by Dan Bilefsky
Basil had grudging respect for Reader. He always got the job done, and he wasn’t a snitch. His greatest skill was his boundless patience and lack of excitability. He had a sixth sense if Scotland Yard was getting close (or at least he used to) and would call off a job for a few months if he had the slightest inkling something was amiss, and then he’d wait it out until he was convinced it was safe. It was a cautiousness born of experience.
Once the gang of retirees had chosen Hatton Garden as their target, the Gardener said that Reader, bossy and determined, divided up the work for the “Firm.” Several times a week for three years, the men schemed and gossiped at old-school pubs and cafés in Enfield and Islington, among them the Castle, the Wheatsheaf, the Moon Under Water, and the Narrowboat.
They especially liked the worn but dependable Scotti’s Snack Bar, a café in Clerkenwell that is peppered by converted industrial factories and gastropubs and is a short walk to Hatton Garden. The café had resisted the gentrification of the surrounding area and served a proper cup of tea. Crisps, or potato chips, were piled high in a wicker basket near the cash register. The men, carrying old supermarket plastic bags or cradling their dogs (Jones’s ever-present white-haired terrier, Rocket; Collins’s beloved Dempsey, a Staffordshire bull terrier), would have long strategy sessions while sitting on white plastic chairs on the outdoor terrace.
The criminal ecosystem where the gang operated suited men of their age. They needed to juggle their criminality with other duties, such as buying one’s wife’s arthritis medication at the pharmacy or doting on their grandchildren. Other than Reader, who lived about ninety minutes away from central London by bus, Jones and Perkins lived a half-hour drive or so from Clerkenwell. Collins, the getaway driver and all-purpose fixer, lived just minutes away. So they combined plotting the biggest heist of the century with their fatherly and grandfatherly duties—walking their dogs, and avoiding arousing too much suspicion among their wives or partners.
Befitting criminals of the analog era, the Gardener said the crux of the planning for the burglary involved old-fashioned shoe-leather reconnaissance. Reader and his team spent hours staking out 88–90 Hatton Garden and the surrounding area.
Except for trusting Basil, Reader was deeply suspicious of the rest of the group—even Perkins, just a few years his junior. The Gardener said he was particularly worried about Jones, whose admirable physical stamina was offset by a mouth that blabbed like a leaky faucet, making him a potential liability for a crime that depended on discretion and avoiding police surveillance. Collins, too, while avuncular and sweet, had a tendency to overshare that Reader feared could mean trouble.
“When you take someone like that Jones or any other laborer, you don’t let them out of your sight even for a minute, in case they do something stupid,” the Gardener said. “It’s like doing any physical laboring job, when you have a construction business and each morning you pick up laborers waiting on the street corner. You don’t tell them anything. You just take them to do the work when you need to do it.”
Nevertheless, the rest of the gang became involved in recruiting manpower for the heist, and as the ranks of those involved expanded, Reader and Basil grew increasingly worried that their cover could be blown, or worse, that too many other thieves could want in on a cut of the action. Freddie Foreman, Perkins’s former associate and the one-time enforcer for the Krays, said that old-school burglars across London had sniffed out that something big was afoot. “Everyone wanted in on the action.”5
Some muscle was needed to carry the tools, wield the heavy diamond-tipped power drill, and transport the wheelie bins stuffed with gold. Among those who say they were approached at the beginning of 2015 was Kevin Lane, a brawny, talkative, square-jawed former boxer who had recently been released from eighteen years in prison after having been convicted for the murder of Robert Magill, a car dealer. To this day, he vehemently protests his innocence.
But having barely tasted freedom, he politely declined. He said he wasn’t surprised; Collins had talked about hitting Hatton Garden for years. “You know, the gang had worked together before the Hatton Garden job and they had been very successful. Ya’ know, they had struck gold before and you want to tap into that.”
