The surveillance operation against Lee Wenham had so far yielded little that could be translated into anything but the most minor charges, but as soon as Dolden arrived at the scene, he knew he had hit paydirt. ‘I immediately recognised the getaway van from the surveillance we’d been doing at the farm,’ he says. ‘Part of me wanted to go there right away and arrest everyone but I had to hold back. I had no idea if the whole gang was going to be there, and by the time I’d managed to get a firearms team together, any evidence would have been destroyed. The only charges we’d be able to make stick would be petty auto theft and that just wasn’t worthwhile. Instead I decided to do nothing. Wenham didn’t know we were watching him or the farm and that gave us the upper hand. The robbery had clearly taken a lot of planning and money, and the gang weren’t going to walk away empty-handed. It was a dead cert that they would strike again.’
In fact the gang had struck once before.
Back in February an armoured Securicor van carrying £10 million in cash had been ambushed after leaving a depot in Nine Elms, south London. In an identical series of events, eighteen-wheel juggernauts had been used to block it at the front and rear, and two members of the gang had cut the hydraulics using miniature chainsaws.
The raid had been hastily abandoned after the unexpected and frankly farcical intervention of a frustrated motorist, whose car had been boxed in by the truck carrying the ramming spike. Blissfully unaware that there was a robbery in progress, the man had snatched the keys from the ignition of the truck and stormed off in search of the driver to give him a piece of his mind.
When the time came to ram the armoured truck, the keys were nowhere to be found. Eyewitnesses saw the raiders frantically searching one another’s pockets and scrabbling about in the gutter in desperation before deciding to abort.
Seconds later, each of the blocking vehicles exploded in a ball of flame. The raiders then ran to the back of a nearby abandoned power station on the banks of the river Thames where they climbed into a waiting speedboat and made good their escape.
The February raid had come under the jurisdiction of London’s Metropolitan Police so Dolden did not learn of it until hours after the Aylesford raid had taken place. Although it could easily have been a copycat crime, it took only a few cursory checks to confirm that the same gang had been responsible. All the blocking vehicles at the Aylesford raid had been fitted with incendiary bombs like those used at Nine Elms, but the gang had fled the scene so quickly they did not have time to detonate them. More tellingly, every vehicle at Aylesford had a spare set of keys taped to the top of the driver’s sun-visor. Any lingering doubts quickly faded when detectives examined the vehicle containing the Aylesford ramming spike. Etched into one of the supporting girders were the words: ‘PERSISTENT ARENT (sic) WE’.
Forensic tests on the getaway van at Aylesford confirmed what Detective Dolden already knew. Saliva on a pair of rubber gloves found on the dashboard belonged to Lee Wenham. A bucket in the back of the other van bore the fingerprints of another member of the gang: Terrence Millman, a fifty-eight-year-old career criminal known to have been involved in dozens of high-value armed robberies dating back to the early 1980s. Millman had spent almost half his adult life behind bars. But robbery was the only thing he knew.
Within a few days of the Aylesford raid, Millman and Wenham were placed under twenty-four hour surveillance and Dolden set about trying to work out where the gang might strike next. ‘We knew what they were after: high-value loads in armoured trucks with close proximity to rivers for an easy getaway so that’s what we started looking for,’ says Dolden. ‘We came up with three possibilities – the two places they had already tried, or a third Securicor depot in Dartford on the edge of Kent. This seemed by far the most likely target.’
With too few firearms teams in the Kent force to cover all three targets and one falling partly outside its jurisdiction, Dolden called Detective Superintendent John Shatford, head of the Flying Squad. The pair knew each other well, having joined forces on a kidnapping case earlier in the year, and Shatford had also been in charge of the Nine Elms robbery investigation.
Teams of detectives from the two forces met every few days to discuss the surveillance operation. Wenham and Millman had both been observed driving in and out of Tong Farm in various stolen vehicles, including a bright yellow bulldozer, and all the signs pointed to another raid being planned.
But just as contingency plans for dealing with the three most likely targets were being finalised, the officers received a report that Lee Wenham had made a visit to the Millennium Dome.
Built at a cost of £758 million, and launched with the slogan ‘One amazing day, one year only’, the Millennium Dome had been billed as a grand celebratory exhibition and amusement park that would appeal to everyone. Housed in the world’s biggest tent and built on a former brownfield site on the banks of the river Thames, it had quickly become an expensive and embarrassing joke. The number of visitors had been fewer than half the predicted figure, the exhibits had been almost universally panned for being dull and insipid, the chief executive had been unceremoniously fired and the Government had been forced to step in on three occasions to inject vast sums of money to prevent the exhibition closing. Even a spectacular speedboat chase sequence using the Dome as a backdrop at the beginning of the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough had failed to spark any interest in the real thing. In short, the Dome was a big waste of time.
The surveillance report about Wenham ran to dozens of pages that were full of the most mundane detail, but what made the note about his visit to the Dome stand out was that Wenham had also visited the exhibition the week before. And that was really, really odd, because the whole point about the Dome was that no one was going there. So why on earth had Lee Wenham gone twice?
