by Dan Bilefsky
The hunter and the hunted could not have been more different. Both were determined that their “last job” would be successful and burnish their legacies. But while the gang was loud and boisterous and urged themselves along with their incessant bluster, Johnson was calm, deliberate, and meticulous. He took nothing for granted. In many ways, his entire career had prepared him for this case.
Johnson grew up in Manchester where soccer is a religion and what team you support is tantamount to choosing a lifelong spouse. Johnson proudly supported Manchester City, a one-time beleaguered east Manchester club that was founded in 1880 and had been in the shadow of its more flamboyant and successful rival, Manchester United, the one-time home of David Beckham. His was the choice of someone with a natural inclination to root for the underdog.
He grew up watching police dramas and was particularly drawn to Hill Street Blues, the pioneering 1980s American police drama that was celebrated for its portrayal of the gritty realism of policing in an inner-city precinct in a fictional midwestern city. In some ways, the precinct captain on the show, Frank Furillo, bears a striking resemblance to Johnson, though Johnson is a far more understated and self-effacing character. Unlike Johnson, who is eminently English and even-keeled, Furillo barks his commands, but he is also an avuncular figure who remains deeply committed to his officers. Johnson disliked taking credit for anything and, with no touch of false modesty, attributed even the biggest wins of his career—and there have been many—to “teamwork.”
Colleagues unanimously characterized Johnson as the kind of officer you wanted to have watching your back. In a country where police typically do not carry guns, he had intense firearms training, a prerequisite for officers facing down armed robbers and hit men. He is precise, reticent, and enigmatic. No one in the Flying Squad could recall ever seeing him lose his cool, even when lives were at stake.
Colleagues say Johnson could also be tough in his dogged push for results, and he was adept at letting others fill in the long gaps of silence in his conversation. His taciturn nature could be unsettling.
Philip Evans, a leading criminal prosecutor who has worked closely with Johnson, said he could be intimidating not simply as a result of his physical stature but also because of his forensic knowledge of London’s criminal underworld that even a seasoned criminal prosecutor would struggle to match. He was the type of leader who empowered his subordinates by giving them space to do their jobs, and, as such, commanded loyalty.2
Whatever his reserve, Johnson’s background in undercover surveillance operations was ideal preparation for his work on the Hatton Garden heist. He led a team of officers charged with tailing the men while avoiding detection and gathering enough evidence so that the gang would not be able to use their age and infirmity to claim that they could not possibly be behind such an elaborate crime. It was a cat-and-mouse game that pitted age against relative youth (Johnson was in his fifties; Reader nearly eighty), carelessness against cautiousness, a gang of thieves chasing the scent of money and a free pension against a man who wouldn’t even dare have a drink on the job and who was determined to uphold the Flying Squad’s legacy. Johnson was patient to a fault and prepared. After Perkins was fingered as a suspect, for example, Johnson read a book on the Security Express robbery Perkins had been involved with in 1983, and noted the parallels with the Hatton Garden heist. The Security Express caper also took place on an Easter Monday.
The Millennium Dome Heist
One of the highlights of Johnson’s career was the smash-and-grab robbery at the Millennium Dome exhibition center in Greenwich on November 7, 2000, an audacious crime straight out of a James Bond film.
At the time, Johnson had recently been promoted to detective inspector at the Flying Squad, and had joined the squad’s Tower Bridge office, which was investigating the crime. The operation would prove to be one of the most challenging—and successful—in the history of Scotland Yard and would provide valuable lessons for Johnson more than two decades later when Hatton Garden was targeted.
Commissioned to mark the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sprawling Dome was designed by the star architect Richard Rogers as a celebratory one million square-foot exhibition space that was both lauded for its ambition but vilified by critics as a monstrous white elephant which cost about £800 million ($1.2 billion) to build and generated massive cost overruns.
