Diamond Wheezers: Aging Thieves Plan One Final Heist

Death comes for everyone, but humans never stop trying to bargain. As long as we've felt time closing in, we've chased myths and miracle stories about springs that can rewind the clock or help us outrun the end. The fountain of youth might be the oldest of them, a shimmering promise that somewhere out there is a way to live forever. In 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon sailed north from Puerto Rico officially. He was looking for new land, but legend says he was also chasing that fountain. A middle-aged conquistador desperate to reclaim what time had already taken to carve his name into history before history erased him. He never found immortality, he found Florida, but the impulse behind his journey never died. It just changed his faces across centuries. That same hunger, the refusal to fade quietly is what drives today's story. About a retired criminal chasing his own private fountain, one perfect final heist to bring his name and his life back from the dead. Let me ask you, when the fear of fading sets in, what would you risk to outrun it? I'm Harviki Yen and this is Killer Stories. It's 2015, just two days after Easter, all around London's jewelry district buildings are reopening after a long holiday weekend, except for one, 8890 Hatton Garden. Down in an underground vault behind eight sets of doors lies, a small room containing hundreds of safe deposit boxes, and since this is the jewelry district, it's filled with diamonds and other precious stones, gold, family heirlooms, and lots and lots of cash. It's a modern day treasure trove, and now it looks like a tornado has ripped through that room overnight. A cabinet has toppled onto one side, dozens of metal boxes are scattered about twisted and empty. The treasures they once held are now simply gone. This is the aftermath of the Hatton Garden Heist, one of the biggest jewel thefts in British history. A detective with London's elite flying squad enters the vault. His branch of the Metropolitan Police specializes in commercial robberies, so he's serviced the mess or is a thorough sweep of the crime scene and finds not a single speck of DNA. That only confirms the detective's theory, whatever gang of thieves pulled this off has been planning this for a long time, and they're clearly professionals with years of experience. Detective, you have no idea just how right you are. The idea for the Hatton Garden Heist was hatched about two and a half years earlier, or so we think. It could have been percolating for even longer than that, because the mastermind Brian Reader had a lot of time on his hands. On the bus, at home, while sitting in the pub, because in the fall of 2012, when the plan started forming in earnest, Brian was already 73 years old and partially retired. He used to be a career criminal, the old school kind who operated with a sort of gentleman code. He's got morals, like sure he might steal millions and crack open saves or act as a liaison in the black market, but also, he's going to make sure nobody's hurt in the process. Even when he's working some really major jobs. Back in 1983, Brian was involved in the infamous Bringsmat robbery. That day, six armed men held up a warehouse next to Heathrow Airport. They tied up security guards and threatened to burn them alive if they didn't hand over their loot. And then, their thieves got away with three tons of gold, worth tens of millions of dollars. Brian Reader wasn't at that warehouse. He didn't tie anyone up and douse them in gasoline. Violence wasn't part of his playbook, but he did help launder the gold after the fact, ensuring it couldn't be traced back to the robbers. The Bringsmat robbery is also what finally landed Brian in prison. He served nine years, and all that time, his wife waited for him, and his kids grew up without him. So when he got out in 1994, he decided to go straight. He traded infamy for a quiet home life and a job selling cars. But by 2012, Brian's status quo had changed. He was still close with his kids, but there were adults now, with their own children and their own lives. And after a long and happy marriage, his wife, Lynn, passed away a few years earlier. Most days, if he did anything at all, Brian visited the same old pubs with the same old friends, and because they were all criminals too, they trade the same old stories about their glory days. His life had become predictable, monotonous, and maybe it got to the point where he couldn't take it anymore. He meets his old friends at the castle pub, and he tells them that it's time for one last job. Oh, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian, one last job. Really? Come on. We've seen it in so many high-smovies before, heat, gone in 60 seconds, the wild bunch, and it doesn't always end well for the people involved. Just ask our dear friend, Donald Sutherland, in the Italian job. Okay. I guess at this point, Brian doesn't feel like he has much to lose. Not to mention, he lives on a pension now, and money's running low. cliche or not, one last ice would set him up for the rest of his old life, with a nice inheritance for his kids. But first, he has to gather the dream team, a core group that includes himself, and a few guys that, more or less, he trust. Let's