Was Britain ’s top crime lord behind Hatt on Garden heist?
. . . and did he stage it to steal away explosive evidence that could finally put him behind bars?
DUrING recent days, the nation has been gripped by the audacity of seven decrepit old lags who pulled off Britain’s biggest burglary, at an age when they ought to have been supping stout in the local and reminiscing about their villainous hey-days.
The unlikely and often farcical last-hurrah of these ‘Bad Grandpas’, who made light of their advancing years — not to mention arthritis and diabetes — to breach a seemingly impregnable vault beneath Hatton Garden, London’s jewellery trade hub, emerged last week after three of the gang were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court.
Soon, they and four other gang members, who admitted conspiring to steal gems, precious met- als, banknotes and valuables worth at least £14 million, will be sentenced; doubtless for so long that some may die behind bars.
meanwhile, production has begun on a film based on their exploits, provisionally titled The Hatton Garden Job, and tough-guy Cockney actors of a suitable vintage, such as ray Winstone, Terence Stamp and 82-year-old michael Caine, are being courted for the leading roles.
Given the bizarre real-life cast of characters — among them an arch-thief aged 76, who caught a bus to the burglary using a senior citizen’s pass, and a crime-obsessed eccentric who slept in his mother’s nightgown and a Tommy Cooper-style Fez — it should be quite a movie.
Yet as one of the film company’s bosses admitted this week, there is one major snag. The eighth gang member remains unidentified and at liberty, and the final scene is contingent upon whether Scotland Yard can catch this enigmatic fugitive, referred to by his fellow burglars simply as ‘Basil’.
While the others made a catalogue of errors which speedily led to their capture, the elusive Basil (who wore a white surgical mask, cap, and possibly a ginger wig) covered his traces so meticulously that, 10 months after the raid, Scotland Yard admits it hasn’t the first clue who, or where, he is. It has offered a £20,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.
MemBerS of the London underworld are convinced, t hough, that at least one man knows all about Basil. He is Terry Adams, the ruthless crime overlord whose eponymous family ‘firm’ has been linked to 25 murders and, in the words of one underworld f i gure, ‘ makes t he Krays l ook like clowns’.
It is hardly a secret that Adams’s vicious claws are deeply embedded in Hatton Garden, whose more shady jewellery parlours have long been a magnet for all manner of crooks, among them money-launderers and ‘fences’ who come to trade stolen valuables.
After all, this bling-filled street, with its Victorian street-lamps and grimy stone buildings, runs through the heart of his ‘manor’ in Clerkenwell, London.
This week, during an investigation into Basil’s identity, the mail discovered just how tightly Adams, 61, controls ‘the Garden’. And from our inquiries it would seem that nothing — certainly not a £14 million burglary — could be planned and executed there without his knowledge. He would surely know the personnel behind it, too, including the mysterious Basil.
One trader, courageous enough to speak to us on condition of anonymity, said Adams was ‘ here all the time’, striking such fear with his saturnine presence that ‘even the security guards and the bloody traffic wardens are friendly towards him’.
Until a few years ago, Adams was rarely seen. raised with his ten siblings on a tough sink-estate in Islington, he ran his crime empire — reputedly worth £100 million and built on drugs, racketeering, and extortion — from a £2.5 million mansion, crammed with expensive artefacts, in Finsbury, North London.
He claims to have ‘retired’ from crime 20 years ago, and said, during a confiscation-of-assets court hearing in 2014, that he had fallen on hard times, forcing him to sell his home and ‘ponce’ a living off his wife ruth, who runs an online fashion business. They now purport to share a one-bedroomed flat.
Having heard how the couple continued to live luxuriously, dining at top London restaurants, reclining in exclusive health spas, and taking exotic holidays, the court rejected this pretence of poverty and Adams — jailed for seven years for money-laundering in 2007 — was ordered to pay back more than £650,000 of his ill-gotten gains.
