Hatton Garden heist ringleader Danny Jones enjoys a stroll after being freed from prison with two-thirds of the £14million haul still unrecovered.
Jones, 66, looked fit and relaxed after completing three sentences in the wake of the 2015 hole-in-the-wall raid.
He got seven years for the burglary and another three years in 2018 for an earlier raid on a Mayfair jewellers.
Jones was handed a further six years and 287 days for failing to repay more than six million he was said to have made from the Hatton Garden heist.
Police claim two thirds of the stolen cash and jewels remain unrecovered.
By March 2020, Jones had repaid £548,218.47 after the elderly criminals were hit by one of the biggest proceeds of crime orders in British history.
He was released from HMP Hollesley Bay this week and was seen enjoying his freedom near his home in Enfield, north London.
His release means Michael “Basil the Ghost” Seed, 60, and John “Kenny”
Collins, 81, are the only two members of the gang who remain in jail.
Mastermind Brian Reader, 82, was released after serving three years in 2018.
A judge later ruled his dementia meant he did not have to go back inside for failing to repay the stolen millions.
Reader is understood to still be living at his home in Dartford, south east London.
Fellow ringleader Terry Perkins died in prison in 2018 aged 69.
Jones, played by Ray Winstone and Phil Daniels in two films about the crime, led police to a stash of jewels hidden in a cemetery declaring “that’s all I had”.
He wrote to Martin Brunt at Sky News in 2015 saying he would take police to the location after admitting conspiracy to commit burglary.
Unknown to him officers had found jewels buried in the graveyard but he led them to a separate, smaller stash, claiming that was all there was.
Prosecutors said he did not tell officers about the larger bag of jewels hoping he could keep it.
Jones was also secretly recorded by police talking to Perkins while driving around London after the raid which took place over two nights during the Easter bank holiday weekend.
Perkins said: “The biggest robbery in the f**king world, Dan, we was on.”
Jones replied: “And what a book you could write f**king hell.”
A teetotal fitness fanatic originally from Tottenham, north London, he has previous convictions including burglary, theft, robbery and handling stolen goods, which meant he has spent much of his adult life in prison.
The lifelong Spurs fan was so institutionalised that he referred to evenings after 5pm as “bang up” and would refuse to receive visitors or take phone calls.
In the surroundings of his detached home, where the large wooden staircase was adorned with a carved skull, he would not sleep in bed with his partner, Valerie.
The father of two preferred to dress in a Tommy Cooper-style fez and his mother’s dressing gown, then bed down for the night in a sleeping bag on his bedroom floor.
Jones would urinate in a bottle because of his obsession with the army and the SAS, and talked to his wire-haired terrier, Rocket, as if he were human.
He spent his evenings reading books on crime and scouring the internet for ideas. A gang source said: “ Danny has got a likeable character. He is very forceful and impatient.
“If you were on a bit of work the odds of it being successful would get better and better every week you were planning it but he would always want to do it tonight.”
Fellow Hatton Garden gang member Carl Wood said of his friend during his trial: “Danny is a very sensitive guy, a very funny man. Eccentric to extremes, that everyone who knew Danny would say he was mad.”
Jones had been jailed for seven years in 1989 and it was during this time, while in Maidstone prison, that was given a cell next to Reader’s old mentor Billy Barrett.
Alarm expert Basil was the last raider to be arrested.
He is serving ten years after finally being jailed in 2019.
The gang, nicknamed the “Diamond Wheezers” because of their ages, tunnelled into an underground safe deposit facility in London’s diamond district.
They got hold of a key to the multiple-occupancy building, enabling Basil to simply walk in through the front door.
Once inside, he let the others in through a fire escape.
Dressed as workmen in high-visibility jackets and face masks, they went unnoticed as they lugged in the heavy tools needed for the job.
The Mirror revealed CCTV of them in action in 2015, showing for the first time that the raid had taken place over two nights.
Jones and Basil were the only two slim enough to get into the vault through the hole they had made with a diamond tipped drill.
Heather Chalk from the Crown Prosecution Service, said in 2018: “Daniel Jones gained millions of pounds of criminal cash from the Hatton Garden burglary.
“In January, the CPS showed the court that Jones had the funds to pay back his ill-gotten gains and today we have successfully argued that his default sentences should be activated.
“Jones has failed to do so and will face more time in prison while the amount owed continues to stand.”
