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A Sign of the Times

The Ibrox heist was like taking candy from a baby for the Monocled Major and his crew. With the van keys in the ignition and no way for the police to track it other than good old-fashioned line of sight, the banks were pretty much defenceless in the face of attacks on their delivery network in that era. Fast-forward half a century and today’s cash-in-transit industry is far removed from those innocent times. Now, heavily armoured and reinforced vans are equipped with a bamboozling array of technology designed to deter thieves, whether opportunistic or highly organised.

From satellite tracking systems to CCTV cameras beaming live images of the delivery rounds back to base, every inch of the journey is covered. Even those who do manage to gain access are not on easy street, with systems for rendering stolen cash unusable in place and other gadgets straight from a James Bond movie being deployed. Lessons from the distant past have been learned and never again will criminals simply be able to drive away with a cash van and its contents – procedures and protocol will see to that. But, for all of the modern advances, the plague of cash van robberies has not been eradicated. If anything, the problem has grown at a rate which the police and long-suffering security firms have struggled to keep pace with.

Faced with increasingly stern defences, perpetrators are going to even more extreme lengths than ever before. From the subtle to the barbaric, such attacks have been alarmingly common in the recent criminal history of Scotland. On a bad week, experts report there can be as many as 15 assaults on cash-carrying security vans in Britain. It makes the cash-in-transit crew’s job arguably one of the most dangerous in the country. That assertion was demonstrated most chillingly over the course of a three-month period in 2002 in the Lanarkshire town of Uddingston. Twice, crews making cash runs at the same Bank of Scotland branch were targeted in that short space of time, and on each occasion they were faced with a situation nightmares are made of. No bullets were fired, no baseball bats wielded, no knives brandished. Instead the raiders came armed with a weapon more unnerving than any of those, choosing petrol as the horrific means to an end.

In the first incident, on 25 September, a masked trio held staff at gunpoint as they threatened them with petrol. The fear of the raiders opening fire must have been very much secondary to the terror felt by those threatened with the prospect of being turned into human fireballs. It was a cold and calculating way of guaranteeing no resistance and enabled the thieves to make off with a considerable cash haul.

The Friday-night attack shattered the peace of Uddingston’s Main Street, the traditional heart of the town and, until recent years, not a location mentioned frequently in connection with serious crime. That has now all changed, with a spate of incidents, but those involving petrol were by far the most sinister.

In the first case, the gang responsible made their escape in a car which had been stolen in Glasgow 10 days earlier. It was found abandoned shortly afterwards in nearby Bellshill Road. Investigating officers described it as a ‘vicious and sustained attack’ by a ‘determined group of men’ who displayed a ‘blatant disregard’ for the security guards’ well-being.

In the second attack, on 13 December, one member of the Brinks Security staff was doused in fuel whilst one of the callous gang of thieves sparked a lighter and threatened to set him alight unless the security team parted with their cargo. Not surprisingly, they obeyed orders and, over the course of the two raids, made off with in the region of £350,000.

Police were confident that the same gang was responsible for both raids. Showing an arrogance to match their brutality, they returned to the scene of their earlier crime to carry out a second attack following the same script. One former detective claimed at the time that infamy as well as fortune may have been a driving force, stating: ‘In prison and criminal circles, armed robbers are the aristocrats of the underworld. They get that misplaced respect, despite innocent people being terrorised and hurt during these robberies.

‘There are easier ways for criminals to make money these days, through drugs and other gangland activities. It is, however, unusual for the same gang to use the same modus operandi and get away with it. It is possible they are looking for a bit of notoriety and are motivated, at least in part, by getting one over on the police.’

That expert opinion, formed with the benefit of dealing with rogues day in and day out, raises a spectre not confined to this particular chapter. Have some of Scotland’s biggest heists been driven by a conviction that the crimes carry a perceived glamour that will attract media interest?

