by Dan Bilefsky
The Flying Squad would need to move quickly. The perpetrators could already have skipped town with their booty, dozens of victims were irate and starting to demand answers, and millions of pounds were at stake—along with the vaunted reputation of the Flying Squad.
The Flying Squad and the Crime of the Century
Johnson was a proud member of the Flying Squad, an elite unit within London’s Metropolitan Police, which was formed in October 1919 and originally consisted of twelve officers who gathered intelligence on robbers and pickpockets from atop horse-drawn carriages, with secret holes pocked in the canvas to allow for spying. Named for the unit’s mandate to ignore geographic boundaries and “fly” all over the capital, the squad was never limited to a single borough.
The Flying Squad, also known as the Robbery Squad, or SDC7 for Specialist Crime Directorate 7, investigates commercial armed and unarmed robberies and other serious violent crimes. It has long held a special place in the British popular imagination, its members depicted as debonair heroes on television and radio in the 1960s and 1970s. Known as the “Sweeney”—Cockney rhyming slang for the murderous barber in Sweeney Todd—members of the Flying Squad would zip around London in Granada or Cortina sedans, decked out in suits and ties, emblazoned with the symbol of a screaming eagle ready to swoop in on its prey. In a 1970s British television show called The Sweeney, the squad was epitomized by a hard-boiled inspector called Jack Regan whose signature phrase was “Shut it!”
The Flying Squad’s officers are also known for their nimbleness at remaining undetected; they work in civilian clothes and when they are armed and undercover, they keep their Glock firearms carefully concealed in a belt holster underneath their suit jackets.
Among the squad’s most legendary officers was Jeremiah Lynch, an Irish-born cop who played a key role in ferreting out German spies during World War II and outmaneuvering a confidence trickster and member of Parliament named Horatio Bottomley, who lined his pockets with money skimmed from government-issued war bonds.
In July 1946, the squad successfully disrupted plans by a gang of thieves to drug the guards at a security depot at Heathrow Airport and steal nearly a million dollars’ worth of gold and jewelry. Learning of the plot, the squad disguised themselves as guards, and ambushed them. Initially a small elite unit, the force grew to have dozens of officers in its ranks and by 1956 was making one thousand arrests per year.
The Flying Squad went head-to-head with many of the country’s most cunning criminals. After the Great Train Robbery of 1963, it hunted fugitive Ronnie Biggs for three decades, before Biggs finally turned himself in in 2001; it ended the Kray twins’ reign of terror over east London; and it also foiled the attempt by a gang of thieves to steal £350 (about $490 million) worth of diamonds—including the flawless 203-carat Millennium Star—at the capital’s Millennium Dome in 2000.
The squad became known for its success in infiltrating London’s shadowy underworld through police informants called “supergrasses,” for its adeptness at catching armed robbers, even if that meant shooting them dead, and for its success at foiling some of the biggest heists the world had ever seen. It has also had its dark moments, including the 1970s, when Operation Countryman, an internal probe, revealed that officers from the unit were taking bribes from Soho pornographers. In 2001 three Flying Squad detectives received seven-year jail sentences after springing a police informant from prison to carry out a robbery on their behalf. But the episodes of bribery and corruption were offset by the Sweeney’s reputation for doggedness, heroism, and courage.
Among its ranks, Johnson was a modern-day Jeremiah Lynch: inscrutable, indefatigable, with a well-honed instinct for the thought processes of the criminal mind and a limitless patience that had allowed him to outsmart criminals of every stripe—time and time again. He knew from experience that catching a thief was usually just a matter of waiting for him or her to make a mistake. And if you waited long enough, they nearly always did.
Above all, he had an unwavering confidence in the methodology of the Flying Squad, confident that its empirical approach would nab the bad guys, in the end, even if Johnson doesn’t like to dwell on past successes. The squad’s playbook had proven remarkably reliable over the decades: methodically gathering evidence, whether that meant secretly putting a listening device in a suspect’s Peugeot or underground hideout; finding a telltale DNA sample from a discarded hair or Coke can left at the scene of a crime; working a network of informants; or sending a team of undercover officers to track a suspect’s every move without being detected.
