Minute by minute, how the £24m raid unfolded inside Aladdin’s cave vault

EVEN by a hardened crook’s standards, it was an audacious raid — if somewhat Seventies in style. From meeting in a pub to plot the fine details to a failed first attempt, jumping down lift shafts, drilling through walls and hiding loot in a cemetery, TOM RAWSTORNE and CHRIS GREENWOOD give a blow-by-blow account of how the £24 million Hatton Garden burglary unfolded . . .

JANUARY, 2015

AS THE New Year dawns, the ringleaders of the plot — John ‘Kenny’ Collins, 75, Daniel Jones, 60, Terry Perkins, 67, and Brian ‘The Guv’nor’ Reader, 76 — fine-tune their plans, which have been several years in the making.

Discreet meetings take place on Friday evenings over a beer in a quiet corner of The Castle, a pub on Pentonville Road in Islington, North London, not far from the Hatton Garden jewellery district.

Gang member Carl Wood, 58, is kept in the loop by phone on a need-to-know basis.

FEBRUARY

INCREASINGLY regular trips are made, by car, to check out Hatton Garden. Brian Reader travels in from his Dartford home by train and is picked up at London Bridge station by one of the gang.

Their target is the 999 doubled-locked safety deposit boxes housed within the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company, in the basement of a seven-storey building with 60 tenants, many in the jewellery trade.

Behind a series of locked doors and sliding gates, monitored by sensors, alarms and CCTV, is a Chubb vault with an enormous steel door that can be accessed only by manually deactivating its combination locks.

The door is too tricky to breach, so the gang are going to go in through the wall next to it.

Having researched drills suitable for penetrating reinforced concrete, they single out the tool for the job: the Hilti DD 350.

Equipped with a £4,000 diamond tip, it weighs 5½ stone and generates such heat when it is operated that it needs a constant supply of water to keep cool. The gang download videos from YouTube and study how the drill is operated.

MARCH

SURVEILLANCE is ramped up. By now, John Collins has been to Hatton Garden at least five times. The gang keep an eye on everyone’s coming and goings, including jeweller Lionel Wiffen, who also has an office in the basement, next to the deposit box company.

Seventy-six-year-old Mr Wiffen is feeling increasingly uneasy. He doesn’t know why, but he becomes convinced he is being watched — either from vehicles in the street or from the building opposite. Only in hindsight will he realise that he is not being paranoid.

There is also something strange about an incident that takes place in the building on the last day of March. Soon after lunch, Katya Lewis, who works there for a diamond company, summons the lift.

It takes six or seven minutes to come, and when it finally arrives there is a white-haired man wearing blue overalls inside.

He is surrounded by tools and building equipment and smiles apologetically because there is no room inside for her to get in. The man fits Terry Perkins’ description.

THURSDAY APRIL 2

6PM: At the end of his ten-hour shift, security guard Kelvin Stockwell, who has worked at the safety deposit box company for 20 years, sets the alarm and locks up as he always does. It is Easter weekend, so he and his colleague won’t be back in until the following Tuesday morning. 6.31 PM: The gang gets into position. Again, Reader travels by public transport, exiting Waterloo East Station with a tap of his Freedom Pass — an Oyster card allowing pensioners to travel for free — at a touch after 6.30pm. 7.02 PM: Reader is on the number 55 bus heading to St John Street, a five-minute walk from Hatton Garden. He is wearing stripy socks, brown shoes and a distinctive scarf, to which he will add a yellow hard hat and a high-visibility jacket with ‘GAS’ written on the back. 8.20 PM: Collins arrives on the scene in a white Transit van, parking around the corner from the vault. Minutes later, he and Wood emerge on foot and check out the building. They are dressed as workmen in hi-viz jackets, with baseball caps obscuring their faces.

Soon after, a man with a black bag over his shoulder approaches and enters the main door of 88-90 Hatton Garden. How he gets in is unclear, but the assumption must be that he has a key.

The individual is referred to by his colleagues as ‘Basil’. Despite being caught on CCTV cameras a number of times, he is the one gang member to remain unidentified to this day. 9.21 PM: Jeweller Mr Wiffen finally leaves his office, having had some late customers. He shuts his office door and climbs up the iron stairs that lead to the street. At the top is a locked fire exit that he routinely uses to get in and out of the building, emerging onto the road around the corner from the main entrance to 88-90 Hatton Garden. 9.22 PM: Basil, hiding somewhere inside the building, watches and waits until Mr Wiffen leaves. Then, following in his footsteps, he opens the fire escape door to let the others in.

