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?"

Allure of the Armed Robber

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.

"As a professional armed robber … you manipulate terror and fear -- that's all you're doing," said Smith, who recently released a novel as a follow-up to his first book, "The Art of Armed Robbery."

If you're a good armed robber, Smith said, you don't have to hurt anyone and you won't get caught.

"If you manipulate in the right way, you can get more or less anything you want," he added. "And I was good at that -- probably still am, but I haven't done it for ages."

The British are good armed robbers. There's no doubt. Of the world's top 10 heists, four took place on British soil. The Tonbridge job is the second-biggest heist of all time, and the largest ever in peace time.

'Greedy and Stupid'

But the British cops also are good. In the 10 days since the $93 million was snatched, they've made arrests and they've found some of the money. There's a lot of manpower on the case and a reward of more than $3 million to anyone who helps the police to put the gang behind bars.

Did the gang steal too much? Did the size of the job bring on too much heat? Smith doesn't think so.

"How can you steal too much money if you're a professional armed robber?" he asked. "You can't."

But Robinson, who has journalism contacts in the criminal world, disagrees. He called the gang "greedy and stupid" -- greedy because they took too much money and stupid because they didn't give as much thought to laundering the money as they did to stealing it.

"The smart crooks are sitting on a balcony in the Mediterranean someplace re-routing the cash," he said.

Smith says the world of armed robbery is changing. Many of his past colleagues have drifted into drug dealing, he says, because a drug deal is an "unreported crime."

"If me and you committed a crime in that building over there," he told this reporter as we sat on by the seashore near his house, "there would be forensic [evidence] left behind. But if me and you did a deal round the corner for some drugs, who's going to know?"

So many crooks have drifted into drugs, many heists are now electronic. The weapon has become a computer mouse rather than a pistol.

But as long as there's cash in banks, there'll be those who try to steal it and those who idolise them for taking the risk of sticking it to the man.