by Dan Bilefsky
Thieves of every stripe had long been drawn to Hatton Garden’s shadowy underbelly. In 1993 burglars armed with pistols and concealed by face masks stole jewels valued at £7 million ($10 million) from Graff’s workshop, the biggest jeweler theft at the time.19 But there have been dozens of other burglaries in the area.
Most memorably, in 2003, the Garden was reeling for months after a six-foot-four-inch man in his fifties, disguised as an Orthodox Jew, stole at least at least £1.5 million ($2.4 million) worth of diamonds from the safe deposit box at 88–90 Hatton Garden, which Reader and his men were targeting.
The man, who variously called himself Philip Goldberg, Luis Ruben, or Ruben Luis, was dressed in a dark suit and tie. He had spent months ingratiating himself into the community, opening a shop, trading diamonds, and winning the trust of his fellow dealers. He would frequently travel to and from 88–90 Hatton Garden to the basement safe deposit where he had rented four boxes in different parts of the vault, an apparent pretext to case out the place, and a similar modus operandi that police believe the gang of aging Hatton Garden thieves likely used.
One Saturday morning, while other Hatton Garden dealers were in synagogue for the Sabbath and the area was deserted, the man disappeared down the staircase to the safe deposit. It was only on the following Monday that a customer noticed that his box had been glued shut; the jewelry and gold inside had disappeared without a trace, along with the mysterious man. He was caught on CCTV cameras, entering the safe deposit with a black bag, but was never arrested. By the time the police saw the footage, he had fled.
Subsequent conspiracy theories swirled around the Garden, including whether the thief had used hypnosis to pry the jewels away. A gemologist at the time told the Guardian that the Garden had been shocked to the core by the burglary. “If he could get away with it in the safety deposit no lock in the world is safe,” she said.20
For decades, there had been a special crime squad in Scotland Yard deployed to police the area, but in recent years, specialized policing in Hatton Garden has been cut back as national crime-fighting budgets have been squeezed. Many of the jewelers today rely on private security firms that began to appear in the late 1990s. Burly men from Eastern Europe with thick necks and menacing glares can be seen on patrol. As a result, the area has not suffered the proliferation of smash-and-grab jeweler heists that have become commonplace from Paris to Tokyo.
Meghnagi, the young jeweler, said, “You see them hanging out on corners, Eastern Europeans, Romanians, who look like wrestlers, not people you want to mess around with.”21
The area that once hosted down-and-out ale houses as well as dozens of brothels has given way to modernist lofts housing Internet start-ups, media companies, and dozens of architectural firms, including the nearby offices of the late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. Between the changing demographics of the neighborhood and the private security, most of the jewelers thought that the days of the big-time heists were over.
They would soon discover they were wrong.
Chapter 5
The Firm Plots
Pubbing, Drilling, Planning
If Tony Soprano, the fictional New Jersey mobster, had lived in London, there is a good chance he would have felt at home in Enfield, an area about ten miles northeast of London that has hosted its fair share of thieves and gangsters and is known for its beer-fueled aspirational working class and its population of temperamental poltergeists. It was also the neighborhood where much of the Hatton Garden heist first took root.
Tree-lined with parks, churches, and pubs with names like The Moon Under Water, handsome middle-class homes, and drab government-subsidized housing, Enfield has a mix of tradesmen and teachers, Polish and Turkish grocery stores, the world’s first ATM machine,1 a large Victorian cemetery, and more than a few well-heeled gangsters and career criminals. It has also been the long-time home of Terry Perkins and Danny Jones.
Jones, the acrobat with a penchant for bodily contortion, resided for years in a sprawling gated house at No. 115 on Enfield’s aptly named Park Avenue. It was a fitting venue for a professional thief with outsized ambitions—the animal skin rugs and the modernist art conveying the swagger of a man whose ego could never be contained by a prison cell. The ostentatiousness of the house also inevitably raised the question: How did he pay for it?
