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Hitting the Heights
Brutal. Meticulous. Terrifying. Efficient. All four of those words applied in equal measure when a violent gang smashed its way into a Scottish security depot in 1998 to carry out what, to this day, remains one of Britain’s biggest unsolved robberies. It was not just the £1.3-million cash haul or the military-style precision that set the well-drilled villains apart from their criminal peers – their modus operandi also proved unique. After all, why use a door when there is a perfectly suitable roof to provide a point of entry with that all-important element of surprise?
When the masked raiders brandishing shotguns crashed through the ceiling of the Securitas base in Aberdeen on a dark December evening, it marked the start of a horrific ordeal for the shell-shocked staff who had their lives threatened during the course of what was Scotland’s biggest-ever armed robbery. But that night’s events also marked the end of a long and methodical planning process for a group who succeeded in pulling off what most would have deemed impossible. Even the police officers investigating the crime were left aghast at the audacity of the slick crew, describing their actions as ‘very quick, very efficient and very well planned’.
To escape with more than £1 million in cash from the heart of a busy commercial zone displayed a sense of arrogance and aggressive determination seldom seen before or since in Scotland, leaving detectives frustrated and the victims traumatised. A £250,000 reward still sits unclaimed and the police file remains open in the hope that, one day, those responsible will be brought to justice. With every passing year, that looks more and more forlorn, with any thought of recovering the seven-figure sum long since passed for the authorities who were left chasing shadows in the hunt for the perpetrators of what appears to have been the perfect heist.
The target for one of the most remarkable robberies ever carried out on Scottish soil sat in wholly unremarkable surroundings. As Europe’s oil capital, Aberdeen has benefited from billions of pounds of wealth pouring into the region – but the industrial zones servicing the burgeoning energy industry are far from glamorous.
Altens, home to Securitas at the time of the raid, is one of those districts which sprung up to cater for the booming demand for business space. Not surprisingly, the oil industry grew up around Aberdeen’s gritty docklands but, as the sector flourished, its reach spread wider. First came development in nearby Torry, a community which had thrived on the back of the fishing industry, and then came rapid expansion in the Tullos area to the south of the city centre. Beyond Tullos and its now ageing buildings lies Altens, a maze of industrial and office buildings constructed during the 1980s and 90s to keep up with demand. Situated on the southern edge of Aberdeen, transport links to Dundee and the Central Belt, via the A90 dual carriageway, are perfect. As the 1998 raid demonstrated, the easy exit routes were not only a boon for the commuters keen to flit south at the close of business but also for those with more sinister reasons for making a swift exit.
With oil giants such as Shell sitting side by side with one-man-band engineering outfits, busy scrapyards and office blocks, the Tullos and Altens industrial estates are a hive of activity morning, noon and night. Until December 1998, Securitas had been just another tenant on the area’s Souterhead Road. And then everything changed.
Renamed to carry the Loomis brand in 2007, Securitas was the major player in the cash-in-transit (CIT) industry. At depots throughout Britain, it would take delivery of millions of pounds in cash deposits each day from businesses and financial institutions, with the firm a dominant force throughout the 1990s and beyond. At one stage Securitas was said to be handling around 40 per cent of all the money being transported on a daily basis in Britain.
Once the cash had been collected or delivered from a central distribution point, a fleet of armoured security vans could be fed to enable deliveries to bank branches and cashpoints in each region. The network was vital to keeping cash flowing, with speed of the essence. The vans, an obvious target for underworld gangs, were incredibly well protected. Sophisticated tracking devices ensured their every movement was monitored and any variation on the well-planned routes and daily schedules would immediately be flagged up to the highly trained command teams. The cash boxes used to carry money by foot from the vehicles to their eventual destination during the various stops on each round were fitted with ink canisters designed to render the currency worthless if tampered with by would-be thieves, making smash-and-grab attempts pointless. The only point at which cash was freely handled was in the sanctuary of the well-guarded depots, the hubs at the centre of the Securitas empire.
The sheer number of vehicle movements and quantities of notes being ferried from point to point meant it was impossible to keep a running total of how much was being held at any one point and, when the company did fall victim to high-profile robberies, it often took an unexpectedly long period of time to put a value to the missing money.
