Diamond Wheezers: Aging Thieves Plan One Final Heist

A 76-year-old career criminal leads a crew of pensioner thieves in Britain’s biggest-ever burglary—an “Ocean’s Eleven with bad knees” that nets £14 million in loot. Sources for this episode include:The Last Job: The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist by Dan BilefskyHatton Garden: The Inside Story (2019) Directed by Tim Conrad“One last job: the inside story of the Hatton Garden heist” (The Guardian, 2016) by Duncan Campbell Keep up with Killer Stories! Instagram: @killerstoriespodTikTok: @killerstoriespodX: @killerstorieshq Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Harvey Guillén?

  La muerte llega a todos. Pero los humanos nunca pararon de intentar negociar. Mientras sentimos que el tiempo se acerca, seguimos buscando mitos y historias de milagros sobre lluvias que pueden revoltar el reloj o nos ayudan a superar el final. Una fontana de la juventud puede ser la más antigua de ellos. Una promesa brillante de que en algún lugar afuera hay un camino para vivir para siempre.

• 0:33Harvey Guillén?

  En 1513, Juan Ponce de León navegó al norte de Puerto Rico. Oficialmente, estaba buscando un nuevo territorio, pero la leyenda dice que también estaba persiguiendo esa fontana. Un conquistador de la media edad, desesperado por reclamar lo que el tiempo ya había tomado. Para enmarcar su nombre en la historia antes que la historia lo eliminara.

• 0:55Harvey Guillén?

  Nunca encontró la inmortalidad. Encontró Florida. Pero el impulso detrás de su viaje nunca murió. Solo cambió de cara a través de siglos. Ese mismo hambre, la negación de desaparecer silenciosamente, es lo que motiva la historia de hoy sobre un criminal retirado persiguiendo su propia fontana privada. Una perfecta final trampa para traer su nombre y su vida de vuelta de los muertos. Déjame preguntarte. Cuando el miedo a desaparecer entra, ¿qué harías para superarlo?

• 1:33Harvey Guillén?

  Soy Harvey Guillén y esto es Killer Stories.

• 2:02Harvey Guillén?

  It's 2015, just two days after Easter. All around London's jewellery district, buildings are reopening after a long holiday weekend. Except for one, 8890 Hatton Garden.

• 2:16Harvey Guillén?

  Down in an underground vault, behind eight sets of doors, lies a small room containing hundreds of safe deposit boxes. And since this is the jewellery district, it's filled with diamonds and other precious stones, gold, family heirlooms, and lots and lots of cash. It's a modern-day treasure trove. And now, it looks like a tornado has ripped through that room overnight. A cabinet has toppled onto one side, dozens of metal boxes are scattered about, twisted, and empty. The treasures they once held are now simply gone. This is the aftermath of the Hatton Garden heist,

• 2:59Harvey Guillén?

  one of the biggest jewel thefts in British history.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  It's organized, it's sophisticated, it's people who have planned it and they know how they were going to go about and commit this crime. So I would imagine that pool of people is quite limited.

• 3:14Harvey Guillén?

  A detective with London's elite Flying Squad enters the vault. His branch of the Metropolitan Police specializes in commercial robberies. So he surveys the mess, orders a thorough sweep of the crime scene, and finds not a single speck of DNA. That only confirms the detective's theory. Whatever gang of thieves pulled this off has been planning this for a long time. And they're clearly professionals with years of experience. Detective, you have no idea just how right you are.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  It was years in the making, a raid on this safety deposit vault whose security system was well passed at sell-by day.

• 3:59Harvey Guillén?

  The idea for the Hatton Garden heist was hatched about two and a half years earlier, or so we think. It could have been percolating for even longer than that because the mastermind, Brian Reader, had a lot of time on his hands. On the bus, at home, while sitting in the pub. Because in the fall of 2012, when the plan started forming in earnest, Brian was already 73 years old and partially retired.

• 4:31Harvey Guillén?

