The Last Job

by Dan Bilefsky

  “It was a bank holiday and there weren’t many people or cars around. So that made it easier to find the Mercedes, since the roads were quiet and there aren’t many Mercedes models with roofs and tires that color,” Day said. “By identifying the Mercedes, we were able to see that they had come to and from Hatton Garden three times that weekend,” he said. “The imagery was fuzzy so we had to look at every angle. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds.”

  Using the massive network of CCTV cameras across London that have made Britons the most-watched nation in Europe, Day and the rest of the team were also able to trace and track the Mercedes’s movements throughout London during the previous several months. Just about a week after the burglary had first been discovered, the network of surveillance footage finally led them to the tool shop in Edmonton, where CCTV cameras had filmed the distinctive car parked outside, while Collins and Jones bought a new replacement pump to help them complete the job. They were homing in.

  Automatic license plate recognition cameras, which photograph license plates and are installed all over London to help police fight crime, had also photographed the Mercedes. Armed with a positive identification on the car and the data on its movements, Day was then able to identify the car’s owner: a portly career criminal called Kenny Collins, whom the Firm referred to as “a wombat-thick old cunt.” The Flying Squad had its first suspect.

  “Once we identified the car, it was a matter of following its trail and seeing where it led us,” Day explained, with the typical deductive logic of a veteran Flying Squad officer and allowing himself a barely discernible soupçon of self-satisfaction. “By tailing Collins, we were able to piece the team together.”

  “Using the same car during and after the crime was a real clanger!” Johnson added, allowing himself to grin.

  And while the aging thieves adroitly used walkie-talkies during the heist to avoid being traced, they continued using the same cell phones they had before the heist, providing the Flying Squad an opportunity to monitor Collins’s calls. Soon it became apparent that Collins was talking to Brian Reader and Terry Perkins, men with long criminal records who were already known to police. Once they had been identified, the police were also able to determine their cell phone numbers, and to track who was calling whom.

  The police had a list of about fifty suspects with the experience to have pulled off such a daring crime. But once they had identified Collins, they tailed him for days, and, before long, he led police to the other members of the gang. “We didn’t go after Reader,” Turner explained. “He came to us.”5

  With the list of key suspects in hand, the Flying Squad also traced the diamond-tipped drill left at the scene of the crime to a drill that had been stolen eighteen months previously in what Day said was a fraudulent purchase under a false name. If it was Jones who had stolen it, he had covered his tracks. But the date of the invoice for the drill showed that the heist had been in the works for at least two years.

  As a picture of the men slowly began to emerge, Johnson assembled a team of more than a hundred officers—forensic specialists, surveillance experts, and officers specializing in burglaries. He also applied to Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime and Operations II Surveillance Command team to plant listening devices in Collins’s Mercedes and Terry Perkins’s Citroën Saxo, and in mid-May the vehicles were bugged.

  Overhearing what the villains were saying was just the evidence he needed to ensnare the gang. It was to be an old-fashioned game of cat and mouse, though the quality of sound and ability to conceal covert listening devices had improved since the days of the Second World War when British intelligence agencies used bugs to monitor captured German fighter pilots.

  Today, British police forces have regional surveillance units that can disrupt wireless Internet networks, surreptitously install bugs in cars or properties, or monitor computers.6 Such is the sophistication of surveillance technology that Scotland Yard reportedly has secret spy planes capable of eavesdropping on cell phone conversations from the sky,7 while snooping local councils in London, Manchester, and Birmingham have tested spy cameras hidden in street lampposts that can monitor whether citizens are committing antisocial behavior after being triggered by loud noise.

  For covert surveillance in criminal investigations, permission must be granted from either the home secretary, the chief constable, or the Serious Organized Crime Agency, among others, and must be justified on the grounds of “national security” or “detecting serious crime.” Such evidence is admissible in court.8

  Using undercover surveillance equipment was a method Johnson knew all too well. All he needed was to summon his vast stores of patience and hope that the gang of gabby elderly thieves began to blab. He didn’t have to wait long.

