FROM THE MAGAZINE
March 2016 Issue

How a Ragtag Gang of Retirees Pulled Off the Biggest Jewel Heist in British History

The police and public gasped at the audacity of the Great Hatton Garden heist of 2015, where millions in cash and jewels were taken from an underground vault in London’s diamond district. Mark Seal investigates the unorthodox daring of the perpetrators—and the high-tech investigation that snared them.
Image may contain Human Person Head and Face
GOLDEN YEARS
Brian Reader, Daniel Jones, Hugh Doyle, John “Kenny” Collins, Terry Perkins, Carl Wood, and William Lincoln after their May 2015 arrests, in London.
Photo-Illustration by Sean McCabe; By Carl Court/Hatton Garden Properties Ltd./Getty Images (Background), from Metropolitan Police Service/AFP (Doyle, Lincoln, Wood), from Metropolitan Police/PA Wire/A.P. Images (All others).

Prologue

‘It required a team with diverse skills…. It took ingenuity and brute force,” reporter Declan Lawn speculated on BBC television three weeks after what was already being called “the greatest heist in British history,” the audacious April 2015 ransacking of safe-deposit boxes in Hatton Garden, London’s diamond district. The crime was indeed epic. So much cash, jewelry, and other valuables had been taken that the loot, worth up to $300 million according to estimates at the time, had been hauled out of the vault in giant trash containers on wheels. Lawn demonstrated the acrobatic feats the gang must have used, and London’s newspapers were filled with artists’ renderings of the heist, featuring hard-bodied burglars in black turtlenecks doing superhuman things. Experts insisted that the heist was the work of a foreign team of navy-SEAL-like professionals, likely from the infamous Pink Panthers, a Serbian gang of master diamond thieves. Retired Scotland Yard detective Barry Phillips believed it was the work of a highly technical team, assembled by a so-called “Draftsman”—who financed the heist and assembled the players, probably from the U.K. He speculated that no member of the gang would have known any of the others, in order to preserve “sterile corridors,” making it impossible for any perpetrator to rat out the others.

The thieves had surely divided up the spoils into easily transportable lots once inside “the slaughter,” as their hideaway would have been called in London gangster argot. Perhaps they had sneaked the jewels out of the country by stuffing them up the butts of racehorses, the flamboyant villain turned celebrity Dave Courtney theorized on the BBC. The thieves would have been whisked out of Great Britain on a quick ferry trip from Dover to Dunkirk or Calais, from where they could disappear into Europe.

British crime aficionados saw the operation as a refreshing throwback to the meticulously planned, supremely executed jewelry heists of yesteryear, the ones that had inspired such classic crime movies as To Catch a Thief and Topkapi. Many were calling it “the perfect crime.”

But when arrests were made a month later, Great Britain collectively gasped.

The Villains

Retirement is a bitch.

Your wife has passed away. Most of your mates are in exile, prison, or the grave. Even the cops you once eluded have died, retired, or forgotten you. You skulk around your run-down mansion in the suburbs of London, puttering in your garden, infuriating your neighbors by running a used-car dealership out of your home, and “hobbling over to the news agent,” as one neighbor put it, for the daily papers to read about younger men doing what you used to.

This was the life of Brian Reader at 76. “He ain’t got no friends no more,” a colleague would say of him. “Sitting down there in the café, talks about all their yesterdays,” said another. “He was a thief 40 years ago.”

The Guardian’s veteran crime reporter Duncan Campbell, who met Reader 30 years ago, described him as something of a gent, “an easy-going character, the antithesis of a criminal wide boy, still in touch with his old school friends.”

And yet for practically his whole life Reader had exasperated Scotland Yard. First arrested for breaking and entering at age 11, he became associated with the infamous Tommy Adams crime family. He was also allegedly part of the “Millionaire Moles” gang, which burrowed under a leather-goods shop and restaurant to loot 268 safe-deposit boxes in a Lloyds bank vault in London in 1971. “Let Sherlock Holmes try to solve this,” the gang reportedly wrote on the vault’s wall before escaping with cash and jewels, worth more than $59 million today, and, allegedly, some pretty interesting photographs of Princess Margaret and actor Richard Harris. Reader, in those days, evaded police and went skiing in Méribel or yachting on the “Costa del Crime,” in Spain, so called because many British villains, as criminals are called in the U.K., found a safe haven there.

Reader had generally managed to “walk” away until the Brinks-Mat Job, named for the high-security warehouse at Heathrow Airport hit by a group of bandits on November 26, 1983. Aiming to steal at most $4.4 million in cash, they instead stumbled on what today would be worth $145 million in gold bullion. Reader was merely a “soldier” on that job, moving the gold between a “fence” named Kenny Noye, who was supposed to arrange for it to be melted down, and dealers in Hatton Garden. But Reader had the bad luck to be present on the night Noye stabbed a police detective 11 times, after which Reader allegedly kicked the body. Although Reader and Noye were acquitted of murder (arguing self-defense), they were both later found guilty of conspiracy for handling stolen goods; for his part, Reader was sentenced to nine years.