None of the officers on the team had been to the Dome, but Detective Chief Inspector Lee Catlin of Kent Constabulary vaguely recalled some details of the launch and rushed off to his computer to check the Dome’s Internet site. He returned a few minutes later and spread several freshly printed pages on the table. Dolden scanned the information and whistled softly. ‘I’d say that counts as a high-value load,’ he whispered.
‘Right on the river too,’ added Shatford. ‘I’ve gotta tell you, guys, I think this is what they’re after.’
The global diamond corporation, De Beers, had decided that the Dome was the ideal venue to display their premier collection. The centrepiece was the 203-carat Millennium Star, the largest internally and externally flawless pear-shaped diamond in the world. It was being displayed with eleven rare blue diamonds. Essentially priceless, the collection had been insured for $350 million.
To steal the diamonds would be to pull off the biggest robbery in the world ever. It would also require a minor miracle. De Beers had spent more than £2 million on security and the specially built vault housing the diamonds was considered impregnable. There were sophisticated pressure pads, time locks, cameras and optical sensors throughout the structure. The walls, ceiling and floor were of reinforced concrete and steel four feet thick. The display cabinets themselves were built of bomb- and bulletproof glass designed to withstand sixty tonnes of pressure without so much as a scratch. According to the manufacturers it would take at least thirty minutes of sustained attack with heavy, industrial machinery even so much as to scratch the glass. The vault was deemed so safe that no guards were posted inside – it simply wasn’t necessary.
Then there was the Dome itself. Security had been designed in the light of warnings from the FBI that it might be targeted by doomsday cults or terrorists on New Year’s Eve. Banks and banks of monitors fed live pictures from 170 CCTV cameras directly to a central control room where dozens of staff could react to the slightest problem in a matter of minutes.
The idea of Lee Wenham going up against such overwhelming odds didn’t add up either. Previous intelligence tests had shown that Lee Wenham had an IQ of just seventy and a reading age of seven. The general consensus
was that he was pretty dumb, but surely even he wasn’t stupid enough to attempt to break into the Dome. And why would a gang that had only ever attacked vehicles suddenly turn their attention to a vault?
It made no sense until Shatford finished the last of a flurry of phone calls and called the rest of the team together to make an announcement. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said. ‘The diamonds are being moved, the exhibition is going to Japan. They’re going to load them into an armoured truck and drive them to the airport.’
‘When?’ asked Dolden.
‘September the first. Two weeks from today.’
The Flying Squad began life in 1919 as the Mobile Patrol Experiment, a rapid-response unit dedicated to armed robbery. The nickname was a reference to the fact that they were the first detectives to be issued with cars and the only ones allowed to pursue criminals into any police division.
During the 1970s their exploits had been immortalised by a television drama, The Sweeney (from the Cockney rhyming slang Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad), which portrayed its officers as hard-drinking men prone to violence in both their personal and professional lives. It was uncomfortably close to the truth – in a few cases. Many Flying Squad officers were specially selected because they had grown up in an area of London known as the Bermondsey Triangle, where the vast majority of top armed robbers seem to hail from. For years it was not uncommon for Sweeney detectives to find themselves arresting people with whom they had been at school.
Such close links with the criminal community inevitably bred widespread corruption and, more than once, huge numbers of officers were fired or jailed. By the time Shatford took over in mid-1999, the squad’s reputation was in tatters and there was even talk of it being disbanded. A new corruption scandal had surfaced and several senior officers had been imprisoned after allegations that, rather than catching villains, they had been planning and carrying out robberies. Shatford knew only too well that in saving the diamonds he would also be saving the reputation of the Flying Squad.
In the early hours of 1 September, a Brinks Mat armoured truck left the Dome en route to Heathrow airport. It was empty, the diamonds having been smuggled out secretly as a precaution the day before. Two firearms teams followed close behind and four others had been posted along the route, but it was soon clear there would be no raid. At the time that the truck pulled out of the Dome complex, Lee Wenham was still in bed, Terry Millman was at home with his family, and all of the suspect stolen vehicles were in the warehouse at Tong Farm.
But a chance sighting was about to change everything.
Just after nine thirty a.m. Detective Sean Allan, one of several Flying Squad officers posted at the Dome as a back-up, made a frantic call to Shatford’s cellphone. ‘Guv, Ray Betson has just come in. And he’s got Bill Cockram with him.’
Forty-year-old Raymond Betson was just about the most cunning and sophisticated armed robber Britain had ever produced, having amassed a personal fortune well in excess of £10 million in a series of daring raids. Despite topping the Flying Squad’s most-wanted list for five years, detectives had not been able to produce a single scrap of evidence against him.
Betson had never worked, never paid tax and had no social-security number, yet in 1997 he had moved from his grim east London apartment into a £500,000 mansion with his lover and their child, paying for the property in cash. Every item of his clothing, right down to his underwear, bore a designer label, and a brand new Mercedes and a top-specification Range Rover sat in the driveway of his home.
