As Operation Gandalf rolled into life in late 2007 and the Lloyds TSB and Ladbrokes robberies were investigated, one of the first things Detective Constable Bingham and his team did was check to see if there were any similar unsolved crimes in the Exeter area. It did not take them long to discover that on January 31 that same year, the very same branch of Ladbrokes had been robbed by a man wearing a black leather jacket, a black ski mask, and black gloves, and who threatened staff with a knife and a handgun before making off with what news reports later referred to as a “substantial” amount of cash. To Bingham, it seemed reasonable to hypothesize that this crime had been carried out by the same man he was now looking for. When Stephen eventually stood trial in the UK for his crimes, he would be charged with this robbery. “In the indictment, I was accused of doing an offense when I came back to England,” he says, meaning that the alleged robbery took place after his return from his round-the-world trip but before he left for Europe and Dechen Chöling. He says that he pleaded not guilty to the offense and that he was never convicted of it.
Bingham does not believe him. “Effectively, he got away with one,” he says. Either way, the timeline shows that Stephen left for Europe not long after the robbery took place. If Bingham is right, it means that Stephen didn’t spend his time at Dechen Chöling wrestling with the question of whether or not he should turn to crime. Instead, he had spent his time at Dechen Chöling wrestling with the question of whether to continue down a path he was already taking.
In any case, in early September 2007, Bingham and the small team working Operation Gandalf were trying to find out who their man was. Their approach was methodical. In the past, says Bingham, police detectives would have been encouraged to try to build up a psychological and personal profile of the man committing the crimes. In many ways this mirrors human instinct, to ask and then address the obvious question: Who is this person? What can we deduce about them? What might they be like? But Bingham believed this was the last thing they should be doing. Why risk overlooking the real perpetrator by allowing yourself to rush to the conclusion that the robber was a drug addict, or had previous convictions for armed robbery, or was working as part of a wider criminal network?
“Old-fashioned coppers would have had a hypothesis immediately about who they think it would be or the type of person,” says Bingham. “Actually that could take you down some very narrow avenues in trying to find who it is. You shouldn’t try and categorize who it is or what they might be like.”
Bingham instead focused on the “golden hour” principle, the idea that following a crime, investigators have a limited amount of time to find and preserve material that could otherwise be lost. “It’s not actually an hour, but it’s about securing evidence. As a detective, you just naturally do that,” he says. “So absolutely flood the scene with forensics and go through all the CCTV, because what you do know is that he isn’t going to be walking down the street wearing a balaclava.”
Stills from closed-circuit television of both incidents were printed in the local papers, though it was impossible to identify the man in the grainy photographs. But as soon as it was clear that they had managed to obtain a sample of the suspect’s DNA from the replica pistol, Bingham allowed himself to feel confident. “We always knew after the Lloyds bank one that we had forensics on him, so we knew we would get him. It was just a matter of time. In this day and age, if you have DNA or fingerprints, you are confident you are going to get him pretty quickly.”
Or at least this would have been the case if Stephen had already been a criminal whose DNA or fingerprints from past crimes—solved or not—were already logged in a database and ready for a match. Only, he wasn’t. Even Bingham, normally so unwilling to jump to conclusions about his quarry, found the idea that somebody might begin their criminal career with an attempted bank robbery a little hard to believe.
“It is unlikely,” he admits. “It’s not a common factor that somebody jumps straight to armed robbery. They normally build up through some form of criminality. They try it out first. Very rarely do you get somebody doing it as their first crime.” He explains that to plan and execute a robbery, never mind knowing what to do with the money you steal, is generally something that requires you to be at least in some way connected to an experienced network of criminals. “If you go into a bank and get fifty grand in cash, you can’t just go and spend it. It’s a naïve person who thinks that if you rob a bank, it’s going to be an easy option.”
As Devon and Cornwall Police searched through CCTV footage, conducted interviews, and analyzed Stephen’s replica gun and fake bomb for forensics, they missed one small thing. When Stephen burst into the South Street Ladbrokes, he’d announced his arrival by hurling a pound coin across the room. He had planned this the previous day, and he would do this as the prelude to many of his subsequent robberies. In his mind it was a sort of symbolic act. The banks and institutions he robbed from had the ability to create money from nothing—from abstract ideas like “debt” and “interest.” When he stole from these institutions, he was simply taking money they had spun from thin air. By leaving them a simple, solid pound coin, he was “repaying” them with the means to eventually summon all the money back again. “That’s what I told myself anyway.” The pound coins he used for this purpose all had a single line scratched through them, though rarely if ever on the side featuring the queen’s portrait. “I probably would have seen that as being disrespectful.”
On September 15, 2007, there was a run on Northern Rock. One of the largest lenders in Britain, the bank had borrowed large sums of money in order to expand and fund customer mortgages. In order to repay the money they’d borrowed, Northern Rock’s business model required them to simply bundle their customers’ mortgages and sell them as CDOs on the international money market. Only, nobody in the international money market wanted CDOs anymore. Nor did they want to lend to mortgage banks in general. This left Northern Rock in a liquidity crisis. They needed more cash.
On September 12, they approached the Bank of England to act as lender of last resort, and received some £3 billion of initial aid. The story was made public on September 14, through a report on the ten o’clock news. This immediately prompted fears that bankruptcy was imminent. The following morning, thousands of Northern Rock customers up and down the country were filmed queuing up outside their local branches in order to withdraw their savings. These queues, often made up of the elderly and retired, remained in place for three days. It was the first run on a British bank in 150 years. When Northern Rock was finally nationalized, thousands of ordinary people who had put their savings into shares in the bank were left with nothing.
Stephen watched this all unfold on the TV in the ramshackle living room at Manstone Avenue. While studio pundits and the customers interviewed on the street were confused and shocked, Stephen was not. As he sat there watching, his mother on the couch beside him murmuring her dismay, it all merely confirmed what he’d already known: that banks had created a system in which they could magic money from almost nothing. But when a reckoning came, it would not be the bankers who faced the consequences, but the ordinary workaday people at the bottom of the pile.
“I remember watching everything about Northern Rock, but it wasn’t a revelation to me,” Stephen says. The constant news coverage of what was being referred to as a “credit crunch” simply stoked his belief. Seeing other people becoming angry at what was happening and, increasingly, expressing their disgust at the banking system’s recklessness and greed made him feel even more righteous.
“There was going to be a recession. And because the recession will have been caused by the banks themselves, I was justified in what I was doing. That’s the thinking I used both morally and logically. That these institutions are effectively stealing the wealth of the world from other people. And if I stole from them and gave it back, in theory, morally you can’t say that’s wrong. I couldn’t see how anybody could say that it was wrong.”