Far less flamboyant than Jones, Perkins lived in Enfield with his wife Jacqueline. Terri, one of his four grown daughters, lived about ten minutes away. Perkins’s gray house on nondescript 6 Heene Road was far more modest and discreet than Jones’s large pile, befitting the understated character of someone used to confined spaces. Small and unremarkable, it was adorned with shabby and outmoded black vinyl chairs in the living room, a faux antique clock on the fireplace, old-fashioned black and white tiles in the kitchen, and kitsch brown and orange floral carpeting on the stairs. A red and yellow child’s toy car was perched on a radiator next to a small dining table. A ladder on the second floor led to a messy attic full of plastic bags.
Only a few blocks away was a plumbing workshop located in a Dickensian-era nineteenth-century shelter for sheep that was owned by Hugh Doyle, a loquacious Irish plumber, an old friend of Collins’s. It was ideal for those seeking a place away from prying eyes. His large house, not far from that of Perkins, is worth close to £1 million ($1.5 million), perhaps not that surprising for a friendly hustler who was constantly drumming up business, not only to support his wife and young children but also to entertain his love of yachting and flying planes. Glowing reviews on the website of his plumbing firm Associated Response laud his jovial manner in dealing with elderly ladies despondent about their dodgy boilers. “Such a good egg!” one gushes.
On any given Saturday, the pubs slowly fill up with men wearing Enfield Town Football Club soccer shirts. Local residents walk their dogs in front of small identical semidetached row houses. Those striving English suburbanites from the 1950s and 1960s who came in search of a suburban escape from the city have been joined by Polish, Turkish, Cypriot, and South Asian immigrants.
Residents are quick to tell you that Enfield has more than a few claims to fame, beyond hosting several of the Hatton Garden Firm. The Lee-Enfield rifle manufactured in the area was standard issue for the British Army until 1957. The world’s first solid-state circuitry color televisions were also made here, along with the world’s first mass-produced dishwasher. The Barclays Bank branch in Enfield was the first place in the world to have an ATM or cash machine, still marked by an English Heritage blue plaque.
If Britons know Enfield, if they know it at all, it is because of the small house at 284 Green Street where an eleven-year-old girl called Janet Hodgson, who spoke with the raspy male voice of a dead neighbor, came to national attention in August 1977. Her mother, Peggy, called the police after two of her children claimed that furniture was moving on its own, and neighbors heard knocking sounds coming from the house.
Soon, policemen, psychics, experts in the occult, and hardened reporters all descended on Enfield to investigate rumors that demonic voices were emanating from the house. Some wondered whether the children were pranksters or acting out (Peggy was spotted by a psychic researcher banging a broomstick at the ceiling). More than thirty years later, locals still dispute whether the Hogdson family was really possessed or whether the whole affair was a hoax.
Behind the Wheatsheaf pub, next to Enfield’s main train station, is the parking lot and sheep shed where Hugh Doyle has his plumbing workshop. In the years leading up to the heist, Hugh gave Collins a key to the shed, which Collins kept on a key chain, along with the keys to his white Mercedes. Toward the end of 2014, neighbors of the pub said they heard strange sounds coming from the shed. This was no poltergeist, but, rather, the sounds of a power drill boring through concrete.
Once the gang had set its eyes on 88–90 Hatton Garden, figuring out how to breach the twenty inches of reinforced concrete separating the vault from the safe deposit cabinet remained perhaps the biggest ch
allenge. Neighbors recalled seeing a small group of graying men going in and out of the sheep shed next to the Wheatsheaf, and then hearing loud drilling at all hours of the day and night.
While infiltrating seemingly impenetrable bank vaults has long been the stuff of Hollywood capers, real-life heists at bank vaults are a rarity. The brute force, dexterity, and know-how required to outsmart modern-day technology—including motion-triggered alarms, heat sensors, and vaults that open only with timers—has stumped even the wiliest thief.
In the United States, bank vaults emerged during the Gold Rush in the nineteenth century, when gun-slinging criminals began to hold up banks, perhaps mindful that it was less arduous than digging in the ground for gold. Banks responded by building ever larger safes and by the 1920s, many had constructed hulking vaults, with thick walls embedded in concrete.