Almost immediately, the white Transit van pulls up outside and the gang start to unload bags, tools and two wheelie bins, which are carried in through the fire escape and down the stairs. Large metal joists are also ferried in. Reader, Perkins, Jones, Wood and Basil are now on the premises. 9.30 PM: Collins parks the van around the block. Wearing a flat cap and carrying a briefcase, he enters 25 Hatton Garden — an office block opposite 88-90 Hatton Garden which has a clear view of the main doors. Again, he doesn’t break in, but somehow has a key. From now on, communication is via walkietalkie. Phones are switched off so they can’t be traced in the future. 9.30PM TO MIDNIGHT: The gang has to penetrate the series of locked doors and gates that lead to the vault. They know that doing so will trigger sensor alarms. In order to bypass the doors, the men target the elevator shaft instead.

Since an armed robbery in the Seventies, the lift no longer goes down to the basement. So the men send it up to the second floor and then disable it there.

Returning to the ground floor, they leave an ‘Out of order’ sign just in case anyone happens to enter the building. Then they prise open the lift doors and one of the gang drops down to the basement floor.

Once in the basement, they break out of the shaft by forcing open locked (unalarmed) shutters that open directly into an office behind the locked doors. They are ‘in’. But now they must effectively break back out again, to fetch the heavy machinery needed for the job. First, they attempt to disable the alarm, hidden in a cupboard, by cutting the telephone cable and breaking off an aerial that could potentially send out an alarm using a mobile signal. They also disable any CCTV cameras they can see.

Next, the electric supply to an iron gate is cut, allowing it to be pulled open, and the lock is broken of the exterior wooden door.

FRIDAY APRIL 3

12.18AM: unknown to the gang, opening the gate improves the signal to the damaged, but not deactivated alarm, allowing it to send out a text message alert to the monitoring company.

In response, a call is put through to Alok Bavishi, a son of the owner of the company, telling him the alarm is going off.

Mr Bavishi is wrongly informed by the security monitoring company that the police are on the scene.

12.20 AM: Mr Bavishi gets hold of Mr Stockwell, the security guard, who agrees to go to Hatton Garden to check. Mr Bavishi says he will join him there. Neither of them is unduly bothered as the alarm had previously been set off by an insect crossing a sensor.

1.15AM: Mr Stockwell arrives and calls his boss, who is still five minutes away, to tell him the front door and the fire exit seem secure. He says it is a false alarm and both men return home to bed.

The work inside continues for the rest of the night. Having cut through a final sliding gate, the men have to penetrate the vault.

With the drill, they make three adjoining, circular holes in the 3ftthick reinforced concrete wall to the left of the steel door.

The holes are 3ft off the floor and measure just 18 in wide by 10 in high — just big enough for a man to crawl through. But there is more work to be done before that can happen, because through the hole they are confronted with the back of the heavy metal cabinets housing the safe deposit boxes.

These metal cabinets are bolted to the floor and ceiling.

The gang’s aim is to push the cabinets over from behind, ripping out the bolts.

To do this they have a hydraulic ram that can create 10 tonnes of pressure. But for reasons that are unclear (probably a faulty pump), the plan does not work and the cabinets will not budge.

7.51 AM: The men leave the premises via the fire escape: first Jones, then Wood, Reader and Perkins.

At the same time, Collins, the lookout, leaves 25 Hatton Garden and returns to the white van and picks up the four men.

Last out is Basil, who leaves through the main front door.

11.18 AM The men head back to their homes. Reader is dropped off at London Bridge station for the journey home. Again, he uses his pensioner’s Oyster card.

SATURDAY APRIL 4

8.36 AM: Today is Terry Perkins’ 67th birthday, but the gang have nothing to celebrate. They decide to regroup and try again. The priority is to sort out the hydraulic ram. They make a number of phone calls.

4PM: Collins drives Jones to Twickenham, where they visit two plant-hire shops. In Machine Mart, they buy a new hydraulic pump.