Reader got out of prison in 1994, and it seemed he had put the life of crime behind him. But two decades later, suffering from prostate cancer and other ailments, he decided to get back into the game with his biggest caper yet. He studied books, such as The Diamond Underworld, and read diamond-industry magazines. He had diamond testers, scales, gauges, and other paraphernalia, all with an eye toward “one last hurrah,” Scotland Yard commander Peter Spindler, who oversaw the London police in investigating the heist, told me. “Someone for drilling, someone for electrics, someone as a lookout—all experienced villains who knew what they were doing.” He added that Reader was called “the Gov’nor,” the leader in British gangster parlance, who, possibly with associates, “set it up, enlisted the others, and called the job on, to the best of our understanding.”

Number two on the heist was Terry Perkins, 67, suffering from diabetes and other health issues, living out his sunset years in an anonymous little house in Enfield. He was a ghost to the neighbors, who had no idea he had once been a ringleader in the largest cash robbery in British history at that time: the 1983 Security Express Job, in which a gang raided a cash depot in East London for $9 million. Perkins was sentenced to 22 years but escaped from Spring Hill prison and went on the lam for 17 years, returning briefly in 2012, to serve out the last of his sentence. Because he and another robber had threatened a bank employee by dousing him with gasoline, then shaking a box of matches in his face, the judge had called Perkins an evil, ruthless man.

But others paint a different picture. He wasn’t a known criminal before the Security Express robbery, said retired detective Peter Wilton. “Usually wore a suit and had a portfolio of houses. The day of the 1983 robbery was his birthday, and his wife was surprised [he left] because he usually waited for his children to give him his presents.” Instead, Perkins left to become a habitual villain who kept “busy in the heavyweight division of commercial burglary,” a defense lawyer would argue, who added that Perkins commanded “subservience” from Danny Jones.

Jones, 60, viewed “his profession as a commercial burglar with some enthusiasm,” said the lawyer. Extraordinarily fit, with tremendous stamina, he was, according to a friend, a “Walter Mitty” type, who read palms and ran marathons when he wasn’t serving more than 20 years in prison. His passions were for the army and crime, and his rap sheet was filled with convictions. He lived in what was called an “opulent” house, where police later found magnification loupes, masks, a walkie-talkie, and the book Forensics for Dummies. “Eccentric to [such] extremes that everyone who knew Danny would say he was mad,” said Carl Wood, another member of the Hatton Garden team. “He would go to bed in his mother’s dressing gown with a fez on.” He would sleep in a sleeping bag in his bedroom on the floor, urinate into a bottle, and speak to his terrier, Rocket, as if the dog were human. At five P.M. most days Jones would lock himself away, to “study crime all the time … read books, watch films, and go on the Internet,” said Wood. For three years, Jones studied the price of gold and diamonds and searched online to learn about diamond-toothed core drills.

A police officer outside the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit building after the burglary.

© Andy Rain/EPA/Corbis.

Carl Wood, 58, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2002, after being trapped in a police sting in a bugged Surrey hotel room. Wood and his accomplices, who included two corrupt London police detectives, were recorded planning to torture a money-launderer and put his body in a car crusher if he didn’t hand over the $850,000 he owed them. “I’ll just go smash, hit him straight in the head,” Wood was recorded saying as to what he planned to do when the man entered the room. Having no trade, and listing his employment as “retired,” Wood would testify he dabbled in “a bit of painting and decorating,” and described himself as “just a general dogsbody.” More than $12,000 in debt at the time of the Hatton Garden heist, he claimed to have been living on disability payments after being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the digestive tract. His genial appearance—V-necked sweater, distinguished beard, eyeglasses on a string—belied his criminal nature. He may have been selected for the Hatton Garden Job for his slim physique, which enabled him to crawl into tight spaces.

Driver and lookout man John “Kenny” Collins, 75, was a classic London villain—a “dodgy” but elegant figure in the streets of London with his beloved Staffordshire bull terrier, Dempsey, nipping at his heels. His legitimate business was high-volume fireworks importation. In fact, he was a walking pawnshop. “He’d buy cars, expensive watches … and sell it back to you later,” said a friend. His rap sheet, stretching back to 1961, included convictions for robbery, burglary, handling stolen goods, and conspiracy to defraud. Diabetes had exiled him into semi-retirement, and he was reportedly growing deafer and more forgetful by the day.

Two peripheral members of the team were Hugh Doyle, 48, a plumber who grew up in Ireland and who was a reader of The Guardian and, he told me, a devoted fan of the late Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens; and William Lincoln, 60, who was incontinent. They stored and helped move the stolen treasure.

One member of the team still at large and not yet identified is Basil, as he was called by the other thieves and the police. He was the inside man, who knew the building, disarmed the alarms, and let the others in. There is a $29,000 reward for a tip that leads to his arrest. (Danny Jones has claimed that Basil was an ex-policeman and “the brains” of the operation, but police are dubious.)