  Brian Reader, a Cop Killer?

  Once Scotland Yard homed in on Reader, thanks to the Firm’s bungling, the Flying Squad had renewed motivation in bringing the perpetrators to justice, beyond just the scale and audacity of the crime.

  Officers in the Yard still remembered the bone-chilling morning on January 26, 1985, when Reader had been seen standing over Detective Constable John Fordham, an undercover officer who had three children and was close to death. Two Rottweilers, Cleo and Sam, were barking ferociously. Only minutes earlier Reader, then forty-five years old and helping the gangster Kenneth Noye to launder millions in gold bars, had arrived at Hollywood Cottage, Noye’s sprawling Kent mansion.

  Scotland Yard had been tailing Noye for weeks, as part of a secret surveillance operation aimed at recovering the gold, some of which had been buried in Noye’s garden. Police were finally ready to pounce. Fordham, known as “Gentleman John” because of his kindly manner, was part of a Scotland Yard special undercover surveillance unit, called C11, according to Noye’s biographer, Wensley Clarkson.

  After sundown on that freezing Saturday, two undercover officers, including Fordham, entered Noye’s estate, when his Rottweilers began barking. “Dogs hostile,” a panicked Fordham said quietly into his radio. Reader and Noye were in Noye’s study when they heard the tumult, according to Clarkson. Then, Noye immediately rushed out. “What’s happening with those dogs?” he screamed.

  When he went to investigate the noise, armed with a knife, and was confronted with the sight of two holes peering out of a mask, Noye punched the man in the head as hard as he could, before Fordham jumped on him. The sequence of events was later disputed, with Noye claiming he had been attacked first. Noye then stabbed Fordham several times, including in the heart, killing him.9

  As a team of officers stormed the estate, Reader fled. Neil Murphy, Fordham’s partner, would later testify that Reader had kicked Fordham’s body before he fled. Reader made his way to a country road and hailed a car, which turned out to be an undercover police car. He was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. Reader soon had a new label attached to him: cop killer.

  Following the killing of Fordham in 1985, Noye was charged with murder and Reader as an accomplice. Prosecutors told the jury that Murphy had seen Reader making a kicking motion near Fordham’s body. Throughout the proceedings, Noye acknowledged that he had killed Fordham but insisted that he had done so because he believed his life was in imminent danger.10

  In a verdict that shocked members of London’s law enforcement establishment and which is still bitterly remembered to this day, both men were acquitted of murder on the grounds that they had been acting in self-defense.

  Now, Scotland Yard had been given a new chance to bring Brian Reader to justice.

  Chapter 9

  A Game of Cat and Mouse

  The Hapless Accomplices

  In the weeks following the burglary, the men reveled in their work. They may have pulled off a wildly daring heist, bypassing the latest in security—its software and hardware—but they were quick to break some of the most basic rules from old-school criminal handbooks. First, they returned to—if not the scene of the crime, exactly—the place where they were known and had most frequented i
n the run-up to the crime: the Castle pub. They were back to plates of bangers and mash at the same spot where they had hatched the plan in the first place.

  Armed with a bravado perhaps conditioned by age—and blissfully unaware that police were already on to them—they went about their lives, shopping for groceries at their local Tesco supermarkets, eating curry at their favorite Indian restaurant, picking up their granddaughters from ballet lessons, and nattering among themselves about their nagging wives, the younger “birds” they fancied (among them a young woman called “Randy Mandy”) their ungrateful children, their hapless sons-in-law, their ailments, their impending mortality, their real estate investments, the state of the country, British versus Portuguese sewage systems, the relative benefits of diesel versus gas, the relative strength of Margaret Thatcher versus Vladimir Putin, and, of course, their retirement plans.

