Episode 6 min
0:00 the vault was empty the reluctant admirer on the tuesday morning after the easter bank holiday in 2015 the staff of the hatton gardens safe deposit company discovered a hole not just a hole but a gateway a 50 centimeter thick concrete wall had been bored straight through and on the other side 73 safe deposit boxes lay open and0:28 empty £14,000,000 in cash gold and diamonds gone0:37 last week we talked about the audacity of bruce reynolds and the great train robbery this this was a different kind of audacity not the work of young men in their prime but something else entirely something older imagine the scene the police arrive the flying squad they see the sheer brutalist ambition of it a hole drilled with an1:02 industrial diamond tipped cord drill the burglars abseil down a lift shaft to even get to the vault this wasn't a smash and grab this was a siege and for four long days over the holiday weekend the burglars had won they were inside undisturbed helping themselves to a king's ransom it was for a moment perfect the largest burglary1:30 in english legal history and the perpetrators had simply vanished the press called them ghosts master criminals but the truth was so much better the masterminds weren't some slick high-tech crew they were a handful of men in their sixties and seventies career criminals yes but old enough to be collecting pensions they call themselves the diamond weasers they2:00 planned the whole thing for nearly three years meeting in a pub in islington called the castle they were bored you see bored with retirement they wanted one last score and you have to admit they had the experience they knew to hit on a bank holiday they knew how to disable most of the alarms they knew exactly what2:23 tools they needed the reluctant admirer low smooth controlled intimate with restrained flashes of amused admiration2:38 this was old school craft and for a while that craft was enough they drilled they looted they walked away with the score of a lifetime the police had nothing no alarms tripped in a way that mattered no witnesses no immediate suspects the gang was home free sitting on millions3:09 the reluctant admirer and then the whole beautiful audacious thing started to unravel it always comes down to the details doesn't it they disabled the alarms inside but they missed one cctv camera on the street it caught him clear as day dressed in high visibility jackets looking like workmen hauling their gear in3:39 a wheelie bin then there was the car one of them a man named kenny collins used his own personal white mercedes for a lookout run his own car police traced the license plate that one simple lazy mistake gave investigators their first thread4:06 and from that one thread4:09 tapestry came undone the police put listening devices in the gang's cars and what did they hear they heard them bragging arguing over how to split the loot planning their next moves on recorded lines they used their personal phones which left a perfect digital map of their meetings it was amateur hour all that old world experience all that4:35 meticulous planning undone by modern technology and simple human ego they were arrested every last one of them the great criminal masterminds were caught because they couldn't resist talking about how clever they'd been only about 4,000,000 of the £14,000,000 was ever recovered and the rest is just gone melted down recut disappeared into the global5:05 stream of illicit wealth the men themselves all went to prison the audacious brilliant and deeply flawed heist was over and all that's left is the story of old men who tried to pull off one last masterpiece and almost did forgetting that in the modern world you can't outrun a license plate