The Hatton Garden heist, it turned out, had been the work of this ragtag group of superannuated criminals representing the last of “traditional British villainy,” in the words of the police commander, Spindler. Most were in their 60s and 70s—more Lavender Hill Mob than James Bond. “Run? Ah, they can barely walk,” Danny Jones wrote to Sky News reporter Martin Brunt from jail. “One has cancer—he’s 76. Another, heart condition, 68. Another, 75, can’t remember his name. Sixty-year-old with two new hips and knees. Crohn’s disease. I won’t go on. It’s a joke.”

Yet they had defied age, physical infirmities, burglar alarms, and even Scotland Yard to power their way through walls of concrete and solid steel and haul away a prize now estimated at more than $20 million—at least $15 million of which is still missing.

The Job

The vault, belonging to the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. (H.G.S.D.), was located at 88–90 Hatton Garden, London. The building is seven stories tall and has around 60 tenants, most of them jewelers. The wooden main door to the building is unlocked between nine A.M. and six P.M., and all the tenants have their own keys for other times. Just behind the main door is a glass door, left unlocked during the day and opened at other times with a four-digit PIN code, which all the tenants know. This leads to an unstaffed lobby. In the 1970s the elevator in the lobby was disabled so it couldn’t descend lower than the ground floor, after a robber with a shotgun rode it down to the basement, where the vault is located. Beside the elevator is a door that leads to a flight of stairs to the basement. This door is also unlocked during business hours; during other times it is locked and only a few people, including the two H.G.S.D. security guards and one member of the cleaning staff, have keys. At the bottom of the stairs, to the left, is another wooden door, with a mortise deadlock. This door is also left open during working hours. At other times it is locked, and only two security guards and H.G.S.D. co-owner and manager Manish Bavishi have keys. Once inside the door, you have 60 seconds to deactivate the intruder alarm with a five-digit code on the alarm box. Directly behind the wooden door is a sliding iron gate, which forms an air lock with a second sliding gate. These are manned by a security guard. To enter the first door you need a four-digit security code for the PIN box; the security guard opens the second gate to let you out the other side. “Significantly,” as the prosecutor put it, inside the air lock there are locked shutters, behind which are the doors, no longer used, to the elevator shaft. These shutters are opened only if the shaft is being cleaned or a tenant has dropped his keys or something similar down the shaft.

Astonishingly, there is a much easier way to get to the vault area: a fire exit on Greville Street, from which iron stairs go down to a courtyard adjoining 88–90’s basement. Only two businesses have a key to the outside lock on the street-level fire exit: jeweler Lionel Wiffen, whose back office can be accessed from the courtyard, and Hirschfelds antique jewelers, located in 88–90. From the inside, the Greville Street door is locked merely with a hand-operated bolt—no key is required to open it. The Hatton Garden basement is accessed from the courtyard by a door with two sliding-bolt locks, and that door leads to the H.G.S.D. basement foyer. At the far side of the basement foyer is a white door, behind which is the H.G.S.D. air lock.

Strange things began happening starting in January 2015. The jeweler Wiffen felt “uneasy” and believed he and his shop were being watched. A few days before the heist, Katya Lewis, of Deblinger Diamonds, was visiting a diamond firm in 88–90 and had to wait what seemed like forever for the elevator. When it finally arrived, she found a crusty, aging repairman inside, wearing blue coveralls and surrounded by tools and building gear. “He smiled apologetically, because there was no room for her to get in,” said the prosecutor, noting that a pair of blue coveralls was later found at the home of Terry Perkins, who had apparently been casing the building.

Then came the fire.

Just after 12:30 P.M. on Wednesday, April 1, a gas main ruptured and slowly leaked gas into the Victorian-era tunnels that now house London’s electrical and telecommunications cable networks. Then a spark in an electrical-junction box ignited the gas, causing dark, acrid smoke to billow from manhole covers and flames to shoot up geyser-like from the ground.

Power failed. Gas supplies ceased. Chaos ensued. Judges at the Royal Courts of Justice and students at the London School of Economics were among the thousands evacuated. Performances of West End shows, from The Lion King to Mamma Mia!, were canceled as dozens of firefighters and police officers dealt with the emergency. It would take nearly two days to bring the situation under control.

This was a fortuitous break for the thieves, entangling the cops and setting off dozens of false alarms.

It was the Thursday before Easter and Passover weekend, and the jewelers of Hatton Garden deposited their goods in their safe-deposit boxes in the vault, believing that their jewels—and their own livelihoods—were safe. The area has more than 300 jewelry-related companies and 60 retail jewelry shops—one of the greatest concentrations of such businesses in the world.

It’s a community built on trust, but that trust is constantly tested by crime. “Hatton Garden has a number of people whose history is not exactly squeaky-clean,” said the late Hatton Garden jeweler Joel Grunberger in 2003, who consulted with director Guy Ritchie on his 2000 film, Snatch, with Brad Pitt and Jason Statham, about a London diamond heist gone wrong. “Honest dealers work cheek by jowl with the villains.”

