The Last Job

by Dan Bilefsky

  Perkins continued his rant. “Everything that I’ve got I am looking after. I am trying to fucking invest it for you lot when I am dead.”8

  Now that his pension was taken care of, it appeared he wanted assurances from Terri that the rest of his newly acquired fortune wouldn’t be squandered. The two marveled that the pound was stronger than the euro, and credited the conservative government. Perkins planned to pay for Terri to go on a last-minute holiday in Portugal so the gang could use her house to divvy up the jewels. The strength of the euro was proving a good excuse to get her out of the country.

  “It’s 1.45 now you know,” Perkins said approvingly, before returning to the subject of his will.

  He had made up his mind: When he died, each daughter would receive £100,000 ($150,000). For a man who had just helped to steal millions in jewels, it wasn’t exactly overgenerous.

  But he wanted assurances from Terri that they would respect his wishes. “When I die, mum might change the rules because it all goes to mum. But I want a straight answer now. When I die whatever wealth I got, we just say it’s hundred grand each alright; I want my four daughters to have a hundred grand each because I would not rest in my grave.”9

  He added, “And if your wishes ain’t going to be carried out when you’re dead what’s the fucking point of being on earth!”10

  For the Flying Squad officers monitoring the conversation, it was not clear whether Perkins, every inch an old-timer when it came to his thievery, had obeyed the old-school criminal code of keeping “business” and family separate. He was obviously close with his daughter and would want to protect her. But all the sudden banter about money, continental vacations, and six-figure inheritances sounded deeply suspicious.

  Bickering and Conniving

  They began to fight among themselves over who got what. It had been such a mad scramble out of the vault that Perkins and Jones, in particular, were worried that they had been stiffed. Brian Reader and Carl Wood, meanwhile, sulked at home, out of the action.

  Friday was their favorite day to meet, the day when most of the heist had been planned. So being creatures of habit, about a month after the burglary, Perkins picked up Jones in the Saxo on a Friday afternoon for what was becoming a daily ritual to chat, gossip, boast, and scheme about what to do with the jewels and to bitch about the others. It was about 11 a.m. The car, however cramped, seemed to be their favored venue to discuss business, perhaps because they calculated that moving around would help them avoid detection. It also got them out of the house, and away from their inquisitive wives. It was a foolhardy calculation.

  On that day, however, they had other things on their minds. Perkins was speeding out of Enfield and the two traveled west through Southgate, in north London, a middle-class enclave with a subway station that looks like a space ship. Two retirees in a car, who had just managed to pull off the largest burglary in English history. But their initial giddiness had given way to anxiety. They were both fuming that they had been cheated out of the most valuable jewels during the mayhem that followed the heist.

  “I wound up with none,” Perkins said to Jones, referring to packets of large diamonds in several of the boxes. “He got the cream, fuck me, there’s a lot of rings there,” Jones replied, referring to Collins, whom they had decided would keep the bulk of the stolen goods, hidden in his house in Islington. They had divvied up the rest in little parcels that they stashed in, among other places, pots in their kitchen cabinets in their homes across London.

  Jones, for his part, had buried some of the loot under a tombstone in a verdant Victorian cemetery near his house in Enfield. The rest he had put in a loft at his brother’s house in a bag concealed by a plank of wood. When he went up to check on it in the days after the heist, he told Perkins, he nearly had a heart attack when his nephew Paul came up behind him, with his girlfriend in tow, and asked him, “What you got up there?” For a show-off like Jones, remaining mum about what he and the others had managed to pull off must have been sheer torture.

  Now Jones and Perkins tried to parse what they could sell, fence, or melt down. “A lot of it is sellable,” Perkins said.

  “Sellable, yes. Necklaces all with stones, then you got the necklace with the fucking big emeralds in it with the matching earrings. There are hundreds of hundreds of rings,” Jones said hopefully.

  “We could chop all,” Perkins agreed, suggesting the method of removing the stones and fencing the jewels to conceal their origins.