meet them now. Next up, Brian Reader, some call him the mastermind, others call him Grandpa, either way, he's the one out front, the man with the plan, the gloves, and the reading glasses. Now meet Terry Perkins, 67, co-captain, and easily the best dressed of the bunch. A man who once told 9 million in cash and spent 17 years on the run, these days, he drives his grown daughter to work. Next on the roster, Kenny Collins, 70s, retired ticket scalper, current firework salesman, he and Brian go way back. They share the room with bars for windows, nothing bills trust like prison housing. Then there's Carl Wood, late 50s, mild mannered, and the former leader of an extortion plot. He's there to let an extra pair of hands pass tools and help with whatever heavy machinery is his scene and sparking. Finally, Danny Jones, the muscle, marathon runner veteran of four decades worth of break ends. He's the youngest of the crew in his 50s, but don't underestimate him. He's slim and agile enough to squeeze into spaces the others can't. Basically, the crew's designated crawl into the impossible whole guy. Okay, so now Brian has his team together and he pitches the target. The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit. Brian's had his eye on this place for years. It's an imposing seven story office building filled with jewelers and traders plying their shiny wares. By day, it's Grand Central Station for Diamonds. But after 6 p.m. and on weekends, it's discerned. Even the security guards clock out on Friday and don't return until Monday. All those jewelers can't just leave all bunch of diamonds just sitting around for hour or so. They lock everything away down in the basement's alt. This could be the biggest payout any of Brian's teammates have ever seen. But just as important as the money is the last shot at glory. Maybe a younger crew would jump into action, but these guys are experienced. So they take their time. Nearly three years in fact. They map the building's layout, decide on the best route and practice every step. Here's the basic game plan. Step 1, steal keys and pin coats to gain access in and around the building. Step 2, the team and all of their tools make their way to the basement vault. Step 3, deactivate the alarm system. But there's the catch. The alarm is high-tech, and the team, well, is not. 73-year-old Brian doesn't even own a cell phone, so he brings in a new team member he refers to only as "bassball." Which is not his real name. In fact, Brian doesn't tell the crew much about basil, just that he's good with electronics. You might think there would be some drama with the last minute addition to the team, another mouth to feed when it comes time to divvy up the loot, but no, everybody likes basil. He's middle-aged, quiet, keeps himself, and he's a fast learner, who's never met a keypad. He couldn't outsmart. It's basically like adding a magician to the team. And if basil can deactivate the alarm system, there's just one more big obstacle standing between them and their treasure. Get past the giant metal vault door. Even basil is like we can't pick this lock, but maybe they don't need to go through the door, not if they can go around it. So that's step 4, drill through the concrete wall next to the door. Step 5, money up the wazoo. On paper, it's a solid plan in practice. Like every one last job, things are about to go south. Brian Reader and his team of all school crooks decide to rob the safe deposit on Easter weekend 2015. The Long Holiday means buildings will be shut down for four entire days. And here's how day 1 of the robbery goes, and yes, I said day 1. By Thursday night, the Hatton Garden District has emptied out for the holiday. Around 830, Brian walks up to the safe deposit building as Colin parks a white van. He drops off Perkins, Jones, and Wood wearing masks and disguised as maintenance workers, while Collins drives off to man his lookout post. The four of them, hurrah by a side entrance. At the other side of the building, Basil waltzes in the front door, how? He has a key. Where'd he get it? Nobody actually knows. Like I said, he's a magician and he doesn't reveal his tricks. Once he's in, he opens the fire escape door and the crew loads in. With their tools, including the 77 pound diamond tip drill, Jones will use to bore into the vault wall. Once the tools are so heavy, that makes the next part of the plan extra difficult. The elevator won't take them down there. It used to go all the way down to the basement, but this isn't the first team to rob the safe deposit. Someone beat them to it by about 40 years. The court was told the lift had been closed since the 1970s, after an armed robber had also used it to get to the vault. For since the 1970s, the elevator won't travel lower than the first floor as a security measure. But these guys, this group of pensioners figure who needs an elevator when you can mission impossible your way down the elevator shaft. It still reaches down to the basement. All they have to do is jam the lift to keep it in place above them while they shimmy down the cables below, with all their tools. Now this is sounding less like mission impossible, and more like final destination. But it actually works. Once they're in the basement, it's time for Basil's biggest trick of