It was a mix of old-fashioned beat policing and modern-day technology that took advantage of the capital’s law enforcement resources—the millions of CCTV cameras that peppered the city in the aftermath of Irish Republican Army bombs in the 1980s and the 1990s that had made Londoners among the most watched and monitored citizens in the world, the automatic number plate recognition technology that secretly photographed millions of vehicles each day and allowed officers to track terrorist suspects or armed robbers, the teams of undercover Flying Squad officers who camouflaged themselves in underground tube stations or ancient jewelry quarters or shopping malls—until the moment was ripe to strike.
“There has long been a myth and mystique about the Flying Squad. There is something about wearing that tie with the eagle on it and saying you served on the Flying Squad,” says Roy Ramm, the former Flying Squad chief and head of special operations for Scotland Yard, who has investigated some of the leading robberies of the century. “The Flying Squad is probably the best known of the Metropolitan police’s various branches. It is also a tough and demanding beast, and to get there, officers have to be among the top in the country.”
In law enforcement lore, Flying Squad officers were also revered for their ballsiness. In the 1980s the squad became far more aggressive in using force after a succession of robbery suspects managed to evade prison on the grounds that evidence—a stolen car used during the crime, a mask left at the scene, a gun found in a hideout—was circumstantial. As a result, the squad began taking suspects out “on the pavement,” swooping in and ambushing armed robbers just moments before they were about to commit a crime—at the risk of their own lives. It cemented the Sweeney’s reputation for employing fearless and brawny tough guys.3
In 2004, after the squad got its first female commander, Sharon Kerr, the BBC mused that the image of the “Sweeney as the haven of the rugby-playing, beer-swilling bruiser” was giving way to a “more family friendly, feminine, post-modernist Flying Squad.”4
Either way, the Flying Squad was not a place for second tries or second chances. There was too much at stake. Money. Lives. The safety of one of the world’s biggest capitals. Being part of the Flying Squad required physical and mental stamina, and a stubborn determination to solve crimes and bring criminals to justice. Overachievers filled the unit’s ranks. “Members of the Flying Squad are very fit and motivated individuals. They are start to finishers,” Turner, the Flying Squad chief, explained. “Even when you have only asked them for A and B, they normally come back with A, B, C, D and E, and even F. They deliver beyond what is expected.”5
By the time the Hatton Garden case landed on Johnson’s desk, undercover surveillance operations were already his specialty. During a long career, he had dismantled gangs of ruthless armed bank robbers, foiled a honey trap plot in which a contract killer tried to kidnap a millionaire businessman by installing an attractive secretary at his office to seduce him, and helped put dozens of the capital’s most wily thieves behind bars.
At the time of the caper, he had recently been promoted to detective chief inspector, the number two spot on the squad, and was in charge of west London, which was a cauldron of burglaries and commercial crime. He was just two years away from retirement. The Hatton Garden job was to be the last big case of his distinguished career. It was to be his last job.
Johnson was a man of action, who gave little away, preferring his work to speak on his beha
lf. He exuded quiet authority and was always immaculately dressed in civilian clothes, a dark jacket and muted navy blue tie, adorned with the yellow sweeping eagle of the Flying Squad—the bird of prey. After decades of long days and nights, he was ready for a change.6
His next move would be to join the Serious Fraud Office, investigating fraud, bribery, and corruption from a grand building near London’s Trafalgar Square. It was a job that would satisfy the imperturbable moral compass that had guided him to do good in the world since he was a novice police officer. Chasing financial corruption was probably better for your health than chasing dangerous armed robbers, and the hours would be less punishing. He could retire his Glock. He could spend more time with his family.
