The Iconic Hatton Garden Heist

As we come up on the ten-year anniversary of the Hatton Garden heist, it’s a wonderful time to look back on this comical crime. Buckle up, folks. 

In 2012, the planning for one of history’s most iconic heists began. 

Let me introduce you to our wonderful cast of characters: Brian Reider, aka The Govna, is 73 years old and was first arrested for breaking and entering when he was 11 years old. Danny Jones is 57, studied crime, and has been involved in jewelry theft. Kenny Collins is 72. He has numerous health problems including diabetes and memory issues. Terry Perkins is 64. He’s a prison escapee and was on the lamb for 17 years. He and Brian Reider go way back. And finally, we have Michael Seed, aka Basil. He’s our youngest criminal at 52 and did 21 months in 1984 for selling acid and marijuana. 

Sounds like the most competent group of young gents to ever heist, right? 

Fast forward to the spring of 2015. The crew is planning to rob the Hatton Garden, a seven-story building in the London jewelry district, the basement of which is full of safety deposit boxes of valuables. On April 22nd, Easter weekend, the gang meets up with Carl Wood (a part-time criminal). The group and its new addition disguise themselves as workers and head over to the building. Kenny goes across the street to play lookout and is basically useless from now on. Basil is already in the building and has disabled the cameras and alarm systems but happens to miss two of the cameras, one of which happens to be the fire exit they’ve been using as an entrance. He also cuts the telephone wire and an alarm goes off, but when the head of security shows up he doesn’t see anything amiss so he figures it was a false alarm. 

The gang plans to drill through the foot-and-a-half concrete that is the basement wall. This backfires when they drill into the back of a row of safety deposit boxes that are bolted down. Good thing they also brought a hydraulic ram, right? Wrong. The pump on the ram is broken, so Danny and Kenny go get a replacement. At this point, Brian checks out of the heist because he doesn’t want to get caught (smart move).  

The rest of the gang comes back the next day, which happens to be Terry’s birthday, but when they get back to the Hatton Garden building the door they’ve been using is locked. At this time Carl leaves too, which leaves Danny, Kenny, Terry, and Basil. Basil gets them back into the building and Kenny goes back across the street to be useless again. Danny, Terry, and Basil manage to get into the vault, which houses 996 safe deposit boxes. The gang was planning on having plenty of time to pull this heist off, but because of the issues they’ve had so far they only have one night. They pack up 73 of the boxes and wheel them out in big garbage cans. Kenny drives the boxes home but doesn’t want to drive alone so his brother-in-law William “Billy the Fish” Lincoln comes with him. To follow the gang’s theme, his medical ailments include incontinence and recent double hip replacements. Once the valuables are in a safe location, the entire crew– including the people who backed out– get a cut.

The initial estimate of stolen goods was 300 million pounds but it turned out to be only 14 million in cash, jewelry, gold, and other valuables. The cops thought it was an inside job and the public was getting carried away with wild theories. There were rumors that it was an international crime, that it was the Pink Panthers (an international jewel thief network), and some people were even convinced that a contortionist was involved. 

Now we return to the two cameras that Basil forgot to disable. One of them captured footage of a flashy car that belonged to Kenny. There’s also footage of Basil walking away form the crime scene with a huge bag over his shoulder, cartoon criminal style. The cops tail them for days and bug their cars, all the while the gang is bragging relentlessly to anyone who will listen about what they did, how they did it, where they stashed the money, and how they’re going to transport it. They’re speaking in thick Eastenders London dialect and using cockney rhyming slang. Cockney rhyming slang is using a sort of code word that rhymes with the real word, for example, “apples and pears” means “stairs,” so you would say “I walked up the apples and pears. 

This of course made it incredibly difficult for the police to decode their conversations, which was apparently so hard that it was compared to work done by Shakespearean scholars. 

In May of 2015, the police raid the homes and known locations of the gang. Danny, Kenny, and Terry and caught at Terry’s daughter’s house, lounging around a smelter and melting down millions of dollars of precious metals in the dining room. In Brian’s house, the cops find a diamond tester, and diamond gauge, and a book on diamond crime. In Danny’s house, they find a book called Forensics For Dummies and costume masks. 

In September the four O.G. crew members admit to conspiracy to burgle. Danny wants to come clean and tells the police where he stashed his cut. He takes them to a graveyard and shows them his stash which he’s hidden under the gravestone of a family member. However, the cops had tagged his location and days earlier found a much larger stash in that very same cemetery that Danny had neglected to tell them about. Danny denies knowing anything about this. 

In November 2015 Basil was identified. In 2016 Danny, Jenny, and Terry were each sentenced to 7 years. Brian has had two strokes so he only gets six years and three months. Terry dies in prison two years later. Brian is released early at half his term because of poor health. Basil gets convicted of conspiracy to burgle and money laundering and gets ten years in prison. 

Despite the gang’s less-than-airtight plans, only 4.5 million pounds out of the original 14 million that was stolen has been recovered.