The most high-profile of all was at the Securitas depot at Tonbridge in Kent early in 2006 – when £53 million was netted in the largest heist Britain has ever seen. It was not until a full internal audit had been carried out that the staggering total could be confirmed. That headline-grabbing incident sent shockwaves around the world and sparked one of the biggest manhunts Britain has ever seen, with investigations stretching as far as Morocco as suspects were trailed across the globe.
The Tonbridge raid had an unbelievable air surrounding it but it was very real. It also sparked vivid memories for the Securitas staff who had been caught up in the Scottish forerunner eight years earlier. The Aberdeen robbery involved a far smaller haul but there were similarities both in the planning and the timing. In England, the cash was snatched in February, when it is thought robbers were confident of a sizeable return for their day’s work thanks to an influx of money generated by retailers during the post-Christmas sales.
In the Scottish equivalent, the thieves also chose the festive period, opting for a pre-Christmas date when the tills were ringing and notes were flowing back and forth between shops and the depot. With every detail seemingly covered during the planning stages, it is inconceivable to think the date was not a matter for significant deliberation.
Location too must have been a factor. Could it have been a local gang or had the potential rewards from the oil-rich city in the north-east of Scotland reached a wider audience? In many ways Aberdeen has hidden its light under a bushel since the oil boom. With oil comes money and the soaring success of the energy industry has led to decade after decade of rising wages and a corresponding strengthening of the entire local economy. Retail has benefited, with Aberdeen ranking among the leading shopping destinations in Britain according to recent research findings and national chains stating that their stores in the city outperform most areas outside of London. Consequently, cash movements are large and frequent as the flood of spending is catered for.
The Aberdeen base of Securitas operated just like every other, with security its top priority. Although set in what appeared from the outside to be an ostensibly standard industrial unit on a run-of-the-mill road within the Altens business district, it was kitted out with a string of defences against unwanted attention.
On the exterior, the building, with its standard-issue yellow brick facade and red PVC cladding, was protected by external bollards and a specially reinforced door to prevent entry being gained by ram-raiding. There was a conscious effort to make sure physical barriers were in place to act as a deterrent against brute-force methods with only subtle signage, a proliferation of security cameras and purposeful metal bars on the inside of the frosted windows hinting at the nature of the unit’s high-value contents. Unfortunately for Securitas, those precautions did not extend beyond ground level.
Inside, the usual array of CCTV technology was complemented by a similarly comprehensive selection of alarms. Set up to be triggered by everything from motion to body heat, they ensured that anyone who did find a way in would quickly be detected. With the alarms feeding directly to Grampian Police headquarters in the nearby city centre, a swift response was guaranteed in the event of an SOS being raised. Staff also had the added safety net of the building’s manual panic alarms, again offering a direct line to police HQ.
Whilst managers and the company’s army of security specialists were comfortable with the efforts they had taken to guard their stock of sterling, they had not bargained on the lengths some are prepared to go to in order to get rich quick – nor had they taken into account the ingenuity of the criminal fraternity.
There is only conjecture as to when the groundwork was done. Police believe the raid was months in the planning but know for certain that the gang responsible was active in the Aberdeen area for at least two weeks prior to the December 3 robbery. They could be sure of that because the getaway cars were stolen in the city in the fortnight leading up to the major incident as the foundations for the well-orchestrated mission were laid.
Nobody thought there was a bigger picture being painted when two vehicles vanished from separate locations in the Aberdeen area. Car theft was not a major problem in the northeast in the 1990s but occasional incidents ensured suspicion was not aroused by what appeared to be random and unconnected offences. But in fact there was nothing random about the two incidents inked in the Grampian Police crime log for November 1998. The vehicles stolen were hand-picked by a group who knew exactly what they were looking for and had combed the streets in search of the models on their wish list.
The first was a Vauxhall Senator saloon car, a model which had become the darling of police forces up and down the country thanks to its hearty performance. The Senator became a familiar sight decked out in emergency livery, particularly on motorway patrols where it could eat up the miles and keep pace with even the most powerful of supercars with a maximum speed in the region of 150 mph at the top end of the range. In its most modern guise, it was active between 1987 and 1993, before being superseded in the Vauxhall line-up. Many officers mourned the loss of a faithful servant, viewed as the perfect police vehicle. Conversely, the big beast of a Vauxhall also made the ideal getaway car.
But one vehicle was never going to be enough for the sizeable gang – they needed a second, more practical addition to their fleet to take care of personnel transportation as well as for coping with the sheer volume of notes they aimed to secure during their smash and grab. For that, they had opted for a Bedford Midi, a nondescript but reliable panel van that would not draw attention as it threaded its way through commuter traffic en route to its destination. Both of the stolen vehicles were white – a factor just as crucial to the thieves as getting the right make and model.