Collins told him that, while the men were plotting the heist, they had established several cardinal rules—chief among them was that there would be no violence, even as he noted that some officers of Scotland Yard were armed. “They are good men. They didn’t want to hurt anyone. They give money to charity, they stand up for women, these are old school criminals,” he said, adding, “they wouldn’t hurt a flea.”6
Reconnaissance
Reader decided that only he, Collins, and Basil would stake out the exterior and interior of 88–90 Hatton Garden and conduct reconnaissance, mapping and memorizing the layout of the area around the vault, the locations of the CCTV cameras, the comings and goings of the security guards. Collins, the designated getaway driver, was meanwhile charged with observing the area around the building and coming up with a nearby outpost where he could act as lookout during the crime. He chose 25 Hatton Garden, a building opposite 88–90 Hatton Garden, which hosts Madison Diamond and Wedding Rings, its name emblazoned on a black awning next to the front door. The venue offers a clear view of the entire street and was ideal for the designated lookout man, providing, of course, he didn’t fall asleep.
The timing of a heist of this magnitude was everything and here Reader’s experience as a young man on the Baker Street robbery proved to be instructive. The Baker Street heist of 1971 had taken place over a weekend, when the area was quiet and banks were closed. Reader and the Firm similarly decided that the Hatton Garden heist should take place over a long holiday weekend, given that Hatton Garden would be deserted and local dealers would be depositing their precious gems for safekeeping over the holidays. The Baker Street job had also involved hours of grueling tunneling underground with cumbersome equipment, impressing on Reader the sheer strength and athleticism needed to break through walls. That meant putting up with the sometimes petulant fantasist Danny Jones, who was strong and agile, and could slither through a hole in the wall.
During the Baker Street job, the thieves had communicated by walkie-talkies. Reader decided that that same method would work even better for the Hatton Garden raid. Mobile phones could be easily traced. (Never mind that, at Baker Street, a neighbor overheard the thieves’ walkie-talkie chitchat on a ham radio, eventually leading to their undoing.)7
Jones had the book Forensics for Dummies in his home and was aware that a single fingerprint left at the scene of the crime could be disastrous. The men also decided they would wear surgical gloves. The gang may have been analog criminals, but they were sufficiently sophisticated forensically that they foresaw the necessity of avoiding leaving behind DNA evidence in the building.
In the three years before the burglary, Basil and other members of the Firm traveled to the building at least a dozen times, observing when the last person left. It was usually the workaholic Lionel Wiffen, a grumpily avuncular jeweler, who had toiled in the building for forty years and used the fire escape door to exit the premises from the back.
During their snooping around, Reader and his team also observed that the safe deposit was left unguarded during the week, after 6 p.m., when the two security guards, Kelvin Stockwell and Keefa Kamara, left after setting the alarm. Moreover, the building’s elevator did not go to the basement where Hatton Garden Safe Deposit was located—a security precaution after the safe deposit had been targeted by an armed robber in the 1970s—but the elevator shaft led directly inside the vault area. If they could figure out a way to climb down the shaft and breach the alarm, then all that would be left would be to access the safe deposit cabinet by breaking through the wall with Danny Jones’s power drill. The ten-ton door protecting the custom-made Chubb vault was deemed too resistant—and risky—to infiltrate.
Hatton Garden Safe Deposit was open five days a week, from 9 a.m. until jus
t before 6 p.m., when it was locked up. Repeated snooping during the weekend also showed that on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, the building was unguarded altogether and largely unoccupied. Many of the resident jewelers lived in north London neighborhoods like Hampstead, Muswell Hill, or Belsize Park and rarely came in on the weekends, except for a pesky jeweler or two such as Lionel Wiffen.
The surrounding area became something of a ghost town on the weekends, its usually bustling and ancient pubs largely depleted of the jewelers and their customers who patronized them during the week. Workmen for the local council did conduct weekend maintenance work, but their loud drilling would provide a welcome diversion.