Burglaries, robberies, and heists, one recorded as early as 1876, occurred so often over the years that, in 1946, the Garden’s merchants decided to build an impenetrable vault. “Sparkling diamonds—their value running into the millions—are giving Hatton Garden sleepless nights,” proclaimed the dramatic voice-over in a film short promoting the opening of Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd., at 88–90 Hatton Garden. “To foil the thieves, Hatton Garden now has its own giant strong room…. Constructed at a cost of more than £20,000 [then roughly the equivalent of $81,000], a two-foot-wide bomb-and-burglar-proof door—operated by a combination that has to be worked by at least two men—opens up a labyrinth of safes.”

Eventually, however, newer technology and the tenacity of the thieves outpaced the security of the vault. “I had a box there for 35 years and closed it down after the third incident,” said jeweler Alan Gard, recalling various robberies in the vault, one involving two security guards who made duplicate keys to boxes in the 1960s, another in which robbers tied up security guards and ransacked boxes in the 1990s, and a 2003 scam by a thief who posed as a jeweler, leased a box, and looted other boxes when no one was looking.

Nevertheless, most of the jewelers still believed the vault to be safe. The owners—for generations British but after multiple sales a family from Sudan—were apparently so confident of its construction that they gave their security guards weekends off. On the Thursday before the Easter/Passover weekend, there was practically a line of people to deposit their valuables. “Four carats, five carats, all shades, brilliant-cut, heart-shaped—a magnificent collection!” one jeweler told me, describing what he had stored in his box that weekend.

At 8:19 P.M. that Thursday, April 2, the staff locked up the vault for the long weekend. About an hour later, a curious sight passed in front of a CCTV camera on Greville Street: a thin man dressed in a blue jacket with a red wig and a flat cap, carrying a black bag on his shoulder, which hid his face from the cameras. This was the villain the police would later call Basil. Responsible for being the advance man, he evidently had keys with which he entered 88–90 through the front door and made his way to the basement fire door. It was his job to disable the alarms and the cameras inside the building, and to let the others in. This he did, making one crucial mistake: he neglected to disable two of the CCTV cameras, one in the fire-exit passage (the camera belonged to Berganza jewelers and was not on the 88–90 system) and another on the second floor of 88–90.

Shortly after Basil appeared, a CCTV camera outside, in the street, showed a white van pulling up to the building’s fire-escape entrance and several men unloading tools, bags, and two wheelie bins, in full view of the people strolling home or to the pubs along the dark streets. These men were disguised as municipal workers, wearing reflective yellow vests—one of them bearing the word GAS on the back—hard hats, and white surgical masks.

But who were they really? Brian Reader was in a colorfully striped scarf, brown lace-up shoes, and striped socks; Terry Perkins in a dark sweatshirt, a hard hat, and a neck chain beneath his vest; Danny Jones in a baseball cap, red athletic shoes, and a “Montana 93” hoodie beneath his street-worker disguise.

Basil opened the fire-escape door for them from within, and the men unloaded their gear. Old Kenny Collins, in a green quilted jacket and a flat cabbie’s cap, carrying a briefcase, apparently used a key to enter an office building across the street, where he would serve as a lookout, but, instead, according to one of his accomplices, he “sat up there and fell asleep.”

It was to be a three-day job, during which they planned to loot all 996 safe-deposit boxes in the vault, as evidenced by diabetic Terry Perkins’s bringing three days’ worth of insulin. “Sixty-seven,” Perkins later lamented of his advanced age. “Fucking 20 pills a day. I had it all with me, my injections. Yeah, if I don’t take the insulin for three days you’d a had to carry me out in a wheelie bin.”

Once inside the 88–90 fire-door corridor, the men evidently could not breach the white door that led to the H.G.S.D. basement foyer and the vault. But they had planned a more ingenious way to get in—one that presupposed deep inside knowledge of the building’s layout. They walked up to the second floor and called the elevator, which they disabled, then returned to the ground floor, and pried open the elevator doors to the open shaft. Then one or more of them dropped down the 12 to 14 feet in the shaft from the ground floor to the basement. Once there they pried open the flimsy steel shutter covering the disused basement elevator door and entered the air lock. They managed to only partially disable the alarm by cutting the telephone cable and breaking off the G.P.S. aerial so that its signal range was compromised—but not quite compromised enough, it turned out. A short time later a text alert was sent to the monitoring company, which then contacted Alok Bavishi, another of the H.G.S.D. owners.

Detective Chief Inspector Paul Johnson addresses the press, April 9, 2015.

By Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images.

The phone rang in the Canary Wharf apartment of Kelvin Stockwell, chief custodian guard of the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit vault since 1995. He arrived shortly after one A.M. to find no sign of forced entry on the front door to the building or the fire exit. Nothing seemed amiss.

