[Anca] I had a problem watching movies
with the same uniform,
with guns.
My mind just went to that moment, that night.
For the first two years,
I was out of work,
I was sick from the event,
so, really, really bad stage.
[Alun] I had nightmares about the incident
for months afterwards.
People picking me up in a van with masks on.
It leaves- it leaves an impression in you,
definitely.
tense music
[Tony] Before the robbery, I was happy-go-lucky,
up for anything.
I was always laughing, joking,
socializing with friends.
The fun- the fun side of me has been sort of taken away.
It's, for an hour-hour and 15 minutes in-in February, 2006,
that's years of my-my-my life.
soft dramatic music
gentle rhythmic music
dramatic rhythmic music
[Sir John] A robbery occurred in Kent.
A substantial amount of money was stolen.
It was all in cash.
This theft
represented the largest amount ever stolen.
The robbers used hostages
as the means to enter the depot.
There are few things more terrifying
than the invasion of home or workplace
at the dead of night
by men dressed entirely in black,
whose faces and heads are covered by masks,
brandishing deadly weapons,
and shouting that you will die
if you do not do as you are told.
And the motive for this crime?
Pure and simple.
Greed.
dramatic rhythmic music
[Andy] So the morning of Wednesday, the 22nd of February,
just after the robbery,
on my arrival,
I could feel
that I really needed to get this right.
I'd never seen a million pounds before.
Who's seen a million pounds?
Who's seen a million dollars?
You know, who's seen that amount of money?
So let's get in and evaluate the scene
and see what we've got.
Got a quick briefing about what's happened
and very quickly learned that the manager had been kidnapped
as has his wife and child,
but also that 14 members of staff were taken hostage
and they are all still in the building.
Get officers with them, get detectives with them.
I said, "No one is to leave,
no one is going anywhere.
Get all your witness accounts,
get them back into that moment,
what they saw,
what they could tell you."
And they were just taking statements,
interviewing us all.
Took all our clothes off us for forensics.
All our clothes taken,
our shoes taken,
trousers, shirts.
So we are all day sitting in the depot
interviewing.
We stayed there for at least 10 hours more.
[Andy] And you start to get a feel about the robbers,
who they were.
We identify seven robbers.
There was a policeman,
he was the guy that went in with Mr. Dixon first of all.
He looked as though he may be Black or Asian,
but we couldn't see much of his face at all.
Then you had one they said was short, Shorty.
He was the shortest member of the gang
and he was carrying a Skorpion machine pistol.
One was wearing a hoodie, so he became Hoodie,
pump-action shotgun.
Then Mr. Average is the guy that
cable ties all the hostages up,
but nothing quite distinct about him.
Hi-Vis was the person that was with Lynn Dixon
and their child in the back of the lorry--
big man, very athletic,
wore a high-visibility vest.
The driver of the lorry, just known as Driver,
appears older by his gait,
by the way he moves,
clearly eaten a fair bit more food than the others,
a little tummy on him.
Stopwatch is a tall
athletic male.
He's carrying an AK-47.
It's clearly apparent that Stopwatch is in control.
tense music
I then walked through the scene
and I could immediately see the vault
is still full of cash.
And it was, whoa [laughs]
how did they get away with all that?
How much would they have got away with
if they'd turned up with a bigger lorry?
This particular cash depot at that time is managed
by a company called Securitas.
Although it's a private company,
it's the Bank of England's money.
[Andy] There was a legitimate concern
about the English banking system
because this cash house was a major supplier
of retail businesses and banks in the Southeast of England
and London.
That dried up immediately,
so there was a cash flow problem.
[Adrian] What was more of a concern was
the damage to reputation
of the security of the Bank of England.
It's the equivalent of Fort Knox in the U.S. have--
had been breached.
We needed to prove to people that this cannot happen
and people will get caught.
[newsman] The Bank of England confirmed that at least
25 million pounds was taken, and it could be much more.
British police are hunting for a gang that pulled off
one of the biggest armed robberies
in the country's history.
Robbers dressed as police
tied up workers and escaped with 25 million pounds.
[newsman] The true figure could be as high as
40 million, making it the biggest robbery
the country's ever seen.