  He used to be a career criminal, the old-school kind, who operated with a sort of gentleman code. He's got morals, like sure, he might steal millions and crack open safes or act as a liaison in the black market, but also, he's going to make sure nobody's hurt in the process, even when he's working some really major jobs. Back in 1983, Brian was involved in the infamous Brinksmatt robbery. That day, six armed men held up a warehouse next to Heathrow Airport. They tied up the security guards and threatened to burn them alive if they didn't hand over their loot. And then, the thieves got away with three tons of gold,

• 5:13Harvey Guillén?

  worth tens of millions of dollars. Brian Reader wasn't at that warehouse. He didn't tie anyone up and douse them in gasoline. Violence wasn't part of his playbook, but he did help launder the gold after the fact, ensuring it couldn't be traced back to the robbers. The Brinksmatt robbery is also what finally landed Brian in prison. He served nine years, and all that time, his wife waited for him, and his kids grew up without him. So when he got out in 1994, he decided to go straight. He traded infamy for a quiet home life and a job selling cars.

• 5:58Harvey Guillén?

  But by 2012, Brian's status quo had changed. He was still close with his kids, but they were adults now, with their own children and their own lives. And after a long and happy marriage, his wife Lynn passed away a few years earlier. Most days, if he did anything at all, Brian visited the same old pubs with the same old friends. And because they were all criminals too, they'd trade the same old stories about their glory days. His life had become predictable, monotonous, and maybe it got to the point where he couldn't take it anymore. He meets his old friends at the Castle Pub, and he tells them that it's time for one last job.

• 6:42Harvey Guillén?

  Oh, Brian. Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian. One last job, really? Come on, we've seen it in so many heist movies before. Heat, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Wild Bunch, and it doesn't always end well for the people involved. Just ask our dear friend Donald Sutherland in The Italian Job. Ugh, okay. I guess at this point, Brian doesn't feel like he has much to lose. Not to mention, he lives on a pension now, and money's running low. Cliche or not, one last heist would set him up for the rest of his old life, with a nice inheritance for his kids. But first, he has to gather the dream team, a core group that includes himself

• 7:24Harvey Guillén?

  and a few guys that more or less he trusts. Let's meet them now. First up, Brian Reader. Some call him the mastermind, others call him grandpa. Either way, he's the one out front, the man with the plan, the gloves and the reading glasses. Now, meet Terry Perkins, 67, co-captain, and easily the best dressed of the bunch. A man who once stole 9 million in cash and spent 17 years on the run. These days, he drives his grown daughter to work. Next on the roster, Kenny Collins. Seventies, retired ticket scalper, current fireworks salesman. He and Brian go way back. They shared a room with bars for windows.

• 8:09Harvey Guillén?

  Nothing builds trust like prison housing. Then there's Carl Wood. Late 50s, mild-mannered, and the former leader of an extortion plot. He's there to lend an extra pair of hands, pass tools, and help with whatever heavy machinery is his scene and sparking. And finally, Danny Jones, the muscle. Marathon runner, veteran of four decades worth of break-ins. He's the youngest of the crew in his 50s, but don't underestimate him. He's slim and agile enough to squeeze into spaces the others can't. Basically, the crew's designated crawl into the impossible hole guy.

• 8:50Harvey Guillén?

  Okay, so now Brian has his team together, and he pitches the target. The Hatton Gardens Safe Deposit. Brian's had his eye on this place for years. It's an imposing seven-story office building, filled with jewelers and traders plying their shiny wares. By day, it's Grand Central Station for diamonds. But after 6:00 PM and on weekends, it's deserted. Even the security guards clock out on Friday and don't return until Monday. All those jewelers can't just leave all bunch of diamonds just sitting around for hours, so they lock everything away down in the basement's vault. This could be the biggest payout any of Brian's teammates have ever seen.

• 9:34Harvey Guillén?

  But just as important as the money is the last shot at glory.

• 9:41Harvey Guillén?

  Maybe a younger crew would jump into action, but these guys are experienced, so they take their time. Nearly three years, in fact. They map the building's layout, decide on the best route, and practice every step.

• 9:57Harvey Guillén?

