Tip for Reading List: Story of a Sensational Heist

The Last Job: The ‘Bad Grandpas’ and the Hatton Garden Heist

The remarkable Hatton Garden jewellery heist of April 2015 — in which nine elderly suspects with a combined age of 533 made away with cash, gold and jewels valued at $20 million at the time — was described by prosecutors as “the largest burglary in English legal history”. It was a sensational crime not just because of the size of the loot, but also because the average age of the suspects was nearly 60. Brian Reader, the alleged ringleader, was 76.

Dan Bilefsky, a journalist who covered the story for The New York Times, has now written a book based on his reporting: The Last Job: The ‘Bad Grandpas’ and the Hatton Garden Heist, which draws on interviews, court records and transcripts from the Metropolitan Police to put together what The NYT review calls a “meticulously researched procedural”.

In the four years since it happened, the Hatton Garden heist has already inspired three films — Hatton Garden: The Heist (2016), The Hatton Garden Job, also known as One Last Heist (2017), and King of Thieves (2018). The story is attractive but, as The NYT review points out, Bilefsky’s book suffers from a certain absence of mystery about the protagonists — indeed, he is “left to make deductions about Reader’s motivations, ranging from ‘a fearlessness borne of age’ to ‘a bravado perhaps conditioned by age”.