...
Crime & heists
2 April 2015 – 5 April 2015 · Hatton Garden, London
Robberies & burglariesStatus: Solved
Image: RHaworth · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
73deposit boxes broken open in a single Easter weekend
Since the Middle Ages Hatton Garden has been the centre of London's jewellery and diamond trade. Dealers kept their stock in rented deposit boxes in the basement of number 88–90. The gang consisted of professional burglars, most of them in their sixties or seventies; Brian Reader, 76, had earlier been involved in handling the Brink's-Mat gold. They prepared the burglary for about three years.
On the evening of Thursday 2 April 2015, before the long Easter weekend, the men reached the basement by a fire escape and the lift shaft. They partly disabled the alarm and used a diamond-tipped drill to bore three overlapping holes in the concrete wall beside the vault door. A cabinet behind it blocked the way, and they left. Two nights later they came back with a hydraulic ram and crawled inside.
The alarm did go off, but the police sent nobody, which later led to an apology. The burglary was only discovered on the Tuesday. Detectives followed a distinctive white car on camera footage, bugged the suspects as they boasted about the job, and arrested them in May 2015 while they were dividing the loot. In 2016 six men received sentences of up to seven years.
The man who disabled the alarm system, known only as 'Basil', was arrested in 2018 and convicted in 2019. About a third of the loot has been recovered; several of those convicted were given additional prison time for failing to repay their share. The safe deposit company went into liquidation. The case has been filmed several times, often with more sympathy for the culprits than the dealers who lost their stock thought justified.