“It’s all locked up,” Stockwell told Bavishi, who was five minutes away in his car, so Bavishi turned his car around and headed home, leaving Stockwell to meet with the police. The police also dismissed the incident, concluding that “no police response was deemed to be required,” according to police reports.

Meanwhile, the team pulled the second air-lock iron gate open. They were in!

But still nearly two feet and an eternity from the safe-deposit boxes, which lay within a Chubb safe embedded in a nearly 20-inch-thick solid concrete wall. The wall would have been impenetrable to a drill in 1946, when the vault was constructed, but it was child’s play to the thieves’ Hilti DD350 diamond coring drill, a 77-pound, $5,200 circular monster.

Now, at last, Danny Jones was able to apply what he’d spent so many nights studying on YouTube. Anchoring the Hilti drill to the floor and concrete wall, and connecting it to a water hose for cooling and reducing the amount of dust, they began boring through the concrete. The DD350 made only a quiet, water-splattering hum as it breached the concrete wall.

Within two and a half hours, three overlapping circular holes had been cut through the concrete. It should have been cause for celebration. But, instead, as Terry Perkins might have put it, “fuck me.” The thieves stared through the holes not into the diamond-filled vault but at a wall of solid steel: the rear of a cabinet of safe-deposit boxes. Unmovable. Bolted to the ceiling and floor.

They had a Clarke pump and hose with a 10-ton hydraulic ram, strong enough to force the doors off of almost anything. But the pump broke. The steel cabinet stood firm.

“Carl, do something for fuck sake,” Danny Jones said to Carl Wood, who was “walking around in circles.”

Around eight A.M. on Friday, April 3, they temporarily surrendered, leaving the vault—but in a move that shocked the others, one of them left for good: the ringleader, Brian Reader. He was convinced that to return would mean certain capture. He made his way to the London Bridge subway station, where he returned home the same way he had come.

Jones and Collins didn’t walk away, though. Instead they went shopping—Collins driving, Jones buying—at two machinery-equipment shops in the London suburb of Twickenham, just two guys shopping for Saturday tools. At Machine Mart, Jones paid nearly $140 for another fire-red Clarke pump ram and hose, using the name “V. Jones” (after Vinnie Jones, the actor from the 1998 heist movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels?) and his street address on the receipt.

They returned around 10 P.M. on April 4. But, finding the fire-escape door locked, Carl Wood followed Brian Reader’s lead and quit.

“His arsehole went and he thought we would never get in,” recalled Kenny Collins later. “The cunt. I said, ‘Give it another half-hour.’ [And he said], ‘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,” declared Perkins after Basil finally let them in again.

Collins returned to his post as lookout, while Perkins, Basil, and Jones went in with the new pump ram in its red box. Back at the vault, they used the metal joists they’d brought in earlier to anchor the new pump and hose to the wall opposite the vault, and 10 tons of pressure went to work.

“It was hissing, that pump, bang, didn’t it? [That’s] all I could hear, bang, and I thought for fuck sake, I had a headache,” said Jones.

Then Perkins exclaimed, “We’re in! We’re in!” And there it lay: the perfect score.

They could see the bounty beckoning. But they were still not inside the vault. Now at least one of them had to slither through the three overlapping concrete holes, a tiny opening measuring 10 by 18 inches across.

This ruled out the stocky Terry Perkins, who would later say he wished, as a sort of “fuck you” to Brian Reader, that he’d taken a selfie of himself as the goods were being ferried out to him. Inside the vault, fitness enthusiast Danny Jones and the slim Basil were busting open the old but still-sturdy metal deposit boxes with sledgehammers, crowbars, and angle grinders. Since they were now two burglars short, they were able to ransack only 73 of the 996 boxes, but it was enough, a vast array of loose diamonds and other stones, jewelry, and cash—stacks of it! There was also gold and platinum bullion.

The burglars felt they were stealing from the rich, including the Hatton Garden jewelers who, Perkins later said, had ripped off his daughter by using a fake stone in her engagement ring. “They deserve all they get, Dad,” his daughter reportedly told him. “They are all riffraff down there,” Jones told Perkins.

“I’ll tell you what he lost, shall I?” said Jones, counting the proceeds from one box alone. “[$2.3] million worth of gold he lost, plus [$102,000] in notes.”

“I feel a bit sorry, don’t you?” asked Perkins.

“Give it back to him,” said Jones, laughing.

Around 5:45 A.M. on Easter Sunday, April 5, after they worked through the night, the job was done: the empty metal carcasses of the boxes were strewn across the floor, along with the drill and broken jack, but no DNA evidence, thanks to the thieves’ careful study of Forensics for Dummies. Jones came up the stairs from the vault to the fire escape with the pump ram, with Perkins following soon after, and they both hauled up a wheelie bin so heavy Perkins had to stop at the top of the stairs, visibly gasping.

Collins drove them away in his Mercedes, dropping the burglars off at their various homes. Within 36 hours, the loot was divided up among them.

