In those early days robbing the couriers was all too easy and small gangs could come away with big money, using nothing more sophisticated that a couple of coshes. By the end of the decade twenty couriers were being injured in raids each week and something had to be done.
The introduction of armoured vehicles pushed the gangs in the direction of banks, the design of which had not changed for years. There was no CCTV, no security screening and wooden boxes full of notes sat on open view on the counter. (Many banks considered it essential to display large sums to impress customers.) But carrying out raids in enclosed spaces with large groups of people meant that coshes were no longer an option. Sawn-off shotguns became the weapon of choice.
The 1960s saw the first of the so-called ‘project’ crimes in which larger, more sophisticated gangs operating under a rigid leadership would tackle high-value jobs that required intricate planning. In 1962 one such gang raided the BOAC building at Heathrow airport. Wearing fake moustaches, bowler hats and pin-striped suits in order to blend in with the crowds, they carried special umbrellas in which the central spine had been replaced by a heavy iron bar.
The heist, organised by a certain Bruce Reynolds, had been expected to net half a million pounds but in the event the gang only got £62,000. (Although they managed to get clean away, Reynolds went on to organise the Great Train Robbery the following year; it proved to be his downfall – he and the rest of the gang responsible were eventually caught.)
By the 1970s improvements in bank security had forced the gangs back out on to the streets, where they began to target the cash-in-transit vans. One team found success by using chainsaws to cut through the side armour and pull out the bags of cash inside, while smaller outfits would often make do with ‘working the pavement’ – snatching one or two bags as the guard transferred them from van to bank. The most skilled practitioners would refer to themselves as ‘pavement artists’.
In Britain, and London in particular, gangland was thriving and many gangs were enjoying a high level of success with armed robbery, but compared to the rest of the world the UK’s gangs were still operating in the Dark Ages. In Europe and America organised crime was evolving into something far more serious and sinister, thanks to the increasing availability of drugs and the vast profits to be made, but in Britain crime was all about cash.
All of that changed with a single job: Brinks Mat.
It was just after 6.40 a.m. on 26 November 1983 that six armed men burst into the Heathrow depot of the security company Brinks Mat. The robbers disabled the sophisticated security system, tied up the guards, doused them with petrol and threatened to set them alight unless they revealed the combinations to the final locks.
In the following days, police and security experts remarked on how well organised and professional the raid had been. The truth was different. That bit of work had been punted around south London only for a few weeks. Mickey McAvoy, a young hardman, and an old blagger called Brian Robinson had put the word out that they were looking for a couple of sensible lads to help them with an inside job. They had heard there would be £3 million in cash in the vault and the plan was to split it five ways. It was only when they got there that they found the gold. They hadn’t expected it. They were so disorganised that they didn’t even have a big enough vehicle to deal with it. They had to go and get a van. They were supposed to be in and out within minutes, but the job took nearly two hours.
Until the Brinks Mat job, London’s villains had simply spent the cash they stole or hidden it in secret stashes, but the need to convert gold into ingots changed the face of British organised crime – and law enforcement – for ever as the gangs suddenly acquired skills in smuggling, money-laundering and a host of related activities.
But the crime also dealt a shattering blow to the already shaky notion of honour among thieves.
Tracking down those at the heart of the raid presented few problems for detectives: the fact that the robbers knew their way around the security system pointed to an inside job. When detectives discovered that one of the guards, Anthony Black, had arrived late for work, missing the robbery, they pulled him in for questioning and he soon cracked. Robinson, who had been living with Black’s sister, and McAvoy were quickly arrested. What also helped was that, where a modern villain will be careful to avoid doing anything that might draw attention to them, the two main players had done little to disguise their new-found wealth. Within weeks of the robbery both men had left the council houses they were living in and had bought enormous homes in Kent for cash. McAvoy had two Rottweiler guard dogs called Brinks and Mat.
Mickey McAvoy was sentenced to twenty-five years and quickly tried to strike a deal to give back his share of the money in exchange for a cut in his sentence. But by then the money had vanished. McAvoy, along with other members of the gang, made the mistake of believing his friends would look after his share of the gold so it would be waiting for him when he got out. Those friends included, among others, George Francis and Brian Perry.
Since 2000 there have been at least five murders linked to the Brinks Mat case. Many are convinced that a number of scores are being settled, while the whereabouts of the money – only eleven of the 26,000 gold bars have so far been recovered – remains a mystery.
When Jimmy Tippett’s mobile phone rings once more a glance at my watch reveals that we’ve been talking for more than two hours. This time it’s good news – his father has been released without charge and plans a night out on the town to celebrate. Jimmy sits back in his chair and runs a palm over the shadowy stubble sprouting from his chin. ‘It’s a strange thing, being part of a London gang. It’s not like being in the Triads or the Cosa Nostra. There’s no initiation ceremony or anything like that, nothing formal, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t codes of conduct, accepted ways of doing things. And the most important rules are, no matter what happens, you don’t fuck people over and you don’t grass.
‘The people I was working with, they were my friends and their dads were friends of my dad. We had all grown up the same way so the whole gang was a hundred per cent trustworthy. You always knew that, whatever happened, no one was ever going to turn grass because their whole family would be against them.’