  “Yeah, chop all that,” Jones replied. But he was worried he had been shafted and that the carrier bag where he had put his stash had not been as filled up as the others. “The gear he give me I’d call them monkey rings,” he complained to Perkins. “I said, ‘What about that? Put some other in here!’ There was a big heap, you know.”11

  The seemingly hapless Collins, who could barely stay awake during the heist, appeared to have been more than alert when it came to deciding how to apportion the booty. Now, they wondered, was his sweet demeanor all just a ruse to dupe them out of their fair share?

  What to Do with the Haul?

  As with any large haul, the biggest challenge was how to dispose of it and turn the valuables into cash. Within a matter of hours after the burglary, nearly every jeweler in Hatton Garden had heard about the heist and so reselling it in the Garden—often the usual fate for stolen jewelry—was fraught with risk. They could try to spirit it out of the country, though that was also risky, or to melt it down and resell at least some of it as gold bars. They decided it was better to hide at least part of it and then lie low, or at least as low as was humanly possible, given their somewhat understandable pride in their accomplishment.

  Tiny and easily concealed, diamonds have long been coveted by thieves seeking to move cash without being traced. Sew a ten-carat £1 million ($1.5 million) into a pair of underwear, fly out of the country, and the gem could quickly vanish into a global supply chain of millions of diamonds that extends from Hatton Garden to New York and Tel Aviv.

  The gang’s stash contained millions of dollars in both uncut and polished diamonds, leaving them with a few options. The uncut diamonds could be smuggled out of Britain and sent to cutting centers in Gujarat, Tel Aviv, or New York, where characteristics such as weight and size could be transformed out of all recognition. Even without that disguise, the chances of finding stolen diamonds once they left the country was very slim.

  The dozens of tiny bags of glittering polished diamonds provided a bigger challenge, however, since some high-end diamond traders have their diamonds laser inscribed with a name or number, as a way to identify and authenticate the stone. But while the identifier, a sort of serial number for diamonds, could help police trace a diamond, there were unscrupulous diamond polishers in the Garden who knew how to make an inscription vanish. At the same time, there was no central global database that listed diamond ownership. A receipt from Cartier or Tiffany wouldn’t help a desperate victim if her diamonds were cut, polished, and sold under a different guise.

  Even as they discussed how to conceal the origins of the stolen gems, the gang was also mulling a way to unload them. One option was to find a criminal courier to spirit the jewels and gold out of the country. If they ended up at a dealer in Antwerp, or at a cutting shop in Gujarat, they would be harder to trace. An heirloom brooch made of rubies could be dismantled, its jewels ripped out and then recirculated in the Garden for resale by an illegal trader. Their stacks of gold necklaces, earrings, and rings could be sent to a foreign port like Rotterdam, where the gold could be melted down by a criminal trader. Or perhaps at a future date, it would be less of a hassle to melt down the gold at a scrap yard closer to home.

  Another option to conceal such a large and high-profile haul was to bury it and hide it for a few months until the frenzy from the heist had died down. That option appealed to the adventurous-minded Jones. An avid consumer of crime thrillers and Hollywood heist films, he had already set his sights on a picturesque Victorian cemetery in Enfield
, about ten minutes from his house. A reconnaissance trip there had given him the idea to bury part of his stash under the gray granite gravestone of his partner Valerie Hart’s father. Had she known that Jones would be disturbing her father’s grave, she likely would have not appreciated it.

  No strangers to unloading stolen goods, the men also needed to find a fence, or intermediary on the black market, who would buy the jewels and not ask too many questions. That task fell largely to Perkins, who, with his grandfatherly demeanor, was adept at remaining invisible. The fence, in turn, could sell the stolen goods back to an unknowing seller.

  With their shadowy handshake deals and paperless contracts, the world’s diamond centers—Antwerp, New York, Tel Aviv, and Hatton Garden itself—all provided opportunities to find a fence who would buy the stolen goods. All that was left was for the Firm to find someone they could trust. Thieves typically lose up to 90 percent of the value of the original jewels when selling stolen items. But if a stash is big enough, such a hefty discount can be offset by the instant gratification of cold cash.