By World War II, bank vaults had become so indestructible that two Mosler bank vaults at the Teikoku Bank in Hiroshima survived after a nuclear bomb was dropped on the city in August 1945, despite the vault doors being severely damaged.2 Fort Knox in Kentucky, which houses a good chunk of the United States’ official gold reserves, is protected by, among other things, a twenty-two-ton vault door and four-foot-thick granite walls held together by 750 tons of reinforced steel.
Of course, clever bank robbers have sought to outmaneuver such constraints by, among other things, using explosives to blast through safes, drilling holes through combination locks, threatening bank staff with force, or, as was the case during the Baker Street caper of 1971, tunneling underground into the vault.
As thieves have become more determined and creative, vaults have been built underground or even under mountains, such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, which was bored into the middle of a frozen, snow-covered arctic mountain to conserve a variety of plant seeds for genetic research and posterity.3 As faith in bank vault security expanded, so too has the range of valuables held in vaults, from priceless diamonds and art works to Colonel Sanders’s secret recipe for producing Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is stored in a safe in Louisville, Kentucky, at the company’s headquarters, and Edison’s patent for the light bulb, which is stowed under Iron Mountain, in western Pennsylvania, two hundred feet below ground.
Vault technology has become so advanced that, by the time Reader and the Firm had decided to hit Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, bank robberies were increasingly rare. According to the British Banker’s Association, there were 847 robberies in 1992. By 2011, there were 66. Nevertheless, in and around 2012, the Firm came to the conclusion that getting into the vault at 88–90 Hatton Garden was doable, if only they could find the right tool to outmaneuver the vault’s door, by drilling through the wall instead.
The task for figuring out how to breach the vault’s wall fell largely to Jones, a man with a penchant for macho power tools. He kept several in his flashy Enfield home in a chaotic-looking tool shed. Beginning in 2012, Jones spent hours trawling the Internet on his ThinkCentre desktop personal computer for tips on how to penetrate the reinforced concrete in the vault. After Jones spotted a group of construction workers wielding diamond-tipped drills while driving near a construction site close to his home, Google led him to YouTube videos showing how to use the Hilti DD350 drill, a powerful diamond-tipped tool that can penetrate seemingly impenetrable surfaces such as concrete or steel, and retails for £3,475 (about $5,210). Such was his determination that he even watched “How-to” drilling videos in Korean. He also made multiple Google searches for “CCTV cameras,” “price of diamonds,” “gold prices,” “gold buyers,” and “Hatton antiques,” and surfed the websites of diamonds.com and cash4mygold.co.uk.
Noel Sainsbury, the owner of Archers Financial Services in Enfield, whose business is adjacent to Doyle’s sheep shed, said he recalled that it was sometime in November 2014 that the walls first began to shake, and he suddenly heard drilling that would continue for increments of thirty minutes before stopping. He said that, around that time, Doyle also installed water pipes outside the shed. It seemed no coincidence given that operating a heavy-duty diamond-tipped drill of the type needed to bore through reinforced concrete required a nearby water source so that the drill could be periodically cooled, or it would stop working. “The drilling would start in fits and starts, but then suddenly stop,” he said. “They would drill in 30-minute intervals. It was as if they didn’t want to attract too much attention.”
He said that toward the end of 2014 four men would appear outside the sheep shed before disappearing inside. They were dressed as maintenance workers from the water company and wearing hard hats that seemed designed to hide their faces. He had also seen the men take arms into the attic of the sheep shed, an odd observation given that the gang was intent on avoiding violence.
“It was the same fellows, they made out they didn’t know each other, but it was obvious that they did. I was in and out all the time, but I did notice them, and I thought it was a bit odd,” he recalled matter-of-factly. “They were practicing for the heist. I have no doubt about that.”
