by Dan Bilefsky
In early February of 2017, a pretrial hearing for the Chatila case was convened at Southwark Crown Court, the same south London court where the Bad Grandpas had initially appeared after being arrested. Seated behind a glass enclosure in the back of the court, Jones craned his head and pressed his ear to the glass. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” he said, interrupting as the clerk read out the charges. Finally, after the charges were read out again, Jones was asked how he would plead. “Guilty,” he replied. Both Perkins and Chick Matthews have denied any involvement in the crime.
The judge, Joanna Korner, appeared to not have been briefed on who was being prosecuted. “Is there anything particularly interesting about this burglary?” she asked the prosecutor, adding, “It was a straightforward burglary on a jewelry store.” When the prosecutor Philip Stott informed her that Jones had been one of the burglars in the Hatton Garden heist—by now, the most publicized burglary in the land of the past several decades—she looked stunned.
Matthews, for his part, told the court that he had no idea that the jewels that he had stored in the ceiling of his office were stolen, and he rejected suggestions that he had been hoarding jewelry or that he had any commercial dealings with Terry Perkins. Matthews said that the jewels found at London City Metals had been given to him at Christmastime 2014 by a friend called James Tibbs, who had asked him to put them in a secure place. He said the gems had been in a locked box, and that he hadn’t opened it. After Tibbs had returned in January 2015 to take some of the jewels, Matthews said Tibbs left the remaining valuables in a thin white garbage bag, which he had put in a safe. But after Matthews observed that the safe’s bolts had been damaged, he said he had come up with the idea of stashing the large emerald stones and gold bangle watch in his office ceiling. The jury looked on incredulously.
Whatever the veracity of Matthews’s testimony, Jones and Perkins’s case may have been buttressed after it emerged that police had destroyed more than two hundred hours of CCTV footage from neighboring jewelers next to Chatila on Bond Street, which could have been used to implicate the men. Only five hours of video footage remains. The rest was destroyed by police during the routine process of discarding old evidence. The remaining stills show the white van the men used, but not the men themselves, potentially undermining the prosecution’s case.1
Even without that evidence, in March 2017, the judge ordered a retrial in March after she became aware that members of the jury had been secretly reading the lurid headlines of the Hatton Garden case. Given all the attention the Hatton Garden burglary generated, prosecutors face a difficult challenge in finding a jury oblivious of Jones and Perkins’s most celebrated heist.
Chapter 17
Life Behind Bars
DETERMINED TO SHOW THE BRITISH PUBLIC THAT the pill-popping grandpas they had embraced were, in fact, dangerous, malevolent, and deserving of harsh punishment, the British state confined the men to Belmarsh, known among the criminal fraternity as “hellmarsh.”
The prison houses some of the most dangerous criminals in the country, among them Abu Hamza, the hook-handed Egyptian Islamic hate preacher who was found guilty in 2014 of, among other things, plotting to set up a terror camp in rural Oregon and supporting terrorists in Afghanistan. It has also been home to Ian Huntley, a school caretaker who murdered two ten-years-olds, and Charles Bronson (born Michael Gordon Peterson), an armed robber dubbed Britain’s “Hannibal Lecter,” who has spent thirty-seven years in solitary confinement after repeatedly attacking prison staff. In 1998 he took two Iraqi airplane hijackers and another inmate hostage at Belmarsh, demanded that they address him as “General,” and threatened to eat one of his victims unless he received a helicopter to take him to Cuba, along with two Uzi submachine guns and an ax. The episode added another seven years to his sentence.
In 2001, Belmarsh was used to detain suspected terrorists who hadn’t yet been charged, leading to accusations that it had become Britain’s Gitmo. Today, it hosts so many convicted Islamic terrorists that guards and prisoners complain it is becoming a “jihadi training camp,” where non-Muslim prisoners are pressured to convert to Islam and then become radicalized.1
While the prison was built in the 1990s to house men deemed a serious threat to public or national security—something perhaps hard to square with the Bad Grandpas—the notoriety of a crime trumps considerations of age. Prior to the imprisonment of the gang in 2016, perhaps its most notorious elderly inmate was Ronnie Biggs, the ringleader of the Great Train Robbery, who turned himself in in 2001 at the tender age of seventy-one.