Last October he won the right to appeal. A new hearing, probably this year, will decide whether he is entitled to a ‘certificate of inadequacy’ which would allow his debt to be consolidated or cut. Together with the fact that his mansion was under constant surveillance by the police, Customs and Inland revenue, this may explain why, as we learned this week, he now appears to have found an unlikely new base: the Costa Coffee parlour on Hatton Garden.
Coincidentally this café, where we found him on Wednesday afternoon sipping a black Americano and surrounded by protective henchmen, is just two doors away from numbers 8890, the building where the burglary of the Hatton Garden Security Company’s vault took place.
Before the Adams crew arrived, the ambience of the cafe had been easygoing. But the moment this imposingly tall, slim man — sombre-faced and clad entirely in black, from his expensive overcoat to his mirror-polished shoes — strolled in, the tension ratcheted up.
Later, he sauntered across the road to another of his haunts — a stall in an indoor ‘jewellery emporium’ which offers instant cash loans, cheque clearance and pawn-broking facilities, in addition to trading rings, brooches, bracelets and other assorted bling.
‘Associates’ of Adams are said to operate this untidy stall, a few doors away from number 25, Hatton Garden. This was the building broken into by the gang’s 74-year-old lookout man, John ‘Kenny’ Collins, who kept watch from its window during the burglary (at least, until he dozed off).
It doesn’t take the investigative powers of Sherlock Holmes to deduce the significance of all this.
If, as CCTV images and bugged conversations between the burglars suggest, Basil was someone acquainted with Hatton Garden who had obtained a key to the burgled building, and had inside knowledge of its layout and alarm systems, then Terry Adams was very well-placed to enlist him.
The trader who spoke to us has spent hours pondering the burglary, and surmises: ‘Basil probably had someone inside the building, who he knew very well. It just has to have been an inside job. maybe this insider who helped him worked in the building and managed to steal a key, or take an impression of it. maybe he had knowledge of which box they should go after.
‘If there is one man who could fix something like that it is Terry Adams. He and his minders are in Hatton Garden all the time, even at weekends. They don’t hang around here all day for fun. They are here because it is to their advantage.
‘This street is a full of useful tips and information. It is quite possible they (the Adams firm) are the source of the robbery. A burglary of this size cannot happen just like that — out of thin air. And these people are so powerful here that they can do anything.’
PerHApS, but one of the 996 strongboxes i n the vault is said t o have belonged to Adams himself. If true, this would have made him a potential victim. Why, then, would he have wanted one of his men to take part?
One suggestion is that he was desperate to get his hands on something he knew to be stashed in the vault. Not a fabulous gemstone or piece of jewellery, but something more valuable still. A bombshell piece of evidence, perhaps, that was being held by one of his rivals, and could do what the police have been trying to achieve for years: put Adams behind bars for life.
According to a well-placed Yard source this week, it is a credible theory. ‘This was never about stealing all that gold and jewellery. It was a job arranged by a mr Big who only appears to have
been interested in one particular box, the number of which he knew,’ he told us.
‘Once that had been identified and removed, he may have told the gang they could have their pick of whatever was there. The message would have been: “When the job’s done, feel free to fill your boots.”’
How could the police know this? After all, as newly released photographs of the ransacked vault reveal, the scene that greeted them when the burglary was discovered last Easter was chaotic, with jemmied boxes strewn across the floor.
Though two of the burglars — tall, slender Basil and keep-fit fanatic Danny Jones, 60, — remained in the vault all night after squeezing through the three adjoining drilled holes, they only managed to breach 73 boxes.
According to our source, forensic experts worked so painstakingly during the first week of the investigation that they were able to deduce the precise sequence in which each was targeted. The one Basil was evidently after was removed from its drawer first.
‘When Basil was caught on a security camera holding a black binliner against his face, it was thought at first that he might have been trying to hide a distinctive scar,’ said the source.
