by Dan Bilefsky
“Fuck me look who’s behind me!” he said, a frantic edge in his voice.
“Old Bill,” Jones replied, using a Cockney expression for police, derived from the 1950s when the London County Council registered all police, fire, and ambulance vehicles with the letters BYL.
“I think it is, it’s got the colors up,” he said, referring to the sirens on the top of the car, “but I don’t know if it’s them or not.”15
Considering what they had done, the men had, until now, appeared remarkably sanguine about the prospect of the police tailing them, lulled into complacency by their false confidence, fanned by the British media, that Scotland Yard believed the burglary was an inside job. Nevertheless, the question of whether they were being followed by police became a recurring leitmotif of their conversations, and the wailing sirens of passing ambulances appeared to give them heart palpitations. Jones and Perkins had even discussed whether to pay £900 ($1,350) to install a radar detector in the Citroën that could warn them if they were being followed. Little did they know they were being listened to as they spoke.
Jones told Perkins, “Oh, John, my nephew, my niece’s son, said ‘I got a good tool for you if you want it.’ I said what is it? He said ‘fit it in your car, you can hide it, hide the aerial, it’s like a little black box like that and it will go bip, bip, bip, bip, bip . . . old bill 20 feet away from you, plain clothes, anything. They use Tetra radio,’ ” he said, referring to the digital police radio scanner that could only be monitored by other police. “It goes up to half a mile, old bill in the vicinity.” He added, “900 quid to have it fitted to your motor.”
“Fuck me,” Perkins replied, approvingly.16
For now, the fear of being caught was momentarily averted as the police car sped away.
THE GANG CONTINUED on their journey to pick up Reader, driving from the gritty environs of Enfield to his courtly home in Dartford, Kent. They kept circling back to what an old and cranky has-been he had become.
“It’s old age, creeps upon everyone,” Collins observed.
“He’s really old now,” Jones replied. “He’s really old now Brian, I look at him sitting there an old man, ’cause he is an old man, ain’t he?”
Reader seemed pathetic. Even he had acknowledged to the others that the heist had aged him.
“As he said to me the other day, ‘I’ve aged five years in the last year,’ ” Collins recalled. “I said you have, we all keep talking about you.”17
The car pulled up to Reader’s sprawling house. Reader suddenly appeared, dressed in a moth-eaten sweater, and slowly walked toward the vehicle. When he got in, the men abruptly changed the subject and started to talk about the weather. Whatever warmth there was between Reader and the others had become as elusive as the English sun.
“They forecasted rain,” said Collins.
“What tonight?” Reader replied.
“No, this afternoon.”
An old Bentley passed them, and Reader, who had dabbled as a used car salesman when not breaking into safes, suddenly became animated. “Fuck me, that’s an old car, ain’t it. What fucking year is that?”
“About 86, ain’t it,” Jones replied.
“Fucking hell that’s near my age,” Perkins said.
Jones noted that he had recently stopped by a car showroom to check out what new car he should buy with his newfound riches and had seen an old Rolls Royce, which had logged sixty thousand miles and which its aging owner, a grand lady, hoped to sell.
“Yeah, he can give the woman five grand for it,” Reader offered.
“You don’t know what one it is but they are common as fuck, there are loads of ’em,” Jones barked back at him. “You’re way behind Brian,” he said, with contempt in his voice. “You’re 40 years behind Brian.”
The men drove around Reader’s sleepy, suburban tree-lined neighborhood for about an hour, apparently thinking it safer to discuss their next moves from inside the car. Then they dropped Reader off back at his house. He didn’t dare ask about his cut from the heist, though it must have been weighing heavily on his mind.
“I’ll see you next week, alright?” Reader said.
“Be careful,” Jones replied.
“Yeah, alright, you’ve got me number,” Reader said.
“You know where we are, come over our way,” Jones added, sounding annoyed at the extra fifty-minute drive it took to pick Reader up when the three of them lived near one another in north London.
“Fucking come over your way?” Reader replied, his voice laced with fury.