The clear train of thought among those who investigated the robbery is that several visits would have been paid to the site for reconnaissance purposes, with every inch of the surrounding area plotted and every mile of the escape route trialled in advance. There was far too much at stake to risk mistakes and the work done in the months leading up to the raid would have been seen as vital as the actions on the night itself.
The beauty of the Aberdeen depot’s location was not that it was isolated, as might be expected to be the preferred option. Instead, it was in the middle of a busy industrial estate, populated by multinational oil and gas companies receiving multiple deliveries by HGV each day and smaller enterprises attracting a steady stream of visitors and vehicle movements. That meant the gang could ghost around the area in the planning stages without any fear of being apprehended. Even today, with the experience of 1998, it is possible to sit undisturbed outside the unit, take notes and wander unhindered around the area. There is no perimeter fence, just an open car park and grassed areas. The process of formulating the heist plan would have been a comfortable one for a group clearly studious in its approach.
With the blueprint drawn up and the theory in place, the first stage of putting the plan into practice was sourcing the two getaway vehicles. What happened to those cars in the two-week period between their theft in Aberdeen and their reappearance at the depot remains a mystery. Storing those cars in the open air would have been a huge gamble – all it would have taken would have been for an eagle-eyed police officer to spot the rogue vehicles after they had been reported stolen and a chain of events would have been triggered that would have jeopardised the whole operation. On that basis, it is fair to assume the perpetrators had access to a garage or storage facility for that period. Where that was located is one of the key missing pieces in the police jigsaw.
Again the issue boiled down to a crucial factor – was this a local gang the authorities were seeking? If it was, then storing two stolen vehicles may not have been an issue. Access to garage premises, whether residential or industrial, would have been relatively straightforward and neither the car nor the van was likely to draw any undue attention. However, had these been visiting criminals it would have been a different story altogether. They would have had to source storage, presumably renting space undercover unless brave enough to leave two stolen vehicles parked in public and potentially open to recovery. They needed to be sure they would be available and would not have been keen to drive them in the period between their theft and the robbery itself.
Being caught behind the wheel of those two vehicles was not the only risk the robbers had to run in the build-up to their moment of reckoning. Just days before they carried out the crime, it is thought at least one member of the gang was sent to the Securitas warehouse to remove a roof panel which would help them gain entry. Not surprisingly for a building of its ilk, an alarm was triggered during that aerial activity – but inspections on the back of the alert failed to spot anything untoward, with the patrol apparently not stretching as far as the roof, and it was put down as a false alarm. It is possible the alarm being set off during that stage of the process was part of the plan, offering the chance to test police response times and providing a means to set an accurate timetable for the main event.
Timing was central to the ruthlessly efficient plan as it swung into operation on Thursday, 3 December 1998. Four of the six-strong group had positioned themselves on the roof of the building in the early evening, just as most of the workers in the surrounding buildings were preparing to head home after a day’s work. Dressed all in black and wearing balaclavas, they were described as an SAS-style gang and, under the cover of darkness, succeeded in reaching their entry point without being spotted.
They lay in wait until a security van arrived to make a delivery. As the vehicle slipped quietly in through the electronic roller doors, the raiders made their move. When guards at ground level began to remove cash in heavyweight sacks from the newly arrived van, the assailants abseiled 12 feet down ropes from the gap in the ceiling they had broken through – a horrifying moment for the Securitas employees, who suddenly faced a quartet of shotgun-toting attackers. The five security personnel at work inside the building were threatened by the gunmen and could only look on in terror at what had begun as an ordinary night at work now descended into a scene resembling something from a Hollywood movie – a real-life Ocean’s Eleven but without the sugar coating.
At the same time as the assailants rounded up the guards, all the time threatening to open fire, the Vauxhall Senator and Bedford van stolen to order by the group arrived at the scene. Driven by the remaining two members of the team, the vehicles were quickly ushered through the entrance door – with employees under duress to smooth their passage. With the getaway vehicles safely inside and away from prying eyes on the outside, the boot of the Senator and rear doors of the van were popped open and the loading process began. The money bags were so large and heavy, stuffed full of carefully bundled notes, they could not be lifted by the raiders. Instead, it took them all their strength to drag the sacks to the rear of the vehicles and heave them inside. All in all, they had loaded £1.3 million in a matter of minutes, not pausing or deviating from the script.