William Cockram, forty-nine, was Betson’s right-hand man and lived in equal opulence with his wife and two children. The pair had grown up in the same street in south London and become partners in crime at an early age. Although both men had previous convictions, they were for minor offences. Between them, they had spent barely a year in jail.
They both owned properties around the world, and what money they could not hide or launder they spent on a champagne lifestyle. To celebrate the new millennium, Betson and Cockram had taken their wives to New York on Concorde and watched the fireworks from a skippered yacht on the harbour. Each ticket for the event, which included a black-tie ball and accommodation in penthouse suites at the Four Seasons, cost £30,000.
Meticulous and aware of every new advance in forensic science, Betson had avoided capture by becoming a master of police tactics. He invested in the latest scanning devices and practised techniques designed to frustrate attempts to keep him under surveillance as a matter of course. Even on the shortest, most innocent of car journeys, he would double back on himself, run red lights or drive around roundabouts several times. Previous attempts to tail him or place bugs in his home had all ended in disaster.
Betson had made sure no one was following him on his way to the Dome, but once he arrived he relaxed. With dozens of tourists milling around he never noticed the slim blonde female detective with the video camera filming him from a discreet distance. Assuming they were safe, the pair did little to hide their intentions. When Cockram went into the diamond vault, he spent several minutes examining the cabinets, feeling for joins and seals, even getting down on his knees to look for weak spots underneath. He then filmed the vault with his own video camera. The pair left the Dome, walked around it and along the banks of the Thames, pointing out the location of nearby jetties and other features. It was obvious that they were working with Wenham and Millman.
Later that same afternoon, they met Aldo Ciarrocci, a former boyfriend of Cockram’s eldest daughter, at a shopping centre further down the river. As they used his video camera to play back footage of the vault, Cockram was heard to say, ‘I thought it was pie in the sky but after being round there I can’t believe it. Security is so light. I kept thinking it can’t be true. But it is. I’m telling you, boys, this is a gift.’
David James, executive chairman of the Millennium Dome, had been in the job just two days when Shatford and Dolden came to see him on 7 September to outline the plot to steal the diamonds, which had now returned from Japan and were back on display in the Dome’s vault. The previous day the sixty-three-year-old former industry troubleshooter had managed to secure an additional £47 million in government funding to keep the Dome open, despite a growing public demand for it to be shut. Despite the extra money, the whole project was hanging by a thread. The last thing he wanted was any bad publicity.
‘I listened to what they had to say and I was absolutely horrified,’ says James. ‘The plan was to keep the Dome running as normal and then let the robbers – who would almost certainly be heavily armed – into the diamond vault, give them a few minutes to start attacking the display case and mount an ambush. I had a vision of a massive shoot-out between the police and the gang with members of the public caught in the middle going down like ninepins. I told them straight: there was no way I was going to let it happen.’
But Shatford, who had now taken overall control of the operation on behalf of the two police forces, was adamant that striking before they reached the vault would be even more dangerous as the robbers might scatter and take hostages.
All argument ended when Shatford announced a new plan: he would scare the robbers off from the Dome and they would move on to a new target. The police would have no idea where so would be able to do nothing about it. If someone got hurt and it emerged that an earlier opportunity to arrest the gang had been blocked that would be the worst publicity of all. James reluctantly agreed to let the raid go ahead.
All through September, the gang made preparations for the robbery, unaware that the police were watching their every move. Wenham began adapting the bulldozer, removing sections to make it lighter and enable it to carry four men rather than one; he also joined Betson, Cockram and others to test a speedboat and a nearby harbour. When it proved too slow, Millman was sent out to buy another, getting the receipt made out in the name ‘Mr T. Diamond’. Millman also bought an industrial nailgun, a device capable of firing nails with the force of a bullet, hard enough to pen
etrate solid steel.
At the same time analysts working for the Flying Squad identified more than sixty days between mid-September and the end of the year (when the Dome would close for good) when tidal conditions were right for the raid to take place. On each such day, up to 150 armed police officers would move into the Dome in the early hours of the morning. Some would be positioned behind a false wall in the back of one of the exhibits; others would disguise themselves as cleaners, hiding their guns in black rubbish bags as they mingled among the visitors.
By the end of October there had been around twenty such full-scale alerts but no robbery. As the logistics of having so many firearms teams at the Dome on so many mornings began to affect policing in other parts of London, Shatford came under increasing pressure to drop the operation on the grounds that it looked as if the robbery would never happen. In a series of heated arguments he pleaded for more time and won a temporary reprieve.
At Tong Farm, tensions within the gang were also reaching boiling-point. James, a friend of Betson who had been brought in to drive the getaway boat, had stormed out and refused to take part in the raid. He had become increasingly uncomfortable working alongside the ageing Terry Millman, who was rapidly becoming a major liability.
In early October, Millman had been stopped by police while driving one of the stolen vans they intended to use in the diamond raid. A breath test showed he was way over the alcohol limit and he was due to appear in court at the end of November. Rather than cleaning up his act, Millman got drunk again and crashed yet another of the gang’s stolen vans. He ran away from the scene of the accident before he could be caught.
Gangs Page 5