Review by New York Times Review
when I was a young reporter in Texas, a 50-something woman piloting a small plane made an emergency landing alongside a busy San Antonio highway, creating a bit of a furor. After the basic five W's had been covered in a roadside news conference, 1 asked about her family situation. 1 can't recall the headline The San Antonio Light ran the next day, but 1 know it used some variation of grandmother, echoing my lede. A peer castigated me. "You're trafficking in stereotypes. What does her being a grandmother have to do with landing a plane safely?" Our culture's "affectionate" ageism is still going strong, especially when it comes to crime. Good lord, we've had two versions of "Going in Style," and Danny Ocean - George Clooney edition - always has a senior citizen in the mix whether he's working with 10,11 or 12 confederates. So in 2015, when nine men were arrested after what would be called the largest burglary in Britain's history, it was probably inevitable that the British tabloids dubbed them "Bad Grandpas" and "Diamond Wheezers." Rupert Murdoch's newspaper The Sun, which coined the "wheezers" headline, went on to note that the combined ages of the nine suspects was 533. Let's see, 533 divided by 9 - that makes the suspects' average age just shy of 60, which happens to be the birthday 1 celebrated a few weeks before reading "The Last Job: The ' Bad Grandpas' and the Hatton Garden Heist." 1 readily cop to being a grumpy old woman, albeit one with a longstanding affection for caper stories. A good heist tale is a good heist tale; a dull one can't be rescued by the fact that the thieves are pensioners. Yes, the Hatton Garden job was big and brazen in execution, undone by the gang's almost comical hubris. But is it a great story, with the Zeitgeist kick of, say, the 2009 Bling Ring? Dan Bilefsky, a New York Times correspondent who arrived in London about the time Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Ltd. was burglarized, is a brisk, enthusiastic storyteller. And the crime was undeniably a sensational one that seized the public's imagination well before anything was known about the suspects. The size of the haul alone made it a big deal: The thieves, working over the long Easter weekend, jimmied open 73 safe deposit boxes, taking away cash, gold and jewels valued at $20 million at the time. Bilefsky draws on interviews, court testimony and transcripts from the Metropolitan Police to put together a meticulously researched procedural. But the early sections of the book are weakened by the fact that the mastermind, Brian Reader - 76 at the time of the burglary - provided no additional information to what was already in the public record. Bilefsky is left to make deductions about Reader's motivations, ranging from "a fearlessness borne of age" to "a bravado perhaps conditioned by age." My hot take? Reader was a thief. Thieves steal. However, the men's ages do matter when the case goes to court. The prosecutor Philip Evans - vividly rendered here; the book is at its best when focused on the good guys - realizes he has to combat the narrative that these are harmless old men who swindled some vague, faceless banking entity. Bilefsky reminds us that the plundered safe deposit boxes belonged to individuals - "Holocaust survivors; young entrepreneurs; retirees; immigrants ... who had arrived penniless to Britain in the 1960s after fleeing strife or civil war." Ultimately Hatton Garden Safe Deposit was forced into liquidation; much of the loot has never been recovered. "People don't seem to look at it as a robbery," Hatton Garden's new owner said in a 2016 newspaper interview. "Here they say, 'O.K., they were just some old men chancing their luck.' ft's strange, but there you go. 1 can't explain it, but I'm no psychiatrist." Bilefsky doesn't try to explain it, either, and maybe it's not fair to wish that he had tried. Meanwhile, the third film adaptation inspired by the heist - yes, third - was released in March. One review asserted most of the criminals were in their 60s and 70s. Nope, only three of the nine, but 1 guess that's not as, well, sexy. LAURA LIPPMAN'S latest novel is "Sunburn." It was probably inevitable that the men were dubbed 'bad grandpas' and 'diamond wheezers.'
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 2, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Former New York Times London correspondent Bilefsky makes good use of his access to the Scotland Yarders investigating "the biggest burglary in English history" to recreate a daring theft carried out by five thieves, who ended their retirement from a life of crime in 2015 by breaking into safety-deposit boxes. Hatton Garden Safe Deposit stored "hundreds of millions of pounds in diamonds, sapphires, gold bars, rare coins and cash" for the many jewelers who worked in that area of London. The gang, led by septuagenarian Brian Reader, planned their break-in to coincide with a three-day weekend; after casing the vault storing the safety-deposit boxes, the criminals were able to figure out what they needed to drill through its walls. Over the course of two days, the gang managed to loot about $19 million in cash and jewels, despite a close call when an alarm went off and led to a check by a security guard, who saw nothing amiss-and no police response. That choice proved highly embarrassing to Scotland Yard after the megatheft was discovered, though the criminals were apprehended fairly quickly, due to a series of missteps. Bilefsky provides just the right amount of detail in this real-life page-turner. Agent: Todd Shushter, Aevitas Creative Managment. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
True crime enthusiasts will be delighted with this account of a London jewelry heist committed by a group of elderly men that occurred on Easter weekend 2015. The thieves spent more than a year planning the robbery of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit over fish and chips at their favorite pub. The timing of the heist was crucial to its success because the weekend of Easter and Passover left Hatton Garden virtually deserted. The heist was not discovered until the long weekend was over and the security guard for the Safe Deposit returned to work. Fortunately for Scotland Yard, nearby businesses' security cameras had recorded throughout the weekend and the getaway vehicles were easy to spot; one of the thieves had driven his own distinctive Mercedes to the scene of the crime. Detectives surveilled and bugged his car and home and were subsequently able to observe the rest of the thieves as they gleefully met and talked about their last job. Much of the conversation was lifted directly from surveillance records and is filled with obscenities and expletives. Narrator Chris MacDonnell engages listeners and makes the story come alive. VERDICT A fast-paced story for fans of heist tales.--Ann Weber, Bellarmine Coll. Prep., San Jose, CA
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A raucous account of "the largest burglary in the history of England," committed by unrepentant, elderly career criminals.In his debut, Montreal-based New York Times Canada correspondent Bilefsky combines humor, pathos, and technical nitty-gritty in a clearly written procedural. In the spring of 2015, the gang burgled the vault at the Hutton Garden Safe Deposit, the central storehouse of London's diamond district, after three years of planning. The author writes that the tale's "villains," despite their physical infirmities, were "possessed by a fearlessness borne of age. What was there to lose?" The crew members resemble characters from a British crime movie, having devoted their lives to the robbery profession; indeed, the ringleader had participated in the notorious heist portrayed in the 2006 film The Bank Job. Bilefsky captures the meticulous, complex planning of the break-in, noting how "old-school burglars across London had sniffed out that something big was afoot." The robbery displayed both brazen expertise and clumsy improvisation, with the thieves even stepping out to buy additional heavy equipment to penetrate the vault: "They wanted what they'd set out to take$19 million worth of gold, gems, diamonds, and cash." The theft's discovery created a media circus and alarmed the close-knit community of old-school jewelers. "The shock was visceral and heartbreaking," writes the author. Yet, Scotland Yard's elite Flying Squad quickly identified the malefactors by analyzing London's pervasive closed-circuit network, followed up by intensive surveillance and wiretaps, which captured the old thieves' injudicious bragging. As one detective noted, "after the heist, their age kicked in." Following mass arrests, the principal thieves struck plea bargains, leaving frustrated prosecutors to try the conspiracy's motley hangers-on. Bilefsky takes a balanced approach, acknowledging the media-cultivated public appeal of the gang's old reprobates but also noting how the losses from the safe deposit wiped out many businesses and families' savings.A well-researched, irreverent tale of a serious yet fascinating crime and the anachronistic underworld that sparked it. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
