A delicious read -Hatton Garden heist: how an old-school working-class criminal's swan song came tog

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/14/hatton-garden-heist-how-swan-song-of-old-school-working-class-criminal-came-together
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In the Kent countryside 31 years ago, two criminals stood over a man slumped on the ground as he took his last breaths.

Over the incessant barking of dogs, shouts could be heard across the chilly January night. One, carrying a shotgun, shouted: “Right, we’ll blow your fucking head off!” He was Kenneth Noye.


The other, Brian Reader, aimed a kick at the man: John Fordham, a specialist police surveillance officer, who had been stabbed five times in the front and five times in the back, with such force that a knife was plunged into his body up to its hilt.

Experts would later tell a trial that Fordham had been held down for some of those stab wounds, inflicted by Noye – then a king in the criminal underworld –that night in 1985. His trusted partner was Reader.

Fordham was part of the Scotland Yard team keeping watch on Noye as part of the investigation into the Brink’s-Mat heist of 1983, when £26m in gold and bullion had been stolen from a warehouse near London’s Heathrow airport.