During a De Beers diamond exhibition there, a gang of six burglars had planned to use a bulldozer to smash through the Dome’s walls, and then deploy smoke bombs, sledgehammers, and nail guns to break through reinforced bulletproof glass display windows and steal £350 million (about $490 million) worth of diamonds—including the dazzling 203-carat Millennium Star diamond. With the gems in hand, they would make off in an inflatable speedboat, down the Thames. The last part of the ruse mimicked the Bond movie The World Is Not Enough, in which Bond chases an assassin on a boat to the Millennium Dome where she attempts to escape via hot air balloon.
In what was then the biggest operation in the Flying Squad’s history, a team of more than one hundred officers secretly tailed the thieves in a meticulously planned sting operation. They had already been under surveillance after the squad had received a tip-off from a paid informer that a daring robbery plot was in the works. In an operation code-named “Operation Magician,” a Flying Squad surveillance team quietly monitored the suspects for months, undetected, following them as they conducted reconnaissance at the Dome, including taking video footage of the river and the jetty, from which they planned to escape.
On the eve of the crime on November 7, 2000, Flying Squad officers switched the priceless gems with crystal replicas of the same size, and the Dome staff was replaced with armed undercover officers, who were disguised as cleaners and had their guns in black garbage bins. Johnson was part of a team of Flying Squad officers who waited outside the Dome in the nearby parking lot of a supermarket to conduct surveillance. The mission was to swoop in and arrest the thieves after they had been immobilized by the team of officers inside the Dome—assuming, of course, that the operation was a success.
“It was quite exciting, you could hear the chug chug of the bulldozer as it passed the parking lot on its way to breach into the Dome and see smoke rising from it,” Johnson recalled, emphasizing, with typical self-effacement, that he was just one of hundreds of officers at the scene.
The Flying Squad team rushed in and arrested four thieves, when they were just inches away from the gems inside a vault. If they had succeeded, it would have been the world’s largest robbery ever. Two other men were arrested on and around the River Thames as they attempted to escape in a powerboat. Not a single gunshot was fired. The theft would be immortalized by a headline in the Sun, the tabloid newspaper: “I’m Only Here for De Beers.”
Johnson said that the covert operation to catch the Millennium Dome thieves underscored what was required when conducting an undercover operation like the Hatton Garden probe. Surprising and capturing the thieves in the act was essential to bringing them to justice, as was jumping on their weaknesses, whether carelessness, an ignorance of forensics, or a tendency to boast.
“In Flying Squad ops, you try and catch suspects in the act,” he explained, noting that criminals “typically won’t talk to you after they are arrested, so you have to structure it in such a way as to amass as much evidence as possible. The idea is that when you arrest them, it is irrelevant what they do or say or don’t say because you have caught them in the act,” he added. “That is the whole ethos of the Flying Squad.”3
Johnson’s decades of crime-fighting skills now faced one last epic challenge. The hunter and the hunted could not have been more different. But each had the benefit of age and experience.
Chapter 11
The Flying Squad Is Listening
A Glimmer of Remorse?
In the weeks after the burglary, the gang talked about how they would spend their newfound fortune. If they had any moral qualms about what they had done, they d
idn’t express it to one another. If the surveillance officers listening in expected to hear even a glimmer of remorse, they were sorely disappointed. As far as the elderly gang was concerned, the safe deposit box holders they had targeted had it coming to them. Never mind that many of them were retirees their own age who had been fleeced of their life savings and pensions as a result of the burglary.
They were “rich cunts,” as far as the gang was concerned. Besides, Perkins was still fuming after discovering, with the aid of a diamond tester, that an engagement ring his daughter Terri had bought in Hatton Garden with seven small diamonds had one that was a fake. “It shows you what a con Hatton Garden is!” he had complained to his son-in-law Spencer, as if that fact gave him a moral get-out-of-jail card for stealing millions of pounds worth of gems. “Oh fucking, the most wonderful thing in the world. The diamond center of the world, that’s what they think.”1
On Thursday, May 7, 2015—general election day in Britain—Perkins was driving in his blue Citroën Saxo on his way to pick up Spencer. As usual, “Leading Britain’s Conversation” was playing on the radio. The gang had been so consumed by the heist and the stress of how they were going to unload the jewels, that the burglary had trumped politics in their frequent conversations. Perkins seemed to take a particular interest in which leader would keep interest rates low. Perhaps not surprising for a man who had spent so many years in a claustrophobic jail cell, Perkins was obsessed with real estate. Property also offered an easy way to hide stolen cash.