They targeted mostly Securicor vans, pavement work. Tippett Jnr was the youngest so he learnt from the rest of them. They had a combination of experience and inside information, which meant they knew which vans to go after and when to get the team together.
‘On the day of a job the tension was just incredible, almost too much. I was actually physically sick a few times. When you’re waiting for it to start, it’s nerve-racking stuff. A second is like a minute and every minute is like an hour. You become totally paranoid, convinced that everyone and his wife is looking at you. Then the signal comes and, bang, it’s off. We’d always work it the same way – two of us would approach the guard from behind and one of them would hold a gun to the back of his thigh. That way he knows that if he tries anything and you let one off, his main artery is fucked and he’s going to bleed to death.
‘Most of the time the guards would do whatever you said but a few times they resisted and you let a few shots off into the air. The bang and the flame would normally be enough to bring them into line, but every now and then we had to use a bit of violence.
‘When it’s done you end up with one or two of those security boxes that they used to carry the cash in and then the hard part is getting the money out. One time I was so excited when we got back that I opened it up right away. And, of course, it exploded and the purple dye went everywhere. Every note in the box was covered with it. And my mate was laughing his head off, saying, “Ah, Jimmy, you fucked it up, you fucked it up big-time.”
‘I was pretty worried but we just ended up using it all in ticket machines on the Underground. You’d buy a single ticket, put the note in and get the change back. Even with the dye it still worked fine and we ended up in the south London press – they did a big story about the fact the money tha
t had been nicked had ended up in the machines at Brixton.’
But Tippett Jnr has moved on from armed robbery. ‘Now it’s all changed, especially so far as the big jobs are concerned. It’s all about CCTV, Big Brother watching you all the time, the helicopters are up in so many minutes and you can’t fucking move. I used to think that if things got really bad, I might have to go back to it but now I’m not so sure. Half the cop cars on the street are those armed-response units. The minute you start waving guns around, you’re asking for big trouble.’
By the late 1980s the police had started to shoot back and the risks of being caught and doing time paled alongside the ever-growing risk of ending up brown-bread. In July 1987 Michael Flynn and Nicholas Payne were shot dead by police during an attempted robbery of a wages van at an abattoir in Shooters Hill, south London. A few months later it was the turn of Tony Ash, shot dead during a wages snatch at the Bejam supermarket in nearby Woolwich. Another member of the gang, Ronnie Easterbrook, fired six shots at police from his old Webley revolver hitting one officer in the leg. He was reloading when a police marksman shot him in the shoulder. (Later Easterbrook famously tried to escape on the way to court by blowing a hole in the police van carrying him there using a lump of Semtex he had hidden in a piece of foil from a Kraft cheese triangle. The charge exploded inwards rather than out and Easterbrook lost a finger.) In 1990 Kenny Baker was shot dead by police near Reigate in Surrey, during an attempted raid on a Securicor van with the notorious brothers Dennis and Mahmood Arif.
Each fatal shooting brought with it fresh controversy, mostly on the issue of whether the criminals had been given an adequate chance to surrender and whether there was a general policy of shoot-to-kill. Either way the incidents, along with the introduction of greatly increased prison penalties for carrying firearms, persuaded many villains to look again at the way they operated. Little wonder, then, that some of the biggest and most successful robberies of recent years have been carried out by gangs who decided it was far better to leave their guns at home.
It was 6.18 a.m. on 11 February 2002 and British Airways flight 124 from Bahrain had just touched down two minutes ahead of schedule. The 187 passengers were keen to disembark and there was an audible sigh throughout the plane as the captain announced that their journey to the terminal would take a little longer than usual. Not only had they been assigned to one of the airport’s ‘remote’ bays, meaning they would have to board a coach to get to the terminal, but they had to wait for some high-value cargo to be unloaded before they could get off.
Soon after the plane had pulled into bay four and the engines had been switched off a British Airways van, driven by a single security guard, rolled into view. A flap opened at the back of the plane and eight heavy-duty crates rolled down a conveyor-belt so the guard could load them into the back of his van. The crates contained a mix of currencies, chiefly American dollars and some Middle Eastern cash, and were due to be transported to another part of the airport for a connecting flight to New York. In all there was around £3 million in untraceable, used bills.
The guard then disappeared into the back of his vehicle to check the boxes against his manifest. At that moment, two Asian men wearing BA uniforms pulled up in a Renault van decked out in the company’s grey, red and blue livery. The new arrivals explained that there had been a mix-up with the work rota and the crates should be placed in their van instead. When the first guard hesitated and suggested calling his supervisor for confirmation, the men pounced. They leapt from their vehicle and pushed him to the ground, tying his wrists and ankles with plastic ties.
The robbers hauled out the cash, dumped it in the back of their van and drove away. Within minutes the guard had freed himself enough to get to his radio and hit the panic button. Across the airport complex, alarms sounded and all exits were sealed but it was too late: the robbers had sailed unchallenged though the checkpoint and vanished into the streets of west London.