After escaping from HM Prison Wandsworth in southwest England in 1965 by scaling down the prison’s imposing walls with a rope, Biggs spent thirty-six years on the road in, among other places, Rio and Sydney. In 1981 he was kidnapped by former-British-soldiers-turned-bounty-hunters hoping to get a handsome reward. But when their speedboat broke down off the coast of Barbados, Biggs was sent back to Brazil since Barbados had no extradition treaty with Britain. His sense of humor intact, he went on to sing vocals for the German punk band Die Toten Hosen. The name of the song? “Police on My Back.”
Buffeted by a debilitating stroke, he finally turned himself in, saying that all he wanted was to “walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter.” While in prison, he married a former Brazilian samba dancer in a private ceremony attended by several prison guards and guests who were carefully frisked. Biggs lived in the prison’s hospital wing, and was eventually transferred to Margate prison, in the seaside town where he craved a pint of beer, on humanitarian grounds. Toward the end of his life, he was forced to use a spelling board to communicate after a series of strokes had rendered him partially paralyzed. He died in 2013 at the age of eighty-four.
The high-profile nature of the Hatton Garden heist destined the gang for incarceration in Belmarsh, even if the only weapon they had wielded was a diamond-tipped drill. The men were nevertheless initially classed as Category A prisoners, which meant being placed in HM Prison Belmarsh’s High-Security Unit, a special prison within a prison reserved for the nation’s worst offenders. The unit, a windowless gray concrete structure has two floors, split into four wings, each with twelve single-occupancy cells. Initially built to house IRA prisoners, it is separate from the main Belmarsh prison quarters and its security is so tight that no two doors can be opened at the same time. Visitors and guards alike must undergo forensic body searches before entering—including examinations of the inside of their mouths and the soles of their feet.2
Since the gang entered prison, family members and their lawyers say they have been suffering from the harsh conditions, the deep sense of isolation, and the challenge of getting medical care for their various ailments. During the first part of their imprisonment, the men were put in cells for two about six-feet wide by ten-feet long, each with a small window. Cells in the unit have a small television in one corner on a plastic desk and a metal toilet. Even Category A prisoners are allowed a kettle, no small thing for the diamond wheezers, who love their English breakfast tea. But Belmarsh guards have long tried to ban the luxury for prisoners in the ward for fear that the more menacing among them could throw boiling water in their faces. The Hatton Garden gang, a docile bunch, pose no such threat.
Hesham Puri, Brian Reader’s lawyer, whose appeal to get his client’s seven-year sentence reduced was rejected, contended that Scotland Yard had pressed for the harshest punishment possible since the Yard was still smarting over its hapless and bungled failure to prevent the heist. Puri said Belmarsh was unduly draconian for men in their sixties and seventies, many of whom were susceptible to illness and whose natural habitat should be a retirement home. “The British legal system is widely seen as a fair one,” he maintains. “But that is not the case in its treatment of elderly prisoners. The Flying Squad is flexing its muscles. They are old men.”3
But Philip Evans, the chief prosecutor on the case and Paul Johnson, the Flying Squad detective inspector, countered that the
punishment befits the gravity of the crime and that the men—in rude enough health to wield power tools and spend a long weekend boring holes through reinforced concrete—are a flight risk and a threat to public security. They deserve no pity or special treatment, Evans said, underlining that they had brought misery to dozens of pensioners their own age. Moreover, the bulk of the stolen gems they spirited away have never been recovered.
“They are hardened criminals, nasty men who would steal the shirt off your back, and the punishment fits the crime,”4 he said.
Despite his protestations, Puri conceded that keeping the elderly gang away from the general prison population had at least sheltered them from the skirmishes and sudden bursts of violence that Belmarsh was notorious for. He said the men had been able to converse with one another, but had been moved to the main, less secure part of the prison. Their mail is scrutinized by prison staff and they are allowed two visitors a month.