As Perkins drove through Enfield, past Polish specialty food shops, Turkish restaurants, and council estates, the two candidates in the election, the incumbent prime minister David Cameron, and Ed Miliband, the challenger from the left-leaning Labour Party, were about to make their final pleas to voters.
Perkins was working class to his core, and Cameron, an Old Etonian who talked as if he had a plum in his mouth, irked men of his ilk. He told Spencer that he liked to vote conservative. He also loved Margaret Thatcher, he said. She had been one tough old bird, and he still credited her for low income taxes and a muscular foreign policy—invading the Falkland Islands, showing the French and Germans who was boss, telling Brussels to bugger off—that had made Britain a country to be reckoned with.
As the newscasters discussed the election, the broadcast suddenly broke off for an update on the Hatton Garden burglary. “Some victims of the Hatton Garden burglary over Easter say their livelihoods have been ruined,” the male newscaster began. “The group representing diamond traders met earlier and advised those who weren’t fully insured that the chance of recovering their losses are very limited.” He then added, “No one has been arrested over the burglary.”2
Perkins’s breathing—picked up by the bug in the car—grew heavier. Perhaps the word “victim” jarred him, because he didn’t consider the safe deposit box holders to be victims. Could it be that an image of the gems and stolen cash hidden in stacks underneath the gang’s kitchen sinks was flashing in his mind, and, along with it, what seemed like a very short-lived pang, not exactly of remorse, but of hesitation? Was he having even a pang of moral gumption? If so, it quickly passed like a little and unexpected sneeze.
Nearby, a Flying Squad surveillance officer in an unmarked car followed him from a distance, but Perkins didn’t notice. Writing in his log, the officer noted that Perkins wore a light-colored jacket and glasses and had a white carrier bag in the car. “Newscaster mentions Hatton Garden robbery,” he jotted down, adding, “Sound of movement within vehicle.”3 The bug was picking up Perkins’s every utterance.
“Shut up,” Perkins suddenly said at the radio, dismissing the report in a barely discernible and husky whisper.4
PERKINS REMAINED OBLIVIOUS that Scotland Yard was listening in, and his tone changed to a more congenial note as his car arrived to pick up his son-in-law Spencer. Spencer was the apparent favorite among his four sons-in-law, judging by the frequency with which they met. Spencer and his daughter Vicky lived just a few blocks away from his small, compact house in Enfield, in the same north London neighborhood. Now that he had come into all this cash, he seemed intent on making up for some of those lost years when he had been nicked and absent while in prison.
Spencer had barely closed the door behind him when Perkins began a tirade on one of his favorite subjects: how Britain was being invaded by foreigners. It was a frequent topic on talk radio and one that was fueled by the debate over whether Britain should leave the European Union. Enfield, Perkins’s neighborhood, was just one of many in London where immigration had transformed the social fabric; only 35 percent of residents were now white Britons, and the local residents spoke 178 languages, among them Turkish, Somali, and Polish.5
“You know the Chinaman’s house opposite, do you ever notice it’s a dirty house, you never seen anyone going in or coming out of it, that is a dirty house,” Perkins said, his voice suffused with disgust.
“No, yes,” Spencer replied.
“It’s up for sale because Terri Googled it—it’s half a million pound,” Perkins, who had long dabbled in real estate, said with grudging admiration.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“You still you got to have 50 grand to put down on a half a million pound property,” Perkins said, calculating how much it would cost to buy each of his daughters a house. “Then there’s the fucking mortgage.”
“Well it’s like that Noel Gallagher,” Spencer replied, alluding to the Oasis drummer whose name must’ve sounded alien to an old-school thief who had spent a good chunk of the 1990s in prison and for whom Tom Jones or the Beatles were contemporaries. But Spencer didn’t seem to notice or care. “He was talking about that boy who left One Direction,” he continued, referring to the defection of singer Zayn Malik from the wildly popular British boy band, whose members could be Perkins’s grandchildren. “He says he’s an idiot. He says if he thinks his 20 million is going to do him for the rest of his life, he’s in for a shock. ’Cause once you’ve had a taste of the high life, you can’t go back.”