“Well, you expect the rest of us to . . .” Perkins added. But Reader cut him off.
“I’ll tell you what I don’t want another poxy fucking Indian!” Reader fumed, the conversation once again eclipsed by their perennial argument over where to have lunch or dinner. “We’ll have a Chinese.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Jones replied, the sarcasm and bile oozing out of his mouth. The door slammed.
Before Reader had barely made his way up the driveway toward his house, the three remaining burglars exploded with contempt.
“That cunt, he doesn’t stop digging me that cunt, I’ll tell ya,” Jones said, sounding exasperated.
“Yeah, he does, doesn’t he?” Perkins said.
“Fuck me he tells me what he’s done. He tells everyone at that cafe what he done 30 years ago, ‘We done this, done that,’ ” Jones raged. “Fuck him!”
They returned to the subject of his stinginess.
“He was saying that he paid half the bill the other night with his daughter. He never said go half with us!” Collins said, adding his voice to the Reader-bashing session.18
Jones, apparently emboldened, decided it was time to call Reader’s loyalty into question, once and for all. He told the others that when he was in prison at Maidstone, in Kent, back in the 1990s, another prisoner, Bill Barrett, a seasoned villain who was eleven years Reader’s senior and who had been Reader’s mentor when he was a young thief straight out of the army, had warned Jones that Reader was not to be trusted.
“I’m gonna tell you something and that’s something you don’t know about him, right. Bill Barrett pulled me in the nick, I told you, didn’t I?” he said, using the Cockney word for prison. “He said I don’t have it with him no more because he writes statements when he got nicked on one of his things, he had written down a load of things he got nicked for, you don’t know that, do you?”
The others listened in stunned silence. Reader had been reduced to a doddering old man during the heist. He was miserly and didn’t buy pints at the pub. He was cranky, a know-it-all, and full of himself. But a snitch? A grass? Someone who could now sell them out, just as they were so tantalizingly close to finally getting rich from all those years of scheming and plotting?
Among the gang, Reader was the one who had been careful to avoid being detected. Now, Jones was adamant that Reader was the one they needed to worry about.
“That’s what Bill Barrett told me about him. See Bill Barrett fell out with him, ’cause I was next to Bill Barrett in Maidstone, I was deep in chat with him,” he said. “See Brian makes out what he is, he can come across here saying certain things. But he doesn’t abide by them, does he?”
“Na,” Perkins replied, finally interrupting his soliloquy.
But Collins, ever the mediator between the squabbling geriatrics, defended Reader. “You know he don’t write out statements, use your fucking loaf,” he said, furrowing his ample brows in Jones’s direction and using the Cockney rhyming slang for loaf of bread, meaning head.
“I’m not saying that he did write some,” Jones replied, sheepishly. “I’m just telling you what Bill Barrett said to me. It might be a load of bullocks.”
“He’s out of date,” Perkins replied. Reader had fucked up every “bit of work,” he repeated. “Every single thing.”19
Jones recalled that Reader had almost cost them the job because he didn’t understand that special diamond-tipped industrial dril
ls could be used to penetrate reinforced concrete. He had initially thought that the concrete at 88–90 Hatton Garden was impenetrable!
“I said to him, ‘how can you work out that the cement is upgraded from one building to the next,’ ” Perkins recalled.
“Fucking hell,” said Collins, bragging that, from the start, he had suggested that the diamond-tipped drills could breach even the walls outside of Parliament. “I was saying that from the word go, these walls are built to put outside the houses of parliament. They’re fucking more or less bomb proof, you can’t have much stronger than them.”
“He was saying it would be harder than that, how could it be?” Perkins added. “Common sense, that’s all you got to have is common sense.”
Perkins suggested it was Reader’s risk aversion that had spooked them halfway through the burglary, prompting them to rush out of the vault before they had finished going through only a fraction of the 999 boxes. “We should be sitting here with half a billion pounds!” he said, “with chauffeur driven Bentleys—one for every day!”