[newswoman] There was so much cash the bandits needed
a full hour to load it into their truck.
And they say it could take several more days
till we know the total figure.
[Chris] Woke up in the morning and it was all over the news.
Being able to pull off that sort of heist
and appear to get away with it immediately sort of,
you know, got the attention of people.
A gang had got away with, it might have been a record.
It wasn't clear how much.
And I thought, oh, this is gonna be quite a big story.
By 8:00 a.m. of the morning after the, uh, uh, robbery,
this was already the talk of the office.
An absolute fortress,
14 feet of razor wire,
security cameras absolutely everywhere,
criminals highly armed and terrified victims,
it was the stuff that dreams are made of.
You could see front pages and spreads
opening up before your eyes.
I read about it, uh, when the robbery was committed
because there was a great deal of publicity.
The gang behind the raid were armed and dangerous.
They say the manager of the cash storage depot in Kent
was held hostage for more than six hours.
It was a big story and we all wanted to be involved in it.
Obviously, what attracted attention was the
kidnapping of-of Dixon and-and wife and child.
[newswoman] And a few moments ago,
we received this picture of the family involved,
Colin and Lynn Dixon.
This photograph was taken on their wedding day.
[newsman] We now know that the manager
of the Securitas Depot was told
his family would be shot dead unless he cooperated.
I don't think any of us anticipated
the scale of media interest in this.
Within hours, we'd had the first media attention.
And it literally snowballed from that point onwards.
Every hour it got busier and busier.
Dealing with the media was gonna be my responsibility.
This is a, a serious organized crime gang.
And, and they're callous.
These people have taken hostages, frankly.
They've taken a, a young woman
and her eight-year-old son and held 'em at gunpoint.
They've terrorized 14 members of staff.
These are callous criminals, they're professional criminals.
They're an organized gang.
What we tried to do with the media is give messages
to the offenders, the robbers,
that we're gonna catch them,
uh, because that puts them on the back foot,
puts them on the run.
And we very cleverly use information to try and gain
more intelligence from the public,
and most importantly, with this case, the reward.
Someone around the edge of this will know
directly who's committed this,
but may not have done the actual crime themselves.
Those people are the people who may be able to earn a reward
of up to two million pounds.
That is significant.
It's the largest reward I'm certainly aware of.
And we played that heavily in terms of the media.
[Andy] Imagine if you're out there and you've not been
part of that robbery but you are a criminal
who knows these people,
somebody will say,
"They've got that, I want a bit of that."
Two million quid just for snitching on them,
just for grassing them up is easy money, isn't it?
So the phones started to ring.
[phone rings]
[newsman] The inquiry team believes fresh leads
could yet come from within the gang itself.
[Andy] We were inundated,
we were absolutely inundated with calls.
We've got hundreds of names coming in,
I mean, hundreds of names, of quality robbers
that we know are robbers.
[newsman] Senior officers have pledged protection
to any individual that leads them to the gang members.
[Nicola] Everybody was talking about it
in our area.
It was all over Sky News,
it was everywhere.
[Adrian] The person was actually dressed wearing what we think,
or-or was described as having
a fairly scruffy ginger beard.
Now, talking to Mr. Dixon,
we think that may be a false beard.
[newsman] Kent Police have issued E-FITs
of the bogus officers
who abducted Mr. Dixon and his family.
I remember, there was two E-FITs side by side.
And everyone was like, "That one is Lee."
The first time I heard the name Lee Murray
would have been when the intelligence, uh,
was given to us by the Met Police.
suspenseful music
The Metropolitan Police
are-are the police that police London.
The piece of intelligence comes in,
they had been sat on someone's desk,
hadn't come to us at all.
And of course the-the job happens and then it's,
"Oh, dear, we'd better tell Kent about this."
That piece of intelligence says that Lee Murray was planning
to commit a crime in Kent disguised as a police officer
and, uh, he was gonna use the skills of a hairdresser
named Michelle Hogg.
We go to the Metropolitan Police,
"What have you got on Lee Murray?
Because he is now a person of interest to us."
dramatic music
Lee Lightning Murray, as he likes to be introduced
in the ring, was a, uh, a dangerous figure.
