Just before nine a.m., Millman’s van pulled up on a small road by the banks of the Thames a mile and half downstream of the Dome. He slipped on a hard hat and fluorescent jacket, then took out several traffic cones and placed them around a large pothole in the road. The rest of the gang would also dress like construction workers. It was the perfect disguise.
The only thing Shatford knew for sure was that, at some point, the robbers would have to go into the vault. How they would get there was anyone’s guess. The favourite theory had been that they would simply come in through the main turnstiles and retrieve weapons they had hidden among the exhibits, but extensive searches had failed to find anything. The bulldozer, the police thought, was probably there to block the road, nothing more.
In the event, Betson’s chosen method of entry surprised everyone.
Betson had driven the bulldozer right up to the perimeter fence of the Dome with Ciarrocci, Cockram and another of their associates, Robert Adams, hiding in the back under a blanket. He pulled to the side of the road and flicked on his radio: ‘Five minutes.’ He and the others then pulled on full-face gas masks.
Meredith received the message, fired up the speedboat’s engines and headed across the Thames to the Millennium Pier, which sat adjacent to the Dome building.
Betson gunned the engine of the ten-tonne bulldozer and slipped it into gear. It shot forward and crunched through the outer fence, snapping two concrete bollards and a lamp-post as if they were made of matchwood.
Shatford was horrified. It looked like they were going to drive the bulldozer straight into the Dome. Around a hundred visitors, including a party of schoolchildren, were milling around inside. Shatford ordered his men to move as many people discreetly away from the vault as possible. ‘We tried to thin out the crowd as much as we could but there had to be people there otherwise the gang would have suspected something was wrong and aborted the job. We had to let them get into the vault.’
The bulldozer continued picking up speed as it crashed through a set of locked gates and entered the main grounds of the Dome. Betson made a sharp right turn and headed towards a Perspex shutter that formed part of the outer wall of the Dome itself. It shattered into a thousand pieces as he tore through it at 35 m.p.h. A handful of visitors and two undercover police officers dived out of the way, narrowly avoiding being crushed, as Betson pulled up right outside the vault.
Cockram and Adams leapt from the bulldozer and ran towards the diamonds, while Ciarrocci jumped down and threw the first of four smoke grenades, filling the arena with a thick blue haze.
Inside the vault, Cockram reached the tall glass cylinder that held the Millennium Star and pulled the nailgun from the canvas bag slung around his shoulder. He fired six times, making a small star-shaped pattern, then stepped aside to let Adams hit the area with a sledgehammer. After two hefty blows, there was a fist-sized hole in the glass directly in front of the Milennium Star. Using £750 worth of tools, the gang had breached the £2 million security systems in just twenty-seven seconds.
‘I couldn’t believe how easily the glass went,’ Adams would say later. ‘I only hit it twice. I was twelve inches from pay-day. I almost had it in my hand. It would have been a blinding Christmas.’
Watching the scene unfold on the monitors in control room, Shatford barked the order: ‘Strike, strike, strike.’ The ‘cleaners’ pulled guns from rubbish bags; dozens of armed officers in black combat gear emerged from all around and raced towards Ciarrocci and Betson. Utterly overwhelmed, outnumbered and outgunned, they surrendered without a shot being fired.
Inside the vault Adams and Cockram were oblivious to what was going on until a stun grenade landed at their feet. Trapped inside the vault they knew there was no escape and threw themselves to the floor.
Outside the Dome, armed officers in police speedboats descended on Meredith while others arrested Millman. A team led by Dolden moved in on Tong Farm and arrested Lee Wenham. In the days that followed, the number of visitors to the Dome soared dramatically as people flocked to the scene of the crime. After eleven months, the boast of ‘one amazing day’ had finally come true.
As the gang had been caught red-handed, prosecutors expected them to offer little in the way of defence when the case came to court. However, it soon emerged that Betson and his men had planned what to say in the event of being captured almost as carefully as they had planned the robbery itself.