Jones berated Reader again for abandoning the heist halfway through, for not believing in them, for succumbing to an old man’s crabby defeatism.
“He’s a fucking idiot by doing that,” Perkins continued.
“Common sense tells ya, that he never thought we would get in,” Collins said, piling on, apparently having overcome his previous instinct to defend his old friend.
“No, he didn’t,” said Jones.20
“There’s only one thing that you’d give that up for, one reason ever, you must of thought that we would never get in, it’s the only reason you wouldn’t come back, innit?” Collins added.
“And Carl copied him,” Jones said, referring to Carl Wood, their ailing, debt-ridden, bespectacled accomplice, who had also abandoned the burglary halfway through, earning the others’ contempt in a measure that perhaps even surpassed their disdain for Reader.
“Carl’s arsehole fell out,” Jones said.
“His arsehole never went, he thought we’d never get in,” Collins said, correcting him, adding, “ ’cause even the cunt, I said ‘give it another half hour fuck we’ve done everything we can do, if we can’t get in, we won’t be able to get in, will we?’ ”
“And we did!” Perkins suddenly intoned with a note of triumphalism.
“Never give up, never give up,” Collins said.
Giddy once again at the recollection of infiltrating the vault, Perkins mused that he wished he had taken a selfie inside the building, to commemorate their moment of triumph, and to rub it in Brian Reader’s face.
“I wish I had a photo, Dan,” he said to Jones. “I know you and Basil was inside. I wish I had a photo to show me sat outside on my own, right, doing what I had to do to say to him, ‘that’s where you left me Brian, look all on my own.’ True, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Collins.21
“Fucking true,” Perkins repeated. Reader, he continued, had betrayed the most coveted honor among thieves by walking away from the very Firm of villains he himself had assembled. “He went home,” he said, still in disbelief.
“Where it started going wrong,” Collins replied, “he was quite content to let the other geezer take over,” noting that Reader had only been too happy to relinquish his leadership position in the Firm to Basil, to abandon the heist before their mission had been accomplished, and to leave it to Basil and the rest of the gang to brave the risk of getting arrested.
Now that Reader had been irreparably demoted, the enigmatic Basil had supplanted him as the one who deserved admiration and respect. After all, he had duplicated the keys to the building in order to let them in, even if he had accidentally triggered the alarm.
“The only one who could get nicked was poor old Basil on the key bit, you know what I mean?” said Collins.
Reader was a foolhardy has-been, Jones and Perkins replied. He had been upstaged by Basil, a novice thief.
“Brian stopped being a thief,” Perkins lamented, wielding the ultimate insult among the criminal fraternity, where having the “bottle” for a job was akin to having blood running through your veins.
“Well,” Jones replied, “Basil learned in fucking two months what he had learned in forty years.”
“I still don’t know why Basil let that fucking alarm go off,” Collins said, adding that Basil had made up some excuse and that he struggled to rebuff him since he was such a canny bullshitter.
“Well, I think he made a rip there,” Perkins replied. “We were lucky.”
“He ain’t a liar, is he?” Jones added, defending Basil. They had apparently bonded during the burglary.
Content with their evisceration of Reader, they turned back to Wood, imaging that his decision to back out of the heist had now reduced him to violent and inconsolable rages. As it was, Wood was heavily in debt and suffered from Crohn’s disease, which made him lethargic, bloated, and prone to sudden bouts of diarrhea. During the planning of the heist, he would whine constantly about his aches and pains. Now that he had foolishly abandoned them, his suffering seemed to cheer them up.
“He’s had nightmares and everything, he’s punched his old woman up there,” Perkins said, mocking Wood, whom he noted was now reduced to working for minimum wage doing odd jobs while the rest of the Firm counted their millions.
“Yeah, yeah, fucking going to work for twenty, thirty quid a day, forty quid a day, broke his finger the other day, fell down a ladder.”
Perkins and Jones imagined him coming to beg them for a loan. “Oh, can I have a bit of money for some shopping?” Perkins said, ridiculing Wood.