the night, disabling the alarm, and he only has 60 seconds to do it. Somehow the great basil once again pulls it off. Don't ask me how, he's the only one who knows, even a alarm specialist aren't quite sure how he did it. But that just leaves the concrete wall. Oh, and did I mention, it's 20 inches thick. By the time Jones fires up the drill and gets to work, it's already past midnight. But in this moment, the guys feel ageless. They're riding high on a rush of adrenaline they haven't felt in years. They have no idea, they've just hit their first major snag. Outside the building, a security guard slides up to the front door and pierce inside. All he knows is that his boss, the owner of the safe deposit, just called him after hours on a holiday weekend and begged him to go see if anything was wrong. When Basil cut the alarm, it didn't just die quietly. With its last little digital gas, it pinged the alarm company. They in turn alerted the owner and flagged it to the police. On paper, this is exactly the moment when everything should fall apart. This is also exactly what you have a lookout for. If Collins were on his game, he'd see the guard, put two and two together, oh, the alarm trip, someone's checking the building, we're cooked and either pull the plug or panic. But Collins isn't freaking out because Collins is asleep at his post. So he never warns them that they've got company. The crew just keeps drilling blissfully unaware there in the middle of a very, very near miss. The guard does a lap, checks the doors, finds them all locked, no broken locks, no shattered glass, no obvious breaking. From the outside, the building looks fine. He calls it in. Fossil arm reports guards responded to an alarm on Friday, but left without checking inside. And the owner thinks, well, I'm sure the police will take a closer look, but they never show up. On this occasion, the systems and processes that we have in place with the alarm companies weren't followed. And as a result of that, officers did not attend the premises when in fact, they probably should have done. Brian and his crew aren't as lucky with the next mishap. Six hours of drilling later, they've bored a whole big enough for Jones to wriggle through. Only he can't. There's something blocking him from getting in, a cabinet inside the vault that is bolted into the floor. Sunrise is breathing down their necks. They either have to leave before daylight or stay trapped inside all day. But the good news is, it's only Friday morning. They can come back. Time hasn't run out yet, so they leave and plan to return later. But Brian has always had a sense for trouble. He warns his team he has a bad feeling, like they're going to be caught. As Collins drives the criminal carpool home, Brian announces, he's out. The team is shocked. They have some choice words for Brian, the C word, the A word, the F word, it's all in there, the whole alphabet. They decide they're not giving up with or without their leader. Two nights later, on Perkins 67th birthday, he returns to Hatton Garden, along with Collins, Jones, Basil, and Wood. Wood immediately gets cold feet and leaves before they even get into the building. The others are more confident. This time, they have a brand new hydraulic pump. And with a bang and a clang, it forces the cabinet off its bolts and onto its side. They're in. A thousand boxes await them inside. To open one, you need two sets of keys used in tandem. Unless, of course, you're just a really strong guy with the crowbar. Jones gets to work. Ripping boxes from the wall and forcing them open, they're running up against the clock, and it's tedious work. In the end, he tears open 73 boxes. Over a third of them turn out to be empty. What they do make off with is still enough to fill bags upon bags. The hall is estimated at a worth of 14 million British pounds, nearly $20 million today. And as far as they're concerned, Brian Reader won't see a penny of it. But he had been right about one thing. They'd pull off a hell of a heist, old school patients, old school nerve, the job itself, flawless, textbook, the kind of thing you brag about in the pub for the next 20 years. But while they were breaking into the past, concrete walls, metal boxes of vault build in 1946, the investigation waiting for them was very much the future. They thought they outsmarted the system. Turns out the system had been recording the whole time. Two days after the heist, the commercial robbery team surveys the crime scene, but the entire vault has been scrubbed of DNA evidence. Thanks to Danny Jones' copy of Forrensix for Dummies. And yes, this is real. When police later searched Jones' place, they found his personal heavily used copy of Forrensix for Dummies, and the man had clearly done the homework. The vault looked like it had been cleaned by a crime scene obsessed housekeeper. Every fingerprint wiped, every surface polished, every stray skin cell, vanished. Investigators walked in expecting chaos and found a spotless clinically sanitized crime scene curated by a 60-year-old burglar with a library card. So next, a detective checks the cameras. Most were smashed during the robbery, even the hard drive was destroyed. But there are two cameras the robbers didn't catch. One, near the fire escape door, where most of