An armoured payroll truck driving down the road alongside the perimeter fence skidded to a halt as an eighteen-wheeler juggernaut jack-knifed directly in front of it, the two vehicles coming to a halt just a few feet apart. A split second later a pale blue Cargo van left a trail of burning rubber as it slid into position behind the payroll truck, cutting off the only escape route.
The raiders poured out of the vehicles. They wore overalls, body armour, full-face Balaclavas, rock-climbing helmets and heavy boots. Some wielded shotguns while others had pistols tucked into their waistbands. Gasoline-driven chainsaws were produced from the back of the van and two of the robbers ducked under the payroll truck and began cutting the hydraulic cables.
One of the van’s security guards snatched his radio, ready to signal that the vehicle and its precious cargo of £8 million in untraceable bills were under attack. He stopped in his tracks when his partner pointed at the man now standing in front of their vehicle and shouting at them. He was holding up three army green magnetic limpet mines. Making sure the guards could see clearly, he armed the first by pressing a small button, causing a tiny red light to begin flashing. He then began fixing the devices to the bonnet. His words were unclear but the guards had no difficulty understanding the meaning: touch that radio and you’re dead.
Traffic was building up behind the van blocking the road as commuters tried to get to work. When one furious motorist left his car to find out what was going on there was no hesitation: the nearest member of the gang levelled his heavy silver handgun, aiming just above the man’s head, and fired two shots in quick succession. Once again the message not to interfere was received loud and clear.
Bryant and the other warehouse workers heard a muffled cry, ‘Two minutes,’ then watched as one of the men who had been cutting cables emerged from under the truck and attacked the hinges of the tailgate. The other ran across to a third juggernaut parked on the opposite kerb. He tore away a red plastic traffic cone from the rear, revealing a fearsome metal spike, hopped into the cab and reversed at high speed.
Through their side mirrors, the terrified guards in the payroll truck realised what was about to happen and braced themselves for the impact. The spike smashed into the centre of the rear doors, throwing the truck forward ten feet and making a small hole in the thick metal skin. Another muffled cry, ‘Again,’ and the spiked juggernaut drew back. The second impact was even harder, throwing the guards up against the windscreen like a pair of rag dolls. Two of the raiders inspected the hole: it was getting bigger; the cash was almost within reach. A series of hand signals were given and the spike was lined up for a third time.
By now Bryant and several other eyewitnesses had flooded the police emergency line with calls about a robbery in progress. Before the van could be rammed again, one of the gang who had been monitoring police frequencies on a scanner screamed the order to abort.
An unarmed traffic-patrol vehicle, staffed by officers Claire Jones and Steven Elliott, had been despatched to the scene, but as soon as the pair turned the corner into the estate, they realised the robbers were expecting them. Jones and Elliott found themselves staring down the barrels of several shotguns. There was nothing they could do. Elliott slammed his Range Rover into reverse and pulled back to safety while Jones called in armed back-up.
But the gang had already started their getaway. They piled into the back of the blue Cargo van and tore off towards the main town. In less than a minute they had reached a sharp turn in the narrow road close to a historic bridge over the river Medway, only barely slowing down. Shocked pedestrians watched as the van appeared to lose control, skidded off the road, through a fence and over a grass verge.
By the time the police caught up, the van had been abandoned and the gang had vanished. It would be an hour before a man walking his dog along the river would call in to complain about a group of young tearaways in a speedboat racing down the river at 40 m.p.h., and the mystery of just how the robbers had got away was solved.
Although they had failed to get any money, the raiders had displayed such military precision and expert planning that suspicion initially fell on soldiers from a nearby army barracks, until the bomb-disposal experts discovered that the limpet mines were nothing more than tinned meat pies that had been painted green, then fitted with magnets and flashing lights.
Detective Superintendent Andy Dolden, the tall, bespectacled head of the Kent County Constabulary Serious Crimes Unit, arrived at Beddow Way a little after eight a.m. Within thirty seconds, he knew exactly who was behind the raid.