Was Perkins smiling inwardly? Did Spencer realize that the man sitting next to him would soon have his cut of millions in cash, gold, and jewels? Perkins’s voice betrayed no change; he was behaving as if nothing had happened. He was adept at maintaining a poker face, honed during nearly four decades of facing down police, judges, and fellow prisoners. It had kept him out of trouble on the inside and made him a dependable member of his Firm since he would never blab or snitch on anyone.
“Yes, that is true,” Perkins offered.
Spencer, warming to his theme, continued. “You can’t go back, that’s what kills people if you’ve had it all and you lose it all,” he said. “If you think you got a big family like yours, four daughters, eight grandchildren, whatever it is, it is all the same. Even if you buy your four daughters a house, that’s four mill, depending where they want to live, then you got to give them some money to maintain that.”
“Yeah, but I can’t see how the mortgage rate can keep going up though,” Perkins replied. “I can’t see it. This mortgage rate has only got to move, which it will do and fuck me, there will be a lot of people in trouble. Well, if wages don’t go up in comparison, you know.” He added, “You might as well live in your car.” It was an astute macroeconomic analysis from a man who had somehow managed to accumulate a large real estate portfolio—even from behind bars—and whose love of his family was perhaps surpassed only by his other great love: cold, hard cash.
“You off to vote?” Perkins asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah.”
“Who do you vote for?”
“Tory. Child of Thatcher, ain’t I.”
“Well, I wish she was back in,” Perkins said approvingly, ignoring the fact that the Iron Lady had died two years earlier at the age of eighty-seven.
“She was a big fan of the old what’s its name, getting on the property ladder,” Spencer said, referring to the 1980s when Thatcher had introduced tax breaks so that workin
g-class people like them could buy their state-subsidized council apartments, with the aim of creating a nation of homeowners and stimulating the economy.
Perkins indicated his approval. Like many working-class criminals, he liked her toughness. Like him, she was self-made. He suggested that Cameron was weak by comparison. “Well, you have more confidence in her if she had to meet Putin in a row or a war, wouldn’t you?” Perkins asked.
“Ah definitely,” Spencer replied. “I’ll see ya’ tomorrow.”
“See ya’ later.”6
For the Flying Squad officer pursuing him, the discussion—boy bands aside—was instructive. Spencer seemed awfully intent on discussing a big purchase like a house, prompting the questions: Was he in on it? Did he know about the burglary? His suggestion that Perkins would need £4 million ($6 milllion) to buy homes for his four daughters seemed like a pretty fat wad of cash for a man who lived in a small house himself, and was only fairly recently out of jail and retired. But for now, the officer decided to omit that from his notes.
A Fatherly Villain
Perkins appeared to have death and money on his mind a few days later when speaking with Terri in the Citroën Saxo on an apparent shopping excursion. He was worried that his wastrel sons-in-law would try to get their grubby hands on his jewels, gold, and cash. It didn’t help that Terri was egging him on.
“It’s been too long now they got comfortable, Courtney and Laura, because you have fucking paid for everything,” she said, referring to two of her sisters.
“No, it’s not happening anymore.”
“I am glad that you are coming to your senses.”7
For the Flying Squad surveillance officer tailing and eavesdropping on Perkins, the family banter was, at least, more interesting than watching Perkins scarf down fish and chips. He aimed his digital camera. Click. Click. Click. Click. Terri wore an oversized blue blouse with red diamonds, and a beige sweater, her peroxide blond hair pulled back with a clip. She had a fake Gucci purse hanging on her shoulder, and clutched a banana peel in her right hand. She looked worn out, tired, and stressed. Was she, too, in on it? After all, criminality often ran in families. Judging by the frequency with which Perkins met her, she seemed to be his favorite daughter. The two spoke often and Perkins took delight in driving her to work.
