partner’s father in a Victorian cemetery in Edmonton, north London.
Jones appeared to further signal his “good behavior” and cooperation by writing to a Sky News reporter from his jail cell, saying he had notified the police about the stash to “make amends to my loved ones and show I’m trying to change. I no [sic] it seems a bit late in my life, but I’m trying.”
In October, Jones was given a temporary reprieve from jail and taken to the cemetery to show police where he had hidden part of the stash under a headstone. But he neglected to mention a much larger haul from the burglary buried under a different headstone at the same cemetery, which police had already discovered. Police had spent hours meticulously examining the headstones near where Jones said he had buried the loot and had excavated stashes of hidden jewels, wrapped inside of shopping bags, using small shovels.
The recounting of Jones’s failed ruse, explained patiently by Evans in court, elicited sniggers among the assembled Fleet Street journalists. His gall was astounding.
The trial offered up other dramatic moments, including when Evans read out the transcript of some of the thieves’ boasts about the burglary, requiring him to utter the words “fuck” and “cunt” over and over again, as the judge in his wig and red velvet cape looked on with arched brows, and a few members of the jury blanched. The defense tantalizingly tried to play up the question as to whether the heist had been an inside job, suggesting that the four ringleaders were not fully responsible.
Hesham Puri, Brian Reader’s lawyer, said that the Flying Squad and the prosecution were intent on putting the elderly gang on trial through the prosecution of the accomplices, even though the senior ringleaders had already pleaded guilty to the crime. The son of Pakistani immigrants, who has become one of the capital’s leading defense attorneys, Puri claimed that the degree of animus against the men and their accomplices was compounded because police were made to look like fools after failing to respond to the initial alarm during the heist. As a result, he argued, the prosecution was intent on making an example of Reader and the others, treating t
hem like dangerous criminals when their crime had been nonviolent and they were aging men.
“They are being treated in this way because of the notoriety,” he asserted. “Even our terrorist suspect clients are being better treated and these men are elderly.” Far from being dangerous, he added, the case had shown that they were out of step with the times, “1980s criminals who committed a crime in the 21st century.”
Moreover, he said the challenge for the defense was made all the harder by the fact that the elder ringleaders had been linked to some of the most sensational crimes of the past—Security Express, Brink’s-Mat, among others—thereby making them and their hapless accomplices objects of fascination. The particular attention on Reader as the master puppeteer of the heist was deeply misplaced, he insisted, given that he had withdrawn from the burglary. “We do not accept that he was The Master. He is in the same category as Collins and the gang. If he was the Master, then why would he have pulled out?”9
John Luckhurst, a defense lawyer for John Harbinson, the nephew of Bill Lincoln accused of using his taxi to transport some of the stolen jewels, said that defense attorneys across the land were jockeying to participate in a case that was quickly deemed the “trial of the century.” He noted palpable tension between the prosecution and the defense, with the latter regarding the former as pompous, hectoring, and patronizing, and intent on projecting the guilt of the aging gang onto the other defendants, including Harbinson, whom he said was innocent of any crime. “The prosecution was arrogant from the beginning,” he said, “and seemed to look down on the defence.”
Evans had reason to feel confident. The audio of the gang bragging about the crime and repeatedly mentioning Wood, Doyle, Harbinson, and Lincoln was the smoking gun the prosecution needed to secure a conviction. As a result, the admissibility of hearsay evidence became the key legal issue of the case. The defense argued that the recorded conversations should not be admissible in court since they were hearsay, or statements offered as evidence that were made outside the trial. But Evans pushed back, and argued successfully that the secretly recorded conversations were legally admissible since they were a declaration of the gang’s involvement in the conspiracy—an exception to the rule banning hearsay as evidence. Moreover, he argued, the secret recordings didn’t show one thief trying to persuade another of something, but, rather a group of thieves giddily reminiscing about what they had done. “If we had lost that argument, it would have very, very seriously weakened our case,” he recalled.10