Go, Robbers! Brits Often 'Don't Mind Cads'

LONDON, March 4, 2006 — -- Thieves made off with $93 million last month by kidnapping the vault manager's family. Open the locks, they told him, or your wife and son get it.

It's known in the trade as a tiger kidnapping. The gang pulled off the biggest heist in British history, but are the British people rooting for them as they have the armed robbers old?

"Let them get away with it," one Londoner told us today. "We don't mind cads, do we? We've had the great train robbers. Everyone loved them, didn't they?"

The great train robbers are lionized 40 years after their crime. And London gangsters like the Kray twins are given funerals worthy of royalty. Horse drawn hearses are mobbed by an adoring public.

The movies may be somewhat to blame. From "The Adventures of Robin Hood" in 1938 to "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" in 1998, British movies romanticize the villain. The crook is always cool. Remember the suave Michael Caine in "Get Carter" and "The Italian Job," or the laconic Terrence Stamp in "The Limey"?

British television news coverage of the Tonbridge heist is breathless. We're fed live aerial shots from news choppers of the police searching a farm and suspects entering a court house.

Jeffrey Robinson, an American writer and journalist who has lived in London for 24 years, understands the saturation television coverage.

"We say, this time it's real," he said. "This time it's not just a bunch of actors playing bad guys. This is the real deal."

But Robinson is mystified by the hero worship of villains.

"I don't know how anybody can idolize armed robbers, because these are really nasty people," he said. "They threaten lives. They torment people."

Part of the allure of the armed robber in Britain is that, yes, there are threats and torment, but rarely does someone get shot. Gun laws in Britain are tight -- for criminals and guards. The guards at the Tonbridge vault were not armed, so gunfire was not exchanged.

Terry Smith -- a convicted armed robber who spent 11 years in jail before going straight, and who once was Britain's most-wanted man -- said if all goes according to plan, then no one gets hurt.