  Here's the basic game plan. Step one: steal keys and PIN codes to gain access in and around the building. Step two: the team and all of their tools make their way to the basement vault. Step three: deactivate the alarm system. But, there's a catch. The alarm is high-tech, and the team, well, is not. Seventy-three-year-old Brian doesn't even own a cellphone, so he brings in a new team member he refers to only as Basil, which is not his real name. In fact, Brian doesn't tell the crew much about Basil, just that he's good with electronics. You might think there would be some drama with the last-minute addition to the team,

• 10:40Harvey Guillén?

  another mouth to feed when it comes time to divvy up the loot, but no, everybody likes Basil. He's middle-aged, quiet, keeps to himself, and he's a fast learner, who's never met a keypad he couldn't outsmart. It's basically like adding a magician to the team. And if Basil can deactivate the alarm system, there's just one more big obstacle standing between them and their treasure: get past the giant metal vault door. Even Basil is like, "We can't pick this lock, but maybe they don't need to go through the door, not if they can go around it." So, that's step four: drill through the concrete wall next to the door.

• 11:24Harvey Guillén?

  Step five: money up the wazoo. On paper, it's a solid plan. In practice, hmm... like every one last job, things are about to go south.

• 11:38Speaker 03

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• 12:38Speaker 05

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• 13:12Harvey Guillén?

  Brian Reader and his team of old-school crooks decide to rob the safe deposit on Easter weekend 2015. The long holiday means buildings will be shut down for four entire days. And here's how day one of the robbery goes. And yes, I said, "day one."

• 13:32Harvey Guillén?

  By Thursday night, the Hatton Garden District has emptied out for the holiday. Around 8:30, Brian walks up to the safe deposit building as Colin parks a white van. He drops off Perkins, Jones and Wood, wearing masks and disguised as maintenance workers, while Collins drives off to man his lookout post. The four of them huddle by a side entrance. At the other side of the building, Basil waltzes in the front door. How? He has a key. Where'd he get it? Nobody actually knows. Like I said, he's a magician and he doesn't reveal his tricks. Once he's in, he opens the fire escape door and the crew loads in with their tools,

• 14:12Harvey Guillén?

  including the 77-pound diamond-tip drill Jones will use to bore into the vault wall. Since the tools are so heavy, that makes the next part of the plan extra difficult. The elevator won't take them down there. It used to go all the way down to the basement, but this isn't the first team to rob the safe deposit. Someone beat them to it by about 40 years.

• 14:37Speaker 06

  The court was told the lift had been closed since the 1970s after an armed robber had also used it to get to the vault.

• 14:45Harvey Guillén?

  Ever since the 1970s, the elevator won't travel lower than the first floor as a security measure. But these guys, this group of pensioners, figure who needs an elevator when you can Mission Impossible your way down the elevator shaft? It still reaches down to the basement. All they have to do is jam the lift to keep it in place above them while they shimmy down the cables below with all their tools. Now, this is sounding less like Mission Impossible and more like Final Destination, but it actually works. Once they're in the basement, it's time for Basil's biggest trick of the night: disabling the alarm.

• 15:29Harvey Guillén?

  And he only has 60 seconds to do it. Somehow, the great Basil once again pulls it off. Don't ask me how, he's the only one who knows. Even alarm specialists aren't quite sure how he did it. But that just leaves the concrete wall. Oh, and did I mention it's 20 inches thick? By the time Jones fires up the drill and gets to work, it's already past midnight. But in this moment, the guys feel ageless. They're riding high on a rush of adrenaline they haven't felt in years. They have no idea they've just hit their first major snag.

• 16:14Harvey Guillén?

  Outside the building, a security guard slides up to the front door and peers inside. All he knows is that his boss, the owner of the safe deposit, just called him after hours on a holiday weekend and begged him to go see if anything was wrong. When Basil cut the alarm, it didn't just die quietly. With its last little digital gasp, it pinged the alarm company. They, in turn, alerted the owner and flagged it to the police. On paper, this is exactly the moment when everything should fall apart. This is also exactly what you have a lookout for. If Collins were on his game, he'd see the guard. Put two and two together, oh, the alarm trip. Someone's checking the building. We're cooked.

• 16:59Harvey Guillén?

  And either pull the plug or panic. But Collins isn't freaking out because Collins is asleep at his post. So he never warns them that they've got company. The crew just keeps drilling, blissfully unaware they're in the middle of a very, very near miss. The guard does a lap, checks the doors, finds them all locked. No broken locks, no shattered glass, no obvious break-in. From the outside, the building looks fine. He calls it in. False alarm.

• 17:33Speaker 07

  Reports guards responded to an alarm on Friday, but left without checking inside.