The Gardener and Basil
In the three years leading up to Easter 2015, the Firm reached out to an old friend and longtime associate of Reader’s, a master locksmith and talented gardener, who had known Reader for decades. This was the man who had introduced Reader to Basil, the Firm’s lanky and enigmatic key and alarm man about twenty years earlier. Reader and Basil became like a father and son, albeit a father and son who squabbled frequently. In the months leading up to the caper, Reader recruited Basil for the heist.
Reader told the rest of the Firm very little about Basil, who was particularly adept at remaining underground and evading police and he revealed little about himself to the others. Basil, who is middle aged, was Reader’s protégé. Yet the Firm’s respect for Basil at times surpassed their esteem for Reader. He appeared to earn their admiration for the speed with which he acquired a key for 88–90 Hatton Garden and learned how to disable the safe deposit’s state-of-the-art alarm system. He would later vanish.
Jones observed to Perkins that Basil was a far quicker study than Reader, the so-called Master, who had decades of experience breaking and entering. “Basil learned in fucking two months what he had learned in forty years,” he said to Perkins in the spring of 2015.4
In order to determine when 88–90 Hatton Garden was deserted, Basil planted an audio-listening device at the entrance of the building over Easter weekend 2013. As a result, he confirmed that the building was unoccupied from Thursday until Tuesday over the long holiday weekend. While an unused building one year didn’t guarantee that it would be unoccupied a year later, the Firm considered it a valuable indicator. Reader was risk averse, and if something felt not quite right, he would freeze the planning operation for several months, and tell the others to stop what they were doing, before resuming work.
Basil was also charged with figuring out how to get into 88–90 Hatton Garden and access the safe deposit. There were more than sixty businesses on the premises and dozens of contractors going in and out during the course of the year, each with a front door key. And it proved remarkably easy for Basil to get a copy of the key from an elderly man who worked in the building. Reader’s former associate, the locksmith and gardener, requested anonymity in order to be able to speak freely. Wiry and fit, “the Gardener” has hypnotic blue eyes. He exudes the quiet confidence of someone who has a secret but knows he is untouchable.
He tends the gardens of his neighbors on the street and has the keys to their homes, which he keeps in a bowl in his kitchen. He is an expert in handling keys. But he can break into a place, with or without them. He was, after all, one of the best locksmiths in London—that is, if you were looking to get in somewhere you weren’t supposed to be.
“All the people I know are crooks,” he said, with a hearty chuckle. “I say it now but on this street, I’m a boy scout, they don’t know my past. I’ve got half their fucking keys. If they knew, their toes wou
ld curl up.”
His rap sheet ended decades ago. He is careful. He prefers to work alone. He was asked by the others to go on the Hatton Garden job but he politely declined, or maybe not so politely. In any case, he never does jobs people bring to him—he prefers to find his own bit of work. It’s more secure. No leaks. No gossiping. No fighting the impulse to tell anyone else.
The Gardener doesn’t like to talk about himself. But when he starts recalling the past, little details slip out. He once lived in the southwest of France, downing oysters and laying low. He has a grandson whom he goes to watch play in soccer matches. But these days he prefers to stay at home.
He said being old makes you philosophical, perhaps, because death is not so far away. Unless, of course, you need money or crave a little action. Just as old people don’t stop enjoying sex, career criminals don’t lose their taste for crime. But these days, he prefers to be sedentary. “I used to look at my mother and she didn’t go out of the house. I used to think, ‘Strange woman, you don’t go out of the house.’ But now I could stay at home and read for days and days and not see a soul,” he explained. “When you get old you change, accepting you’re going to go. You know I’ve sat down with old people and I’ve heard them say, ‘Yeah, I’ve had enough, I’d be glad to go.’ And I can see that mentality now because I am coming to that stage.”
Like many a young man on the make, he moved to London, lured back there after his family had fled the capital during the Blitz. He and Reader have more than a little in common, including fathers who abandoned them when they were young. The two became “business partners” in the 1960s. But they fell out over money, until they were reunited about four years ago at the funeral of a friend, a fellow thief. He recalled the falling out as a “ridiculous thing.”
