0:00 The largest burglary in English legal history was planned by men who could have been collecting their pensions.0:08 Last week we examined plans that were almost perfect.0:12 This one… this one was so audacious, it almost feels like a story from another time.0:19 It’s Good Friday, April third, two thousand fifteen.0:23 The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company is silent.0:27 But inside the vault, the air is thick with concrete dust.0:31 A hole, fifty centimeters wide, has been bored through the reinforced wall.0:37 Seventy-three safe deposit boxes are pried open, their contents gone.0:42 The building’s alarm had, in fact, been triggered hours earlier.0:47 But no one came.0:48 The police dismissed it.0:50 The thieves were left completely ALONE.0:53 The men responsible were not your typical high-tech crew.0:58 Brian Reader was seventy-six.1:00 Terry Perkins, sixty-seven.1:02 John “Kenny” Collins, seventy-four.1:05 The press would later call them the “Bad Grandpas.” For nearly three years, they planned their masterpiece.1:13 They held their meetings in a pub, The Castle in Islington, sketching out details over pints.1:20 They were old-school criminals, planning one last, magnificent score.1:26 A retirement fund, as one officer put it.1:29 The plan was audacious in its simplicity.1:32 Over the long Easter weekend, when London’s diamond district was deserted, they would go in.1:39 Dressed in high-visibility jackets to look like utility workers, they slipped into the building and abseiled down an empty lift shaft to the basement.1:51 There, they faced the vault.1:53 Fifty centimeters of reinforced concrete.1:56 They brought an industrial-grade drill, the kind used for major construction.2:02 For hours, they drilled.2:04 It was loud, punishing work.2:06 They worked in shifts, boring three overlapping holes to create an opening just big enough for a man to squeeze through.2:15 But when they finally breached the wall on that first night, they found their way blocked by the back of a heavy metal cabinet of safe deposit boxes.2:27 They had the right tools to break into a vault, but not to move a filing cabinet.2:33 They had to pack up and leave, empty-handed.2:37 Most crews would have quit.2:39 Not this one.2:40 They came back the next night with different equipment, finished the job, and spent hours ransacking the boxes.2:48 They walked away with an estimated fourteen million pounds in jewels, gold, and cash.2:55 For two days, they were ghosts.2:57 They had defeated a vault, bypassed an alarm, and vanished.3:02 It was, for a moment, the perfect crime.3:05 And then… they started acting like themselves.3:09 They went back to the pub to celebrate.3:12 To brag.3:12 They didn’t know that the police, now scrambling, were already closing in.3:18 The fatal mistake wasn't some high-tech forensic trace.3:22 It was much simpler.3:24 Much more… human.3:25 John "Kenny" Collins, the seventy-four-year-old lookout, had driven his own white Mercedes to the heist.3:33 He just… drove his own car.3:35 Police simply pulled the surveillance footage from the area and looked for vehicles that were there on both nights of the burglary.3:46 There it was.3:47 A white Mercedes.3:48 They traced the license plate to Collins.3:51 From there, the whole network unraveled.3:54 Police put the crew under surveillance, listening to their conversations, watching them meet.4:01 They heard everything.4:03 They heard them boasting about the heist, arguing about how to divide the loot.4:09 Within eighteen days of the crime, the "Bad Grandpas" were in custody.4:15 Some of the haul was recovered.4:17 One of the men, Danny Jones, led police to a bag of jewels he’d buried in a London cemetery, hoping for a lighter sentence.4:27 But more than half the fourteen million pounds is still missing.4:32 And one man, the mysterious figure known as "Basil" who disabled the security system, was never identified.4:40 He remains a ghost.4:41 The others received sentences of up to seven years.4:45 Their grand finale, their pension pot, ended in a prison cell.4:50 They planned an analogue heist in a digital world.4:54 And in the end, they weren't brought down by a brilliant detective, but by a license plate reader and their own loose talk.
