Diamond wheezers ordered to pay back £27.5m

Five elderly villains behind the Hatton Garden jewellery raid were ordered to pay back £27.5m or face a total of 28 years extra in jail.

Estimates of the amount stolen from the safe deposits over the Easter weekend of 2015 have ranged wildly from £15m to £35m.

Following a year long financial investigation, defence lawyers agreed that the elderly gang made off with a minimum of £13,690,331.

Cash, jewellery and bullion worth £4m has been recovered, while some of the stolen gold, recovered from a cemetery and the gang’s ‘smelting factory’, has been returned to its owners.

The five gang members were sentenced to a total of 34 years behind bars in March 2016.

‘Ringleader’ Brian Reader, 78, was given six years while John Collins, 77, Daniel Jones, 63, Terry Perkins, 69, and William Lincoln, 62, all got seven years for conspiracy to commit burglary.

Philip Stott, prosecuting, said around 40 individuals had been identified as having lost valuables in the raid.

‘There’s not a single victim or box holder who will receive back in full what they have lost,’ he said.

The court heard that that gang had remained silent on the whereabouts of their ill-gotten gains.

Judge Christopher Kinch QC said: ‘There has been very little in any genuine cooperation.’

The judge ordered Reader, Perkins, Collins and Jones pay back £27,507,388 between them, or face another seven years each in jail, if they do not pay that sum.

Notorious robber and jewel thief Reader, dubbed the ‘guv’nor’, has £6,644,951 available in assets and he has three months to pay it back.

He had claimed he did not make a penny from the raid after bailing out before the vaults were breached.

Collins was ordered to pay £7,686,039 after prosecutors said he had that figure in available assets.

He was also given three months to pay that sum.

Jones must pay back £6,649,827 but will default on those payments according to his defence.

‘He has no other assets and will have to serve the default term,’ said Graham Trembath, QC, defending.

Perkins was ordered to cough up £6,526,571 but he also cannot pay it, the court heard.

Peter Rowlands, defending, said he will have to serve the additional jail time as ‘there’s no prospect at the moment of that being recovered’.

He said he will sell his holiday villa in Portugal and other properties to meet some of the costs.

Perkins has been diagnosed with severe heart failure since conviction, and has to visit hospital every three weeks.

Lincoln was ordered to pay a much smaller £26,898 for his lesser role in the plot or face another nine months in jail.

Another Hatton Garden burglar, 60-year-old Carl Wood was ordered to pay £50,000 by Judge Kinch QC or face an additional 18 months in jail last November.

Boiler fitter Hugh Doyle was told earlier today to pay a nominal £367.50 for letting the gang use his office premises to switch the items between vehicles.

The losers in the raid will be compensated by the confiscation amount, but it’s unclear how much of that £27.5million will ever be recovered.

The confiscation hearing closes the book on the audacious gem heist carried out by the gang dubbed the Dad’s Army gang and the ‘Diamond Wheezers’.

Only Lincoln, Collins and Jones were sat in the dock today to hear the ruling, assisted by hearing loops.

Judge Kinch described the raid as one of the ‘biggest in English history’ today (tues).

‘As is often the case… records are there to be broken, other crimes may have eclipsed this case since.

‘But the burglary at the heart of this case stands in a class of it’s own,’ he said.

‘Each member of the team must have been committed to bringing out a successful conclusion.’

Between 60 and 70 jewellery boxes were taken in the raid, containing nearly £14million of valuables, by drilling into the concrete vault over Easter Weekend 2015.

The raiders made off with the stolen jewellery after disabling the alarms, and immediately began shifting it out of London.

Some was taken back to the house of Perkins’ daughter Terri, some buried in the cemetery and others moved to undisclosed locations in the following hours.

Judge Kinch said that the stolen goods were still ‘jointly available’ at the time of their arrest.

One of the burglars, known only as ‘Basil’, remains at large.

Both Perkins and Reader were said to be too ill to attend the confiscation hearing which began earlier in the month.

Reader is battling prostrate cancer, and has suffered a stroke since he was jailed.

Since the raid none of the victims have been able to reclaim their valuables, which have been held in police stations throughout proceedings.

Goods worth round £600,000 have not been claimed and will likely be listed for police auction.

Reader has convictions dating back to the 1960s and was jailed for eight years for his part in the infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery in 1983.

The notorious heist involved armed robbers stealing £26million in gold bullion from Brink’s-Mat, near London’s Heathrow Airport.

The bullion theft remains one of the biggest heists ever to take place in Britain – the gold taken was worth around £500million at today’s gold prices.

Perkins, one of the ringleaders of the Hatton Garden raid, had celebrated his 67th birthday on April 4, 2016, as the raid continued over the Easter weekend.

Exactly 32 years earlier, on 4 April 1983, he celebrated his 35th birthday by carrying out an armed robbery on the headquarters of Security Express, on Curtain Road, in Shoreditch.

The robbers made off with £6m in what, at the time, was Britain’s biggest ever cash robbery.

Perkins was jailed for 22 years at the Old Bailey in 1985 along with John Knight where they were described as ‘two evil, ruthless men’.

Lincoln has a string of convictions for attempted burglary, burglary and attempted theft between 1975 and 1985, but his most recent conviction was for battery in 2013.

They now must meet the judge’s order or face a lengthening of their sentence.

Collins, of Islington, north London; Jones, of Enfield, north London; Perkins, of Enfield; and Reader, of Dartford, Kent, all admitted conspiracy to commit burglary.

Lincoln, of Bethnal Green, east London, was found guilty of the same offence and one count of conspiracy to conceal, convert or transfer criminal property.

ENDS