Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist review – a brazen sitdown with a super villain

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It is a truth I feel should be universally acknowledged – that a headline-grabbing crime, which still has one of its charismatic perpetrators alive and willing to talk about it now on camera, must have a documentary dedicated to it.

The last one was the three-part miniseries The Diamond Heist, from Guy Ritchie’s production company, about the Millenium Dome Robbery (although the best line came not from the villains but from one of the laconic police officers responsible for trying to track down members of the gang as they put their plan together. They got a lead on one when he went back to the venue without his daughter. “No one goes to the Millenium Dome twice.” This is what I pay my taxes for.)

You can’t help but feel the latest film worked its way through to commission along an unbroken chain of whey-faced men who have had privilege and comfort foisted upon them at every turn. Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist is the tale of “the largest burglary in English legal history” we are told – but to not quite as compelling an effect as you suspect the makers intended. It took place 11 years ago and although it dominated the headlines back in those halcyon days when things smaller than the destruction of the world could habitually make the cut, I suspect it has largely failed to live in the minds of the generations since.

What marked it out, apart from the size of the haul, was the ages of the gang’s members. The oldest was 76-year-old ringleader Brian Reader, whose life of crime had previously involved laundering proceeds from the Brink’s-Mat robbery (so, really, nothing to do with the bit wherepetrol was poured over warehouse staff and they were threatened with a lit match, or the several fatal shootings linked to the crime thereafter). The youngest was 54-year-old Michael Seed (who was responsible for disabling the alarm system and escaped capture for a few years after the event). I’m not quite sure why this seized the imaginations of the press and public so fully at the time. Is there an official retirement age for diamond thieves of which I was unaware? Is it absurd that men with experience manage to commit one of the more successful endeavours in the field? Or are there just a lot more blokes out there wishing their lives could have been different? We may never know.

Anyway, on with the show. Its star is surviving Hatton Garden heistmeister John “Kenny” Collins, the aforementioned charismatic villain without whom there can be no programme at all, let alone one that runs a little longer than even the most diehard stolen-diamond fan can say he’s in the market for. Collins pops up throughout to add some humour to the account of just how the raid was accomplished (lift shaft, drilling, hydraulic ram, safe deposit boxes ransacked, bin bags for loot, away) and how the police eventually tracked down the guilty parties (surveillance, time, surveillance, surveillance, time, and luck – all but the last in quantities only provided for crimes of a really lucrative – I mean, serious – nature).

Collins has a nice line in outrage. His contempt for accomplices who did not stay to see the job through (“He fucked off! He didn’t fancy it! He just went! … Anyone with half a brain would go back”) remains impressively undimmed by the passage of the years. His own capture is treated with a shrug and a grin. “If I hadn’t had a fucking dog, I’d have fucked off abroad straight away! That was unfortunate!” He has a grudging respect for the police who eventually identified Seed through CCTV footage that showed his distinctive gait as the result of an old car accident. “I never noticed him fucking walk funny!”

Only a fraction of the stolen goods – estimates vary wildly as to how much was actually taken, which really raises questions about early millennium jewellery maker/dealer record-keeping – is thought to have been recovered, though Collins assures us that is “All bollocks! They got it all back. As far as I know.” But, occasionally and reluctantly mentioned are the victims of the raid, some of whom – as one of the lucky and fully insured ones, Jigar Choksi, notes – lost everything and were ruined. But let’s not ruin a good story. Last word goes to Collins. “I don’t regret doing anything I done.”