The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin Read Free Book Online Page A

promoter for Cage Rage. “He had stabwounds, bullet wounds. He was a proper from-the-streets kid.”
    Three weeks after the stabbing, though covered in zippers of scars, Murray had resumed his training in the gym. But realistically, his promising career was threatened. Particularly as mixed martial arts was becoming gentrified, what promoter would permit a man with such serious injuries to fight again? What if a scar opened during a fight? Murray may have realized as much, and that could have been an incentive to turn to crime.
     
    T HE THIEVES TOOK too much money. Had the Securitas gang made off with, say, a few million pounds, it might have been one thing. But the magnitude of the heist was such that overnight it became an international cause célèbre. Even the most staid British newspapers covered the case breathlessly and exhaustively. The surveillance video from the depot was televised nationally and, inevitably, made it online. Hundreds of British policemen were immediately deployed to investigate. Hefty reward money provided an incentive to anyone with any knowledge to come forward. “The gang had no chance,” says Howard Sounes, the British author of a forthcoming book on the heist.
    The suspects, though, also did plenty to hasten their demise. Mirroring Murray’s fighting career—disciplined and methodical in MMA; arrogant and unthinking in street brawls—the same thieves who had been smooth and poised in the actual pilferage could scarcely have been sloppier in the aftermath. Some gang members boasted to friends about the heist. One of the vehicles used in the crime was set afire in the middle of a field, attracting attention. The money was poorly hidden. Oceans 11 quickly devolved into a comedy of errors that recalled the Al Pacino classic Dog Day Afternoon. “That’s what happens,” says Bruce Reynolds, the convicted mastermind of Britain’s Great Train Robbery of 1963 and now something of an armchair analyst of British crime. “All the planning goes into the robbery and none goes into whathappens once you have the money.”
    Within 48 hours, police had made their first arrest. Acting on a tip, they apprehended Michelle Hogg, a makeup artist and the daughter of a policeman. Police found a quantity of latex they alleged Hogg had used to make prosthetic disguises for the robbers. (Under questioning, Hogg gave a statement saying she was too scared to identify the thieves.) Later that day, police found the van used to hold the Dixons. The next day, acting on another tip, they located a second van used in the robbery. When they looked inside, they found guns, ski masks, bandannas and £1.3 million in cash. Acting on still another tip the following day, police raided the homes of Murray’s pal Lea Rusha, an aspiring mixed martial arts fighter, and Rusha’s friend Jetmir Bucpapa. In Rusha’s bedroom, police found plans of the Securitas depot, and hidden in a nearby garage was £8.6 million in cash.
    All told, within 10 days, five people had been charged. Millions of pounds had been recovered. And innumerable additional leads had surfaced. “A gang of misfits and bruisers pulled off the biggest robbery ever with considerable criminal aplomb,” says Sounes. “But they were also stupid. This was a brilliant caper which turned into a farce.”
    The fate of the accused was sealed in the fall of 2006 when Hogg “went QE” (Queen’s Evidence), as the Brits say, and testified against her co-conspirators in exchange for her freedom. She explained how she created the disguises so the gang members who posed as police officers couldn’t be accurately identified.
    On Jan. 28, 2008, after seven months of trial during which more than 200 witnesses were called, five men—including Rusha, Bucpapa and Hysenaj, the insider—were found guilty for their part in the robbery and sentenced to a total of 140 years in jail. At the sentencing, authorities urged the public to resist romanticizing the caper. Fearing for their