BY JAMES SIMONS
Criminals who commit serious crimes are often very stupid in their attempt to commit the so- called perfect crime.
An abundance of time spent organizing a crime is rarely enough to guarantee never being caught. The compulsive desire to steal an awful lot of money or kill somebody without getting caught reveals a lot of ignorance and stupidity on the part of the perpetrators of the crime.
All it takes is once slip, one mistake, and you are busted! The raiders who participated in the £14m Hatton Garden Heist, thought they had got away with the biggest robbery in the world. The youngest of them is 58 years of age, and the oldest is 76 years. One would have ascribed more wisdom to the old gang, but his wrong it would be to equate age to wisdom and common sense.
The gang who secretly met regularly after the hit were unaware they were secretly being recorded by detectives, and they made the first dumb error of planning to meet up in an Enfield car park to split some of the haul. It did not occur to them that many car parks have cameras even though their capture was secured due to the clever surveillance they had been out under by police.
More stupid was the fact they left incriminating evidence in their homes including a small smelting machine and a forensics for dummies book. How dumb! If this was a subconscious admission that they were dumb, they paid the price for it in more than one way. Their successful plan to penetrate the very tight security was made even more dumb by the revelation one of the gang members -John ‘Kenny’ Collins, used his own car to drive to the scene. Naturally, crooks plotting such a major robbery would be incredibly wary of involving more individuals than necessary, though a smart crook would have contemplated the self inflicted trap embodying that hasty plan. London’s roadside and motorway cameras have long been equipped with automatic number plate recognition technology, a common knowledge fact that only a dummy would not have known.
The experienced gang researched their ambitious plan for over a year, with one of them apparently posing as a lift man to prove the theory they could enter the basement through the lift shaft. Further efforts put into researching their golden target included research of the CCTV camera and alarm system, falling victim to their ignorance of a separate camera belonging to a nearby jewelery shop. They had been involved in the £3m Baker street robbery of 1971. Brian reader, whose street credentials include the £26m gold bullion Brinks Mat robbery of 1983, is the oldest at 76 years of age, and nick named The Guv’nor by his criminal pals, presumably for his experience and savvy in the criminal world of making fast illegal money.
Any such savvy failed him woefully here, as the carefully planned robbery did not go undetected. More than £10m remains unaccounted for, but a long prison sentence awaits this criminal team. Dubbed the bad grandpas, they will have earned a lot of respect for their criminal bottle and systematic plan in successfully researching and implementing the grand heist, but the weaknesses of their plans will probably haunt them for the rest of their lives. They will be sentenced in March.