Almost Perfect: The Daring Heists That Nearly Got Away

The hole was twenty inches deep, ten inches high, and eighteen inches wide. It was bored through two feet of reinforced concrete, and it led directly into the vault of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company. Last week, in 'Almost Perfect,' we looked at audacious heists that unraveled spectacularly, but the men who drilled that hole had a different story — they wrote a masterclass in how to succeed… right up until the moment they failed. This wasn’t a team of young, tech-savvy criminals. This was the “Bad Grandpa” gang. Their ringleader, Brian Reader, was seventy-six years old.

His accomplices were mostly in their sixties and seventies. They planned the job for months, not in encrypted chat rooms, but over pints of beer in a pub in Islington. They studied YouTube videos to learn how to disable modern alarm systems. They acquired a key to the building's fire escape from a man known only as "Basil." And they chose their moment perfectly: Easter weekend, 2015. London's diamond district would be a ghost town for four straight days. On Thursday night, they went in. They disabled the lift, climbed down the shaft, and forced open a set of iron gates.

Then they started drilling. They used a seventy-seven pound industrial drill called a Hilti DD350. The noise was deafening, but no one was there to hear it. They drilled, and they drilled, and they broke through. But inside the vault, a massive metal cabinet holding the deposit boxes blocked their path. Their hydraulic ram, the tool meant to move it, failed. Day one was a bust. And here is where audacity tips into legend. They didn't panic. They didn't run. Brian Reader, the seventy-six-year-old, walked away from the job. But the others?

They went to a hardware store, bought new equipment, and on Saturday night, they came back. This time, it worked. They forced the cabinet aside and pried open seventy-three safe deposit boxes. They stuffed bags with gold, with diamonds, with Rolexes, and with piles of cash. An estimated fourteen million pounds worth. They packed it into wheelie bins, loaded it into a white van, and simply drove away. For two days, they were ghosts. They had pulled off the largest burglary in English history. So how did it fall apart? This is the turn.

This is where the old-school masters meet the modern world and lose. The police had no alarms, no witnesses. But they did have cameras. Thousands of them. And they had cell phone data. The crew had been so careful inside the vault, but so careless outside. One of them, John Collins, the seventy-five-year-old lookout, used his OWN Mercedes to drive to the heist. He was caught on camera, clear as day. Another couldn't resist bragging to his friends. This is a pattern we've seen before, not just in crime, but in espionage. Think of the old Cold War spymasters, masters of dead drops and brush passes, suddenly finding themselves in a world of ubiquitous digital surveillance.

The skills that made them legends were suddenly obsolete. The Hatton Garden crew were masters of an analog game. They could defeat a vault, but they couldn't defeat a cell tower ping. They understood safes and alarms, but not automatic license plate readers. They were caught because they left a digital trail a child could follow. Scotland Yard simply connected the dots. The men who drilled through two feet of concrete were ultimately brought down by their own cars, their own phones, and their own pride. They had the patience to plan for three years, but not the discipline to stay quiet for three weeks.

Their greatest trick wasn't breaking into the vault; it was convincing themselves they could get away with it in a world that had already passed them by.