Puri said that Reader, the oldest among the seven men imprisoned for the burglary, was gravely ill and suffering from a litany of illnesses, including blindness in one eye, deafness, Bell’s palsy, and a stroke he suffered in prison in the spring of 2016, about a year after his arrest. He complained that when Reader was hospitalized after his stroke, he had been handcuffed to a prison officer while in bed and guarded by nine officers, including six armed with machine guns.5
“I don’t want him to come out of there in a box,” his daughter Joanne told the Guardian.6
Nick Corsellis, Carl Wood’s lawyer, said that Wood was despondent in prison since he would likely never see his ailing and bedridden parents again. He complained that the gang typically only got half an hour of exercise a day at Belmarsh and only half an hour of daylight, and that it was having a detrimental psychological effect on Wood.
Perkins—the most stoic among the gang after having spent so many years in prison—had to take twenty-nine different tablets a day, in addition to insulin shots for his diabetes, and in prison, his health quickly deteriorated. In June 2017 he collapsed in Belmarsh with a heart attack and was rushed to St Thomas’ Hospital in central London, where he was fitted with a pacemaker to help control abnormal heart rhythms. He was then sent back to Belmarsh to convalesce in the prison’s hospital wing.
Collins, the second eldest in the gang after Reader, suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, rheumatism, and memory loss, but friends say he is tenacious and resigned to his current life behind bars. Kevin Lane, an old pal of Collins’s, spent eighteen years in prison for a murder conviction, including several in the high-security unit at Belmarsh where he endured weeks in solitary confinement “on a slab of concrete.” Lane said that he had visited Collins in prison and that he was not the type to complain. “It is outrageous that a bunch of old men are in Belmarsh, a maximum security prison,” Lane argued, noting that his friend was tough as nails. “You don’t get bleeding sentimental. These guys are old school criminals. They will do their time, and they will not complain.”
Some of the younger members of the gang, however, have managed to cope quite well. Perhaps the most upbeat among the prisoners was the loquacious plumber Hugh Doyle. During his short stint in prison, he lost nearly thirty pounds, whiling his days away by exercising in his cell. “He is a fundamentally honest man who has made one big mistake and he is here to pay for that today,” his lawyer told the judge during his sentencing in March 2016.
As for sixty-three-year-old Danny Jones, whose lithe physique allowed him to slither through the figure-eight holes during the heist, friends say he has made use of his time in prison to exercise, doing sit-ups and push-ups in his cramped cell. Ever the vain showman, he is also writing his memoirs with a view toward burnishing his legacy. After pleading guilty to the Chatila burglary and admitting that he stole £1 million ($1.5 million) in jewelry and precious stones, he will likely be a very old man before he gets out.
Yet for all the hardships of life behind bars, the men continue to bask in their fame, which prison has done little to dull, and in fact has been enhanced by a movie about the heist, King of Thieves, starring Michael Caine as Brian Reader and Ray Winstone as Danny Jones. Fact is rather harsher than fiction, however, and at the beginning of 2018 the gang faced confiscation hearings aimed at assessing how much of their personal assets should be seized by the state, given that three-quarters of the estimated £14 million ($21 million) in gems, gold, and cash they stole had still not been recovered, a value that has fluctuated in the years following the burglary. In June 2016, following the massive media attention focused on the trial, a woman told Scotland Yard that she had lost £7 million ($10.5 million) worth of gold bars during the heist, but had only remembered she had them in the safe deposit after the case came under the spotlight. Investigators on the case said the woman’s claim was credible; she came from a billionaire family “for whom £1 million was the equivalent of a tenner,” or £10. That brought the total value of stolen gems to £21 million ($31.5 million), though some estimates have valued the haul at £25 million ($37.5 million), of which only £4 million ($6 million) has been recovered. Friends of the gang suspect some of them are still sitting on their stashes while doing their time, hoping to enjoy the spoils of the heist in their advanced old age. “What’s the point of doing it, if you bloody give it back?” asked one longtime associate.
