The Hatton Garden Heist

On Maundy Thursday, the second of April 2015, a small group of British career criminals — average age sixty-two, the youngest in his fifties, the oldest seventy-six — entered a building above a row of jewellers' shops at 88-90 Hatton Garden in the centre of London. They went down to the basement. They climbed through a lift shaft to bypass a steel security gate. They reached the wall of the vault. They drilled.

By the morning of Tuesday the seventh of April, when the first dealer arrived to retrieve items from his box and discovered the box open and empty, the group was gone. Seventy-three of the one hundred and ninety-five safe-deposit boxes had been emptied. The estimated take was somewhere between fourteen and twenty million pounds.

The vault

The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit had operated continuously since the 1950s. The vault sat in the basement of a nondescript brick building, two storeys below street level, behind a steel door, behind a metal gate, behind a concrete wall reinforced with steel rebar. It was leased by jewellery dealers, gem cutters, antique dealers, and a handful of private clients who store small valuables outside their own homes. The vault held one hundred and ninety-five private boxes. The Easter weekend was a four-day public holiday in the UK. The building closed at six PM Thursday and was not scheduled to reopen until Tuesday morning. Ninety-six hours of empty building, in central London, in a building containing a vault.

The men

The four men eventually convicted as the core of the operation were, in age order: Brian Reader, seventy-six. Terry Perkins, sixty-seven. Daniel Jones, sixty. Carl Wood, fifty-eight. Reader had a long and well-documented career as a London robbery operator dating back to the 1980s. He had previous convictions, including for handling stolen goods from the 1983 Brink's-Mat gold bullion robbery. He was, by criminal standards, retired. He had come back, by every available indication, for one last job.

The case file, when it was eventually built, established that the planning had taken approximately three years. Several of the men had been clients of the safe-deposit business at various points over the previous twenty years. They had walked through the basement. They had used the lift that descended to the vault. They had inspected, casually, over years, the building's pattern of opening and closing.

The drill

They entered the building Thursday evening through the front door, using a key the operation had obtained through means never fully detailed at trial. They went down to the basement. They identified the steel gate that led to the vault corridor. They climbed through the lift shaft, which the building's staff used as part of the elevator's maintenance access, and dropped behind the gate. They reached the concrete wall of the vault — approximately fifty centimetres thick, reinforced with steel rebar.

Their tool was a Hilti DD350 industrial diamond core drill — used by construction companies for cutting through reinforced concrete on commercial sites. Fully assembled, the drill weighs approximately seventy-five kilograms. They had brought it down to the basement in pieces and assembled it on site. The drill cut three overlapping circular holes in the concrete, producing an opening approximately twenty-five centimetres in diameter. Through that opening, they could not enter the vault directly — too small for an adult body — but they could reach the back of the safe-deposit box stack and pry the boxes open from behind. Most of the boxes were the older, simpler design. Not individually alarmed. The vault's primary security was the door, which they had bypassed.

They worked through the night. They opened seventy-three boxes. They returned the following night for a second pass.

Wheelie bins

They left through the front door. On Sunday morning, with the haul packed into bags and wheelie bins. The wheelie bins, the press later noted, were of the kind a London resident would use to take rubbish to the kerb. They were not concealed. They were rolled along the pavement of Hatton Garden in daylight. The men returned to their respective London homes.

The pub

The Metropolitan Police obtained, from CCTV across central London, footage of the men entering and leaving the building over the Easter weekend. Within several weeks, the men had been identified through facial recognition and through their criminal records. The Met then placed audio surveillance on the suspects' homes and vehicles — and, in particular, on a London pub called The Castle, in Pentonville, where the men met to discuss division of the proceeds. The pub conversations were recorded for several weeks. They were extensive.

Among the most-quoted exchanges in subsequent press coverage was an unguarded discussion between Perkins and Jones in which they reflected, with some satisfaction, on the success of the operation, and complained, with considerable feeling, about how much of their share each of them had given to the operation's various intermediaries. They did not know, in those conversations, that they were being recorded.

Trial

The trial began at Woolwich Crown Court in November 2015. The four men were convicted of conspiracy to commit burglary in March 2016. Brian Reader, the seventy-six-year-old, was sentenced to six years and three months. Terry Perkins received seven years. Daniel Jones received seven years. Carl Wood received six years. Several other participants were convicted and received shorter sentences. Most of the haul has never been recovered. The operation produced what is still considered the largest successful burglary in English legal history.

Brian Reader died in prison in 2023. Terry Perkins died in prison in 2018. The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, which had operated continuously since the 1950s, never reopened.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 15. Stream the episode here.