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A Security Expert Breaks Down a Daring London Vault Heist

The theft of 72 safety deposit boxes seems straight out of an "Ocean's 11" movie.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

It's the story that's winning hearts and minds nationwide: At the beginning of this month, a group of men broke into a vault in London's Hatton Garden and raided 72 safe deposit boxes.

The area, just behind Farringdon tube station, is best known as the capital's jewelry quarter, begging the question: Why keep your jewels there? If I was hiding diamonds, I wouldn't put them in one of the places most likely to be targeted by diamond thieves. I'd bury them in a cute little chest in a cemetery, beneath the grave of someone with a name I found funny. (Get ready to smell precious stones, Seymour Cox!)

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Another odd thing: The alarm reportedly went off as the drill juddered its way through a wall, yet the police opted not to respond. What is going on? I wanted to delve deeper into the situation, so I got on the phone to the director of a private security company (who wanted to remain anonymous) called Athena Intelligence. I spoke to him about the audacity of the heist, the loot, and why things may not be as black and white as they seem.

Some of the raided safety deposit boxes. Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Police

VICE: Hi. Have you ever come across a case like this before?
The Director of Athena Intelligence: To be honest, it's not really what I get involved in—that's the police's job. Private security tends to get involved in the prevention as opposed to the aftermath of it. And in this case it obviously failed.

Seems weird that they could get a 20-inch hole through a wall in central London without anyone realizing.
Well, there's a number of possibilities, you know. The first being that they were inside the building when it had closed for the weekend and, from there, they dropped down the lift shaft. Also, I think it was three or four holes they cut to create a corridor wide enough to get a man through. The diameter of the drill wasn't wide enough to get a person through, so they needed three or four circles next to each other. They had to do that same task multiple times, which is not a quiet job.

How could you achieve something like that without alerting the whole street?
I don't know how noisy the street was and I don't know how good the sound insulation is in the vault, but regardless of that there would be noise throughout the building. How you could achieve a heist like that without alerting the security guards in the building is beyond me. I don't know how that could be done. It's possible there was an inside man who was either voluntarily enlisted or forcibly enlisted to assist.

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The alarm went off but the police chose not to respond. Why do you think that is?
That's another strange one. I think that the alarm went off, which is monitored by the alarm company, who then contacted the police as a matter of protocol. Now, the police will respond based on the alarm company's recommendations. If the alarm goes off and the alarm company says, "Look, there's just work going on in the building, don't worry, we've had problems with this bloody alarm for the last couple of weeks," then they would make it a lower priority, and with tight resources it wouldn't be worth dispatching an officer to the scene.

It's almost Hollywood-esque, this crime.
It is a fascinating crime. The sort of thing you could make a film of in the future. It was phenomenally done. I do operations planning for tasks all over the world, and you need detailed advanced reconnaissance to make sure you have the right tools for the job. So that was an extraordinarily well-planned job. The other thing you need to consider is that there's no chatter in the UK criminal network. Generally people cant keep their mouth shut, and the lack of chatter in the UK network might indicate that there was a foreign involvement, possibly not EU.

Why do you think they went for this location in particular?
I was thinking about this. Firstly it's been done twice before. I don't know how recently that was, but it's been done twice before, which makes me wonder why anyone would bother leaving anything with them in the first place. If you look, there were almost a thousand boxes there, and they only did 72 boxes in the period that they were there. Once you're in, you can open these boxes pretty easily. So why they only did 70-odd boxes is a mystery to me. I just wonder whether people have thought, Was there a specific box being targeted for a reason by this gang? And were the rest of the boxes just a distraction? Were they going for specific boxes rather than just randomly opening boxes before they ran out of time? I wonder whether that's been raised or investigated, because, to be honest, if I'd spent all that time and effort getting in there, I'd take more than 70 boxes.

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The damaged entrance to the vault Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Police

Depending on how much time you have, 70 could be a lot of boxes to sift through.
It depends on whether they've managed the situation. All the same, what we still haven't seen or heard much of is from the victims. Not a lot of people seem to have come forward and said, "That's my box." I wonder what was in those boxes, is all.

Are heists harder to pull of now than they were in the past?
I think so. With technology, forensics and all the prevention technology around, it makes it very difficult to do and get away with, and if they're going to do it, they need to be extremely well informed and well qualified, for want of a better word. And they've got to have a plan for getting rid of the cash. They cant just turn up in Marbella with a load of cash—they're going to start triggering all sorts of alarm bells that way. So they've got to get rid of whatever it is they've taken. That's why I'm not sure they went in and blindly opened whatever boxes were in there. Some of those boxes would probably contain mortgage papers—stuff that's only of interest to the people concerned. Not all of them are going to be full of diamonds and cash and drugs, or whatever. I wonder whether it's a specific box targeted for a specific reason, and of course that would have required a further level of intelligence. Given what they've demonstrated, I don't think that would be beyond them.

Do you think, with your expertise, that you'd be able to pull off a stunt like this?
[Laughs] Firstly, let me say, it's not something I'm involved in or would ever want to be involved in—we only work on the right side of the UK law. But that level of planning is almost military; it's so detailed. They've had a lot of intelligence that's allowed them to be in the right place at the right time with the right logistics and have the drill plan in place as well. It's been done with military precision. With the right intelligence I'm sure it could be done by a lot of people, but it would take top tier intelligence and top-notch support on the ground.

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Related: Watch our documentary, 'Europe's Most Notorious Jewel Thieves'

Don't you think making a getaway in a white van—like they did—is a bit clichéd?
It doesn't mean they've kept it, though. It could be a decoy. I'd be amazed if they kept that vehicle and didn't switch it out somewhere very close to the scene.

What do you think the culprits are up to now? Opium dens in Marrakech?
I think they've probably split up. If they've got any sense they would have gone their own ways without letting each other know where they were going, while having a simple means of getting together in the future. Their job now would be to launder whatever they've taken—and that might not be cash or gems or what have you; it could be anything, we just don't know—without drawing attention to themselves and surviving on the profits. Again, the assumption to this is that this has been a heist for financial gain, and this might not have been the case.

What else could it have been for?
It could have been somebody with papers or documents or hard drives or anything from that place that needed to be taken, and in order to mask the theft of that particular item of interest they've stolen from all the other boxes which are inconsequential to the operation itself. Maybe it was a foreign intelligence operation?

@joe_bish

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I Made Friends with a Guy Who's Robbed 60 Banks