Hatton Garden
Hatton Garden, a shopping street in London’s Camden neighbourhood, is the city’s principal diamond and jewelry quarter. There are over 300 businesses and 90 shops in the jewelry industry, representing the largest cluster of jewelry retailers in the UK.
April 2015
In April, 2015 everything was moving along as usual in Hatton Garden and people were looking forward to the imminent 4-day Easter bank holiday weekend when many of the businesses on and around the street would be closed, including Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd.
On Thursday April 2, 2015 (after the businesses had closed for the holiday weekend) four men worked quickly to carry out the plan they had spent three years perfecting. First, they disabled a second floor elevator and climbed down the elevator shaft to enter the basement of Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. The walls around the vault itself were made of reinforced concrete and were 2m (6 feet) thick but the men had brought a heavy-duty drill and they bored straight through the walls. This would have taken several people using drills to create smaller holes which they connected into one larger hole to enter the vault, and it would have occurred over the course of several hours.
Once they gained access to the vault they left their tools strewn around the floor and emptied over 70 safe deposit boxes, mostly belonging to uninsured jewelers. The total stolen was worth up to £14 million (equivalent to roughly £19 million now).
Since there were no outward signs of forced entry or robbery, nothing was noticed until Tuesday April 7, 2015 when Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd’s staff returned to work. Then the vault was opened and they saw debris, dust, tools, drills, and open and empty safe deposit boxes strewn carelessly around the room. Oh and a huge hole in the wall.
The Investigation
The police were immediately called and the theft was deemed so significant that the Flying Squad, a branch of the Specialist, Organized & Economic Crime Command within London’s Metropolitan Police Service, was called in to lead the investigation.
As soon as the police laid eyes on the vault and saw how the thieves had gained entry they knew it was “an organized operation”. The police checked all surrounding CCTV cameras with their hopes low since such an organized group had surely evaded the cameras too, but this is where they got lucky.
The thieves were caught on CCTV outside Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd and six people could be seen in these videos, nicknamed by the press; “Mr Ginger, Mr Strong, Mr Montana, The Gent, The Tall Man and The Old Man”. It’s hard to get information on how they did this, but the police started identifying each of these men, one by one, until they had rounded up the whole gang. The men were Brian Reader (the mastermind of the plan), Carl Wood, William Lincoln, Jon Harbinson, Hugh Doyle, and Michael Seed. At the time of the robbery all the men were in their 50s, 60s, or 70s, earning them nicknames like The Greying Thieves or Diamond Geezers.
One of the investigators said it was easy to catch them despite their years of careful planning, and histories of crime, because they were “analogue criminals operating in a digital world, and they lacked the knowledge to defeat digital detectives” (O’Connor, 2024).
What Happened
So, the ringleader, 76-year-old Brian Reader, who was also involved in another huge gold robbery in 1983 (known as the Brinks-Mat robbery) was arrested on May 19, 2015 by the Flying Squad. Then in November of the same year Carl Wood, William Lincoln, Jon Harbinson and Hugh Doyle are all arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit burglary and conspiracy to conceal, convert or transfer criminal property. Finally, three years after the theft, on March 28, 2018, Michael Seed was arrested and charged with conspiracy to burgle and conspiracy to conceal or disguise criminal property (he was the tech expert of the group and the reason why no alarms went off inside the vault).
On March 9th, 2016, Wood was sentenced to six years in prison and Lincoln received seven years for their charges. Doyle was jailed for 21 months and was on a suspended sentence for two years in addition to having to pay £367.50 for his “general criminal conduct”. Reader was sentenced to six years and three months. Harbison was found not guilty.
In 2018, Reader was discharged from prison and was struggling with his health; he died at his home in 2023 with his death certificate listing him as a “retired gardiner”.
Don’t think I forgot about Seed. He wasn’t even arrested until years later when “gold ingots, gems and jewellery worth £143,000 were found in his bedroom” (The Guardian, 2019). He was found guilty at trial of burglary and conspiracy to burgle and was sentenced to ten years in prison for the former charge and eight years for the latter, running concurrently. On October 1, 2020, Seed was ordered to repay £6 million in damages or face an additional seven years in prison.
So far, the police have only ever recovered about £4.3 million (£5.9 million today) of the original spoils of the theft. Some think the money was taken to Portugal where one of the gang members has a house and some think it’s just well hidden and will never be returned as the gold was melted down and the jewelry was broken apart for sale.
Works Cited
“Hatton Garden Raid: Vault Breached via Lift Shaft”. BBC News. 2015. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-32233310
“Hatton Garden Ringleader ‘Basil’ Found Guilty over £14 Million Heist”. The Guardian. 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/15/hatton-garden-heist-ringleader-basil-michael-seed-found-guilty
O’Connor, Amber. “Hatton Garden Heist: How Much was Stolen and Where are They Now?” Cosmopolitan. 2024. https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a60809952/hatton-garden-heist/