Speedboat getaways, daring heists and shotgun hold-ups: the premise for Netflix’s latest documentary reads like a Guy Ritchie film.
Which is is, kind of. Guy Ritchie is a producer on The Diamond Heist, but the story – of how thieves almost made away with the biggest haul in history at the turn of the Millennium – is astonishingly true. Valued back then at £350m, today their target haul would have come to an equivalent value of around £750m today.
Not bad for a job that started on a farm in Kent. With the help of Lee Wenham, one of the architects of the crime – whose story is told in the documentary – we unpack what happened.
The Millennium Dome
As the millennium approached, Britain was booming. The country was riding high on a wave of fashion, music (Blur, the Spice Girls, Oasis, you name it) and political change: Tony Blair had just become the Prime Minister.
It was a time of optimism, and to mark the upcoming millennium in a meaningful way it was decided that some unused docklands in Greenwich would be used to create a massive tent-like dome that would house a huge exhibition (this is now the O2).
The exhibition was a flop. It opened from January 1 until December 31, 2000, and only attracted around half of the expected 12m customers. However, one of the show’s biggest draws was the De Beers diamond exhibit.
De Beers – one of the largest diamond mining companies in the world – agreed to put some of their most valuable jewels on display for the show, including the legendary Millennium Star. This was a flawless 203.04-carat diamond worth (at the time) £200m. These days, it’s worth just under half a billion pounds.
Naturally, De Beers anticipated that this would be a bit of a thief magnet, so they spent £50,000 designing and creating a pretty much impregnable safe for the diamonds to be housed in. This involved an “impenetrable” glass exterior – which could “maybe” be broken by a man attacking it with an ice axe for half an hour, the staff were told – cameras, motion sensors and a vault door that locked every day at 6pm on the dot.
Safe as houses? Not quite – as the police were soon to find out.
Lee Wenham
One of the brains behind the raid was Lee Wenham. An East End native, he grew up going to pubs with his dad that were frequented by gangsters.
“I'd been brought up around gangsters and villains and all that sort of thing, so I didn't really know any other life,” Wenham explains. “Everything around me was people up to no good, basically.
“So if you were in the pub, every five minutes somebody would be coming in and whispering in each other's ear and chunks of money were being handed over.”
The young Wenham was intoxicated with the lifestyle, and began a career of crime: his first heist was a JCB, aged 15, but as he moved into adulthood he picked up various jobs: “bringing back cigarettes, bringing back puff from Holland, ecstasy tablets, all sorts of things. I moved around doing different things, smaller jobs.”
Bigger jobs soon came knocking. In February 2000, armed men tried to rob £10m from a security van in Nine Elms, in South London, by blocking both ends of the road around the van. They then rammed it with a giant metal spike welded onto a lorry (to penetrate the back of the van) – but were foiled when a passing motorist managed to swipe the keys from the lorry, forcing the robbers to flee via speedboat.
Then, on July 7, another attempt: a security van was rammed by a van with a metal spike in Aylesford in Kent. The robbers got closer to the money – threatening the security guards with a shotgun and planting fake mines made from tin cans to get them to jump out of the van – before a police car appeared and they had to flee once more.
(In a nice touch, the spike for the first robbery was named ‘Gertie’ and the second was ‘Gertie 2’ – and while Wenham is cagey about the robberies, as they link to a crime he wasn’t convicted of, he says the naming came down to “a mixture of two of us, me and another guy just fooling around.”)
Ray Betson
The diamond heist wasn’t Wenham’s idea, though – it was the idea of a colleague of his, Ray Betson. “He approached me with it and said he needs help with it. And that's how I got involved in it.”
Wenham was in. “When this came along I just thought: this is the one that’s gonna make me someone in the underworld, you know? Give me a status,” he says.
With Betson, they put a team together. These included William Cockram (the muscle), Terry Millman (an old school gangster) and Aldo Ciarrocchi. And soon enough, Wenham was making trips down to the Millennium Dome with his infant daughter to scope out the vault.
