by Dan Bilefsky
Above all, Evans had to successfully link the accomplices to the crime, which he did with great aplomb and more than a little guile, using his verbal dexterity and the poker face he had honed during his years as a prosecutor to help the defendants implicate themselves.
Hugh Doyle: The Loquacious Tongue-Tied Plumber
Among those who fell into his trap was Hugh Doyle, the affable forty-eight-year-old Irishman, whose defense was predicated upon him being an honest and hardworking plumber whose only crime had been to let his old drinking mate John Collins have access to the courtyard outside his plumbing offices, unaware that Collins wanted to use it as an exchange for millions in stolen jewels. Doyle was accused of helping to conceal and transfer the stolen goods.
Initially charged with conspiracy to commit burglary and remanded to Belmarsh prison before his charge was reduced, Doyle had spent three and a half months in the prison, where he had lost nearly thirty pounds, whiling his days away by exercising in his cell. With a friendly streak that knows little bounds, he mingled effortlessly with convicted Islamic radicals, with whom he discussed religion, armed with a copy of Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great.
Asked under cross-examination by Evans how he knew Collins, an initially confident Doyle said he knew him from fifteen years previously when they were drinking mates at a pub called the Harlequin in Islington. He conspicuously failed to mention that he also knew Perkins, Reader, and Jones, but when pressed by an incredulous Evans, he relented.
Asked whether he knew about their criminal past in some of the most legendary robberies of the century, Doyle said he did not. He said he had no idea there was a bold heist in the works, or any crime, for that matter, and that he had given Collins a key to his office in a medieval sheep shed in Enfield, so he could “let himself in and make a coffee.”
Evans arched his brows. “You say you didn’t know specifically, but you knew that Mr. Reader and Mr. Perkins were two men involved, in their past, in serious crime?” he asked.
“I didn’t know it was anything about serious crime,” Doyle replied.
“What did you talk about on these 20 occasions, what were the general topics of conversations?” Evans asked, referring to the pub nights at the Harlequin where the men had all met.
“It was 15 years ago, so I can’t remember any specifics, but they were just funny,” Doyle replied, describing Collins as “a real Arthur Daley character,” a reference to an iconic shifty wheeler-dealer car salesman featured in a long-running British television series called Minder.
Sensing that he was obfuscating, Evans hit back, insinuating that Doyle had known the men well, and that Perkins, who was on the run at the time from prison and reportedly working as a short-order cook at the Harlequin, had even made them all fish and chips. The jury smiled at the line.11
But Doyle’s worst moment came when Evans asked him about a key he had found among Doyle’s car keys that had also been found on Collins’s key chain for his Mercedes, the one spotted at the scene of the crime. Evans knew from Scotland Yard that the two keys were an exact match and that Doyle had given Collins a key to the padlock of his work shed. As Evans grilled him about the key, Doyle was forced to acknowledge that he had given Collins a key to the padlock that secured the wooden doors to his small brick shed. (In the end, the transfer had been carried out in the parking lot next to the shed, in full view of CCTV cameras.)
Evans also played a secretly taped recording made by Scotland Yard. “Can you tell me what you need, ’cause we have options,” Doyle can be heard saying in his distinctive Irish brogue.
Evans recalled the moment Doyle floundered with no little relish. “Doyle’s problem was that he ran his case that he was the honest plumber who was going to tell the jury the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But he was caught in several lies. His whole case was based on his argument that he had only allowed them to use the area outside his workshop to transfer the bags. But now he had to explain why on earth he had given Collins the key to his premises. He became stuck.”12
All that being said, Doyle remained outwardly upbeat throughout the trial, even using his newfound notoriety as an opportunity to drum up business for his plumbing firm. He even tweeted a message to his 197 followers saying he hoped he would go free and asking if anyone needed a new boiler.
Carl Wood: The Grumpy Accomplice
The fifty-eight-year-old Carl Wood, wearing glasses, a beige V-neck sweater, white collared shirt, and dark trousers, appeared pensive as he sat in the back of the courtroom. He had the aura of a would-be high school civics teacher that belied his former criminal past, including his involvement in an extortion racket with two corrupt cops in the early 1990s that had landed him four years in jail after he had, among other things, been caught by police threatening to rough up the victim with a blade. During the trial, he wore a look of haggard resignation. He was often seen reading the Daily Mail, the conservative tabloid known for its “Little Englander” populism and lurid stories about immigrant crime. He fidgeted in his chair and looked at the assembled journalists with bemusement.
Indebted to the tune of £20,000 (about $13,300), unemployed, and suffering from Crohn’s disease, Wood seemed a pathetic figure. Now, prosecutors were intent on proving that he was “Man F” in the grainy CCTV footage of the burglary that showed the men entering 88–90 Hatton Garden. Backing up their case were the surreptitiously made audio recordings of Jones and Perkins—in Perkins’s blue Citroën Saxo—ruthlessly mocking Wood for chickening out halfway through the burglary after discovering that the fire escape door was closed.