Police also have a theory that, in the months leading up to the heist, Reader hired an old crony to pretend he was a local jeweler and rent a safe deposit box in the building, perhaps armed with a body camera, that would have enabled the gang to case out the vault’s interior and help determine how to outsmart the various alarms and CCTVs. In any case, Reader had worked for more than a decade in and around Hatton Garden, and had criminal associates who had used the safe deposit. That would have allowed him to draw a map of the building’s exterior and interior and to memorize the interior layout of the vault.
The techniques used by the gang to plan the burglary did not require technological prowess, but rather the need for patient observation, which was in no short supply among retired senior citizens. Craig Turner, the Flying Squad chief, noted that it wouldn’t have been difficult for one of them to rent a safe deposit box in the building in order to be able to visualize the interior of the vault and realize that drilling through the concrete wall was a way to avoid having to breach the giant Chubb lock on the vault door.
“There was definitely a level of commitment and planning,” he said. “Everything they achieved you could achieve by just walking around that building. If it was many years in the planning, imagine how many times they could’ve walked into that building without being detected. It wouldn’t have been difficult to go in and say they wanted to hire a box and to do so under a bogus name, and have a look. If they went a week before, maybe people would remember them. But not if this was years in the planning.” He added, “There is a long tradition in British criminal history of doing heists on long holiday weekends when there aren’t that many people around.”8
To this day, the outside of the building remains unguarded.
Something Suspicious Is Afoot
Trim with short silvered hair, Lionel Wiffen has fingers blackened from years of polishing diamonds. It is an occupational hazard for Wiffen, who began an apprenticeship in Hatton Garden in 1957 at the age of fifteen and started his own company specializing in fine jewelry just six years later. He works at his cramped offices in the basement of 88–90 Hatton Garden, often seven days a week, his loyal and studious wife, Helen, the firm’s bookkeeper, never far from his side.9
Among the five-dozen businesses at 88–90 Hatton Garden, Wiffen was often the first to arrive, at 7:30 a.m., and the last to leave, sometimes after 9 p.m. Occasionally, he arrived so early that the front door hadn’t been unlocked yet by one of the security guards. The incessant blabbing and wheeling and dealing of some of the other diamond traders were not for him. He liked to get to the point.
While most of his business derived from selling diamond rings, he also restored antique jewels that had been in a family for generations. He spent about six months working on Kate Middleton’s royal sapphire engagement ring, a point of pride. That the rich and famous were among his clients was proudly advertised on his website, though he was abidingly discreet. In private, he might boast that he once received an order from a store to supply a ring for Victoria and David Beckham, engraved with D followed by V.10
Most of the jewelers at 88–90 Hatton Garden enter through the front door to get to their offices, walking through the building’s lobby, and then down a long staircase to the basement, where Wiffen’s company Lionel J Wiffen Ltd Fine Jewellery, is located a few doors down from Hatton Garden Safe Deposit and its 999 deposit boxes, where he also rented a box. (There are only two other jewelry businesses in the basement.)
But Wiffen, a creature of habit, often preferred to access his office from the fire escape stairs, which were reached from the side entrance to the building on Greville Street, and led to a courtyard. It was a more discreet place for his clients to leave with their $10,000 diamond rings. As the main door of the building closed at 6 p.m., the back entrance was also more practical.11 Seen from the street, the back entrance is nondescript and inconspicuous, and conceals the secretive world of diamond trading inside.
In the months leading up to the burglary in March 2015, Wiffen, a guarded man with sharp eyes and an acute sense of his surroundings—the product of decades of dealing with very dear gems—felt like he was being watched. He would see the same white van drive up and down Greville and then park outside. He also noticed a blue Citroën Saxo and a Land Rover. Someone appeared to be casing the building. He was sure something suspicious was going on.12
He had sensed that something was wrong as of January 2015 when he felt eyes on him as he was escorting customers outside of the building. “I have felt uneasy,” he told police. “I have noticed vehicles watching me or the door. I may be paranoid. But in this industry we are very conscious of who is around us, and during this period I often felt that there were too many vehicles parked on Greville Street with people in them.”
He wasn’t the only one to become suspicious of people appearing to be staking out the building.