• 17:39Harvey Guillén?

  And the owner thinks, well, I'm sure the police will take a closer look. But they never show up.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  On this occasion, the systems and processes that we have in place with the alarm companies weren't followed. And as a result of that, officers did not attend the premises when in fact they probably should have done.

• 18:01Harvey Guillén?

  Brian and his crew aren't as lucky with the next mishap. Six hours of drilling later, they've bored a hole big enough for Jones to wriggle through. Only, he can't. There's something blocking him from getting in. A cabinet inside the vault that is bolted into the floor.

• 18:22Harvey Guillén?

  Sunrise is breathing down their necks. They either have to leave before daylight, or stay trapped inside all day. But the good news is, it's only Friday morning. They can come back. Time hasn't run out yet. So, they leave and plan to return later. But Brian has always had a sense for trouble. He warns his team he has a bad feeling, like they're going to be caught. As Collins drives the criminal carpool home, Brian announces, "He's out." The team is shocked. They have some choice words for Brian. The C-word, the A-word, the F-word. It's all in there, the whole alphabet. They decide they're not giving up,

• 19:07Harvey Guillén?

  with or without their leader. Two nights later, on Perkins' 67th birthday, he returns to Hatton Garden, along with Collins, Jones, Basil, and Wood. Wood immediately gets cold feet and leaves before they even get into the building. The others are more confident. This time, they have a brand-new hydraulic pump. And with a bang and a clang, it forces the cabinet off its bolts and onto its side. They're in.

• 19:40Harvey Guillén?

  A thousand boxes await them inside. To open one, you need two sets of keys used in tandem. Unless, of course, you're just a really strong guy with a crowbar. Jones gets to work. Ripping boxes from the wall and forcing them open, they're running up against the clock, though. And it's tedious work. In the end, he tears open 73 boxes. Over a third of them turn out to be empty. What they do make off with is still enough to fill bags upon bags. The haul is estimated at a worth of 14 million British pounds, nearly 20 million dollars today. And as far as they're concerned, Brian Reader won't see a penny of it.

• 20:24Harvey Guillén?

  But he had been right about one thing. They'd pull off a hell of a heist. Old school patience, old school nerve. The job itself? Flawless. Textbook. The kind of thing you brag about in the pub for the next 20 years. But while they were breaking into the past, concrete walls, metal boxes, a vault built in 1946, the investigation waiting for them was very much the future. They thought they outsmarted the system. Turns out, the system had been recording the whole time.

• 21:03Speaker 04

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• 21:35Speaker 06

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• 22:02Speaker 06

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress? A hoodie slips beneath a blazer? An old cap finds a new scarf? Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 22:35Harvey Guillén?

  Two days after the heist, the commercial robbery team surveys the crime scene. But the entire vault has been scrubbed of DNA evidence, thanks to Danny Jones' copy of "Forensics for Dummies." And yes, this is real. When police later searched Jones's place, they found his personal, heavily-used copy of "Forensics for Dummies." And the man had clearly done the homework. The vault looked like it had been cleaned by a crime-scene-obsessed housekeeper. Every fingerprint wiped, every surface polished, every stray skin cell vanished. Investigators walked in expecting chaos and found a spotless clinically sanitized crime scene

• 23:18Harvey Guillén?

  curated by a 60-year-old burglar with a library card.

• 23:25Harvey Guillén?

  So next, a detective checks the cameras. Most were smashed during the robbery. Even the hard drive was destroyed. But there are two cameras the robbers didn't catch: one near the fire escape door, where most of the crew waited to be let inside, and one across the street, at a different business. And sure, all of the thieves were wearing disguises and masks. That's to be expected. But the detective knows there are other clues to look for if you have enough determination to sift through thousands of hours of CCTV footage. Using cameras from all over Hatton Garden, he constructs a basic timeline of the heist. And he realizes, on the second night,

• 24:10Harvey Guillén?

  there's a really distinctive car that keeps circling the block: a white Mercedes with a black top.

• 24:21Harvey Guillén?

  Once he finds a clear shot of the license plate, the rest falls into place, because he has the technology to simply input those plates and track the car all over London. And that's how he traces it back to the sleepy lookout slash driver Kenny Collins.

