Two of the masterminds behind the Hatton Garden heist were involved in two of Britain’s most audacious robberies more than three decades earlier, a jury has been told.
Brian Reader was convicted over the £26m Brink’s-Mat armed gold robbery in 1983. Reader, nicknamed the “guvnor” in the Hatton Garden heist, was jailed for eight years for conspiracy to handle stolen goods after the raid at the Brink’s-Mat warehouse, near Heathrow airport, west London, the jury heard.
He also was convicted for dishonestly handling £66,000 in cash and sentenced to an extra year of imprisonment.
The jury at Woolwich crown court heard that another Hatton Garden ringleader, Terry Perkins, 67, was convicted of involvement in the 1983 Security Express robbery, in which a gang netted £6m, and he was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment.
Reader and Perkins are among four men who have already pleaded guilty to the Hatton Garden robbery, carried out over Easter weekend in 2015.
The jury has heard that the theft at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company, in the heart of London’s diamond district, netted £14m in jewels, cash, gold and platinum, and that two-thirds of the haul is still missing.
Two other men who have pleaded guilty also have criminal convictions, the jury was told.
John Collins, 75, has convictions for offences dating back to 1961, including robbery, theft and handling stolen goods. Daniel Jones, 60, has been sentenced for offences of theft, burglary and handling stolen goods dating back to 1975.
The prosecution has told the jury that the gang planned to carry out the biggest burglary in English legal history when they broke into the Hatton Garden security vault. They drilled through a thick concrete wall and broke open security boxes.
The court has heard there were so many valuables in the 73 security boxes they broke open that two wheelie bins were used to take them away.
Four other people are on trial over the Hatton Garden raid, and deny the charges. Three men are charged with conspiracy to burgle: William Lincoln, 60, of Bethnal Green, east London; John Harbinson, 42, of Benfleet, Essex; and Carl Wood, 58, of Cheshunt, Hertfordshire.
They are also charged, along with Hugh Doyle, 48, of Enfield, north London, with conspiracy to conceal, convert or transfer criminal property. Doyle is also charged with actually concealing, converting or transferring criminal property.
Opening the case last month, the prosecutor Philip Evans said of the four who had already pleaded guilty: “These four ringleaders and organisers of this conspiracy, although senior in years, brought with them a great deal of experience in planning and executing sophisticated and serious acquisitive crime not dissimilar to this.”
Evans told the jury of Reader and Perkins’s place in English criminal history: “This offence was to be the largest burglary in English legal history. Two of these men had also been involved in some of the biggest acquisitive crime of the last century, and the other two had for many years in their earlier lives been involved in serious theft.”
The trial continues.
