Terry Perkins held his breath as his old friend Danny Jones and their mysterious accomplice Basil began to work the pump that powered the hydraulic ram.
Everything had been leading up to this point. They had drilled through the thick concrete wall of the Hatton Garden bank vault.
Now they had to topple the heavy metal cabinet that stood between them and untold riches.
One last job: From left, Timothy Spall (Terry Perkins), Geoff Bell (Carl Wood), Brian F. O’Byrne (Basil), Kenneth Cranham (Brian Reader), David Hayman (Danny Jones) and Alex Norton (Kenny Collins) in the ITV drama
Perkins had tried to help, but the strain on the 67-year-old diabetic was obvious to the other two men, who had motioned for him to stop.
As Jones pumped again, there was a loud crack. ‘F****** hell, Danny,’ Perkins wheezed. ‘Careful. If that goes, we’re finished.’
Jones, 58, gritted his teeth and kept at it.
More pumping. Loud hissing. Then a huge bang. Jones winced, then massaged his eyelids with his index fingers.
As the dust settled, the three men peered together into the hole. Beyond it, they could at last see 999 safety deposit boxes crammed with treasure. ‘We’ve done it!’ the robbers said in excited, hoarse whispers.
Within days, the Hatton Garden Job had become the most celebrated jewellery heist in London’s criminal history, particularly when it became clear that it had been carried out by old lags out for ‘one last job’ before running off into the sunset.
As a film-maker, I knew this was a tale ripe for dramatisation, an irresistible combination of chutzpah, nostalgia and old-fashioned low cunning.
But as I started investigating the inside story for my book – which helped form the basis of a forthcoming four-part ITV drama starring Timothy Spall and Kenneth Cranham – it soon became clear that this was hardly the crime of the century.
The Hatton Garden job was a catalogue of incompetence and blundering from start to finish
On the contrary, the Hatton Garden job was a catalogue of incompetence and blundering from start to finish.
This, after all, is a heist where the lookout twice fell asleep; where crucial equipment exploded; a robbery in which two conspirators simply walked off the job; and where one of the gang members came close to a diabetic coma. Along the way, they left a catalogue of clues that would make tracing the nine-man team all too easy.
Now I wanted to hear their version of events. With the robbers serving lengthy jail sentences, reaching them took patience, an underworld contact and, finally, a letter addressed to Jones at Belmarsh prison.
It was just a few days later that my phone rang, and a man called Jon introduced himself as the representative of both Jones and Perkins. ‘They want to talk,’ he said. ‘They want to tell the real story of what happened.’
And so over a dozen meetings with Jon, direct contact with the robbers inside Belmarsh and discussions with Jones’s partner Val and two close associates of the gang, I gained exclusive access to the story of the April 2015 raid through the eyes of the men who carried it out.
They told me it had been years in the planning and they had believed it to be meticulously organised.
While there was certainly no shortage of criminal experience, their track record did not suggest they were masters at the art of getting away with it.
Perkins, for example, had been jailed for 22 years for the £6 million Security Express raid in 1983. But he also had diabetes and heart trouble.
Jones, meanwhile, had served five years after stealing £92,000 of jewellery from Ratners.
Brian Reader, then 76, was a long-time associate of Perkins and one of the chief architects. He served eight years for handling stolen gold from the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery.
Then there was the character known only as Basil, a man in his 40s, who I’ve now established was brought in by Reader, not drafted in as a latecomer, as police have suggested.
AS for the equipment they needed, Jones had been searching the internet for drills that could penetrate the vault’s thick concrete wall since August 2012. By May 2014 he had identified what he needed – as his undeleted internet history would later prove.
Undated handout photo issued by the Metropolitan Police of the inside of the vault at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company
The following January he was having regular planning meetings with Perkins and the getaway driver, 75-year-old John ‘Kenny’ Collins, at The Castle pub in Islington, North London. The gang thought their plan was rigorous, detailed and professional, safeguarded by a tiny circle of trust. Yet everything fell apart almost as soon as the operation swung – or staggered – into action.
Basil’s work was critical. He had just 60 seconds to disable the alarms, tucked away in a cupboard under the stairs; cut the telephone wires coming out of the alarm box; and break off the system’s aerial.
He succeeded – but that didn’t stop Jones somehow triggering a separate alarm that rang in the local police station while trying to cut through a metal door. This was an Easter weekend, however, and to the gang’s good fortune the duty officers ignored it and they were allowed to blunder on.
There was another taste of things to come when Collins, the supposed lookout, went across the road for fish and chips, then fell asleep, waking up to find a security guard nosing about.
In Jones’s words, ‘Funny f***er is Kenny.’ Perkins couldn’t agree more: ‘Kenny is! One hundred percent funny f***er.’
At 2am, the gang had drilled through the wall of the vault, but by this stage the elderly robbers were grumpy and exhausted, according to Perkins. And while they had punched a hole into the vault, their way was still blocked by the rows of metal deposit boxes lining the wall.
‘We hadn’t even started to put together the air ram yet, which was supposed to push the cabinets away from the wall,’ he explained. And when they did, disaster struck. The pump shattered into tiny pieces, and with this the gang imploded, the rivalries and tensions laid bare.
