Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

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Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby 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.)
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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby Mikethehack » Thu Dec 31, 2009 8:11 am

SECURITAS raid suspect Lee Murray has vowed to brave the horrors of his foreign jail rather than face a court in Britain.

Cagefighter Murray, 32, is in a squalid prison cell in Rabat, Morocco, while he awaits trial for the £53million robbery.

But he says he is ready to “hang f**king tough” behind bars because he doubts he would get a fair trial in the UK over his alleged role as the mastermind of the raid in Tonbridge, Kent.

Speaking from his cell in Sale prison, Murray explained why he has resisted extradition to the UK over the infamous 2006 heist.

He said: “Why the f**k would I want to come home to face an indeterminate sentence? OK, I am in 24-hour solitary confinement in a dungeon in Morocco, with rats and cockroaches the size of mice.

“An English prison is like a Hilton Hotel compared to this place but it’s still four walls and a door.

“What was you thinking I was coming home to – beers and buffets with fi reworks in the yard, surrounded by beautiful girls with fat arses?

“A prison is a f**king prison. Who gives a shit where it is.”

London-born Murray is accused of fleeing to Morocco with £33million of the spoils from what is the world’s biggest cash raid.

But all he wants is to get out of jail as soon as possible so he can see his three children. He added: “If that means I have to ride it and hang f**king tough in Morocco then so be it. I know if I stay here in Morocco I will at least get a release date.

“In England I would never know if I would be released from prison again. Someone like me don’t get released from indeterminate sentences.

“And what chance do I have of getting a not guilty? They have already made it sound like I committed the robbery.”

Murray made his comments to author Howard Sounes, who has written a book on the Tonbridge raid.

His mum Barbara, 60, has said: “Lee will never come back to the UK. He will either stay in Morocco after he gets out of jail or start a new life in Europe.”

HEIST: The True Story Of The World’s Biggest Cash Robbery, by Howard Sounes, is published by Pocket Books price £7.99.

http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/11 ... ace-court/
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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby DBR » Fri Jan 01, 2010 11:26 pm

Greed makes people incompetent and arrogant. Ask a businessman why he charges so much for a product and he will not bat an eye and say, "If you want quality, you have to pay for it." Have that same businessman in an interview and scoff at what he offers to pay you and say, "You get what you pay for and you're not paying enough" and he will go on about how "you can't get good help these days" and people are assholes and "don't have a good work ethic."

They got what they paid for.
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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby vagabond » Thu Jan 21, 2010 9:33 pm

DBR wrote:Greed makes people incompetent and arrogant.


And is punished here in the US...oh wait, never mind.
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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby DBR » Mon Feb 01, 2010 9:14 am

Yeah, the number one punishment used to be FAILURE. But I have learned now from the political puppet masters that there is such a thing as..."Too Big To Fail."

Interesting concept that doesn't filter down to us common folks, we do the bailing out and we won't see a bailout for our woes, real or imagined, our fault, not our fault, just a fucking accident and nobody's fault.
I was on my way back from the P.O., not the Parole Officer, but the Post Office, and I was being followed by Yuri and Sergei Cutchikokoff. Normally these guys were my Ketel One dealers, but today was much, much different...

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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby Mikethehack » Mon Feb 01, 2010 9:22 am

There is 'Too big to fail' and 'Too insignificant to be worth saving'. Most people fall into the latter category.
Remember what they say about loans. If you owe the bank $100,000, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, the bank has a problem.
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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby JamesInTheWorld » Wed Feb 03, 2010 10:47 pm

I still think its funny that armored car companies are one of the lowest paying employers – I don’t know why we don’t hear about some driver running off with his truck every week


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Re: Heist-the incompetence and the arrogance

Postby Charlie-CBC » Sat Mar 27, 2010 12:45 am

JamesInTheWorld wrote:I still think its funny that armored car companies are one of the lowest paying employers – I don’t know why we don’t hear about some driver running off with his truck every week


~James


Ten years ago, here in North Carolina, some Loomis Fargo workers drove off with $17 million. They caught them, but only because they were idiots and started spending like crazy.

The worst thing I heard about armored cars recently though was another robbery in Greensboro, North Carolina in December 2008. A guy just walked up to one of the guards, shot him in the head, and took the money bag. Where were the other guards, the ones to watch his back? There weren't any, just one other guy who was driving the truck. Brinks has cut so many jobs that now they have the armored cars staffed with just two guys, one to drive and the other to walk in and out of the places to pick up the money bags. They probably pay them $7.50 an hour with no benefits too.
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