{"id":370526,"date":"2026-04-02T03:31:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T03:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/370526\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T03:31:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T03:31:08","slug":"hatton-garden-the-great-diamond-heist-review-a-brazen-sitdown-with-a-super-villain-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/370526\/","title":{"rendered":"Hatton Garden: The Great Diamond Heist review \u2013 a brazen sitdown with a super villain | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is a truth I feel should be universally acknowledged \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

The last one was the three-part miniseries The Diamond Heist<\/a>, from Guy Ritchie\u2019s 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. \u201cNo one goes to the Millenium Dome twice.\u201d This is what I pay my taxes for.)<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t 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 \u201cthe largest burglary in English legal history\u201d we are told \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

What marked it out, apart from the size of the haul, was the ages of the gang\u2019s members. The oldest was 76-year-old ringleader Brian Reader, whose life of crime had previously involved laundering proceeds from the Brink\u2019s-Mat robbery<\/a> (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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

Anyway, on with the show. Its star is surviving Hatton Garden heistmeister John \u201cKenny\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 all but the last in quantities only provided for crimes of a really lucrative \u2013 I mean, serious \u2013 nature).<\/p>\n

Collins has a nice line in outrage. His contempt for accomplices who did not stay to see the job through (\u201cHe fucked off! He didn\u2019t fancy it! He just went! \u2026 Anyone with half a brain would go back\u201d) remains impressively undimmed by the passage of the years. His own capture is treated with a shrug and a grin. \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t had a fucking dog, I\u2019d have fucked off abroad straight away! That was unfortunate!\u201d 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. \u201cI never noticed him fucking walk funny!\u201d<\/p>\n

Only a fraction of the stolen goods \u2013 estimates vary wildly as to how much was actually taken, which really raises questions about early millennium jewellery maker\/dealer record-keeping \u2013 is thought to have been recovered, though Collins assures us that is \u201cAll bollocks! They got it all back. As far as I know.\u201d But, occasionally and reluctantly mentioned are the victims of the raid, some of whom \u2013 as one of the lucky and fully insured ones, Jigar Choksi, notes \u2013 lost everything and were ruined. But let\u2019s not ruin a good story. Last word goes to Collins. \u201cI don\u2019t regret doing anything I done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is a truth I feel should be universally acknowledged \u2013 that a headline-grabbing crime, which still has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":370527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":{"0":"post-370526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/370527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}