8 PM: Mr Wiffen returns to Hatton Garden with his wife to clean up his office ahead of an expected visit by an electrician the following day (Sunday). When he arrives at the fire exit, he is surprised to find it unlocked and ajar.

He goes down to the basement, but finds the door to the safety deposit company is locked (Basil having bolted it from the inside before being the last to leave).

He and his wife clean the office for an hour, leaving at 9pm and locking the fire exit door behind them.

9.17 PM: Collins’ Mercedes leaves his home and travels to Hatton Garden. Jones and Wood get out of the Mercedes. Reader is nowhere to be seen, having decided he no longer wants any part in the raid.

His colleagues are unimpressed. One will describe him as ‘an old ponce’, while Jones later observes: ‘All them months and f***ing years’ work he’s put in to go “Look I won’t be here tomorrow” cos he’s thought you’ll never get in there and the simplest f***ing thing, common sense thing, got you in.’ After a quick recce, the car heads back to Collins’ home, arriving at 9.40pm.

22.04PM: The gang return, this time in the white van. Jones, Wood, Collins and Perkins get out, while Basil again enters 88-90 Hatton Gardens through the main — locked — entrance. Carl Wood tries the fire escape several times and, finding it locked, has a heated discussion with the others.

Perkins tells him to give it more time, that all they need is another half-hour. But Wood gets cold feet and leaves the scene. Again, they question his bottle, one observing that ‘his a***hole went’.

As before, Basil unlocks the fire escape door from the inside. Jones and Perkins go in through the fire escape, Jones carrying a Nike holdall with the new pump. Collins assumes the look-out role again in the property opposite.

Once inside, they use the metal joists to anchor the pump and hose on the wall opposite the vault, directing the ram through the hole and against the back of the cabinets.

As they realise that their plan is succeeding, Perkins tells Jones: ‘It’s working! It’s working! It ain’t f***ing come back. We’re in. We’re in.’

Once inside the vault, they jemmie open 73 of the 999 safe deposit boxes and ransack them. The boxes they chose to target, it will emerge, contain the most valuable items in the vault. Are they just lucky or are they acting on inside information?

SUNDAY APRIL 5

5.44 AM: Jones emerges from the fire escape carrying the pump. He and Perkins then bring the two wheelie bins and several bags full of jewels and other valuable items up the stairs to the fire escape.

The bins are so heavy they struggle to shift them and Perkins, a diabetic, is not in the best of health. During the job he has been injecting himself with insulin, joking later that if he hadn’t it would be he who would have been carried out in the wheelie bin.

Collins leaves his lookout post and heads to the van. He drives it to the fire escape and the loot is loaded up. Basil joins them, having exited the main doors of 88-90 Hatton Garden.

6.44 AM: The four men leave the scene.

7.30 AM: Just 45 minutes after the gang departs, Mr Wiffen arrives to let the electrician in. Again, he finds the fire exit unlocked and open, and again he is concerned. He cautiously enters the building, but can see nothing untoward.

MONDAY APRIL 6

HAVING got away with their haul, the plan is to conceal and hide the stolen goods for a while, waiting for the publicity to die down before they launder it. The wider gang is to be involved transporting and hiding the items.

Phone calls ensue and a meeting takes place with at least Perkins, Collins and Jones present to sort out the stolen goods. These include precious stones, such as £15,000 sapphires and diamonds, watches by Breitling, Omega, Tag Heuer and Rolex, gold rings, earrings, necklaces, bangles and brooches.

There are bundles of brand new £50 notes, U.S. dollars and Euros, as well as platinum and gold bullion.

The haul is split and hidden behind skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and under floorboards. Some is sold, some is concealed in a cemetery, but the location of much, much more remains unknown.

TUESDAY APRIL 7

8 AM: Security guards arrive at Hatton Garden, discover the burglary and call the police. Over the coming days, detectives — and the gang — slowly realise just how big the raid has been.

Or, as Perkins puts it to Jones: ‘That is the biggest robbery that could have ever been. That will never happen again. The biggest robbery in the f***ing world, Dan — and we was on that c***.’

But the last word must go to Jones, who, with admirable foresight, was to observe: ‘If we get nicked, at least we can hold our heads up that we had a last go.’