His career in the ring projected him up to a status
in which he was able to paint a picture as a-a champion,
a dangerous man in the ring...
shielding him from intrusions into what, uh,
he was getting up to outside the ring.
My understanding was that Lee Murray
was just starting to make a living out of cage fighting
and I think had great ambitions.
I think the main feeling was that he made money out of
either selling drugs or assisting people
who were selling drugs by giving them
the necessary protection.
He was a,
a criminal in the Southeast London, North Kent area,
graduated, you know, in-in his criminality,
drugs, uh, violence.
There was a mixture, it was a mixed bag of all sorts
of someone growing up in a tough part of South London.
He would have run the drugs traffic i-in that area.
He was a career criminal, so he was well known.
The Met Police had concerns about Lee Murray's role in the
importation or certainly the distribution
of Class A drugs,
cocaine in particular.
[Fryklund] Like, I can look at Lee for longer than
three seconds and go,
"What you got going on, dude?"
You're wearing a fucking Rolex
and you're wearing Gucci shoes, and we're in Iowa.
And then he can say, "Ah,
I'm also a bit of a gangster
and I'm-I'm able to be a fighter
because I do this on the side.
But my side hustle is really my real gig.
Don't tell anyone."
[Fryklund] So when we got to London,
when he said,
"I'm going to do some errands, you want to go to do some shit?"
100%.
Just like go pick something up, drop something off,
or whatever.
Like one, a couple of times during the day
and then a couple of times in the night.
soft dramatic music
[Fryklund] He'll stop right in front of the building.
People will come get his car.
He will go past everyone, go in the clubs.
Dude, I'm seeing all this and like,
okay, your guys are peeling shit off and he's going,
"Thanks for letting us in the door."
I'm like, "Dude, you just fucking gave the guy like what?
What was that?" Like, pshh.
And everyone's like, fucking Lee, fucking what's up?
[Nicola] Everybody knew Lee, he was like the mayor.
He would walk in somewhere and it would just dead silent.
Everybody turns to look and everyone's like,
"It's Lee Murray, it's Lee Murray, it's Lee Murray."
[Frykland] Love it, like, this is like,
this is how the cool kids roll, I love being the cool kid.
I'm fucking all over that.
Their whole crew, the-the Barney Boys,
that's who they are, that's who these guys are.
That was, that's his gig.
It was one from when he was a teenager.
He already had not even one foot in MMA,
one foot in,
in a life of crime.
One, you know, both feet were in the life of crime.
He was, he was already all that.
I do remember Lee gave my wife and I a-a wedding gift.
And it was china, a china set.
My wife came from an affluent background in Montreal.
She recognizes that this china is not your average china.
This is thousands of dollars,
and she goes,
"What job does Lee have besides fighting?"
And I said, "I don't know, I don't think he has a job."
And she goes, "This is the best china you can find."
So then I went, "Hmm." [laughs]
[Dave] We were doing a PlayStation, uh, shoot.
You have to wear these, these suits
and all, all these sensors on you and go round
kicking in doors and fighting people.
We got Lee Murray to do this.
And he's turned up in this yellow Ferrari.
"What are you doing?"
He said, "I want to make a good impression,
I want to make a good impression, you like the car?"
And he's all like jumping around
and we had to calm him down.
God knows how he got this yellow Ferrari.
I just remember him pulling up at this PlayStation thing,
oh, my God, look at this kid in his yellow Ferrari [laughs].
[Fryklund] We were driving through London
in a black Mercedes,
having a good old time,
going way too fast, flying.
And he fucking clipped his mirror on-on another car
that went by, ripped it right off, cshhh.
And we got pulled over and he fucking gets out,
"Stay here."
"Do you know who the fuck I am?
Get the fuck out of here."
And the fucking two cops get back in the car
and-and piss off.
Fucking blew me away,
I've never seen anything like it.
slow rumbling music
[Nicola] It's fair to say he got into his fair share of run-ins
with the police.
We were friends, I think I was about 24 or 25.
He'd given me and my friend a lift and we got stopped about
two or three times.
They would just search him,
then see that he's got nothing on him,
and then let him go.
You could tell he was getting quite frustrated with it.
I think they were trying to catch him with something on him.