  While Jones and Perkins appeared adamant about cutting out Reader, they nevertheless relented somewhat and, in the end, let him remain among their inner circle, cognizant, perhaps, that his contacts and experience laundering gold and stolen goods was now invaluable as the gang struggled with how to unload their goods. After all, Reader had played a pivotal role in fencing stolen gold during one of the most audacious robberies of the 1980s, even if that had eventually landed him behind bars.

  After a group of thieves in 1983 had stolen £26 million ($38 million) worth of gold bars at Brink’s-Mat, the security company at Heathrow Airport, Reader’s role was to help convert the gold into cash after it was smuggled back into the country from the Netherlands and Belgium, sometimes hidden in Tupperware containers in trucks or the gas tanks of large Grenada and Austin sedans.

  Reader would later recall how he met associates like “Little Legs” Larkins at a Turkish bath in Paddington, in central London, where the two would discuss where to sell the gold in Hatton Garden. Reader would receive half a percent commission on each shipment. He wasn’t too bothered. He was a frugal sort12 and he was careful to not attract suspicion by spending too much of his cut. Reader had developed key skills—and contacts—during the Brink’s-Mat gold-laundering operation that would now prove helpful. It made sense for the other men to keep him around, as long as he didn’t try to bully them into getting too big a piece of the action.

  Master of None

  At another meeting at the Castle pub, the Firm discussed the challenges they faced. In an apparent nod to his expertise, Reader was present. But Wood was out of the game, judging by his absence at the meeting and the frequency with which the crew castigated him; he would not get a single pence.

  As Jones and Perkins drove around London discussing how to divvy up the spoils—with Neil Diamond, Boy George, or talk radio amped up on the car radio—they seemed barely able to contain their glee that Reader’s decision to leave in the middle of the heist had knocked him off of his perch. Their joy in his suffering felt as relentless as the drill they had used to break through the reinforced concrete.

  Now that Reader had shown himself to be lily-livered and craven, the others who had persevered and now had millions in gold and jewels to show for it mercilessly mocked him for his stupidity and fecklessness.

  The men already resented Reader for his cockiness, and for never offering to buy a pint when they went to the Castle. Perkins and Jones were stewing with animus toward him. He lived in a house that looked like a country manor. He thought his long rap sheet somehow made him superior. A bit of a “wide boy,” as the expression went in working-class slang to describe an untrustworthy hustler. Now was their chance to kick the old fart back down to earth. It turned out that this group of aging thieves could be as vicious as American teenage girls. Provided, of course, the object of their scorn wasn’t listening.

  “Brian must be having a nightmare,” Perkins mused. “I hope he fucking suffers.”

  “Fucking wanker, regardless of his age,” Jones added.

  “Fucking wanker,” Perkins repeated. Perkins told Jones he was aggrieved that Reader behaved as if he outranked him, even though Perkins had been present at the 1983 Security Express robbery, a holdup that had yielded £6 million ($9 million) in cash—the largest cash robbery at that time—and for which he had been sentenced to twenty-two years behind bars. A badge of honor among thieves. Reader even decided where the gang would take breaks from plotting to get a bite to eat. When Perkins suggested Delhi Grill, favored by the rest of the gang, Reader would sometimes veto it. “He only has toast for lunch,” Perkins raged. “Fucking lunch!”

  Perkins fulminated that there were three “bits of work” he had done with Reader over twelve years and he was finally ready to tell “the Guv’nor” he had wrecked them all. “I am going to say ‘You fucked every one of them up Brian, and the last one you walked away.’ ” As if Reader was in the car with them, he admonished him, “You gave up being a thief ten years ago you cunt!”13

  Jones had been invaluable during the heist due to his Houdini-like physical flexibility and his impressive athletic endurance. But Reader appears to have done little to conceal that he considered Jones to be a fabulist and a blabbermouth. As far as Jones was concerned, he had been patronizing him for months. Now that Reader had been demoted from the top to the bottom of the gang, it was Jones’s turn to vent and get even.