The entire episode inside the faceless industrial unit lasted no more than quarter of an hour from the moment the masked robbers made their shock entrance through the roof to their exit by car and van, with the roller door lifted to enable them to drive unchallenged from the building and into the crisp winter’s night.
A brave guard had managed to activate a panic alarm during his ordeal, despite the shotgun deterrent, but, by the time police arrived at the scene, it was too late. Units had been scrambled from a series of surrounding police stations as well as from the Queen Street HQ, racing to the south of the city with sirens blaring and lights piercing the dark sky. But the well-drilled gang had already made their escape – and pointedly had chosen to do so whilst additional bags of cash remained in the depot and were theirs for the taking. They had refused to let the lure of additional gain cloud their judgement and stuck rigidly to what appears to have been a predetermined schedule for the length of time they could afford to spend at the scene. It was another demonstration of the cold and calculating nature of the men responsible. It was a disciplined and professional operation.
Throughout the robbery they were meticulous in their efforts to preserve their anonymity. Faces were never exposed and only one man spoke – the cool and composed individual victims classed as the gang leader. He barked his instructions in a distinctive Cockney accent, adding to the already established theory that the perpetrators were an experienced organised crime gang from south of the border. Such was the slick execution of the master plan, detectives were convinced they were not dealing with first-time offenders or opportunistic locals.
For the whole duration of the drama, there was an eerie sense of calm surrounding proceedings. Aside from the ringleader’s assertive instructions, it was conducted in silence with clockwork precision. Workers at neighbouring premises were oblivious to the shocking scene unfolding in the adjoining building. The Securitas depot sat on the edge of a horseshoe of small units, sheltered by a band of trees and shrubbery adjacent to its exterior wall but, in such confined surroundings, it is astonishing that the activity on the early evening in question did not attract attention.
Just as the robbery had been carefully plotted, the getaway was far from an afterthought. It was then that the choice of vehicles – and in particular the choice of white for both the car and van – came into their own as the drivers produced flashing blue lights to mount on the dashboards. To members of the public both vehicles had the appearance of unmarked police vehicles and drivers moved aside to allow them easy passage through the traffic which so often clogs up the busy industrial parks of Aberdeen.
From the inner-city surroundings of Souterhead Road, the two-car pack cut through the suburban commuter village of Cove as the scenery quickly flicked from town to country. Cove, perched on clifftops hugging the east shore to the south of the city, provides a gateway to a network of coastal roads and lanes servicing the agricultural land in the area. The robbers used that to their advantage as they disappeared into the night, travelling at speed along a route they must surely have rehearsed time after time as they perfected the dash for freedom.
With stone dykes and ditches lining the rutted surfaces, the cross-country sprint was not one for the faint-hearted and the fact it was conducted in pitch dark adds even more weight to the assumption that the drivers chosen for the role had experience and ability behind the wheel.
Within 25 minutes of the alarm being raised at the depot, Grampian Police had established a series of roadblocks on all key routes leading to and from Aberdeen in an effort to snare the gang. But the raiders were one step ahead throughout the night in question and ensured they used little-known minor roads to speed them away from the scene of the crime, never venturing close to the main arteries. The path took them at breakneck speed through the tiny fishing village of Findon and into Portlethen, another commuter outpost, for the next stage of their bid to evade the authorities during a rapid four-mile dart away from Altens. Had it not been for a report of a Vauxhall Senator being driven erratically in the town by a concerned member of the public, the route would have been protected for even longer.
There was, as with all heists of this magnitude, an element of luck involved. For all the planning and plotting that had been carried out, the getaway path was one which was fraught with danger. As it was single-track for stages of the road, the raiders would have been hoping for a clear run. This was rural Aberdeenshire after all – one tractor blocking the road, one herd of cattle being moved from field to field and the whole operation could have been thrown into jeopardy. As they shuttled past the neat bungalows lining the road in Findon, they knew the worst was over and the home stretch was in sight.
In addition to being contacted about the Senator’s haste, witnesses also came forward to tell police that at least one passenger from the two vehicles had been seen being dropped off in the car park of the Asda superstore in Portlethen. The presumption is the next in the chain of getaway vehicles was parked outside the store, inconspicuous among row upon row of cars visiting the busy supermarket for more legitimate purposes.
