Almost Perfect: The Daring Near-Misses of Legendary Heists

Over the Easter bank holiday in 2015, a team of burglars drilled through fifty centimeters of reinforced concrete to enter a vault in London's diamond district. It was the largest burglary in English legal history, and it’s a masterclass in crimes that came breathtakingly close to being perfect. Imagine the scene. It’s dark. You’re at the bottom of a lift shaft. The air is thick with concrete dust, and the only sound is the high-pitched scream of a Hilti DD350 industrial drill biting into the wall.

For two straight nights, this was the entire world for a small group of men. Their target was the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit facility. Their prize was whatever lay inside seventy-three of its private boxes. But this wasn't a crew of young, agile cat burglars. The ringleader was Brian Reader, seventy-six years old. A career criminal who'd been part of the legendary Brink's-Mat robbery back in 1983. His crew were men in their sixties and seventies. John Collins, the lookout. Terry Perkins, the muscle.

They called themselves the "Bad Grandpas." And they had planned this for years. They knew the building would be a ghost town over the long holiday weekend. They slipped in through a fire escape, disabled the alarms, and rappelled down the lift shaft to the basement. Then, the drilling began. They bored three overlapping holes, creating a narrow opening into the vault. It was just big enough for one of them to squeeze through. Inside, they went to work, forcing open deposit boxes with crowbars and angle grinders.

They had done it. They walked away with an estimated fourteen million pounds in diamonds, gold, and cash. And for weeks, it looked like a clean getaway. Scotland Yard was stumped. No signs of forced entry on the main doors. No witnesses. The press called them ghosts. But the perfect plan... was about to be undone by simple human error. The crew got careless. They started using their own cars for meetings to discuss how to launder the loot. John Collins, the lookout, was caught on a security camera near the scene...

driving his own distinctive white Mercedes. Police bugged their cars and listened in as they argued, bragged, and planned their next moves. They heard everything. The arrests happened just over a month later. The "Bad Grandpas" were rounded up one by one. The trial was a strange spectacle. Old men, some hard of hearing, straining to understand the judge. Brian Reader was sentenced to six years in prison. Of the fourteen million pounds they stole, only about four point three million was ever found.

The rest, along with a mysterious final gang member known only as "Basil," vanished completely. They planned for the alarms. They planned for the guards. They planned for a fifty-centimeter wall of reinforced concrete. They defeated the entire security system. But they couldn't defeat their own egos. In the end, it wasn't a laser grid or a pressure plate that brought them down. It was bragging. It was impatience. It was a white Mercedes parked in plain sight. They built a perfect machine to crack the vault...

and then they threw a wrench in it themselves.