Robbers Pulled Off $388 Mill Heist Pretty Well. The Escape, Not So Much.
Say you’re an elite thief who just pulled off a brazen $388 million diamond heist. Now I get the logic of hiding in plain sight. But hell, you’re allegedly holding something north of $54 million. What makes you decide not to, say, move to a nice island somewhere with no extradition treaties? A real mystery for the ages.
You know who did allegedly stick around? Seven older white British men—one of them 76!—who were just arrested in London in connection with the perfectly-executed heist that, incredibly, Guy Ritchie was not involved in.
The alleged perpetrators, who have day jobs as plumbers and used car salesmen, are all aged 45 and up. But they had apparently perfected some other skills—police say the Hatton Garden bank heist was “organised... sophisticated. The people who carried it out clearly knew what they were doing.”
The scheme itself was, for all intents and purposes, The Perfect Plan. Investigators believe the band of undoubtedly gruff and witty bandits waited until Easter, when the bank and surrounding stores closed for a four-day weekend. Then they apparently broke into the bank building, shimmied down an elevator shaft to the basement, used a diamond-tip drill [that perhaps, for dramatic effect, broke off at a critical moment, though that’s neither here nor there] and bored through a six-foot thick wall into the vault. Once inside, they proceeded to leisurely raid at least 72 safe deposit boxes.
They were still in the building when police reportedly decided not to check out the building’s alarm, which had been tripped by the burglars (who I bet had a great repartee as they sailed through the undoubtedly comical, yet periodically tense, arc of the heist.)
Their total haul in cash, diamonds and other valuables has been widely estimated at around $388 million—or around $55 million, evenly split. Not bad for a little mad money.
Interestingly, after deciding to stick around, god only knows why—maybe to plan one last heist, you know, the big one—the seven apparently began to turn on one another. One neighbor tells the Daily Mail she heard an already-“filthy rich” used car dealer father and son, who were swept up in the raid, arguing a day or two before their arrest.
Silvia Castelao, 40, said she saw the pair locked in a ‘stand-up row’ just two days before police swooped.
‘They were shouting and swearing at each other really loudly. I could not believe it because they are supposed to be father and son.
‘But whatever the argument was about they were going crazy with each other – with lots of swearing and shouting.’
Cops apparently retrieved “a number of large bags containing significant amounts of high value property,” so things aren’t exactly looking good for them. But I bet Jason Statham’s agent is pretty amped.