The final resting place for the Senator and the Bedford van was on waste ground behind Portlethen Parish Church, perched on a hillside and surrounded by grassland. The church offers a good vantage point over the neighbouring residential and commercial areas, suggesting it was a carefully selected location rather than a hastily chosen dumping ground. In the shadow of the imposing granite kirk, the remaining members of the gang unloaded the vehicles and torched them in an effort to destroy any forensic evidence before vanishing – complete with £1.3 million of Securitas’ funds. It was only when a local resident spotted flames licking into the sky from the rear of the building and contacted the fire service that police were able to piece together the movements of the group they had been trying in vain to trace.
Within hours of the robbery, Grampian’s finest had assembled a team of 40 officers to investigate the heist. There was a tremendous public response to the initial appeal for information, with detectives and uniformed colleagues interviewing hundreds of witnesses. They spent time visiting businesses throughout Altens and left no stone unturned in their quest for vital clues. Staff at the cash depot were also quizzed at length, with officers duty bound to explore the possibility that the raiders may have had help from the inside. That was not a theory that was ever publicly discussed or given credence by the investigating team.
A painstaking forensic examination of the Securitas premises and the nearby ground was conducted as experts from across the force’s various disciplines joined together for one of the most significant investigations in the history of law enforcement in the north-east.
Securitas also redoubled its attention to its Altens branch in the aftermath of the raid, looking again at the measures in place to preserve the integrity of the building. It was the first time the firm had suffered a robbery at any of its Scottish bases and the repercussions reverberated throughout the company. The five staff members targeted by the raiders all underwent counselling as they came to terms with the impact of an armed robbery.
Incredibly the loss of £1.3 million did not impact on cash flow in the city, with Securitas quickly able to bridge the gap in supply to prevent disruption. Robbery or no robbery, the show must go on. As the cash-handling company attempted to return to normality, police set about gathering CCTV footage from neighbouring properties to join the film taken within the depot on the night of the raid. Detectives took the decision to release the video for public consumption, with images showing the guards being held at gunpoint, and this stirred another wave of calls to the incident desk.
The raid, which had already been the subject of intense press coverage throughout December 1998, benefited from national exposure as a reconstruction on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme was played out late in January 1999. Again the attention prompted snippets of additional information from viewers but not the breakthrough the investigation team was hoping for.
As has so often been the case, landing a prime spot on Crimewatch was a major strike for the investigating team. Since the first show was broadcast in 1984, it has been a vital tool for officers keen to reach out beyond the confines of their own force area. The Securitas robbery had been big news in the north-east and relatively so in Scotland as a whole, but tapping into the English audience was seen as key. There was never any assumption that the criminal network was small and spreading the reach of the appeal for information was an important part of the strategy.
The lack of concrete leads was all the more frustrating given the huge rewards on offer for positive information. Within a week of the crime, Securitas had put the lure of £150,000 on the table. That figure later rose to £250,000 but, so far, the company has not had to dig out its chequebook to pay the bounty. The trail had gone cold, even if the evidence pointed towards one of England’s crime gangs.
Criminologists believe as few as three major criminal enterprises were responsible for the bulk of major heists across Britain during the late 1990s and early part of the new millennium. Their targets were said to stretch well beyond British shores, with intelligence suggesting even Germany’s gold reserves were not safe from the reach of UK thieves as they plotted even more daring and ambitious missions from safe houses on British shores.
Grampian Police were keen to explore links between their own investigation and other work being undertaken by forces elsewhere in the country. Following the £53-million episode at Tonbridge in 2006, officers from Aberdeen co-operated with Kent counterparts to compare notes on the record-breaking heist and the smaller but similar incident in Scotland. Just as in the Scottish raid, the thieves had used getaway cars designed to appear like unmarked police vehicles – one of a number of similarities. Unlike the Scottish robbery, detectives recovered large quantities of cash during the course of their lengthy investigations in England and made a series of arrests both in Britain and abroad. Six men were eventually found guilty at trial of playing a part in the Kent heist, with other suspects either cleared of the charges or still at large.
Those convictions took place a decade after the Aberdeen raid and Grampian Police detectives returned to the limelight in 2008 to issue a fresh appeal for help in cracking their own case. The file remains open although the hopes of ever gaining a conclusion by bringing suspects to court remain a fading dream for those who were left stumped by a carefully choreographed and perfectly executed heist.