In late January 2018 at Woolwich Crown Court, judge Christopher Kinch said that the men had jointly benefited from an estimated £14 million ($21 million) worth of cash, gold, and stolen gems from the heist, and he ruled that together they owed £27.5 million ($41 million). If they failed to pay back that amount, each would have about another seven years in prison added to their sentences.
Mindful of their advanced age, the judge nevertheless argued that the men did not merit special treatment. “A number of these defendants are not only of a certain age, but have in some cases serious health problems,” he told the court. “But as a matter of principle and policy it is very difficult to endorse any approach that there is a particular treatment for someone who chooses to go out and commit offences at the advanced stage of their lives that some of these defendants were.”
Among the Firm, Collins was ordered to pay the highest share: £7,686,039 (about $10.4 million). The others had mocked him as a “wombat-thick old cunt” but it seems he was the most successful among them and his smuggled cigarette and fireworks businesses had yielded stacks of cash, along with expensive properties in north London and abroad.
During the confiscation hearings, Brian Reader’s legal team tried to argue that he didn’t owe anything since he didn’t profit from the crime. “They call him ‘The Master’ but how can he be the ‘Master’ when he walked away,” his lawyer, Puri, protested.7
Weakened by a stroke and prostate cancer, and suffering from partial blindness and diminishing hearing, Reader struggled to hear during the part of the proceedings he attended, repeatedly craning his head in the dock at the back of the courtroom, encased in glass.
James Scobie QC, one of his lawyers, told the court that Reader had abandoned the heist after the first night once the men had been unable to access the safe deposit boxes, depriving himself of any of the looted gems. Referring to the Flying Squad’s secretly recorded audio of the men discussing how to divvy up the loot following the heist, he said there was no evidence to suggest that he got a single diamond, gold bar, or pence.
But Judge Christopher Kinch, decked in his velvety robes and armed with the same skepticism he had worn throughout the gang’s legal proceedings, was unconvinced, and ordered Reader to pay back about £6.5 million (about $9.2 million) more, or face additional prison time. His home in Dartford, along with some land, was valued at about £1.2 million ($1.6 million), and his lawyer told the court that he would likely die in prison. However, Reader got a reprieve, and in July 2018, he was released from prison after serving a little more than three years, about half of his orginal six-year and three-month sentence, even though millions of pounds in jewels rem
ains missing. He was seventy-nine years old as he walked out of Belmarsh’s doors. The oldest member of the gang, Reader had been given a sentence seven months shorter than the other ringleaders because of his very poor health.
The Sun commemorated the moment with the headline: “GET OUT OF JEWEL FREE CARD.” The newspaper reported that Reader, frail and walking with two sticks, was seen basking in the sunshine in the garden in front of his large home and being ferried around town by his son in a red Porsche. Prosecutors and the good men of the Flying Squad were understandably peeved that he walked free while his victims, some of them ailing and aged themselves, continue to suffer from their losses. But with an order by the court to pay about £6.5 million (about $9.2 million) or face another seven years of jail time, Reader’s freedom could prove short-lived. Nevertheless, he is challenging the order and the Court of Appeal has decided to allow him to remain free while his case is decided.8
Jones and Perkins were ordered to pay back the same amount as Reader. Perkins’s lawyer told the court his client would have to sell his apartment in Portugal, but even that would nowhere near cover the £6.5 million ($9.2 million) he now owed. He added that Perkins “had no prospect of any further funds.” The shock appeared to be too much, even for the unflappable Perkins, who suffered from diabetes and heart failure. On February 4, 2018, just days after learning of his additional punishment, Perkins died in his prison cell from natural causes, possibly taking the secret of where the missing loot has been hidden to his grave. Two prison guards tried to revive his slumped body. He was 69 years old.
As for Jones, he will serve the default time after he claimed he only had a little cash in the bank and no assets. The sprightly “youngster” among the Hatton Garden ringleaders will be an old man by the time he finishes serving his long sentence.