Glasgow’s newspapers in particular have thrived on the apparently weekly updates and salacious tales from the city’s underbelly. From the days of Arthur Thompson, arguably the first ‘celebrity’ gangster in the country, right through to the modern day and the many high-profile trials and murders in that particular scene, there have been miles and miles of copy generated. Editors would argue that public interest is at the root of the news agenda and that is ultimately and inevitably the case. Just as crime is fiction’s greatest genre, the same too applies in the factual world of newspapers. And, if it helps sell papers, it will always find a space on the page.

Behind the headlines is a more human story, one rarely told. The Brinks employees were left traumatised by their experiences in what is normally a peaceful corner of the Central Belt. When they set out for work on those otherwise unremarkable days, there was no amount of training that could have prepared them for what lay ahead. The identical raids saw three balaclava-clad men pounce during evening collections from the Bank of Scotland branch. Their uniform of boiler suits became a familiar sight during a spate of raids during the period in question, with five in the Strathclyde area alone. The theory was that all were carried out by the same crew, one which was cash rich by the end of their spree having raked in hundreds of thousands of pounds along the way.

During the Uddingston petrol attacks, two members of the trio clutched guns as the third played menacingly with the naked flame from a lighter in front of the petrol-soaked guard. It would have taken little more than a spark flying in the wrong direction for what was apparently intended as a threat to become a matter of life and death.

Bags stuffed with money, fresh from the bank, were handed over by terrified colleagues in a desperate attempt to avoid their workmate being torched. With the bags surrendered, a waiting getaway car allowed the raiders to make a speedy exit. Meanwhile, their innocent victim was left to come to terms with what had just played out.

Police described the new method as ‘very worrying’ – at least that was the phrase used in public. Behind the scenes, the sentiments were far stronger as officers tackled the utterly barbaric attacks. The only saving grace was that nobody was injured or worse, despite the recklessness of the petrol attacks. The mental scars, however, were immediately evident and it is fair to assume those will never disappear for the guards caught up in those two incidents.

Unusually, in 2009, the same Uddingston bank was again hit by raiders. In March that year, two armed robbers targeted security men, forcing them to open a safe before making away with £100,000 in cash. A getaway driver made up the trio, piloting a silver BMW away from the branch after the 12.45 a.m. attack.

The two attacks featuring petrol were, unfortunately, not isolated. On both sides of the Border, the desperate tactic was employed with alarming regularity as guards were left to rely on their wits to escape with their lives.

In Scotland in 2007, not far from the Uddingston incidents of five years earlier, the same threat was employed during a Post Office robbery in East Kilbride. Again, the guard was doused in petrol and forced to hand over cash. The thief, who police believed was working with a partner, escaped in a stolen Mercedes Coupé. A reward of £5,000 was offered by worried Post Office chiefs after what police described as a ‘particularly disturbing attack’ in which there was no ‘regard whatsoever’ for the trauma faced by the victim. The thief made off with a five-figure sum, speeding to Bothwell before dumping the getaway car.

What all of those attacks shared was the common thread of force and threats of violence being used to ‘persuade’ staff to part with their money. What they didn’t involve was an active attempt to gain access using a more direct approach. That was demonstrated better by the audacious gang who struck on 9 April 2003 in Rutherglen. Four men, with their faces masked against the gaze of the security camera network, went to work with a shattering plan – quite literally. For the unsuspecting crew of the Brinks van handling cash from the Bank of Scotland on Stonelaw Road, Burnside, at 1 a.m., the first hint of trouble was when a JCB digger came hurtling towards their vehicle around 100 yards from the branch. The famous machines sport their bright yellow livery for good reason – it is said that, on a construction site, workers are more likely to see a piece of kit in that colour than one painted in any other tone and not least if it is out of the direct line of sight. It is fair to assume the guards on duty that night were not on the lookout for heavy machinery heading in their direction but certainly saw it coming.

The sound of crunching metal and shattering glass that followed was the soundtrack for the episode, as the digger’s power and weight were put to use – pinning the security van against a nearby insurance broker’s building, taking a parked Ford Fiesta with it, in a scene of carnage on the streets. It was a seven-tonne bright yellow battering ram. Bystanders who witnessed the incredible episode unfolding said it looked to have been a ‘well-planned heist’.