‘Now it seems he was carrying a bag containing what he’d come for on his shoulder.’ The source couldn’t say what this might have been, or who it was for. However, reporters who covered the Old Bailey trial were offered a tantalising glimpse of the sort of confidential material locked in the vault.
Among the exhibits produced by defence barristers was an antiquated-looking tape cassette with the words ‘confessing to…’ scrawled on the label. What dark secret was being admitted? As it was never played, we cannot know.
Of course, Terry Adams is but one of countless people who might have wanted to destroy such explosive material. There is absolutely no proof that he was involved.
Moreover, sifting through a 67-page transcript of conversations between gang members Jones, Collins and Terry Perkins, recorded by bugging devices concealed in cars they used before they were arrested, there is no real hint Basil might have been in Adams’s employ. As these foul- mouthed old jailbirds boast of their exploits and ponder the difficulties of dividing their haul, they do make references to a senior member of the Adams ‘firm’ — a long-time associate of Brian Reader, 76, (the gang member who went to Hatton Garden by bus).
HOWEvER, Jones insinuates this big-time gangster has no interest in their stash. ‘He don’t want i t,’ he remarks sourly. What other clues emerge from their expletive-filled chatter? For one thing, Basil is no ace thief.
To the contrary, he appears to have been a total novice, more adept at blustering than burglary, and perhaps even on his first job.
Jones to Perkins: ‘Basil learnt in f***ing two months what he (veteran robber Reader) had to learn in 40 years.’ And later: ‘Basil never done his job right, Tel.’ Perkins: ‘No, he f***ing didn’t.’ Jones: ‘He got money for old rope there, Terry.’
Then there was an outburst by Collins. ‘I still don’t know why Basil let that f***ing alarm go off,’ he said, referring to a mistake that almost led to the gang being caught red-handed.
Perkins: ‘No, well I think he made a rip (mistake) there.’
Collins and Jones joke that when he is quizzed about this, Basil will doubtless try to baffle them with ‘bull…’ But all three concur that he ‘ain’t a liar’.
From these exchanges, it seems they know him quite well. There are also several hints that he lives overseas, perhaps on the Spanish Costas, or in a country such as Thailand, where you can exist on a shoestring.
By Perkins’s estimation, Basil made off with just £82,000 in cash and Jones says he will have to
‘come all the way over and do a double journey’ to collect his full share of the spoils.
But the modest amount he has will last him ‘for ever’ because he always ‘goes for the cheapest gaffs’.
Whilst this may add to Basil’s mystique, it does little else. Nor does it tally with an interview published in a red top tabloid last week, with a gangland figure who purported to know him.
Calling Basil ‘The Ghost’, he said he had become a criminal only 20 years ago, when he was in his mid-30s, and that he was single, childless, and originally from the South-East. He also had brothers and sisters ‘living in the UK’. Oh yes, and he was 6ft and slightly built: facts easily gleaned from the CCTV images.
So where should the Yard start looking? They shouldn’t bother.
That’s the view of retired Liverpool gangster Charlie Seiga, who is thought to have unwittingly provided the blue-print for the Hatton Garden job, because he once plotted a similar raid and wrote a book about it.
‘First off, “Basil” just doesn’t exist,’ he told us, adding with a derisive snort. ‘Who is called Basil these days?’
Whatever his real name, Seiga envisions a shrewd man and agrees he was helped by what career burglars call a ‘card-marker’: someone with inside information.
He might even have recruited the old lags to do his dirty work and been present largely in a supervisory role.
‘All he has to do now is keep his nose clean and his mouth shut. If any of the others was going to turn him in, in return for a shorter sentence, they’d have done it by now,’ says Seiga. Doubtless he is right.
Whether or not Basil is caught in the coming months, producers of The Hatton Garden Job plan to cover all bases by shooting two endings to the film : one to be used if he’s found; the other if he isn’t.
In Hatton Garden this week, the betting was firmly on the Basil-less version being screened. But the Yard might yet upset the odds — perhaps by dropping into Costa Coffee and asking the man in the black outfit a few questions.