“Oh, I need a bit of money for a bit of puff,” Jones joined in, his voice trailing off, before he quickly added, as if addressing Wood, “Fuck off!”
Jones, who had recruited his old mate Wood into the Firm, now blithely called him a “lunatic.” He berated himself for failing to realize that his old and dear friend was so spineless.
“Yeah, well that’s my fault with him anyway I said to him ‘Stay there, if we get nicked at least we can hold our heads up that we had a last go, the last fling,’ and he goes fucking right and what’s he do? Blows a raspberry!”22
Reader and Wood, Collins said, had allowed their personal problems to overwhelm them.
“Fucking problems,” Jones said, clearly exasperated.
“We all got fucking problems,” Collins replied.
Little did they know that they would soon have bigger problems than they realized.
Chapter 12
The “Cut Up”
Laundering the Jewels
THE GANG FELT RESTLESS. THE ARGUMENTS OVER how to split the proceeds and launder the jewels were becoming more and more heated. The plan was to sell the haul for cash but they still hadn’t figured out exactly how. Perkins was eager to melt down some of his gold. “That could be my pension,” he told the others, his expressed goal all along.1
The men needed to be patient, but their nerves were fraying. One false move could prove their undoing. Befitting old-economy thieves, the men stashed away piles of diamond necklaces, emeralds, gold chains, and cash in an assortment of places far less secure and high tech than the safe deposit they had managed to infiltrate.
But they wanted to consolidate the stash in one place, to make sure, among other things, that it wasn’t stolen by rival thieves. This led to another big mistake: Kenny Collins—forgetful and not particularly reliable—was given a key role in the logistics operation, making him the caretaker for the bulk of the loot. They were senior citizens prone to afternoon naps and apparently had forgiven him for falling asleep on the job.
Collins, who had hidden some of the gems in a casserole dish in his kitchen cupboard, arranged for the eventual transfer of the stolen jewels—or “gear”—to be handled by his friend William “Billy the Fish” Lincoln. A part-time fishmonger, Bill enjoyed going to Roman baths to expunge the smell of fish from his doughy body, and suffered from, among other things, incontinence an
d sleep apnea. He, in turn, hired his nephew John Harbinson, whose role would be to transport the gear in his taxi to a handover point—a parking lot outside Hugh Doyle’s plumbing workshop in back of the Wheatsheaf pub in Enfield.
Even as the men contemplated their newfound riches, Perkins and Jones were feeling nervous that the circle of thieves involved in the heist had become too large. Someone could blab. As it was, Jones and Perkins had been startled to discover Lincoln had been lurking around Collins’s house after the caper, with the jewels so close by. He told Jones that he had complained to Reader about it.
“I said to Brian, I said, ‘ere, how does this fucking Bill know about anything,’ ” Perkins told Jones. “Bill, he said Bill. I said the fucking geezer round Kenny’s, Bill.” He added, “Bill has wound up with the fucking gear . . . I said all them big stones are already gone.”2
Then there was Hugh Doyle, the loquacious Irishman, who had lent Collins a key to his plumbing workshop in Enfield, ostensibly so the gang could practice their drilling there. His prodigious gift of gab now seemed to be a curse. Doyle seemed to worship the older men and was impressed by their involvement in some of the most daring crimes of the century. But the respect wasn’t reciprocated. Perkins and Jones thought him a bigmouth and an overfriendly dolt.
“Don’t fucking leave them bags with Hughie,” Perkins warned Jones. They were discussing how and when they would consolidate the jewels, believing that Doyle would inevitably steal some of it.
“He’s a complete cunt. You’ve got to treat everyone as the enemy,”3 Jones said.
“You wouldn’t know if someone’s took a stone out of these parcels.”4
Perkins was particularly annoyed that he had managed to carry only one wheelie bin stuffed with jewels up the stairs at 88–90 Hatton Garden. But given his diabetes, he was thankful to have even come out of there standing.