  And Jones raged, “He was a thief forty years ago, they never took no chances, had it all their own way. Like all them thieves then.” He ridiculed Reader as a friendless “old ponce” who spent all his time waxing lyrical about the past. In the pantheon of insults from men of their class and generation, “ponce”—an effeminate man—was up there. Criticizing Reader for his nostalgia was a rich rebuke coming from Jones, who spent ample time bragging about past exploits, imagined and real, to whomever would listen.

  Jones mused that Reader was past his “sell-by date” and could no longer live off his past glories as one of London’s most talented break-in men. Never mind that Reader’s plan had worked, minus, perhaps, Collins driving his own car to the burglary.

  “I said to him the other day, you’re 40 years behind, Brian. You can see what a selfish man he’s been,” he told Perkins, noting that Reader had become “defeated.”

  A sprightly sixty-seven-year-old, Perkins noted that at least he acknowledged his age and that he had fallen behind the latest in break-in technology during his long years in prison. But not Reader. “Dan, I’m out of date, I’m behind, but I know it and I admit it. He don’t, does he?”14

  He ended his assessment with one final flourish: “Fucking wanker!”

  ON FRIDAY, MAY 15, Perkins and Jones set out with Collins behind the wheel of that very same white E200 series Mercedes used in the burglary. The gang was on its way to pick up Reader, ostensibly to discuss their ongoing efforts to find someone to launder the jewels. It was about six weeks since the burglary and the men were growing more anxious. They didn’t want to deal with Reader, judging by the constant verbal takedowns of their former “Master,” but he was still acting as an unofficial adviser of sorts, apparently eager to get his cut.

  As Jones entered the car, the Flying Squad activated the listening device and Collins’s dog could be heard barking loudly. Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” was blasting from the radio. The music was deafening.

  Back in the car, the men turned immediately to the unfinished business of the stash and who was hoarding what. “You got any packets of diamonds in your parcel?” Perkins asked Collins nonchalantly.

  “No, I haven’t, no. I’m not saying no, no, I don’t know,” Collins replied. His ability to speak was suddenly failing him as Jones and Perkins circled him suspiciously.

  Even without their nagging concern that Collins would steal part of the stash for himself, he was going deaf, slowing down, and becoming increasingly forgetful. Perkins seemed
worried he might be in over his head. To make things worse, Collins’s mother-in-law was in the hospital and his doting wife Millie was away. Heist or no heist, the demands of old age had not suddenly evaporated.

  “Where’s Millie—Clacton?” Perkins asked, referring to a seaside resort in Essex, about a two-hour drive from London.

  “Her mum’s in hospital in Colchester, she’s gone down to visit her,” Collins replied.

  “So you’re on your own?” Perkins asked, sounding overcome by sympathy. “You’re upset about being on your own, ain’t ya?” he added, ribbing his friend about his growing dependency in old age on his wife.

  “No I prefer it on my own an’ all, all the time,” Collins replied, with more than a hint of false bravado, exerting his independence, even as his intensifying aches and pains had made him more and more in thrall to Millie. He himself had gone to the hospital that same day for a checkup.

  “I told ya’ I went and had a medical today. I had to count from 20 backwards, the months of the year backwards,” he said.

  “I couldn’t do that backwards months of the year—December, November,” Jones replied.

  “November, October, September,” Collins said slowly and sto­ically, seeming eager to show off that his memory was not as bad as the others thought, that he was no “wombat-thick old cunt,” as Jones had described him to the others.

  Collins was about to go through a red light when he suddenly noticed a car edging up behind them, perhaps one of the small army of police surveillance officers who had been tailing them for weeks. He slammed on the breaks. Was Operation Spire about to hit a snag?