🗝️ Famous case · London, 2015
The Hatton Garden heist (2015): what we know
Over the Easter weekend of 2015, in London's diamond district, a gang of burglars gets into a safe deposit company through the lift shaft and drills through a concrete wall of the vault. The ringleaders are between 60 and 76 years old. Here is how this heist unfolded, as the sources tell it.
Two nights, one Easter weekend
Thursday, April 2, 9:19 p.m.: the Hatton Garden safe deposit closes for four days. At 9:23 p.m., a man goes down toward the vault, followed by three others pulling wheelie bins. The burglars had disabled the lift on the second floor, climbed down the shaft, forced doors, then drilled through the vault's 50 cm concrete wall with a core drill: three overlapping holes, just big enough to squeeze through, without touching the armored door.
Friday, April 3, 12:21 a.m.: the alarm goes off. The police are told, but the call is graded as needing no response. The gang leaves at 8:05 a.m.: its hydraulic pump failed to push over the cabinets of boxes. The oldest gives up. The others buy a new pump, come back on Saturday at 9:17 p.m. and leave on Sunday at 6:10 a.m. One of them, seeing that a fire exit door had been locked, got scared and never went in.
Nearly 14 million pounds
73 boxes are forced open, mostly those of independent jewelers from the area; some kept their retirement stock there. The loot is put at nearly 14 million pounds. No violence: nobody was hurt or threatened. Only about a third was ever recovered.
The investigation
The heist is only discovered on Tuesday, April 7, when the building reopens. The Daily Mirror publishes the CCTV footage on April 10. The distinctive Mercedes of one of the ringleaders, filmed in a nearby street, puts the police on the trail. On May 19, 2015, the Flying Squad arrests the ringleaders in the middle of sharing out the loot. Another one had hidden his share under gravestones. An electrical fire under Kingsway on April 1, unrelated, had first muddied the waters.
The sentences
In March 2016, the three ringleaders who pleaded guilty, Kenny Collins, Daniel Jones and Terry Perkins, get 7 years in prison; the oldest, Brian Reader, 6 years and 3 months; Carl Wood, the one who backed out, 6 years. "Basil", the man with the keys who let the gang in, real name Michael Seed, is only arrested in 2018; he is sentenced in March 2019 to 10 years. The safe deposit company, ruined, went into liquidation in September 2015.
Your turn to reconstruct the heist
In Enquetix's famous case, you reconstruct the heist by pure deduction: who was in the gang, how it got in, with which tools, and which surprises nearly gave it away. The facts are documented 📚. The convicted go by their real names 📚; those whose identity was never established by a judgment have a made-up name 🔎.
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Sources: sentencing remarks of Woolwich Crown Court (March 9, 2016); Wikipedia ("Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary"); NPR.