the crew waited to be let inside, and one, across the street, at a different business. And sure, all of the thieves were wearing disguises and masks that's to be expected. But the detective knows there are other clues to look for. If you have enough determination to sift through thousands of hours of CCTV footage. Using cameras from all over Hatton Garden, he constructs a basic timeline of the heist, and he realizes on the second night, there's a really distinctive car that keeps circling the block, a white Mercedes with a black top. Once he finds a clear shot of the license plate, the rest falls into place, because he has the technology to simply input those plates and track the car all over London. And that's how he traces it back to the sleepy look-out/driver Kenny Collins. Instead of arresting him right away, they want to see if Collins will lead them to the rest of the team. So they begin to tell Collins everywhere. Sometimes it's boring work, there's a lot of dog walking and trips to the pharmacy, but they start to notice patterns, who he meets with, who he calls, and that adds two more suspects to their list. Brian Reader and Terry Perkins. About a month after the high, Brian meets up with Collins and Perkins at the castle pub. The same place they met every week to work out their plans. And since Brian wasn't there the second night to witness the moment of triumph, his good friends are willing to tell him all about it, in a pretty animated kind of way. They don't notice the undercover cop across the room filming their conversation. The pub is so loud, we can't hear what they say, but you can see Perkins acting out how they use the pump to knock down the cabinets. All of this grants police enough cause to bug some of the guy's cars. Almost immediately, they capture audio of them bragging about the heist. In no uncertain terms, they're like, and this is actually a direct quote from Perkins. We've done the best bit of work of the whole century. So what do these men have no chill? Well, as the weeks pass, they get caught here because they think they're getting away with it. Because the media is all over the case, and the prevailing theory is that this was a foreign group of robbers. Brian's crew assumes nobody's looking for suspects just around the corner from Hatton Garden. And there are a few reasons police hold off on making their arrest. For one thing, they really want to nab Brian Reader because they still see him as a cop killer. Yeah, not everybody thinks he's a gentleman crook. Back in 1985, Brian was accused of killing a detective constable. He was acquitted at trial, but the older guys on the force, they haven't forgotten his name. Secondly, investigators want the loot back. See, this wasn't a victimless crime. This the scene of a 19th century diamond market and a 21st century heist. To be honest, it makes me very unhappy and very sad what's happened. There are people obviously who probably aren't insured have lost everything. A lot of the people who rented those safe boxes were not insured. They thought the vote was their insurance. Many of them were immigrants, some were Holocaust survivors, and they'd come to England decades ago and build a life for themselves. After the robbery families lost retirements and heirlooms, businesses folded, but there's a chance the police can recover those losses. They just don't know where the loot is hidden. After the heist, the robbers didn't have time to divvy up the goods, so it got split up and hidden all over town. In a friend of a friend's apartment, in a cemetery under a tombstone, the plan was to wait out the media and the police, but now a few weeks later, Jones and Perkins get antsy. The longer they wait, the less they trust everyone, so Perkins pays for a vacation for his daughter to get her out of town. He wants to use her house to divvy up the loot, what they call the slaughter. Oh, they think their days away from living it up for the rest of their old lives, but remember, their cars are still bugged. So when Perkins tells the crew, "Yeah, we're going to my daughters for the slaughter." He's also telling police where to catch them red-handed. More than 100 police officers descend on the house. At the same time, they raid the homes of everybody they suspect had a hand in the Hatton Garden Heist. Brian Reader, Collins, Perkins and Jones plead guilty and all receive six to seven-year sentences. Wood and other associates are tried and convicted, but it takes longer to track down Basil, aka Michael Sneed, who's arrested in 2018. They spent years trying to break into a vault, only to end up locked in one. That's the real fountain of youth. The illusion that one perfect moment can freeze time, revive who you were, let you outrun the years. Brian's crew chased that myth just like once they leoned it, and like him, they didn't find it. They didn't find immortality, just consequences. So you tell me, if becoming a legend is the closest thing we have to living forever, is it still worth it when the legend is built on your dirtiest deed? Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, the Spotify podcast, new episodes release on Mondays. If you like today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description, until next time, I'm Harvey Gehen. Stay safe out there.