REVEALED
After 52yrs Mirror solves riddle of who stole the Jules Rimet trophy Gangland brothers carried out 1966 theft & ‘nicked it for the thrill’
THE mystery of the 1966 World Cup theft is finally solved in a Mirror investigation.
We can reveal the Jules Rimet trophy was stolen by Sidney Cugullere with brother Reg, before it was found a week later in the street.
His nephew says he did it “just for the thrill”.
SIDNEY Cugullere loved to boast that he was the first Englishman to lift the World Cup – long before a victorious Bobby Moore at Wembley.
Gangland’s “Mr Crafty”, Sidney was the man who stole the Jules Rimet trophy months before England hosted the 1966 tournament, the Mirror reveals today.
Until now mystery has surrounded its theft, and what happened to the precious cup in the week before it was found again by a dog called Pickles.
But now, with the 2018 World Cup just 22 days away, our investigation tells for the first time the story behind one of the world’s most notorious thefts.
Armed robber Sidney, then 40, stole the trophy with the help of brother Reg, say three independent sources with knowledge of the heist including Reg’s son Gary.
And he did it just for fun, says Gary, who decided to tell the story after he was approached by the Mirror.
He said: “Sidney just nicked it for the thrill – not for financial gain, but just because it was so easy.”
It led to one of the biggest manhunts in Scotland Yard’s history and became a bigger story than that year’s general election. But Cugullere died of cancer in 2005, aged 79, having never been caught.
Only a handful of relatives, friends and gangland figures have known the truth.
One source said: “Many a time Sid would say he was the first Englishman to lift the World Cup in 1996 and that he did it before Bobby Moore.
“He was an opportunist and the stealing of the Cup was just that. He didn’t have any inside information or help from the guards. It was spur of the moment.”
He had tried to extort a ransom of £15,000 for the trophy with the help of pal Ted Betchley, but the plan went wrong after his friend was arrested. Yet still he was not exposed as the culprit.
The Mirror has spent 10 months tracing Cugullere’s history and family after a source disclosed the thief was a man named “Sidney Coo”.
Using interviews with insiders, police files and National Archives records we pieced together the most complete picture so far of what happened.
Cugullere, jailed for more than 25 years for other offences, took the winged Greek goddess figurine on Sunday 20 March 1966 from the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, Central London.
It was insured for £30,000 and was being exhibited in a glass cabinet by the Stanley Gibbons stamp company. Sir Stanley Rous, the president of FIFA, had only agreed to it being released from the FA headquarters on condition it was watched 24 hours a day. The exhibition was closed on the Sunday and there were four guards on duty, split into two pairs. One source said Cugullere told him in the 1980s how he had pulled off the burglary. He had driven to Westminster from his home in Walworth, South East London, to case out security after hearing the Cup was on display there.
Wearing a brown removals-style coat he walked into the area open to the public and went to the locked room where the trophy was housed in a padlocked cabinet.
The source said: “There were those door handles you get on schools, the large metal ones, and he realised he could unscrew them and get in. The handle fell and was hanging there.”
The handles were holding a wooden bar across the rear doors. Once removed, Cugullere could get inside.
The insider said: “Sid had a bag with his tools including bolt cutters.
“He said he couldn’t believe it was just in a glass-fronted wooden cabinet with a chain and a little Woolworths padlock on it, and no security
watching it. He cut the chain and in seconds got the cabinet open. When he got it out, he braced himself to lift it, expecting it to be very heavy.
“But he said it was so light it was untrue. He said it wouldn’t have made much as scrap in them days.”
Cugullere then put the trophy in his bag and walked out. Gary says his father Reg told him he was also in the Methodist Central Hall, but did not see Sidney take the cup.
He said: “On the street after coming out of the doors Sid lifted his jacket and said, ‘’Ere you are, Reg, look at this’. He opened one side of his jacket and the World Cup was there.
“My dad went: “F***ing hell, Sid, what the f*** do you think we are going to do with that?”
Back at the Methodist Central Hall, security guards were in for a shock. Senior guard Frank Hudson was meant to be keeping a constant eye on the Cup with colleague George Franklin on the first floor.
Franklin later told police he checked the Cup at 11am before going for a coffee with Hudson.
At 12.10pm, one of the downstairs guards found the padlock on the case removed and the trophy stolen.
The next day police issued a description of a lone thief in his late 30s, around 5ft 10in with sallow skin, dark eyes and greased-down black hair. The description fitted Cugullere.
Sidney took the trophy home, but soon realised his wife Nell “would have flung him out” if she found it.
So he called Reg, who took it home in his car to Leighton Buzzard, Beds. And that’s when police nearly found the trophy they were all searching for.
The source said: “Reggie had it under the front seat. He got pulled at a general stop by the police and they searched the car but didn’t find it.”
Rewards totalling £5,500 were soon offered for its safe return, far more than Sidney could get if he melted down the 14in gold-plated silver Cup.
DI Len Buggy of the elite Flying Squad led the probe. His break came when the Chelsea and FA chairman Joe Mears was phoned by a man calling himself Jackson, who said a parcel would be arriving the next day.