After introducing Wood to the jury as a heavily indebted friend of Danny Jones for whom the burglary was to offer financial relief, Evans showed the jury a photograph of Collins’s white transit van with Wood seated next to Jones in the passenger seat as the men drove home after the first night of the burglary. He also presented the surveillance images showing the men entering the building, and pointed to Wood.
“That man has glasses, lives in Chestnut, is called Carl, is white, about the right height, and he knows Danny Jones, and is in regular contact with Mr. Jones,” Evans said, matter-of-factly. “It is you, isn’t it?”
“I totally disagree. It is not me,” Wood replied. While he acknowledged he was in debt, he said he was home at a family BBQ during the time when the heist was unfolding. He also used visits to his mother in an old people’s home as an alibi, even as he stumbled over the precise dates. He was bad with numbers and couldn’t remember the date of his marriage or his two daughters’ birthdays, he said, by way of explanation.13
Evans wasn’t impressed. “You are making up your evidence as you go along, aren’t you?” he said, quietly chiding him. “You are lying to the jury, aren’t you?”
Evans effectively rebuffed Wood, saying that his purported alibi of being at a BBQ on Saturday evening of the heist, the second night of the burglary, didn’t add up, since the BBQ had ended before Wood had left to join the rest of the crew. A cell phone call between Wood’s wife and one of his daughters revealed that he was not at home when the burglary was taking place. Moreover, a review of logs at the old peoples’ home showed that none of the visits with his mother had taken place during the burglary.14
Wood had acknowledged in his defense statement that Jones had hinted to him that he was involved with something big. He said Jones told him, “That thing I was talking about—just keep watching the telly.” Wood told the court that he and Jones had met thirty years before, initially united by a common love of fitness. But after he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in his twenties, he said the two took quiet walks together and visited garden centers.
He told the court that his disease was very painful—“It feels like a mouthful of ulcers with a bottle of vinegar in your mouth,” he explained. He repeatedly mentioned his aged mother Beryl, at one point bursting into tears as he described her Alzheimer’s, which he said had made her bedridden for four years. He also wept as his wife described how s
he had been with him on the evening of the burglary.15 It was hard to not feel sorry for him, until you remembered that he had once been accused of threatening to beat up a man and put him in a trunk. But was the jury buying it? Their faces blank, it was hard to tell.
Then, in an apparent attempt to distance himself from Jones, Wood sought to present his erstwhile best mate as an eccentric fabulist, even as prosecutors say he unleashed a torrent of lies and half truths to try to avoid a prison cell.
“Danny is a very sensitive guy, a very funny man, eccentric to extremes, everyone who knew Danny would say he was mad. He would go to bed in his mother’s dressing gown with a fez on. He would read palms, tell people he could read their fortunes,” he told the court. He continued: “He would sleep in a sleeping bag in his bedroom on the floor and go to the toilet in a bottle. He’s got a big thing about the army. He’s eccentric.”
Jones, socialized from years in prison, wouldn’t answer the door after 5 p.m.—a time when prisoners were locked back in their cells. “He slept on his own with his dog Rocket.” He told the jury that Jones had an obsession with crime but that the two never discussed it.16
Reflecting back on Wood’s testimony Evans said that prosecuting him was “like shooting fish in a barrel” since his testimony was undermined by so many gaping holes. “Wood’s evidence was balls,” he said. “He was making it all up.”17
“Billy the Fish” Lincoln
Prosecutors described Bill Lincoln as the “getaway driver for the stash,” the man the gang asked to store the millions of pounds worth of jewels, diamonds, and cash they had stolen. Lincoln duly complied, prosecutors alleged, storing the stolen booty from Hatton Garden at his house in the gritty East End London neighborhood of Bethnal Green. He then eventually off-loaded it to his nephew, the taxi driver John Harbinson, who kept the jewels in several bags, hidden in his garage.
Accused of conspiring to commit the burglary at Hatton Garden, the sixty-year-old Lincoln sought to present himself at the trial as a simple and ailing man, a loving son, father, and grandfather, who would be more likely to be found at a market in east London buying eel or salmon for his friends or mother than involved in hiding diamonds and emeralds. But like Wood and Doyle, he, too, struggled to present a credible alibi.
The court heard how Lincoln was infirm, unable to work, and received disability allowance. Like most of his other aging cohorts, he suffered from a host of ailments including sleep apnea, bladder-control problems, and he had also had a double hip replacement.
At one point during his testimony, he broke down in tears after describing how his two-year-old grandson had been in the hospital after suffering a head injury. Lincoln had not been able to take care of him, forcing the boy to be looked after by someone else when the accident occurred.
Asked by his defense lawyer Mark Tomassi where he was during the early hours of Good Friday when the burglary began, Lincoln said he had been at Billingsgate Fish Market, a bustling and expansive fish market complex in east London whose trading hall hosts dozens of shops and a 1,500-ton freezer. Lincoln went there every Friday morning, he said, and on this occasion he said he was accompanied by “Jimmy Two Baths,” a friend who he had promised to introduce to the fishmongers there so he could buy his own seafood.18
The jury listened in rapt and amused attention as Lincoln explained how he had met Mr. Two Baths at Porchester Spa, a majestic Edwardian art deco spa in west London that originated in the 1920s, and where the two helped bathe each other. It was the kind of place where you can imagine London gangsters discussing business through thick steam wafting in the air. Jimmy was known as “Two Baths,” Lincoln explained, “because he goes down twice” in the water. He said the duo had gone to Billingsgate at 5 a.m. on April 3, and that he recalled the precise time because he had called Jimmy Two Baths on his cell phone.