Since joining the Hendon Police Training School, the London Metropolitan Police Service’s main officer training center, when he was twenty-three years old, he thought he had seen it all—that is, until he saw those figure-eight-shaped concentric holes bored into a reinforced concrete wall, in a basement in central London, that would soon take on iconic status across the country.
A Media Frenzy Begins
On Thursday, April 9, 2015, two days after the police discovered the crime, Johnson convened a hastily arranged press conference, and announced that Hatton Garden had been hit. By the time he arrived, a scrum of Fleet Street reporters had already formed a large semicircle outside 88–90 Hatton Garden. There was already a sense of excitement that something big had taken place in a country that relished the theater of dramatic heists.
“They forced open shutter doors into the basement where Hatton Garden Safe Deposit is based and then made their way to the vault area. Once outside the vault area, they used a Hilti DD 350 drill to bore holes in the vault wall. This wall is two meters thick and is made of reinforced concrete,” Johnson said, in a matter-of-fact voice to the crowd of reporters. “The vault is covered in dust and debris and the floor is strewn with discarded safety deposit boxes, numerous power tools,” he continued. “We are in the process of identifying the owners of the safety deposit boxes that have been interfered with.” He refused to say how much had been stolen.
This being England, the tabloid media reacted with barely concealed glee turning what little information they had in the days following the crime into sensational headlines. “HATTON GARDEN RAIDERS PLUNDER UP TO £200 MILLION FROM SAFE DEPOSIT,” screamed the headline in the Daily Telegraph. “HATTON GARDEN JEWELRY ROBBERY: POLICE LAUNCH MANHUNT AFTER EASTER WEEKEND HEIST,” declared the Mirror. “PERFECT PLANNING OF £200 MILLION BLINGO HEIST REVEALED,” the Sun’s headline blared.
The tabloids went into overdrive. Dominated by the Sun, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and the populist Daily Mail, edited by the combative Paul Dacre, they feasted with barely concealed delight on a story that had it all—an old-school caper out of Hollywood, a whodunit mystery, and a crime committed in central London, over a long weekend, under the nose of Scotland Yard.
The revelation that the police had somehow missed the alarm particularly whetted the appetite of Fleet Street, which had recently been in a simmering battle with Scotland Yard in the aftermath of a salacious phone-hacking scandal that had rocked the media and law enforcement establishment. In 2014, London—and the world—had been captivated by a trial during which key protagonists in the tabloid media, including the former editor of the News of the World, a now defunct Murdoch tabloid, were accused of illegally bribing police and intercepting voice mails in the pursuit of stories, including the voice mail of a kidnapped teenager, Milly Dowler, who was later found dead.
The June 2014 trial exposed a culture in which journalists were paid six figures for celebrity scoops and sifting through garbage bins, along with the systemic eavesdropping on the cell phones of British luminaries, including the royal family and leading politicians.7
During the scandal, several Scotland Yard officers were accused of leaking some of the confidentially acquired information to journalists and the sometimes cozy relationship between journalists and police came under intense scrutiny. In July 2011, Scotland Yard’s police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, resigned after coming under criticism for hiring a former News of the World executive, who had been questioned by police investigating phone hacking—as an adviser. A year later, the Yard’s communications chief, faced with a disciplinary hearing over his link to the same executive, also resigned.8
The result was that, by the time of the Hatton Garden heist, the access and information provided by Scotland Yard to journalists had been severely circumscribed and the relationship between the British media and London’s Metropolitan Police, strained in the best of times, had become fraught by mutual distrust and suspicion. The lack of information whetted appetites even more.
Meanwhile, as news of the burglary began to spread, frantic owners of the safe deposit boxes from across Hatton Garden began to mass outside the building, desperate for any information regarding their valuables. It quickly emerged that many of them were not insured, believing the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit to be impenetrable. Photographs of the gaping holes drilled through the wall and grainy CCTV footage of the four thieves were soon splashed on the covers of Britain’s newspapers.