  There was also some unfinished business to attend to—the disposal of the white van used in the heist—a task, which, according to a person close to the gang, was handled by Perkins. Ever adept at camouflaging himself as a doddering and kindly old man, he drove the van to a scrap yard in north London where it was turned into scrap metal. Collins also contacted his sixty-year-old brother-in-law, William Lincoln, a burly lug of a man with bladder-control problems, and asked him if he would help transport some of the stolen goods and help conceal them. Lincoln, in turn, contacted his nephew John Harbinson, a forty-two-year-old taxi driver with whom he had reconciled after twenty years, to see whether he could provide transportation and store three bags of jewels in his garage. He told Harbinson that the diamonds, rubies, and emeralds were a “load of old shit.”

  Also rounding out the team was Hugh Doyle, an amiable Irish plumber who prosecutors suspect of offering up his plumbing studio in Enfield, north London, as a drilling rehearsal space ahead of the heist.

  “Billy the Fish” Lincoln

  William Lincoln was known as “Billy the Fish” by the others because he made extra cash by supplying friends and family with fish and seafood he bought from Billingsgate Fish Market in east London—including eel every Sunday for his mother in Essex. Like many working-class criminals in east London, Lincoln had a taste for jellied saltwater eels, known as the “poor man’s delicacy.” High in fat, they were served cold and congealed in bars known as “eel, pie and mash houses.”

  With remarkable self-awareness, Lincoln conceded to the others that he was “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” but also said he was not a “divvo,” or dummy. He was encumbered by bladder-control problems—which would sometimes embarrass him when arriving unannounced—and a hip replacement. At the time of the heist he was on government disability.

  But for all of his perceived clumsiness, Lincoln was deemed to be trustworthy by Collins, who was married to Lincoln’s sister, Millie. He had been a petty thief for much of his life and had been convicted for attempted burglary in the 1970s and 1980s. He was generally harmless but also had a temper, which could flare up from time to time. In 2013 he was convicted of battery after attacking a gang of youths with a chair because they were making a fracas on a street in Bethnal Green, the east London neighborhood where he liked to hold court with his cronies.

  These days, when not selling fish, he would often go to the baths at a community center in Bethnal Green, and gleefully dunk his bearlike body in the water. Collins was a relative, if only by marriage, and Lincoln, who was always eager to help a family member in need, agreed to help him hide millions of dollars of stolen goods.

  The Plumber

  Compared to the rest of the gang, Hugh Doyle, an affable Irish father of two with a white speckled goatee and sparkling eyes, was comparatively young, only forty-eight at the time of the burglary. He had driven a taxi and worked as a plumber and appeared to be in awe of the elder men and their storied careers.

  Doyle was a natural-born charmer and bon vivant who had a pilot’s license and liked to go yachting. Married with two young children, he was a popular neighbor in Enfield, north London, where he lived in a large semidetached brick house. Neighbors said he was always rushing from one place to another on his motorbike, servicing boilers, and engaging in chitchat. “Everyone knows Hugh,” said a neighbor. “He’s the kind of person who is always friendly, always offering a helping hand.” His Facebook page shows him piloting a variety of small planes, taking his son to the National Maritime Museum, doing indoor skydiving, and yachting with friends.

  He was friendly with Collins, Reader, and Perkins. They were drinking buddies he had met at the Harlequin Pub in Islington in the late 1990s and early 2000s, where Perkins had worked as a short-order cook after he went AWOL from prison. Doyle gave Collins a key to his plumbing workshop, behind the Wheatsheaf pub in Enfield, which prosecutors suspected the gang used to practice their drilling ahead of the burglary. Doyle said he gave Collins the key so he could “let himself in and make coffee.”

  After the burglary, the gang used his plumbing business as a meeting point and a place to store some of the jewels, including gold and gems. Collins trusted Doyle, but the others remained suspicious of him. They worried that their inner circle was getting too large and that Doyle would take some “cream” for himself.

  Catch Me If You Can

  Once Collins was identified, the Flying Squad noticed that he kept meeting with the same three or four men, in their sixties and seventies, at the same pubs and restaurants in north London and Enfield, often huddled together, whispering.

