Kurtis Dilks has been convicted at Nottingham Crown Court of being part of a four-strong gang who smashed into the home of former England footballer Ashley Cole and threatened to cut his fingers off.
Dilks, 35 and with an address in Clifton, Nottinghamshire, was found guilty by a jury of being part of the crew who broke their way into Cole’s Surrey home with a sledgehammer at about 9:30pm on January 21, 2020.
The courier had denied three charges of conspiracy to commit burglary, four charges of converting criminal property, three charges of conspiracy to commit robbery and two counts of robbery.
He will be sentenced next Friday.
In addition to the attack on Cole, Dilks was found guilty of conspiring to rob the wife of former Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Tom Huddlestone in May 2019 with fellow defendants Ashley Cumberpatch and Andrew Macdonald.
In total defendants had stood trial accused of a number of offences in relation to "ruthlessly executed" robberies carried out between October 2018 and January 2020.
Cumberpatch, with a former address in Carlton, and MacDonald, formerly of Woodstock Avenue in Nottingham, were both found guilty on 11 charges.
Tevfik Guccuk, of Southgate in London, was found guilty on five charges and Sercan Evsin, with an address in Barnet, was guilty on four charges. Christopher Yorke, from Rose Ash Lane in Arnold, was found guilty on one charge.
The remaining four men on trial were found not guilty.
Dilks was described as a "dominant and dangerous" robber in court and he was the only member of the group to have left DNA evidence - on a knife - outside Cole's home.
During the trial Dilks told the jury he believed someone was “framing” him after a knife with his DNA was found outside Cole’s house near the village of Fetcham. The courier claimed someone had stolen the knife and other items from his van and he was “most certainly not” involved in the robbery.
Under questioning from his defence barrister, Simon Eckersley, Dilks had said: “The only aspect I can believe is those items were stolen out of my van. It’s something I don’t do every day, to check everything is there. I would only check if I needed to use the item.”
But following four days of deliberations the jury returned their verdict at lunchtime.