Thanks to the media frenzy, news of the crime soon reached all the way to No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister, and David Cameron called the Scotland Yard commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, to stress that the reputation of the Yard was on the line. A group of villains could not walk into a vault in the center of London in broad daylight on a holiday weekend—steal millions worth of gold, jewels, and cash—and be allowed to get away with it.
Hogan-Howe, a tough-on-crime police commander in the old-fashioned mold, was known for taming gangs when he was chief constable in Merseyside, a county in northwest England, and respected for having successfully policed the 2012 London Olympics. He wanted results.
Theresa May, then the no-nonsense head of the Home Office—Britain’s internal affairs ministry—and now the prime minister, was also keeping close tabs on the case. British law enforcement came under the global spotlight as the New York Times, Le Monde, and others piled in on a case that seemed conjured from the pages of a crime thriller.
With the British media engaged in a guessing game of “Who done it?” people the world over were fascinated by reports of a heist that seemed to hark back to a different era.
“There was concern from the highest levels at Scotland Yard from the commissioner downward, who wanted to know, hour by hour, what progress was being made,” Turner, the Flying Squad chief, recalled. “From the onset, there was huge pressure to solve the crime. I would certainly rate it at the top of the biggest challenges I have encountered in my career. It was one of the most notorious crimes of the century. The world was watching.”
A failure on a case of this magnitude, and the legacy of the Flying Squad would be irreparably shattered. “You want to perpetuate the Flying Squad’s legacy,” Johnson said. “In this business, you’re only as good as your last case.”9
The Flying Squad faced huge pressure to solve the crime, while at the same time keeping a covert police operation secret amid intense media scrutiny. The Sweeney ordained itself the most fit and able to take on the case since the Metropolitan Police in Camden borough, in northwest and central London, who were charged with policing Hatton Garden, didn’t have the capability or the resources. Besides, they had missed the initial alarm.
The case quickly became Scotland Yard’s top priority, having seeped into the public imagination: The large holes drilled through reinforced concrete. The mystery of who was behind it. The insatiable appetite of the tabloid press ensured that it dominated the headlines.
At the inscrutable Flying Squad each covert operation is given a name, chosen from a chronological list, and the investigation was unceremoniously dubbed “Operation Spire.” The name for what would become one of the most notorious crimes of the past three hundred years was randomly chosen, according to Turner, and had no particular signifi
cance.
Beyond the pressure from the highest levels of Scotland Yard and the government, the Hatton Garden investigation was also complicated from the beginning because of the scale of the crime: 999 safe deposit boxes, 73 of which had been emptied. All the stolen jewelry, gold, and gems had to be meticulously documented and identified, a task made all the more difficult by the fact that dozens of safe deposit boxes had been thrown on the floor during the mayhem of the burglary, and many of the hundreds of gold chains and rings strewn on the floor looked alike.
Dowries, Family Heirlooms, and Life Savings
Safe deposits are repositories of lives lived, where treasures and family histories are kept under lock and key—children’s birth certificates, the deeds of houses, black and white family photographs, war medals, engagement rings, memories of loved ones long since departed—and while the millions of pounds in stolen gems would eventually be quantified, the emotional cost of the heist was incalculable.
Entire life savings were wiped out in the burglary, along with cherished heirlooms. There were millions of dollars’ worth of fine jewelry, valuable antique coins, and wads of cold cash spirited away for retirement and to start new businesses. University funds for grandchildren. Money for long put-off vacations for hardworking men and women who worked nearly one hundred hours a week at Hatton Garden and relied on the safe deposit as a storehouse for their dreams.
The victims of the heist included people from all walks of life: Holocaust survivors; young entrepreneurs; retirees; immigrants from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, who had arrived penniless to Britain in the 1960s after fleeing strife or civil war and had rebuilt their lives, and started flourishing businesses. One Afghan diamond trader was so shaken by the burglary that even though he spoke excellent English after decades in the country, he brought an Urdu translator to his police interview. Other elderly safe deposit box holders were reduced to tears as they recounted their losses to the police.