When his defense lawyer asked if he was involved with the Hatton Garden burglary, Lincoln replied, “No, Sir.” When his lawyer followed up by asking him if understood the charges against him, Lincoln said he did. “I am not a divvo, but I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” he added sheepishly. The jury giggled at Lincoln, who seemed straight out of EastEnders, a popular British soap opera depicting the lives of the working class.
Called to the stand to vouch for his friend, Jimmy Two Baths, whose real name was James Creighton, confirmed that Lincoln was known as “Billy the Fish” and that the two hung out at the spa, where they did “quite a lot of schmeissing.”19 It was perhaps the first time the Woolwich Crown Court, known for its terrorism cases, had heard the Yiddish term used to describe someone being whipped in a hot steam room after the body is worked over with a sponge, known as a schmeissing besom. Since the 1920s, well-healed East Enders had made the pilgrimage to Porchester Spa for a proper schmeissing, a practice introduced by Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the century.
The jury appeared riveted by Lincoln’s colorful testimony, but there was only one problem: his alibi didn’t add up. He may well have been at the fish market at 5 a.m. on Friday morning. But his role in the heist came after the burglary when he helped store the jewels at his home, making his fishmarket alibi largely irrelevant.
The prosecution was also able to show that Lincoln’s car had been caught by automatic number plate-recognition cameras on the north side of London Bridge on the first night of the burglary about five minutes before Brian Reader’s subway pass had been registered going through London Street station. That strongly suggested that he had driven Reader to the station after the men abandoned the heist, midway through, on Friday evening, so that Reader could take the train back to his home in Dartford.
“It was an unfortunate twist for Mr. Lincoln,” Evans said, with a wry laugh. When Lincoln’s lawyer claimed Lincoln had been in the area Friday evening to shop at nearby Borough Market, that alibi also imploded, after it emerged that the market was closed at that time of day.20
Sympathy for Lincoln may have been buttressed when constable Matthew Benedict described how Lincoln had wet himself after his arrest, apparently unable to control his bladder. But Lincoln’s attempt to project the image of a doddering geriatric came undone after prosecutors described how he had ripped up a piece of paper with the address of the Wheatsheaf pub—the place where the jewels were exchanged—after police smashed his car window and arrested him. That piece of paper, turned into dozens of small pieces and found by police on the floor of the passenger side of Lincoln’s car, would later help to seal his fate.
Kelvin Stockwell, the Security Guard
During the trial, Kelvin Stockwell, his right hand shaking with a tremor, slowly made his way to the dock to testify. It was hard to not feel sorry for him. He appeared tired and infirm, and testified in a voice barely above a whisper.
When he arrived at the safe deposit on April 3, 2015, after the alarm was initially triggered, Stockwell said he had inspected the premises and was convinced that nothing was amiss. The doors were secure around 1:15 a.m., at which point he had called the safe deposit’s owner Alok Bavishi, who was just ten minutes away from the building, but told him to go home.
“I got out of the car, went to the front of the building. I pushed through the doors, they was secure. I went round to Greville Street and I looked through the letterbox. All I could see in there, the light was on, was a metal box on the floor and a bicycle.” Meanwhile, the gang was just meters away inside the vault, drilling into reinforced concrete. But that was a fact he would discover only later.
Stockwell had worked at the safe deposit for twenty years. He recalled the moment when he discovered the safe deposit had been hit after he arrived at the building on the Tuesday following the burglary. “The main front door at street level was already open. There’s a lock on that wooden door and that had been popped and there was a hole and I saw we had been burgled. On the floor was tools, cutting material. I could see the lights were on. On the second door the bars were lifted up. I went into the yard to get a signal and phoned the pol
ice.”
Stockwell told the jury that he was convinced that the gang must have had inside knowledge of the safe deposit, given the ease with which they had disabled the alarm and targeted boxes on the right-hand side of the vault, which held the most lucrative stashes of jewelry, cash, and gems.
Nick Corsellis, Carl Wood’s lawyer, seeking to deflect guilt from his client, asked Stockwell, one of the few people who had access to the vault, the security codes, and the keys to the safe deposit and its boxes, whether he thought the burglary was an inside job. “The people who were involved in this crime must have had detailed inside information,” he told the jury. “The alarm system that was in place was very sophisticated. It related to sensors in terms of a person’s movement within the vaults, it related to sensors to the front door, if not other doors, it gave on a very short period of time, 60 seconds has been mentioned, to trip the alarm and then deal with it being turned off. And there had been no incidents where the alarm had been triggered since its installation in 2007. That night when you were called out to your place of work was the first time there had been an alarm activation.”