The van was shunted off the carriageway on to the pavement, with the digger’s bucket providing the battering ram. The heavy metal scoop was then used to smash open the bulletproof glass and leave the driver exposed. It suggested a fair degree of experience since, as anyone who has attempted to operate a digger will admit, the controls are not altogether intuitive. Could there have been practice involved or a dry run?

As the lone member of the gang driving the JCB set about his task there was immediate back-up from two fellow crooks who arrived at the scene in a blue Subaru Impreza. The trio forced their way into the van, threatened staff with guns and then made a quick exit, along with a sum which has been estimated at anywhere between £300,000 and £800,000 in cash. Banks, hit repeatedly by such incidents, were reluctant to publicise the net result.

It was unusual but not unprecedented. In 1985, a security van in Surrey was attacked by a gang using an excavator to cut a hole in the cargo area before making off with hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The terror of having what was, on face value, a strengthened vehicle wrecked by force was one thing for the Rutherglen guards but it got worse as the prospect of sawn-off shotguns being pointed at their heads loomed large, with the guards told they would be shot unless they threw the cash bags out into the open.

A red Vauxhall Vectra, driven by the fourth member of the team, was also used in the raid. Each of the quartet was clad in black and all four had their faces covered by what the victims described as balaclavas or ski masks. They sped off from the bank in the direction of Burnside Road, leaving behind three members of the Brinks staff who were fortunately uninjured but left shaken by their experiences at the hands of their attackers. The Subaru and JCB were recovered for examination and the Vectra was later found torched as the thieves did their best to dispose of lingering evidence in the getaway car. The escape route took them in the direction of Braemar Road in Cathkin, with the Vauxhall dumped in a lane running behind a shopping precinct.

Detective Inspector Gordon McConnell of Rutherglen CID led the public appeal and called for witnesses to come forward. It was becoming a familiar script for detectives, with seven other security van heists in the Central Belt in the space of just six months leading up to the incident.

Slowly the details were pieced together, just as the remnants of the scene were. The first step was to trace the origins of the two vehicles at the centre of the case. The JCB was tracked back to Uddingston Bowling Club from where it had been stolen in the hours leading up to the crime and driven the eight miles to Stonelaw Road ready for the attack.

The Subaru, it transpired, had been taken from a forecourt in Edinburgh 15 days earlier. It was removed from the Calder Motor Company on the capital’s Corstorphine Road and stored in the interim, before being wheeled out to provide the rapid transport required by the raiders. The desirability of the Subaru was not surprising, given its purebred rally pedigree and outstanding performance. What its use did do was point to the changing tastes among those involved in Britain’s heists. In the 1970s, Scotland Yard famously labelled the humble Ford Transit van as the nation’s most wanted, citing the fact that it was used in 95 per cent of bank robberies at the time. Jaguars and Rovers had also been popular whilst fast Fords, such as the Sierra Cosworth, took on the mantle in the 1980s and 90s – with the dubious honour now passed to the likes of Subaru and Mitsubishi as the performance car hierarchy shifts.

The specific car was a far from subtle choice, with the attention-grabbing, high-power model adorned with the registration plate S118ARU, yet nobody appeared to have seen it after it was spirited away from the Calder garage. Police issued a desperate plea for information on the car’s whereabouts and also spoke out specifically to one person they believed had key information – a taxi driver who was reported to have been parked and watching as the robbery played out in front of him.

The investigation took police from coast to coast, with the trail from the scene of the car theft leading shortly after the heist to a caravan park in Ayr, where detectives launched a lightning-quick raid, bursting in at midnight and arresting Barry Paul. For Paul, it was the end of the road but, to this day, he remains the only person ever charged in connection with the high-profile and highly lucrative incident. Although Paul, when eventually summoned to appear at the High Court in Glasgow, admitted stealing the JCB and Subaru to order for the gang, it was accepted that he had not been present when the robbery took place. It was also argued in court that he did not know the details of the plans, particularly that guns would be used. After those mitigating circumstances were taken into account, Paul was sentenced to five years in jail by Lord Emslie.

