Britain’s biggest bank heist was ‘executed flawlessly’ — then it fell apart
nypost.com40 miles from Central London — wasn’t the kind of place to keep police on the edge of their seats in suspense. But in the early hours of Feb.
22, 2006, a call came in that rocked local law enforcement — and shortly after, an entire nation. Kent Police rushed to a nondescript Securitas depository near the Tonbridge rail station, only to find that the largest bank heist in the history of the United Kingdom — 53 million pounds — had just been pulled, the perpetrators gone without a trace.Moments before, a motley crew of criminals had charged in with assault rifles, submachine guns and pump-action shotguns.
Some employees had been tied up inside the money cages, while others were forced to help load the stolen cash onto a truck.Police were stunned.“It was executed flawlessly.
Nobody was hurt. You just don’t see this stuff happening in real life,” Pat Kondelis, director of “Catching Lightning,” a new Showtime docuseries exploring the incident, told The Post. “To hold 14-plus people hostage for over an hour and get away with [the equivalent of] $92.2 million in cash, not firing a weapon, is pretty damn remarkable.”The execution was indeed remarkable.There were elaborate and pricey disguises created by a London makeup artist with theater experience; a plan that involved installing one of the criminals as an employee at the depot weeks in advance to film the setting through a belt loop camera; and even the kidnapping of the depot manager.
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