‘I think we’ve been burgled,” Kelvin Stockwell recalled being told by his associate guard on Tuesday morning, when he arrived at work.

“I went downstairs, and I saw the top lock of the door was missing,” Stockwell told me. He peered through the hole where the lock should have been and saw “drills, cutting tools, pipes—chaos,” he said. “I called the police. Fifteen, 20 minutes [later] they turned up. They looked through the door. We went inside. It was like a bomb had hit the place.”

Along with the police came the boxholders, and by 10 A.M. the street in front of the vault was filled with misery. “I was sitting at home enjoying an afternoon cup of coffee, a piece of Passover cake, when I heard my children speaking of a big robbery,” said a diamond dealer, who claimed he had more than $720,000 worth of diamonds in his box. “I didn’t take notice, because there are robberies all of the time. Then, after a half-hour, one of my children said, ‘It’s the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit.’

“I heard that, and I’ve never felt anything like it,” he continued. “If you had said to me, ‘Jump out of a 20-story building onto a mattress in the street,’ that’s what you feel. Everything you worked for … gone!”

He joined the fray on the street, where emotional dealers were barred from entering the building. The media soon arrived, along with insurance adjusters. Then came the excruciating wait—three, four, and, in some cases, five or more days—as the police sorted through the rubble. The calls from police to the victims began on Thursday.

Give us a list of what’s in your box.

It was a seemingly simple request of the police to the victims. But some couldn’t say with certainty, and others wouldn’t say. Did their boxes contain contraband, possibly stolen goods and cash that hadn’t been declared to the British tax authority, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs?

“That is why we will never know how much was actually stolen—because safety-deposit boxes are used for a number of reasons, and one of them is anonymity,” said former senior detective Barry Phillips.

As the heist dominated the British media, and the CCTV video of the masked marauders leaked to the Mirror newspaper and was aired on television and Web sites, the public seemed to be rooting for the daring, dexterous, still-at-large diamond thieves, while blaming the victims and the police, who had failed to respond to the burglar alarm.

For six weeks after the heist, the burglars sat in the suburbs of London, reveling in their rewards and reliving their crime. Old age and infirmities be damned—they were full-on thieves again, back in their old haunts, the cafés and the Castle pub, where they had spent three years researching and planning the heist, full of beer, fish-and-chips, and bravado. They had a source in Scotland Yard, Jones told Perkins, and the Yard was “fucked.”

“Ain’t you caught them yet, the big heist?” Jones said, quoting what his source had asked a detective, and the cop answered no. That was because the chumps thought it was an inside job, Perkins said, that the Sudanese owners of the vault had ripped off their own business. “If they think it’s an inside job, they will not put 100 percent into it,” Perkins told Jones. “They’ll think, You mugging us off, you cunts. You want us running all around London when it’s fucking from inside.”

“No comment,” Perkins said of what he planned to say in the unlikely event the police ever bumbled into arresting him for the job. “I’ll say, ‘What? You dopey cunt, I can’t even fucking walk.’ ”

The New “Sweeney”

The Flying Squad, the elite investigative unit within London’s Metropolitan Police department, was formed in 1919 and named for its ability to “fly” across London without regard to districts. Its detectives call themselves “thief takers.” Once renowned for their contacts within London’s criminal underworld, they have solved some of the biggest and most famous cases in Britain.

I met the two lead detectives in the Hatton Garden case in a conference room in the multi-story New Scotland Yard building, in central London: Paul Johnson, 54, a tall, chiseled Clint Eastwood type, and his bright and intense deputy, Jamie Day, 43. Both wore business suits and ties bearing the squad’s descending-eagle logo. But beneath their affable, professional demeanor they undoubtedly embody the Scotland Yard legacy of being implacable when it comes to getting their man.

“I’m senior investigating officer, so I sort of direct it and manage, and Jamie and the team does all the work,” said Johnson, whose 31 years on the force have involved many “high-risk things like armed robberies, dynamic crimes in action like that.”

“I’m the case officer,” explained Day, 20 years a London cop, 7 on the Flying Squad. He was the first detective through the vault’s door on the morning after the burglary.

The team on the Hatton Garden heist consisted of most of the 50 or so officers in the western unit of the two-unit Flying Squad. “[The Hatton Garden case] is not usually what the Flying Squad would take, per se,” said Johnson, because no one was physically injured and none of the perpetrators appeared to have carried guns. “But obviously there was the magnitude of it and the detail that the gang had gone to to get themselves in. Clearly, we’d have to take it.”

The two detectives seemed a far cry from the fabled 1960s and 1970s Flying Squad sleuths known as “the Sweeney” and depicted in books, movies, and on television. (The expression is Cockney rhyming slang derived from the name of the murderous barber of Fleet Street, “Sweeney Todd.”) Back then they were rough-hewn Sherlocks in fast cars and shady bars. “Oh, the Sweeney?” said Paul Johnson of the old era. “It has moved on. It has to move on. We haven’t got a Granada or Cortina [the cars in which the old squad would chase their prey]. But it’s the same commitment to getting results. You’ve got this legacy over the years: Brinks-Mat, Millennium Dome, Graff, the Great Train Robbery [all among England’s biggest, most infamous heists] from years ago. You want to make sure you perpetuate that legacy…. There’s a pride. We all like to wear our ties with the eagle.” He lifted his and showed it off to me, the screaming eagle landing on its victims.

