.png)
3 days ago
19
I suppose the wonder is that it has taken Guy Ritchie so long to get around to telling the story of the Millennium Dome robbery, in which – way back at the turn of the century, children – a group of south-east London criminals ram-raided a national joke in pursuit of the 203-carat Millennium Star diamond worth £200m, which De Beers had unaccountably agreed to display in the capital’s gangster heartland.
Strictly speaking, Richie himself is not telling it; the three-part documentary The Diamond Heist comes from Oscar and Emmy award-winning company Lightbox and is executive produced by Ritchie. But the subject matter is so perfectly him that any meaningful separation in your mind as you watch it collapses quicker than a Greenwich exhibition venue’s shutters under the weight of a JCB driven at speed by a man intent on a multimillion pound payday.
There are charismatic villains, mostly in the form of Lee Wenham. Then in his 30s, he had been following in his father’s criminal footsteps since he abandoned school/school abandoned him at the age of 12. Wenham had lived the highlife – he was pulling in about £6,000 a week by his 20s, smuggling cigarettes and “taking out” cashpoints – but felt he did not yet command the respect Wenham Sr did. Then Wenham Sr introduced him to Ray Betson, a star in the gangster firmament, who was planning a big job and needed some help. Could Wenham find a way to breach the hexagonal, impact-resistant steel vault and remove the Millennium Star and its companions – worth a further £150m – from the impregnably toughened glass cases they were kept in, surrounded by motion sensors and under 24-hour guard?
Wenham took his daughter Beth for a day out at the dome. As an exhibition space and entertainment venue he “thought it was shit”. But there were possibilities offered by the diamond display and the fact that – as the De Beers head of security put it as part of his argument against the company’s decision to loan out the jewels – the dome was “a tent with a flat concrete floor.”
The first episode, entitled “Robbers” puts together the how, in full Ritchie mode – quick cuts, montages, propulsive editing suddenly arrested (if you’ll pardon the pun) by freeze frames with names and captions stamped all over them in big bright letters. When it comes to the violence – a failed attempt to rob a security van of nearly £9m with a spike-mounted lorry, and sawn-off shotguns being blasted at police – only pathetic Guardian types, surely, would pause to wonder whether the real-life nature of the material, such as the police officers getting shot at, the security van guards presumably being quite frightened, any passing members of the public being endangered, should have curbed the glamorisation at all. So, assuming you’re not one of those berks, you will be thrilled by the ingenuity of the men as they work out the best time and place to make the raid, find a man on the inside who can give them vital details about patrol times and whether repeated shots from a nail gun will weaken the display glass enough for them to sledgehammer the sparkling goods free long before the five minutes it will take for the police to arrive are up, and they can escape down the river in an arranged speedboat happily thereafter.
The second episode, especially for those who don’t already know the outline of the story, executes a Ritchie-style unexpected rewinding and flipping of the narrative. Entitled “Cops”, this time we hear from members of the flying squad who had been watching the gang almost from the beginning. They’re not as charismatic, perhaps, but they do have a nice way with a laconic one-liner. One remembers how suspicions of Wenham took a large leap forward when he went back to the venue without his daughter. “No one goes to the Millennium Dome twice.”
Cameras and officers are secretly installed at the entrance to Daddy Wenham’s farm, which is being used as a safe house for the planning and preparations (JCB? Check. Speedboat? Check. Various well-known gangsters going in and out on the regular? Check, check, check). On the day of the raid, other officers are disguised as cleaners and Dome staff and scattered around the vault, which is “closed for cleaning” so that the public are out of harm’s way. In the third episode, “Cops and Robbers”, we go through the aftermath and a couple of final twists (“Motherfuc-” says Wenham, after the denouement, down the lens before we smash cut to the credits). Again, if you put the really quite serious danger aside and all the suffering the gang members must have caused many innocent people during their long and varied careers out of your mind, it’s a hugely satisfying tale, brilliantly told. So, don’t be a Guardian-reading berk – just enjoy!