“My first thought was, ‘it’s too easy,’ to be honest,” Wenham says. “Putting that amount of where it was. I didn't think the security was very good.”
As the weeks passed, the gang formulated a plan: they would strike first thing in the morning, when the Dome was almost empty of visitors, breaking down the gates with a JCB pinched from a nearby building site. The glass could be broken by three hits from a Hilti gun – a powerful building tool made for punching nails through steel – before being smashed with a sledgehammer.
“I’d used one of them guns before and they'd go through two inches of steel,” Wenham says. “So I got one and I tested it on a bit of steel outside on the farm. I showed them and they said that's it. That's what we're gonna use.”
Once that happened, the gang would make their escape via speedboat, with a local fisherman ready and waiting to whisk them away across the Thames afterwards.
The Flying Squad
Unfortunately, the police were also on their tail – specifically the Flying Squad, the former elite police unit dedicated to foiling robberies. They’d worked on the Brinks-Mat Robbery (immortalised in the TV series The Gold) and were alerted to the robbery after a tip-off.
At a meeting to discuss the information about the tip-off, as well as the Nine Elms robbery, one of the detectives quipped, "Maybe they are after the Millennium jewels?" That sparked the investigation – and soon Wenham’s team were being monitored around the clock.
After a few aborted attempts, on November 7, the raid finally happened. At 9.30am, two hundred officers were stationed around the Dome – including forty from the firearms unit, sixty Flying Squad officers and twenty on the river, to cut off the escape attempts. The diamonds had also covertly been swapped out for decoys.
Before the raid, some of the officers were also disguised as cleaners and Dome employees, while others were positioned behind a dummy wall, ready to spring into action. And at 9.30am, the gang broke into the exhibition space in the stolen JCB, wearing body armour and gas masks.
Ciarrocchi started throwing smoke bombs, while Cockram broke the glass with the Hilti gun, followed by a sledgehammer. Then the police pounced, arresting the robbers – as well as the getaway driver, and a man monitoring police radio frequencies on the opposite shore of the Thames.
As for Wenham, he never got his promised share of £1m – he was arrested back on the farm. “I drove to the farm because the guys were g gonna come back to the farm and I had to get rid of the vehicles and stuff like that,” he says. “I knew something was up when the when the police put the gun through the window to my head. I thought, ‘something's not quite right here.’”
The trial
It didn’t take long at trial for the jury to find all of the conspirators guilty. As the ringleaders, Betson and Wenham got an 18-year jail sentence, whilst Aldo Ciarrocchi and Robert Adams were sentenced to 15 years – Terry Millman died of cancer before the trial started.
"You played for very high stakes, and you must have known perfectly well what the penalty would be if your enterprise did not succeed,” the judge said upon their sentencing. "This was a wicked, professional plan, and one which was carried out with the minutest attention to detail. Mercifully, the police were on to it."
All this time later – and now out of jail – Wenham got the respect he wanted. “As soon as I went in prison, all the way through my sentence, I had a lot of respect. I never had any problem from anyone in prison at all for the five years I was inside,” he says. “I don't have to buy drinks in the pub anymore.”
These days, he runs a landscape gardening business. And his days of crime are over – as are, he says, the days of most audacious heists like the one he tried to pull off.
“I personally feel then was the last year or two that they could get away or try to get away with something like that. It all died out after that. There's too much media coverage and phones and cameras. I guess cybercrime is the thing now. And that's not my field.”
As for whether he’s been back to the Millennium Dome since – he has. “I did find myself just I was coming into the entrance, checking the gates,” he says. “It was a bit of a weird feeling really.”
And does he have any regrets? “Well, if I’d known the police were gonna be there, I wouldn't have done it!” he says. “But otherwise, would I have done anything differently, no. The only regret I’ve got is I didn't get the diamonds, I didn't get the money.”
The Diamond Heist streams on Netflix from April 16