The Hatton Garden investigative teams were overseen by Peter Spindler, who, like the thieves, was approaching retirement. Working around the clock on the streets and in a field office in Putney, in southwest London, officers and detectives deciphered more than 350 pieces of evidence. Most important, Spindler said, they “trawled” through days of CCTV footage collected from the 120-plus cameras in and around Hatton Garden. The evidence was producing results, but “you want to keep all the cards close to your chest,” said Johnson, who was under extreme pressure from the media to solve the case.

Early on in the investigation, a young member of the CCTV team spotted the Flying Squad’s first big break: a white Mercedes E200 with a black roof and alloy rims. It had passed through Hatton Garden multiple times prior to the Easter/Passover weekend.

“All the imagery is quite murky,” said Johnson. “The CCTV team had to get all the angles on it…. So it was piecing together the jigsaw of all the different [camera] angles you can get.” The Mercedes, they would quickly learn, belonged to an ex-con: Kenny Collins. “When they went down initially they had the white van…. That was a car that they bought months ago and wasn’t attributable to anybody,” said Johnson. “So they could quite safely drive down there, drive away in that on the first night, because it’s never going to raise any suspicion. If anybody checked on that van, it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody. On the second time they come down, what they don’t know is ‘Has that van been seen? Has the burglary been discovered? Has there been a report on that [van]?’ So they couldn’t come down in that van.”

But using the easily traceable Mercedes instead was a major screwup. Through automatic license-plate recognition the police traced it to John Collins’s home and tracked the car’s movements from there to the store in Twickenham where Danny Jones bought the replacement hydraulic pump.

Just as foolhardy, the burglars, while using walkie-talkies during the actual heist, used their own cell phones before and after the burglary. “Researching cell phones and call-data analysis, we started building a picture,” recalled Spindler. Then they set about connecting the digital dots—cars, cell phones, CCTV footage—and it was more than enough to get special approval for Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime & Operations 11 Surveillance Command team to plant listening devices (which are reserved in the U.K. for only the highest-level organized-crime and terrorism cases) in Kenny Collins’s Mercedes and in Terry Perkins’s Citroën Saxo. Still, it wasn’t enough to arrest.

“They can meet people all day long,” explained Johnson, but meetings alone mean little.

So they began to bug their cars. How? “Surveillance pixies,” Johnson said, laughing. “Surveillance teams,” explains Day. “They follow people around on and off for about seven or eight weeks without being compromised, and that’s not an easy thing to do.”

The thieves were trailed by detectives, observed by lip-readers, bugged for many days and nights in their cars, and videotaped in their favorite bars, and the Flying Squad was astounded by what they heard. Three of the thieves—Perkins, Jones, and Collins—were recorded bragging about how they did the heist, what they stole, how they were going to dispose of the goods. “The biggest robbery in the fucking world … we was on,” said Terry Perkins in just one of many endlessly incriminating statements.

Brian Reader was snared by the surveillance detectives one evening in May, a month after the heist, when the Flying Squad dispatched an operative with a hidden video camera to the Castle pub, where Reader sat drinking with Perkins and Collins. In the middle of the pub, Perkins pantomimed for Reader the moment that Danny Jones and his 10-ton hydraulic pump knocked over the massive wall of safe-deposit boxes to allow them entry into the vault. “Boom!” Perkins exclaimed, according to a lip-reader, who deciphered the conversation.

According to Johnson, Jamie Day “spent hours and hours” transcribing recordings and unraveling the East London dialect and slang. A lawyer at the trial compared the work of deciphering their conversations to the work done by Shakespearean scholars.

Damning as the recordings were, it still wasn’t enough to arrest.

“It obviously is good,” said Paul Johnson. “But you have to say to yourself, ‘What would happen if we lost this [evidence]? We’ve still got to have a case without it.’ You’ve still got to work your way through everything else and make sure you’ve got enough to corroborate what they’re saying. If you don’t, they would have an option of saying that ‘we’re just a bunch of elderly fantasists who were talking a lot of old nonsense in the car.’ So we’ve got to prove that that’s not the case.”

They had to catch them with the goods.

Once the heat died down, the thieves planned to sell their haul for cash, provide for family members, and fund their pensions. But by this time people were talking and other villains seemed to know about the heist. Danny Jones, who had hidden some of his share beneath family graves in a cemetery, exited his house one morning at four A.M. to find waiting for him a villain, who then asked him questions about the deal. It was imperative that they consolidate everything and sell it off fast.