Paul, from Cambuslang, was arrested three weeks after the robbers struck in Rutherglen. In the time between the incident and his arrest, he had been busy. He had spent £6,000 on an Audi and a further £16,480 in cash on a brand-new caravan. His stay in that proved short, rudely interrupted by Strathclyde’s finest as they closed the net on one of their prime suspects. A search of the caravan found £1,770 in cash locked inside a newly fitted safe. It remains the only money to have been recovered during the course of the long and winding investigation. Together with the £22,480 Paul was known to have spent, the sum hints at a £25,000 bounty for his part in proceedings.

Work in the cash-in-transit industry has become increasingly perilous. Petrol, guns, diggers and even swords have been used to persuade guards to part with the contents of their vans. It was in May 2012 that a robber armed with a Samurai sword struck again in Uddingston, working with others brandishing baseball bats to liberate £20,000 as security guards transferred the week’s canteen takings from the Kwik Fit Insurance office at Tannochside Business Park to their vehicle. It was another black night in a town which has become something of a robbery hot spot, no doubt partly because of its location within easy reach of a motorway network which provides a handy route for disappearing into the night.

According to industry experts, the advent of technology has posed little deterrent as the three-quarters of a billion pounds transported each day in the UK provides an irresistible lure. One risk management expert in the security van sector said: ‘[Security vans] are tracked on a permanent basis. We know exactly where [each] vehicle is at any point of time, we know how long it stops for, we know where he’s going, what his route is – any deviation of that route we can identify and tell the authorities very quickly exactly where they need to home into.

‘You could be looking on a bad week in the UK at 15 attacks. On a less bad week you could be looking at five or six, so the weeks vary – it is partly seasonal, even criminals go on holiday occasionally . . . and then they run out of money and come back.

‘If you go to an ATM and it is no longer working you might consider it has run out of money or is no longer working. The likelihood is, in certain parts of the UK, that it hasn’t got any money because the crew couldn’t get there on the run they were doing that day because they were attacked at a previous site.’

That plague of attacks has led to a weird and wonderful suite of solutions being implemented. A South African firm has recently unveiled one of the more extreme innovations involving a combination of two chemicals being fired into the body of a security van on the command of either threatened crew members or those monitoring CCTV footage back at base. On contact with each other, the two chemicals combine to form a foam barrier which, as it hardens, is resistant to fire and bullets – an instant shield to fend off attackers. That was pioneered by G4S in South Africa although the firm’s British experts were not lagging too far behind. In 2010, the UK security specialists revealed a system which used the injection of glue into cash boxes when activated by concerned staff, with the notes inside being rendered useless.

Anyone who has sat behind a security van in traffic will be aware of the collage of warning stickers adorning the vehicles. They are not empty messages – they are part of a real and concerted effort being made to deter would-be attackers. Kevin O’Connor, risk director with G4S Cash Solutions, said: ‘Our tests show that the glue will ensure that an attack on a G4S cashbox will be completely worthless to the perpetrator. This new technology will complement our existing degradations systems of dye and SmartWater.

‘Criminals caught following an attack on one of our CIT [cash-in-transit] couriers already face a high probability of being convicted with the aid of SmartWater evidence, which has an impressive 100 percent success rate in securing convictions when used in criminal cases. Glue is the latest in a series of high-tech solutions we have developed to reduce the number of attacks on our CIT crew and vehicles.

‘The deployment of glue is another example of a successful partnership between the Met Police and the private sector in developing an effective deterrent against violent attacks on CIT couriers. We continue to work closely with all police forces, trade unions, the government, customers and local communities to develop ways to curtail these attacks.’

The glue was part of a £100-million investment in crime prevention by G4S over a five-year period. Other additions include more heavily armoured vehicles, body armour for staff and the adoption of more high-tech ideas. The partnership with SmartWater Technology was part of that programme, with that firm inventing a system which left any money within a stolen cash box covered in a substance that is invisible to the naked eye. Anyone coming into contact with it would also be marked with a DNA-type code which would remain present for up to six months, enabling police to make a link between unsuspecting criminals and the scene of the crime. G4S makes for an interesting case study, with the company rising to become Britain’s market leader in the cash-in-transit business. More than 7,000 employees and 2,000 vehicles, spread across 53 different bases, make the operation tick.