Since April his unit had been running a covert surveillance operation against Lee Wenham, a thirty-three-year-old mechanic and scrap-metal merchant suspected of involvement in large-scale auto theft. Wenham was part of an extensive family of wealthy gypsies, and earlier in the year had paid £220,000 in cash for Tong Farm, a sprawling complex that included an apple orchard and several large warehouses. Wenham had quickly made the farm the base of his operations and had been seen driving a variety of stolen vehicles in and out of the premises. He had long been rumoured to be a main supplier of getaway vehicles for armed robberies and now, for the first time, police had hard evidence of his involvement.
The surveillance operation against Lee Wenham had so far yielded little that could be translated into anything but the most minor charges, but as soon as Dolden arrived at the scene, he knew he had hit paydirt. ‘I immediately recognised the getaway van from the surveillance we’d been doing at the farm,’ he says. ‘Part of me wanted to go there right away and arrest everyone but I had to hold back. I had no idea if the whole gang was going to be there, and by the time I’d managed to get a firearms team together, any evidence would have been destroyed. The only charges we’d be able to make stick would be petty auto theft and that just wasn’t worthwhile. Instead I decided to do nothing. Wenham didn’t know we were watching him or the farm and that gave us the upper hand. The robbery had clearly taken a lot of planning and money, and the gang weren’t going to walk away empty-handed. It was a dead cert that they would strike again.’
In fact the gang had struck once before.
Back in February an armoured Securicor van carrying £10 million in cash had been ambushed after leaving a depot in Nine Elms, south London. In an identical series of events, eighteen-wheel juggernauts had been used to block it at the front and rear, and two members of the gang had cut the hydraulics using miniature chainsaws.
The raid had been hastily abandoned after the unexpected and frankly farcical intervention of a frustrated motorist, whose car had been boxed in by the truck carrying the ramming spike. Blissfully unaware that there was a robbery in progress, the man had snatched the keys from the ignition of the truck and stormed off in search of the driver to give him a piece of his mind.
When the time came to ram the armoured truck, the keys were nowhere to be found. Eyewitnesses saw the raiders frantically searching one another’s pockets and scrabbling about in the gutter in desperation before deciding to abort.
Seconds later, each of the blocking vehicles exploded in a ball of flame. The raiders then ran to the back of a nearby abandoned power station on the banks of the river Thames where they climbed into a waiting speedboat and made good their escape.
The February raid had come under the jurisdiction of London’s Metropolitan Police so Dolden did not learn of it until hours after the Aylesford raid had taken place. Although it could easily have been a copycat crime, it took only a few cursory checks to confirm that the same gang had been responsible. All the blocking vehicles at the Aylesford raid had been fitted with incendiary bombs like those used at Nine Elms, but the gang had fled the scene so quickly they did not have time to detonate them. More tellingly, every vehicle at Aylesford had a spare set of keys taped to the top of the driver’s sun-visor. Any lingering doubts quickly faded when detectives examined the vehicle containing the Aylesford ramming spike. Etched into one of the supporting girders were the words: ‘
PERSISTENT ARENT
(
sic
)
WE
’.
Forensic tests on the getaway van at Aylesford confirmed what Detective Dolden already knew. Saliva on a pair of rubber gloves found on the dashboard belonged to Lee Wenham. A bucket in the back of the other van bore the fingerprints of another member of the gang: Terrence Millman, a fifty-eight-year-old career criminal known to have been involved in dozens of high-value armed robberies dating back to the early 1980s. Millman had spent almost half his adult life behind bars. But robbery was the only thing he knew.
Within a few days of the Aylesford raid, Millman and Wenham were placed under twenty-four hour surveillance and Dolden set about trying to work out where the gang might strike next. ‘We knew what they were after: high-value loads in armoured trucks with close proximity to rivers for an easy getaway so that’s what we started looking for,’ says Dolden. ‘We came up with three possibilities – the two places they had already tried, or a third Securicor depot in Dartford on the edge of Kent. This seemed by far the most likely target.’