  While the tabloid media was feverishly reporting that the Pink Panthers were behind the crime, Johnson now knew the more embarrassing truth: the villains appeared to be homegrown and graying.

  The Flying Squad faced enormous pressure to ensure that the covert operation wasn’t compromised, even as the media continued to pry, and frustrated Hatton Garden jewelers clamored for the recovery of their stolen jewels. The media played an inadvertent and invaluable role by throwing the real thieves off the scent.

  In the days after the burglary, the Mirror published leaked CCTV footage of the men as they fled the premises, giving them the nicknames Mr. Ginger, Mr. Strong, Mr. Montana, the Gent, the Tall Man, and the Old Man, and expressing alarm that the gang had already fled the country. But their identities were obscured and the public did not realize that they were older criminals. While it is not clear who leaked the footage, it could have been part of a deliberate strategy by Scotland Yard to destabilize the gang.

  “We went quiet and it perpetuated even more media attention,” Turner recalled. “For me, this was fantastic, as it was taking attention away from what we were doing. And the villains were watching and thinking: the police are looking over there—they are looking at Germany, they are looking at eastern Europe, they think it’s an inside job—they are not looking at us. So we let the media run with their conspiracy theories as it worked to our advantage.”

  Keeping a lid on a covert operation that had all the delicious aspects of a homegrown thriller demanded discipline. No one could know. No other colleagues outside the Flying Squad. Not a spouse. Not a friend. No one. “The crime captured the public imagination and this was something we had to manage. There was so much interest and we had to run a covert operation, while satisfying the public and keeping what we were doing secret,” Turner said. “There were quite a few people inside Scotland Yard who knew about this and the media were trying to dig in and you didn’t know, did ya’?” he says, smiling widely. “I had concerns about the security of the operations given the massive press interest in what had happened.”1

  AS THE FLYING SQUAD patiently waited for the men to incriminate themselves, lying low was no little challenge for the Firm. They appeared to have felt reborn following the heist, and could barely contain their glee.

  Accomplishing such a sensational heist would make even a young man feel giddy, never mind a gang that had had to contend with arthritis and diabetes. It was enough to make Jones want to do cartwheels down the street. They had just pulled off what some were alre
ady calling the heist of the century, perhaps even more daring than the Great Train Robbery fifty-two years before. Every thief in Britain was marveling at it. Punters at pubs across the land were toasting to their sheer gumption, and engaged in the national parlor game of trying to guess who they were. Images of three gaping holes in the concrete wall of 88–90 Hatton Garden were being flashed on news bulletins every hour, a testament to their bravura performance. Without the curmudgeonly Reader to shush them, the rest of the liver-spotted crew began to crow.

  On May 15, on a sunny day, more than a month after the burglary, Perkins and Jones were driving in Perkins’s blue Citroën Saxo near their homes in Enfield when the two began to boast about the heist. As far as they were concerned, Scotland Yard had no idea who was behind the caper.

  Using the cockney rhyming slang word “tom”—short for “tomfoolery” or jewelry—and referring to the previous Security Express robbery Perkins had helped to pull off in the 1980s, when he and a gang of thieves stole £6 million ($9 million) from a security depot in east London, Jones was triumphant: “The biggest cash robbery in history at the time and now the biggest tom history in the fucking world, that’s what they are saying . . . And what a book you could write, fucking hell,” he said.

  Perkins, less prone to hyperbole than Jones, was equally effusive. “And what are the fucking odds, what fucking odds!” he said. “We done the best bit of work of the whole century!”

  Back at the Flying Squad headquarters, the officers surveilling the gang could barely believe what they were hearing as the boasts were picked up by the surveillance bugs in Perkins’s car. Just minutes before Jones and Perkins had begun to talk, the bugs had been activated. “Positive identification of Perkins out of home address,” reads Scotland Yard’s audio transcript, recording its license plate EN51EUD and the date and time—14:43 p.m. on May 15, 2015.2