by Mikethehack » Thu Dec 31, 2009 8:09 am
Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Imagine a Securitas AB cash depot holding 200 million pounds ($320 million) in notes from the Bank of England. The staff’s pay for this responsibility? A base salary of 30,000 pounds a year for the boss; as little as 5.50 pounds an hour for the workers, many of them recent immigrants whose security status no one has checked.
Handling bricks of 50-pound notes all day might make you hanker for a more open-handed payday, with no tax withheld. And so it is that an Albanian becomes the insider for a gang of low- grade villains planning to rob the place disguised in latex masks.
A corny film or improbable novel? No, we’re talking about the largest cash robbery in U.K. history, the subject of “Heist” by British author Howard Sounes.
The crime happened in Tonbridge, England, in 2006. The gang was a mixture of South London petty criminals -- drug dealers, would-be professional fighters, fitness freaks -- and a bunch of losers in the Tonbridge area -- con men, hucksters, that class of person.
Still, they got away with 53 million pounds ($85 million), surpassing the Great Train Robbery gang of 1963, which made off with 2.6 million pounds (worth about 50 million pounds in 2006). The risk of the insurers not paying up even posed the possibility of Securitas closing its depots across the U.K., in which case the country would have run out of money.
Child Held Hostage
The daring of the raid would have guaranteed the villains heroic status for a “victimless” crime, except the deed was only possible because the gang kidnapped the depot’s manager, Colin Dixon, and held his wife and small child hostage. It was the gun-toting threats that induced Dixon to cooperate in the heist. Obviously, the traumatized, middle-aged, underpaid suburbanite was suspected, falsely, of collusion.
And of course all the ham-fisted raiders were caught, except for the ringleader. Lee Lamrani Murray was the product of a violent Moroccan father, a lousy education and a lugubrious London public housing project. A part-time cage fighter and full-time thug, he escaped to Morocco with loads of cash.
The crook claimed Moroccan nationality, got it and lived riotously beyond the reach of British justice while the U.K. press fumed. Until he was arrested for local offenses and thrown into a vermin-ridden Moroccan jail, his bulging bank accounts frozen.
Indictment of System
Sounes, the author of bestsellers including a biography of Bob Dylan, has produced a factual and fast-paced account. He doesn’t make judgments, but we are allowed our own. For me the affair reads like a social document as well as a thriller, an indictment of the stupidities of the U.K. system on every level.
First is the gullibility of the Bank of England in entrusting hundreds of millions of pounds to an outfit that recruited workers casually, through an agency, and kept their wages low.
Then there’s the idiocy of an immigration system so lax that pretty much anyone can get into the country and assume any name he or she wishes. Several of the gang had been illegal immigrants, and the police were in the dark about the Albanian insider’s real identity and associates until the very end.
Next comes Britain’s cozy, localized police force. Murray might have been caught before he did a bunk if the Kent constabulary hadn’t resisted offers of help from the Flying Squad, the anti-robbery unit of London’s Metropolitan Police. Even in the country’s biggest cash crime ever, custom and petty rivalries prevailed.
Inane Thieves
Then we have the inanities of the raiders. Though they dropped clues like litter, they were themselves clueless. One stashed 10 million pounds in a lock-up garage and drew attention to himself by failing to pay his weekly bill of 10 pounds.
Lastly was the not-so-solemn farce of the trial, where a high-toned liberal judge sentenced the vicious child kidnappers to 30 years with eligibility for parole after serving half their terms -- a mere 15 years, in effect. Albanian insider Ermir Hysenaj, who smiled as he left the court, got 20, and could be out in nine.
I doubt Dixon, his wife or his child will recover by then, if ever. Meanwhile, Sounes says, the police have only recouped about half of the 53 million pounds.
“Heist: The True Story of the World’s Biggest Cash Robbery” is published by Pocket Books in the U.K. (490 pages, 7.99 pounds).
(George Walden, a former U.K. diplomat and member of Parliament, is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
I'm not really a proper reporter, due to the chronic lack of discipline, negligible attention span, and a certain juvenile difficulty taking serious things seriously.
Andrew Mueller.