Their plan in tatters, they stood there squabbling. It had become clear that there was a corrosive rivalry between Reader and Perkins, the two elder statesmen, a fault line that would become a chasm.
It seems the gang turned on Reader, blaming him for the catastrophe of the air compressor. ‘Why the f*** hadn’t he thought that the cabinets might be bolted to the floor?’
‘Not my fault,’ he spat back. ‘It’s because you didn’t align the pump properly and broke the base.’
It was a turning point. Reader’s instincts were to cut and run, saying: ‘Forget it, it’s over. We are gonna get caught. It’s done.’
‘Mate, we’ve been planning this together for years,’ replied Perkins, shaking his head. For the moment at least, they had no choice but to flee.
At 6.32am on Good Friday they sprayed the crime scene with a solvent to get rid of DNA traces and Basil, as efficient as ever, took out the computer hard drives containing CCTV footage.
Jones and Perkins, however, were hell-bent on returning. This, after all, was meant to be the big one.
With hindsight, of course, it seems that Reader might well have been right, for no sooner had the bungling gang resumed operations than they dropped another clanger.
At 4.30pm on Easter Saturday, Collins drove Danny to a store in Twickenham, South-West London, to buy a new, bigger hydraulic pump, only for their car number plate to be picked up by the police automatic recognition systems. The gang had always thought Collins was rather stupid. ‘He couldn’t remember his own name,’ according to Jones.
Hatton Garden: The Inside Story by Jonathan Levi is published by Blink Publishing on November 30
Yet it was Jones who then made a truly fatal error, giving his real address for the invoice for the new air pump. It later emerged that his ‘disguise’ – a colourful jersey – was so distinctive it could be tracked back to him.
That night, the men returned to Hatton Garden, the most famous jewellery street in London, only to hit fresh trouble.
As they waited to make sure the coast was clear, Carl Wood, 58, a friend of Jones, became the second man to crack. ‘F*** this, I’m heading off,’ he announced.
Then, once again, the narcoleptic Collins fell asleep on the job, yet somehow they were undeterred.
‘When you think about it, we must have been crackers, stone crackers,’ Perkins said, looking back.
When the second pump was attached to the battering ram, the gang feared that it, too, would self-destruct under the strain, but with an almighty crash, the cabinet finally came away from the wall to reveal the deposit boxes inside.
However, there was a new issue. It turned out that only Basil and Jones were slim enough to fit through the narrow hole and smash open the deposit boxes. The gang recall joyous shouts from the two as the treasure was revealed: gold, silver and platinum bullion, jewellery, cash, foreign currency and – in packet after packet – loose diamonds.
But experts they were not, with Jones attempting to describe some of the necklace settings as ‘them sort of funny stones… aquamarine or something?’
And because only two men got inside, just 73 of the 999 boxes in the vault had been opened by 5am – and of these, 29 were empty. It was then that Perkins, with his diabetes and dodgy heart, keeled over just outside the vault and started going into a diabetic coma. It was genuinely touch and go, but Jones gave him a lifesaving shot of insulin. He later laughed that if Perkins had died on the job, he would have left him there and carried on.
Just after 5am, they started preparing to leave, and at 6.45am they emerged into the dawn light of Easter Sunday with the spoils famously stuffed in wheelie bins.
They had sprayed the scene with solvent once again but crucially left behind specialist drill bits and pieces of the broken pump. Both were traceable – another error in the catalogue.
The following day they attempted to divide up the spoils, solving the many disputes between them with nothing more sophisticated than the toss of a coin.
Jones wanted ‘enough to pay the bills’, while Perkins wanted houses for his children and ‘a flat in Portugal to rent out’.
Yet nobody had worked out what to do with the loot and the gang was riven with mistrust. ‘The reason that it all fell apart was the lack of a proper after-plan… the afterplan was a disaster,’ reflected Jones.
Today, as he serves a seven-year sentence, he remains tortured by what they left behind – if only the pump had not broken, if only they hadn’t fallen out, if only they were younger and stronger, it might have been the biggest robbery in history.
Instead, on Tuesday, May 19, 2015, the villains were arrested in co-ordinated police raids. Val Jones recalls the police searching her dresses in case priceless diamonds had been stitched into them to look like cheap diamante.
From amid this farce, only one figure has escaped without paying the price. Basil has been neither taken down nor taken apart, and remains one of the central mysteries in the case. He was the only gang member never to show his face and the only one who got away.
I strongly believe the police now know who Basil is. So how has he evaded them?
Jones once said Basil would ‘never get nicked in a million years’. Is that because of his skill as a career criminal, or because, as some suspect, he is under some form of police protection?
One of the things Jon and Val Jones both told me during our meetings was that there is a twist to this story – a key element that no one has yet uncovered. That is one piece of gold that the gang have so far got away with.
© Jonathan Levi, 2017
l Hatton Garden: The Inside Story by Jonathan Levi is published by Blink Publishing on November 30, priced £8.99. Offer price £7.19 (20 per cent discount) until November 26. Pre-order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15.