The hunt for the van didn’t last long. It was found two miles away in Feltham, consumed by a ball of flame. The money and the gang had long gone. In the space of little more than fifteen minutes two unarmed men had somehow managed to pull off one of Britain’s biggest ever cash robberies and got clean away.
The whole operation screamed ‘inside job’: details of the movement of currencies are known to just a handful of people. Not only that, the van involved had been taken from the maintenance shed. Despite this, thorough monitoring and interviews with all those who had access to the appropriate information failed to deliver a single clue as to who was responsible.
And then, a little more than four weeks later, it happened again.
In the early hours of 19 March, twenty-two-year-old security guard Sundeep Sidhu had been sent out in his van to meet South African Airways flight 234, newly arrived from Johannesburg. As a supervisor watched from a separate vehicle – part of a routine staff inspection – Sidhu loaded two silver cash boxes containing almost £3 million in mixed currencies into his van and set off to complete the transfer.
Sidhu’s van moved off as normal but after only a few seconds lurched suddenly to one side, then the other, and began accelerating hard towards the nearest exit. There was no answer from Sidhu’s radio, and by the time the supervisor had sounded the alert, the precious cargo was outside the airport perimeter.
Fifteen minutes later a sobbing Sidhu called the police – ‘I’ve just been robbed at knifepoint.’ He explained that as he’d started driving off, two men appeared in the back of his van, threatened him with a knife and ordered him to continue through security checkpoints off the airport. He followed instructions to take the robbers to a getaway car in a deserted country lane two miles from Heathrow. He had called the police as soon as they had left.
Sidhu said his attackers were Asian and in their mid-twenties – identical to the two men involved in the earlier robbery. The Flying Squad – the Metropolitan Police specialist armed-robbery division – were convinced they were dealing with the same team. ‘The descriptions of the suspects in both robberies are very similar and so was the method they used,’ said a spokesman later that same morning. ‘You would think they would be satisfied with what they got last time.’
Apart from the obvious greed of those involved, the other thing that struck the investigating officers was that, if anything, this robbery was even more audacious and daring than the first. The South African Airways flight had arrived just minutes after a separate flight from Cape Town carrying several prominent dignitaries. The two planes had taxied close to one another and at least fourteen armed guards were on the Tarmac to protect the VIPs. This meant the two robbers had had to sneak past to get on to the van. They had also had to guess which of the two vehicles the money would be placed in.
Sidhu had worked as a part-time security guard at Heathrow for more than three years when the ordeal happened. Like all of ADI’s guards he had been positively vetted as posing no criminal or terrorist threat. But as the day went on, police began to suspect that, far from being abducted, he had driven the van willingly and been a key part of an elaborate robbery plot.
Although supposedly traumatised by his experience, on the night of the robbery in March, Sidhu was seen with his brother Harjit, twenty-five, talking animatedly on a park bench near their home in Uxbridge, Middlesex. The brothers were then seen meeting up with a small group of friends including Anil Parmar, Manish Bhadresa and Harbhajan Padda, and continuing what appeared to be an exciting conversation.
It aroused suspicions enough for a major surveillance operation to be launched. But while police could film Sidhu and his friends talking, they were not able to get close enough to find out what they were saying or plant bugs. They hoped one of the gang would lead them to the place where they had hidden the money, but after weeks of close monitoring there was nothing. With more than twenty hours of silent video under their belts, the police employed the services of Oxford graduate Jessica Rees, profoundly deaf since being struck with meningitis at the ag
e of four. The mother of two can lip-read with an unprecedented level of skill and accuracy. She can tell what is being said even when the subject is facing away from her, speaking with an accent and wearing a heavy beard.
The tapes turned out to be an absolute goldmine. One showed Harjit sitting with Padda in a car park at the end of a cul-de-sac in Hounslow. After watching it through once, Rees replayed it, this time translating the silent words. ‘No one’s suspected . . . the police have not sussed anything,’ said Harjit. ‘They’ve got no evidence. If the police think it’s me I’ll just say, “So, then, where’s the money?” They won’t have a thing on us.’
Another tape showed Harjit and Parmar meeting outside a Southall pub to discuss the various ways they could change the dollars they had stolen into sterling without arousing suspicion. Yet another, filmed at a local branch of McDonald’s, showed them talking about dividing up the haul: ‘Everybody gets £250,000. We’ve got it stashed, it’s all over the place.’
Rees even managed to work out what the gang members were saying while they spoke on mobile phones, and it was this that led police to a lock-up garage owned by Padda in Twickenham where they found two holdalls containing £2 million in US dollars, sterling and euros.
Rees’s evidence was so damning that, once confronted, Sidhu and the others immediately pleaded guilty to all charges, but there was no evidence to suggest they had anything to do with or knew anything about the first robbery.
For now, at least, the gang responsible for that robbery remain at large. No one seems to know anything and those responsible have more reason than ever to keep their mouths shut.
There are two observations that can be made about the Heathrow robberies. The first is that high-value armed robbery is no longer the exclusive preserve of white, working-class gangsters, a sign of just how much the business has changed in recent years. With many of the larger, better organised gangs now putting their efforts into other areas, the void has been filled by a wide range of newcomers.
Gangs Page 2