Their mistake was letting the increasingly careless Kenny Collins handle the logistics. The day after the burglary, Collins hid some of his loot in casserole dishes in his kitchen cupboard, but gave most of it for safekeeping to “Billy the Fish” Lincoln, the brother of Collins’s longtime girlfriend. “I said to Brian [Reader], I said, ‘ere, how does this fucking Bill know about anything?” recalled Perkins. “Bill, [Reader] said. [Who’s] Bill? I said, the fucking geezer round Kenny’s…. I went upstairs to have a shower, right, and when I came down there was a bloke there who I never knew, which was Bill, and Kenny had told him everything. I said, ‘cos Bill has wound up with the fucking gear.”

At 60, Bill Lincoln was nobody’s idea of the ideal bagman. He suffered from incontinence, sleep apnea, and a recent double hip replacement. He lived in Bethnal Green, in East London, a breeding ground for wanton criminals and once the home turf of the infamous gangsters the Kray twins. Lincoln had convictions for attempted theft, burglary, and battery. He duped his nephew Jon Harbinson, 43, a London taxi driver (who was eventually acquitted of having any part in the crimes), into transporting the goods from his house to a handover point. Because who would suspect that the proceeds from the great diamond heist would be carried in a London taxicab? Even more reckless was Collins’s choice of the handover point: a public parking lot in the borough of Enfield, under CCTV surveillance, beside the workshop of plumber Hugh Doyle, who would be charged and convicted as an accessory, despite testifying, “I had no knowledge of what was taking place. It was a public car park covered by CCTV. No way in a million years was this a good place to do something this stupid.”

No, it wasn’t, but, yes, they did. At 9:44 A.M. on Tuesday, May 19, in full view of the CCTV camera and with the Flying Squad monitoring their every move, the burglars transferred three canvas holdalls filled with jewels from the taxi to Collins’s Mercedes. The police already knew the location of the “slaughter” because Perkins and Jones had previously revealed the address in conversations recorded in their car.

The Flying Squad was ready to descend. “I was sitting in my office with our lawyer and our press officers and staff officer, getting text-message updates, and it was very gripping,” said Commander Peter Spindler, of the moment when the burglars and their valuables entered a house belonging to Terry Perkins’s daughter, on Sterling Road, in Enfield.

At that same moment, just after 10 A.M. on May 19, almost six weeks after the heist, the Flying Squad stormed 12 addresses, surrounding them front, back, and sides, and hitting them all simultaneously so no one could escape. From Enfield to Bethnal Green to the suburb of Dartford, more than 200 officers, some in riot gear, battered through doors and dragged out the suspected burglars and their accomplices. Lincoln was stopped in his car; later at the police station he wet his pants. Reader was escorted from his old mansion “a little unsteady on his legs and clutching his heart,” said a neighbor.

On Sterling Road, Terry Perkins, Danny Jones, and Kenny Collins were at the dining-room table, on which a smelter had been set up to melt between $2.9 million and $4.4 million worth of precious metals that lay in holdalls, when officers burst through the front door wearing riot helmets and flame-proof overalls, and carrying what’s called a “commissioner’s key,” a battering ram.

“Collins and Perkins were placed onto the sofa, while Jones tried to run out the back door, but only made it a few yards into the garden,” recalled Jamie Day.

Even then the thieves thought they could outsmart Scotland Yard. Once in custody, they pretended they didn’t know one another. “They’re old, experienced criminals, obviously, so the drill if you’re an older criminal is not to say anything, keep your mouth shut, and just see what opportunities there are to get out of it,” said Johnson.

But then each of the primary suspects was played segments of the audio recordings, in which he admitted a great deal and incriminated the others. Upon hearing evidence against him, Kenny Collins didn’t even ask for bail. “Collins said, ‘I’d rather have a cup of tea,’ ” recalled Johnson. “He knew he was never going to get bail.”

“When you listen to them discussing it, I think, they’re quite comfortable in the fact that they’re in their older years, white-haired old men—nobody’s going to look at them,” said Jamie Day. We’re driving around in a little car here, two old boys. Who is going to stop us? The police aren’t looking for us. They’re looking for the fit, able people who have committed this.

“Tom Cruise abseiling down a lift shaft,” added Johnson.

But, presented with the recordings, the CCTV footage, and other digital evidence, Reader, Perkins, Jones, and Collins felt they had no choice but to plead guilty. The others charged in the heist—Carl Wood, Hugh Doyle, and William Lincoln—were found guilty at trial in January. As of this writing, the seven were set to be sentenced on March 7. Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, Ltd., went into liquidation in September, unable to recover from its damaged reputation.

As for the mysterious Basil, he is still at large, along with two-thirds of the haul, worth more than $15 million.

The thieves were able to steal the CCTV cameras inside the actual building and its basement vault. “What they forgot, or didn’t know,” said the prosecutor, “was that one little camera in that walkway outside the back of [one jeweler] was still working and recording what they were doing.” Said Peter Spindler, “They were analog criminals operating in a digital world, and no match for digital detectives.”