Under English law there is a subtle distinction between the act of robbery and the act of stealing: the former includes the use or threat of violence and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. A charge of stealing implies the perpetrators did not intend to cause any harm to anyone. The longest jail term available is seven years.
Betson, Cockram, Ciarrocci and Adams pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal but not guilty to conspiracy to rob. The fact that none of the gang had been carrying guns during the raid – much to the surprise of the Flying Squad – worked heavily in their favour. Only Meredith denied both charges. Millman, who finally succumbed to his cancer, died six weeks before the trial began.
Once the prosecution had completed their case, Betson took the stand. Cocky and confident, he told the jury that, as borne out by his criminal record, he had never been involved in violent crime or armed robbery and instead made all his money from tobacco-smuggling. While he admitted trying to steal the diamonds, he knew there was no possibility of anyone getting hurt because the Dome was practically empty that morning.
‘How could you possibly know that?’ asked the lead prosecutor.
Betson cleared this throat and faced the jury. ‘Because we had a man on the inside. A policeman called Michael Wearing, my brother-in-law.’
Betson explained that Officer Wearing had been one of a small team assigned to patrol the exterior of the Dome during the first half of 2000. While working there he had struck up a friendship with a man named Tony who worked security at the building. Between them, they had hatched the plan for the raid and taken the proposal to Betson.
Wearing was hastily brought before the court. He had served with the Metropolitan Police for more than twenty years and had an unblemished record. He had married the sister of Betson’s wife in 1991 and become godfather to Betson’s son. But if Betson had hoped family loyalty might save him, he was very much mistaken. Wearing’s most painful moment in the witness box came when he admitted that back in 1998, two years before the attack on the Dome, he had made a confidential report to his senior officers suggesting that his brother-in-law had been responsible for several robberies. Betson swore under his breath as the revelation emerged.
The arguments raged on with the defence claiming this was just a clever ploy on Wearing’s part to cover himself. Cockram and Ciarrocci took their turns in the witness box and supported Betson’s account. Not only had the mysterious Tony suggested the raid, he had also funded it. Cockram and the others were on ‘wages’ of £100,000 to do the job. ‘I thought the diamonds were only worth a couple of million,’ he said. ‘I was shocked when it turned out they were worth a lot more.’
Only Robert Adams refused to go into the witness box, anxious that his previous criminal history should not come to light. During the early 1980s he had been jailed for six years for attempting to kill his wife.
The allegations against Wearing soon collapsed. The officer had never made any secret of his relationship with Betson to his superiors on the force, and the Flying Squad had been aware of the connection all along. The idea that Wearing had provided any help or assistance for any element of the robbery was dismissed as utterly false.
In the end it was the weakest link, Kevin Meredith, who condemned them. As experienced, hardened criminals, every other member of the gang had said nothing during arrest and interview. Meredith, however, had started talking within minutes of being handcuffed on the boat and only stopped when he was joined by an attorney and advised that he might be better saying nothing.
But it was too late. The court heard Meredith on tape saying he had been threatened by Cockram and had only agreed to take part in the raid because he was in fear of his life. Most crucially Cockram had told him: ‘Don’t worry, we won’t have shooters or anything. But we’ll have ammonia, and if anyone comes up to us, that will put them straight down on the floor.’
It was enough to convince the jury that the gang would have had no hesitation in using violence and, apart from Meredith, they were all convicted of the more serious offence. Betson and Cockram received eighteen years, Ciarrocci and Adams got fifteen each while Meredith came away with five.
Their arrest and capture might have been a complete surprise but on their way to prison, the gang were finally let in on the biggest secret of all. As soon as De Beers heard there was a threat to the diamonds they had replaced them with crystal fakes. Even if the raid had gone according to plan, they would not have got their hands on the real gems.
Like so many of the hugely ambitious ‘project’ crimes that had gone before, the great Dome robbery ended in failure and stiff prison sentences. Little wonder that for the latest generation of would-be blaggers growing up in the traditional breeding-grounds of the Bermondsey Triangle, armed robbery has lost its appeal.