It arrived three days after the theft, on the Wednesday, and contained lining from the trophy and a ransom note demanding £15,000 in five and one-pound notes. The note, written by Cugullere, said: “Dear Joe Kno (sic) doubt you view with very much concern the loss of the world cup...to me it is only so much scrap gold.”
He said the cup would be “for the POT” if the ransom was not paid.
Buggy posed as Mears and arranged to meet “Jackson” in Battersea Park – in fact Sidney’s friend Ted Betchley, 46, a former docker. Betchley was arrested. He insisted he was just the middleman, paid £500 for his part, and was jailed for just two years.
Gary said soon after the theft Reg and Sidney hid the World Cup in Reg’s father-in-law’s coal shed. He added: “My dad was freaking out and he knew there was no way they could sell the cup. They didn’t melt it down or destroy it because it’s the World Cup. They realised they had to give it back.” Seven days after the theft, on March 27, docker David Corbett was taking his cross-bred collie Pickles for a walk when he spotted the cup in the street.
It remains unclear how it got there. Corbett collected £6,000 in rewards.
Bobby Moore went on to lift the Cup after England defeated Germany 4-2 in the eighth World Cup final.
Sidney and Reg had wreaths in the shape of the Jules Rimet trophy at their funerals – and a picture of the World Cup was included in the order of service for Reg’s 2012 service.
Gary said: “I gave a florist a picture of the Cup, she never asked why.”
He said of the heist: “It’s the crime of the century and my dad and uncle will forever be remembered as the people who stole the World Cup.”
Sidney just nicked it for the thrill.. not for financial gain.. because it was so easy GARY CUGULLERE NEPHEW OF THIEF SIDNEY CUGULLERE
BURSTING out of a corner shop with a furious owner chasing him, young Sidney Cugullere was the decoy, leaving younger brother Reg to raid the cigarette shelves.
The boys had little choice but to get by with their carefully executed heists as they fought to survive in South East London during the depression era.
A source who knew Mr Crafty for decades said: “He didn’t have nothing when he was growing up and was thieving from a very young age.”
Born in 1926, the eighth of nine siblings, Sid lived by East Street market, off the Walworth Road.
Brother Reg’s son Gary, 50, a crane operator and a dad-of-three, said: “I remembered Dad telling me they used to steal all the fags out of kiosks and wheelbarrow them off to sell them.
“Sidney, who was the fastest runner, would steal something so the bloke
behind the counter would chase him. While he was gone, Reg would take whatever they wanted.”
But when they got home, they’d be lucky to keep their ill-gotten gains.
The source added: “If Sid had a tickle, his dad would say ‘I’ll take that to the police station if you don’t give it to me’ and his dad would take the money and get a new car.”
South East London was home to bigtime crooks including the Richardson gang, “Mad” Frankie Fraser and Hatton Garden brains, Brian Reader.
Sid knew them all and is thought to have done time in borstal with Fraser.
Back in Walworth, he fell in with a “tight team” of safe-blowers who would rob post offices up and down the country. Cugullere went “on the trot” during the war after pretending to be mentally ill, later claiming he flogged his gun and uniform.
In 1954, at 28, he was suspected of a £3,000 safe robbery in King’s Cross where another brother, Freddie, 36, was working as a nightwatchman.
Seven years later Cugullere was jailed in Leeds for “robbery with violence” near Doncaster, South Yorks, after taking £10,000 from mail bags. He was released in April 1964 and married Hetty “Nell” Hoare in May, claiming that, from then, he had gone straight. We now know that two years after his release he stole the World Cup. Known as “Cooey” to mates, the Arsenal fan and Mirror reader loved spending his cash on women and fast cars, driving a Porsche and Mercedes. The source said: “Sid was a womaniser and Nell threw him out many times. “He’d take her to one pub on a Saturday night and his girlfriend to another one on a Friday. “Sid would go into a pub with the wife and shout ‘Old Bill – let’s get out!’ when really he had just seen a bird he had been with the night before.”
Always smart, Sid would wear a duffle coat over a shirt and tie, with sports coats, slacks and slip-on shoes.
A trained carpenter, he also worked at Guy’s hospital and in a home for people with learning difficulties.
The source said: “He was very polite, a great thinker and planner. Sid was a thief but never burgled houses, it was always bigger; banks and warehouses. He was also very funny.”
The source added: “He would go in as a Securicor man with real bags and the staff would put the money in. His uniform was spot on complete with crash helmet and neck piece.” Gary remembers the cash from one robbery being dug up from the garden where it had been buried for Sid.
“The containers weren’t watertight. I remember walking into the house and thinking ‘what is that smell?’
“When I went upstairs there were loads of washing lines with £50 and £20 notes hanging off and drying out.”
Cugullere evaded justice for the World Cup theft but in 1971 he got eight-and-a-half years at the Old Bailey for a plot involving £100,000 in fake fivers. Reg got six years.
The last sentence he got was 13 years in the late-1980s for robbery.
He died of prostate cancer in St Thomas’ hospital in 2005, three years after his only child Lesley passed away.
The source said: “He died of a broken heart. He was a shaky wreck after she died.”