• 24:42Harvey Guillén?

  Instead of arresting him right away, they want to see if Collins will lead them to the rest of the team. So they begin to tell Collins everywhere. Sometimes it's boring work. There's a lot of dog walking and trips to the pharmacy. But they start to notice patterns. Who he meets with, who he calls. And that adds two more suspects to their list. Brian Reader and Terry Perkins.

• 25:10Harvey Guillén?

  About a month after the heist, Brian meets up with Collins and Perkins at the Castle Pub, the same place they met every week to work out their plans. And since Brian wasn't there the second night to witness the moment of triumph, his good friends are willing to tell him all about it in a pretty animated kind of way. They don't notice the undercover cop across the room filming their conversation. The pub is so loud, we can't hear what they say. But you can see Perkins acting out how they used the pump to knock down the cabinets. All of this grants police enough cause to bug some of the guy's cars. Almost immediately, they capture audio of them bragging about the heist in no uncertain terms.

• 25:54Harvey Guillén?

  They're like, and this is actually a direct quote from Perkins. "We done the best bit of work of the whole century."

• 26:05Harvey Guillén?

  So why do these men have no chill? Well, as the weeks pass, they get cockier because they think they're getting away with it. Because the media is all over the case. And the prevailing theory is that this was a foreign group of robbers. Brian's crew assumes nobody's looking for suspects just around the corner from Hatton Garden. And there are a few reasons police hold off on making their arrest. For one thing, they really want to nab Brian Reader because they still see him as a cop killer. Yeah, not everybody thinks he's a gentleman crook. Back in 1985, Brian was accused of killing a detective constable. He was acquitted at trial,

• 26:48Harvey Guillén?

  but the older guys on the force, they haven't forgotten his name. Secondly, investigators want the loot back. See, this wasn't a victimless crime.

• 26:59Speaker 06

  This, the scene of a 19th century diamond market and a 21st century heist. To be honest, it makes me very unhappy and very sad what's happened.

• 27:10Harvey Guillén?

  There are people, obviously, who probably aren't insured, have lost everything. A lot of the people who rented those safe boxes were not insured. They thought the vault was their insurance. Many of them were immigrants, some were Holocaust survivors. And they'd come to England decades ago and build a life for themselves. After the robbery, families lost retirements and heirlooms, businesses folded. But there's a chance the police can recover those losses. They just don't know where the loot is hidden.

• 27:43Harvey Guillén?

  After the heist, the robbers didn't have time to divvy up the goods, so it got split up and hidden all over town, in a friend of a friend's apartment, in a cemetery, under a tombstone. The plan was to wait out the media and the police, but now, a few weeks later, Jones and Perkins get antsy. The longer they wait, the less they trust everyone, so Perkins pays for a vacation for his daughter to get her out of town. He wants to use her house to divvy up the loot, what they call "the slaughter." Oh, they think they're days away from living it up for the rest of their old lives, but remember, their cars are still bugged.

• 28:25Harvey Guillén?

  So when Perkins tells the crew, "Yeah, we're going to my daughter's for the slaughter," he's also telling police where to catch them red-handed.

• 28:37Harvey Guillén?

  More than 100 police officers descend on the house. At the same time, they raid the homes of everybody they suspect had a hand in the Hatton Garden heist. Brian Reader, Collins, Perkins, and Jones plead guilty and all receive six-to-seven year sentences. Wood and other associates are tried and convicted, but it takes longer to track down Basil, aka Michael Sneed, who's arrested in 2018.

• 29:09Harvey Guillén?

  They spent years trying to break into a vault, only to end up locked in one. And that's the real fountain of youth, the illusion that one perfect moment can freeze time, revive who you were, let you outrun the years. Brian's crew chased that myth, just like Bonsa de León did. And like him, they didn't find it. They didn't find immortality, just consequences. So you tell me, if becoming a legend is the closest thing we have to living forever, is it still worth it? When the legend is billed on your dirtiest deed?

• 29:52Harvey Guillén?

  Thanks for tuning into Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast. New episodes release on Mondays. If you liked today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Guillén. Stay safe out there.

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• 30:47Speaker 04

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress? A hoodie slips beneath a blazer? An old cap finds a new scarf? Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Findfall your way at Ross.

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