The “diamond wheezers” overcame diabetes, heart disease and incontinence to carry out a spectacular last job
W.W. Norton; 304 pages; $26.95.bomb-proof door of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company has never been breached. But over the long Easter weekend of 2015, an ingenious gang found another way into the closely guarded vault beneath London’s jewellery quarter. After sneaking into the building, the robbers climbed down a lift-shaft, disabled an alarm system and drilled through 20inches of reinforced concrete, before worming their way through the hole to ransack the safe.
The story provides a rich slice of London’s East End underworld, with a cast including men with names such as “Little Legs” Larkins, Billy the Fish and Jimmy Two Baths. One of the other crooks depicted in the book has a pair of Rottweilers called Brinks and Mat ; another once kept a pet lion and has a door-bell that plays the theme from “Goldfinger”.
Scotland Yard initially made a hash of the case. The grandpas tripped an alarm as they broke in, but the police failed to respond. In the aftermath of the crime, tips pointed to an eastern European gang called the Pink Panthers. But soon the Flying Squad homed in on the grandpas, largely thanks to John “Kenny” Collins, described by fellow gang-members as a “wombat-thick old cunt”, who drove to the crime in his own distinctively painted Mercedes.
The grandpas were “1980s criminals who committed a crime in the 21st century”, as one of their defence lawyers put it. They used the same mobile phones after the robbery, forgot to throw away their public-transport smart-cards, and boasted about the crime in their bugged cars and in their favourite pub , where the police were filming them and passing the footage to a lip-reader.
Eventually the cops swooped, catching the men red-handed with Lidl bags full of loot. “It’s overwhelming I suppose, innit?” conceded one of the gang when police confronted him with the evidence. It was: the grandpas pleaded guilty and were sent to a high-security prison, some of them straining with their hearing aids to hear the judge’s sentence."Rough diamonds"
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