All of the evidence shows that the threat of violence is never far from the surface in security van raids but force is not the only element. It was on 10 October 2011 that the incredible lengths that raiders will go to and the forward planning employed were revealed. It was on that day that Glasgow was hit by raiders in disguise. And not just any disguise – the costume of choice was that of Strathclyde Police, with three men dressed as uniformed officers striking at the NatWest branch in Blythswood Square. And the disguises were not the only unusual facet to the events of that day – the fact that the robbers struck in daylight set it apart from the more usual night-time operations. It was at 10.40 a.m. that the gang made its move, pouncing as the delivery was made. Despite the use of guns, there were no shots fired and nobody was injured. Staff of the bank and the security guard were, understandably, left traumatised.

The police outfits bought the raiders time as they made their move, also adding an all-important element of surprise to their plan. In reality, that surprise lasted only seconds – just as long as it took them to pull out their guns and make their demands.

CCTV footage of the drama was released to the public, coinciding with an announcement that the British Bankers Association was offering a £25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the culprits. An e-fit image of one of the suspects was released too, pulled together after scores of witness reports had been collated. All of that pressure and the financial lure did not provide the solution – it was left to detectives to continue the hunt – but it did drag the daylight robbery back into the spotlight.

The footage showed the fake policemen threatening a security guard as he made a cash delivery to the bank. They fled the scene, clutching a stolen cash box, and made off in a silver Mercedes E-Class. The car was last seen heading along Blythswood Street before turning right on to Waterloo Street and then joining the M8’s westbound carriageway.

Immediately police launched an intensive and extensive probe, led by Detective Inspector Kate Jamieson of Strathclyde Police. Obtaining footage from all CCTV cameras in the vicinity was a top priority – as was slotting together the observations from witnesses who reported seeing the three ‘policemen’ in the area during the minutes before they pressed ahead with their heist.

The E-Class used to flee the scene was said to have been driven at speed through the crowded city-centre streets and its erratic journey was something detectives hoped would spark memories among potential witnesses. It was a big beast of a car to pilot through the congested streets but it also had the power and bulk required if a chase had developed and force was needed.

One week later, officers returned to the Blythswood Square bank and set up cordons to stop motorists and pedestrians. It was the latest attempt to pin down evidence that could lead to the robbery gang and to flush out further information. DI Jamieson stated, ‘Blythswood Street and Waterloo Street are very busy areas, with both pedestrians and motorists, and I would appeal directly to anyone who may have been in those areas at the time of the incident to come forward to police urgently.’

Tens of thousands of pounds were taken by the culprits. Once again the perils facing those in the cash-in-transit trade on a day-to-day basis were underlined, with the case also emphasising some worrying developments in the business during a period in which companies in every area of commercial life were attempting to tighten the purse strings.

Union officials stepped forward to publicise the fact that, whilst guards had once always worked in pairs as a safety measure, daytime deliveries were, at the time of the NatWest raid, being conducted by lone operatives in an attempt, according to the UK’s general trade union GMB at least, to cut costs. It was also suggested that the same reasons were behind the decision not to implement the latest technology, including SmartWater, in the Glasgow area. Cal Waterson, lead officer on the security industry for the GMB, said at the time, ‘The problem we have in Glasgow at the moment is the safety back-ups aren’t quite as intensive as they are in other parts of the country. Some of the boxes they carry the cash in don’t have the explosive dye. The companies are rolling them out as quickly as they can and targeting the worst-attacked areas first.’

Indeed, drivers and crew threatened to strike in the aftermath of the JCB attack in Uddingston. It took assurances from bosses that manpower levels would be maintained to avert that action but no amount of promises will ever remove the risk faced by the brave men and women every day of every year on Scotland’s streets.