The plan was not sleek. It was old-fashioned, physical, and audaciously simple. Over the four-day Easter weekend in 2015, while London was quiet, a group of men—mostly in their 60s and 70s—entered a lift shaft at 88-90 Hatton Garden. They disabled the communal elevator, climbed down, and used a Hilti DD350 industrial drill to bore a hole 20 inches deep, 10 inches high, and 18 inches wide through a 20-inch thick concrete wall. They crawled into the vault of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company. For the next two days, they methodically ransacked 73 safe deposit boxes. The haul was later estimated at up to £200 million in jewels, gold, and cash.
This was not a digital crime. It was a feat of analogue persistence. The men, dubbed the “Bad Grandpas” and the “Diamond Wheezers” by the press, brought sandwiches, a thermos, and a concrete saw that got stuck. They failed on the first night, returned the next, and succeeded. The comedy of their ages and methods belied the sheer scale of the theft. They were caught, inevitably, not by a high-tech alarm—which they had bypassed—but by their own van’s distinct license plate, captured on CCTV. The heist was less a thriller and more a stubborn, late-career project, a final, massive score executed with the weary expertise of men who knew that time, for once, was on their side.