A few weeks before the burglary, Katya Lewis, who works for Deblinger Diamonds in the area, observed something odd at 88–90 Hatton Gardens. She was on her way to deliver some gems to L & R Josyfon Ltd on the third floor, and noticed that the elevator was taking an “extraordinarily long time.”
Just as she was about to leave, about ten minutes after she pressed the button, the doors suddenly opened. There before her, she recalled, was a white-haired man, with sideburns, about sixty years old, six feet tall, dressed as a workman in blue overalls, a blue fleece, and carrying a ladder. He smiled apologetically, as the floor of the elevator was covered in power tools and there was nowhere for her to stand. She took the stairs instead.13 The man she described bears an eerie resemblance to Terry Perkins, perhaps on a reconnaissance mission. But it seems doubtful that Reader, risk averse as he was, would have allowed Perkins to jeopardize their plans. Who was it?
Lewis would later tell police that she had felt impressed that someone of that age was still working and doing manual labor. “When I first saw this man, I thought, ‘Wow he is doing well at his age to still be working,’ ” she said. “I looked at where he was standing and thought it must’ve been hard for him to get into the lift without someone loading the tools and stuff around him.” She recalled he never spoke a word. As she walked down the stairs and left the building, she said she saw no other workmen. “I have never seen him before in the Hatton Garden,” she said. The man, she added, just kept smiling.14
Chapter 6
The Heist
Pills, Fish and Chips, and Concrete
AS READER WAS MAKING HIS WAY TO HATTON GARDEN on Thursday, April 2, 2015, just another anonymous senior citizen on a bus, the guards at 88–90 Hatton Garden, Kelvin Stockwell and Keefa Kamara, set the alarm, as they had every working day for the past twelve years, in the basement premises of the safety deposit. Stockwell was the last to leave, and he locked the safe deposit company’s wooden front door. It was 6 p.m. This being a long holiday weekend, the two guards did not plan to return until Tuesday. Once the guards had left, the building’s concierge, Carlos Cruse, locked the magnetic glass door at the entrance of the building and left through the front door, which closed behind him and locked automatically.
A relic of the 1940s, the security deposit was nevertheless trusted among Hatton Garden jewelers, many of them older Jewish men, who believed in its sturdy dependability. Like them, it had been in the quarter for decades, and the
sight of jewelers traveling to and from the safe deposit, their precious diamonds hidden in small plastic bags in money belts or concealed in their underclothing, was a part of the rhythm of daily life in what was a modern-day shtetl and commercial center. Reader and his gang were preying on elderly men and women of their same generation, men and women who valued God over technology, and who thought nothing of leaving their precious valuables in a safe deposit that had barely been updated in decades.
By early Thursday evening, Reader reached the inconspicuous seven-floor building on the handsome, manicured street. A large plaque on the outside said HATTON GARDEN SAFE DEPOSIT LTD. The rest of his crew was already there: John “Kenny” Collins, Daniel Jones, Terrence Perkins, and Carl Wood. The men had arrived in Hatton Garden at 8:25 p.m. in a white Ford transit van driven by Collins.
A few minutes earlier, Collins parked the vehicle on Leather Lane, around the corner from 88–90 Hatton Garden, where Jones and his old mate Carl Wood exited. They cautiously walked around the building and around the block to conduct reconnaissance. After three years of planning, the moment had finally come. One wrong move and everything would unravel. One wrong move and the millions of pounds in jewels they had been fantasizing about for months would be out of reach.
Lionel Wiffen, the busybody jeweler whose office was in the back of the building, was still there, dealing with a customer, and the men returned to the van on Leather Lane and waited until 9:21 p.m. when Wiffen finally emerged, delayed by a last-minute phone call from his wife. Wiffen left from the fire escape door in the back of the building. For the gang, the wait must have felt like an eternity. They had been observing Wiffen for months and worried that the pesky workaholic could prove an obstacle. He always seemed to work late and had a perpetual look of suspicion on his creased face. The tension must have been palpable, though the men at this stage of the caper appeared to be confident.