With too few firearms teams in the Kent force to cover all three targets and one falling partly outside its jurisdiction, Dolden called Detective Superintendent John Shatford, head of the Flying Squad. The pair knew each other well, having joined forces on a kidnapping case earlier in the year, and Shatford had also been in charge of the Nine Elms robbery investigation.
Teams of detectives from the two forces met every few days to discuss the surveillance operation. Wenham and Millman had both been observed driving in and out of Tong Farm in various stolen vehicles, including a bright yellow bulldozer, and all the signs pointed to another raid being planned.
But just as contingency plans for dealing with the three most likely targets were being finalised, the officers received a report that Lee Wenham had made a visit to the Millennium Dome.
Built at a cost of £758 million, and launched with the slogan ‘One amazing day, one year only’, the Millennium Dome had been billed as a grand celebratory exhibition and amusement park that would appeal to everyone. Housed in the world’s biggest tent and built on a former brownfield site on the banks of the river Thames, it had quickly become an expensive and embarrassing joke. The number of visitors had been fewer than half the predicted figure, the exhibits had been almost universally panned for being dull and insipid, the chief executive had been unceremoniously fired and the Government had been forced to step in on three occasions to inject vast sums of money to prevent the exhibition closing. Even a spectacular speedboat chase sequence using the Dome as a backdrop at the beginning of the James Bond film
The World Is Not Enough
had failed to spark any interest in the real thing. In short, the Dome was a big waste of time.
The surveillance report about Wenham ran to dozens of pages that were full of the most mundane detail, but what made the note about his visit to the Dome stand out was that Wenham had also visited the exhibition the week before. And that was really, really odd, because the whole point about the Dome was that no one was going there. So why on earth had Lee Wenham gone twice?
None of the officers on the team had been to the Dome, but Detective Chief Inspector Lee Catlin of Kent Constabulary vaguely recalled some details of the launch and rushed off to his computer to check the Dome’s Internet site. He returned a few minutes later and spread several freshly printed pages on the table. Dolden scanned the information and whistled softly. ‘I’d say that counts as a high-value load,’ he whispered.
‘Right on the river too,’ added Shatford. ‘I’ve gotta tell you, guys, I think this is what they’re after.’
The global diamond corporation, De Beers, had decided that the Dome was the ideal venue to display their premier collection. The centrepiece was the 203-carat Millennium Star, the largest internally and externally flawless pear-shaped diamond in the world. It was being displayed with eleven rare blue diamonds. Essentially priceless, the collection had been insured for $350 million.
To steal the diamonds would be to pull off the biggest robbery in the world ever. It would also require a minor miracle. De Beers had spent more than £2 million on security and the specially built vault housing the diamonds was considered impregnable. There were sophisticated pressure pads, time locks, cameras and optical sensors throughout the structure. The walls, ceiling and floor were of reinforced concrete and steel four feet thick. The display cabinets themselves were built of bomb- and bulletproof glass designed to withstand sixty tonnes of pressure without so much as a scratch. According to the manufacturers it would take at least thirty minutes of sustained attack with heavy, industrial machinery even so much as to scratch the glass. The vault was deemed so safe that no guards were posted inside – it simply wasn’t necessary.
Then there was the Dome itself. Security had been designed in the light of warnings from the FBI that it might be targeted by doomsday cults or terrorists on New Year’s Eve. Banks and banks of monitors fed live pictures from 170 CCTV cameras directly to a central control room where dozens of staff could react to the slightest problem in a matter of minutes.
The idea of Lee Wenham going up against such overwhelming odds didn’t add up either. Previous intelligence tests had shown that Lee Wenham had an IQ of just seventy and a reading age of seven. The general consensus was that he was pretty dumb, but surely even he wasn’t stupid enough to attempt to break into the Dome. And why would a gang that had only ever attacked vehicles suddenly turn their attention to a vault?
It made no sense until Shatford finished the last of a flurry of phone calls and called the rest of the team together to make an announcement. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said. ‘The diamonds are being moved, the exhibition is going to Japan. They’re going to load them into an armoured truck and drive them to the airport.’