Those who manage to avoid being shot by the police or grassed up by the people they thought were their friends still face the prospect of at least fifteen years in prison, even if they were unarmed. And, under the three-strikes-and-you’re-out system, a third conviction means an automatic life sentence.
Under a new clampdown even little-league robbers acting out of desperation face stiff sentences. Take the case of nineteen-year-old Teresa Hall from West Bromwich, who had been a model student before falling in with a bad crowd. Within the space of a few months she had fallen in love with an older man with a heroin addiction. When she could no longer subsidise his habit she helped him raid their local Total petrol garage, the boyfriend brandishing a handgun while Teresa filled a bag from the till. The pair escaped with just £311. A week later a second raid at a One Stop shop went wrong when the owners were alerted by a panic alarm. Hall sprayed CS gas at them. Arrested and charged, she said in mitigation that she had only gone along with the raids to help her boyfriend. Despite this she was jailed for nine years.
‘It’s just not worth it,’ says Jimmy Tippett Jnr. ‘When you do a robbery and stick a gun under the nose of some bank clerk, half the fucking world goes out looking for you. There’s the bank, the insurance company, the cops,
Crimewatch, Most Wanted
– the lot of them. But if you fly over to Amsterdam and bring back an ounce of charlie in your underpants, it’s almost as if no one gives a fuck. These days, if you’re talking about crime, you’re basically talking about drugs. It’s all about money, isn’t it? And until someone finds a quicker or better way of making money than through drugs, that’s the one people are gonna be sticking with.’
COCAINE
CHAPTER FOUR
At first it seemed like little more than the tragic suicide of a successful racehorse owner who, in a moment of madness, had simply gone too far.
When the body of forty-nine-year-old Eugene Carter was found hanging from the rafters of his plush Kent home in February 2001, most of his friends in the equestrian world believed it was because he couldn’t live with the shame of a brutal road-rage attack the previous year. Although he had not yet been charged or even arrested, the police were closing in fast and Carter knew only too well that he risked losing everything he had worked so hard for.
‘His behaviour was becoming increasingly unpredictable,’ said a former colleague. ‘He was withdrawing into himself more and more, shutting off from the outside world. I wasn’t that surprised when I heard – it was obvious that he was under an incredible amount of stress.’
The trouble had started when Carter, who owned at least a dozen prime racehorses, went inexplicably berserk after finding a bicycle parked in an alleyway off Chislehurst high street that he wanted to drive down. Visibly shaking with fury he climbed out of his sleek black Mercedes, picked up the bike and, swearing to himself over and over again, threw it over a nearby wall.
The cyclist, a thirty-one-year-old Iranian, came out of a nearby barber’s, saw what had happened to his bike and confronted Carter. It turned out to be a terrible mistake. Carter launched into a vicious attack, kicking and punching the man to the ground, then repeatedly smashing him in the head with a house brick, all the while spitting out a stream of racist gibes. Leaving his victim bloody and unconscious in the gutter, Carter then walked back calmly to his car and drove away.
The incident had been seen by dozens of eyewitnesses and, though none was able to recall the registration number of the vehicle that had been involved, they had all seen enough of the attacker’s face to help put together an identikit picture.
‘People came to us and described a man who looked identical to Carter,’ says one police source connected to the inquiry. ‘The name came up time and again. We were closing in on him and he knew that. I guess that’s why he did what he did.’
Eugene Carter was far more than a petty thug and fan of the sport of kings; he was just about the biggest drugs baron that London has ever seen. A true underworld pioneer, Carter was singlehandedly responsible for creating the vast and lucrative market for cocaine that exists to this day. Only now can the real story of his life be told.
At the start of the 1980s, few people in the world of British law enforcement were concerned about cocaine. Average Customs seizures for each year of the preceding decade were a mere seventeen kilos while the haul for the whole of 1984 had been just thirty-five.