When you get into trouble with the police
when you're younger and then you're trying to break away
from that and make something of yourself,
it's like it-it-it--
you've left a mark
that they're not gonna let you rub out.
[Andy] The trouble is when you,
you lift the lid on things like that,
so the, the old adage, a can of worms, that is what it is.
And you say, "Oh."
And you look and say, "Where does that go?
Where does that go?"
So what do you do?
Where do you start?
You're not gonna go for Lee Murray,
"You're under arrest for robbery."
What evidence have you got?
If you go straight for the hardened criminal,
they're just gonna tell you to fuck off.
So what do you do?
You, you go for the weak link.
What else have we got to lose?
Nothing.
Get a team together,
go up to London.
In February 2006, I was a detective constable with
the Kent Police Serious and Organized Crime Unit.
So we got a phone call, um, from my boss, uh, at the time.
He said, "We need you to go and help colleagues up at
the Serious Crime Unit, there's been a robbery
and you might be there a week, or maybe two."
A decision had been made that
I was going to pursue a Michelle Hogg.
She wasn't answering the door.
We forced the outside door
and then we made our way to her flat.
And she met us, she was in tears.
My initial reaction was clearly something is linked.
I just have no idea at this particular moment how or why.
They arrest Michelle Hogg
and they start to search her flat in Plumstead.
"What do you want?" I said, "Okay, search the dustbin."
"Well, we, we haven't had time to do that."
Truck was coming down the street.
"Is it clearly identifiable as hers?"
"Yeah, it's got number 14."
"Just seal the bin up and take it."
I said, "Do that before they empty it."
In less than five minutes, that would have been,
would have been emptied out into the garbage truck.
[Andy] They take it, they put it in the back of the van.
It's this stinky, horrible trash can.
They take Michelle Hogg back to a police station in Kent.
[Dave E.] In the interviews with her on that first day,
she clearly was scared.
And it was quite difficult for me to sort of really fathom
exactly what role she had played.
[Andy] She works at a hairdresser's
called Hair Hectik.
It's run by Michael Demetris.
He knew Lee Murray because he did his hair all the time,
on almost a weekly basis.
I said I've never seen a man have so many haircuts.
Michael Demetris, the hairdresser of Hair Hectik,
had actually employed Michelle Hogg and knew that
she did theatrical makeup and that she was trained in it.
[Dave E] Michael Demetris had identified certain skill sets
that Michelle Hogg had, particularly around the
use of prosthetic makeup.
She could literally make you look like
somebody completely different.
[Andy] Michael Demetris is arrested.
Both of them exercise their right to silence,
and they're being advised.
[William] I'm afraid the attractions of, um,
the Michelle Hogg case was, um,
its notoriety and-and-and the publicity, which made it
an attractive case, um, to be involved in.
Secondly, I thought she was a very interesting person
to act for.
My first impression was that she was completely
and utterly out of her depth.
She was the most unlikely person to be involved
in a professional armed robbery.
She was a young woman
of hitherto perfectly good character
and rather frightened.
[Andy] The interviews progress throughout the day.
Michelle Hogg then says,
"I'd like to make a prepared statement."
She basically says, "I made up these people like
with prosthetics.
I was told it was for a video game.
I did not know it was anything to do with any crime.
I'm too frightened to name them.
If I name them, I'm frightened for my family and myself.
I can't do it."
She says, "I'm not gonna speak to you."
So she has to be bailed.
Nothing really changes with Michael Demetris.
He's subsequently bailed as well.
[Adrian] We'd already thought maybe they were wearing
sort of prosthetic masks or something like that.
I'll be honest and say we didn't really think
they would have done it because we'd never experienced that.
This is sort of Hollywood Mission Impossible stuff.
We'd never seen that,
for real, in a robbery.
[Dave E] Myself and another colleague spent the weekend
in a basement at our police headquarters,
sorting Michelle Hogg's wheely bin.
So of course this poor officer has got this
disgusting mixture of waste food and God knows what else
in the bottom of this bin.
But at the very bottom are two black bin liners
and they're, they're sealed.
Opens them up,
Aladdin's cave.
Bingo, bingo, bingo.
Theatrical makeup, latex,
false hair to make beards.
And there are cigarette butts...
false caps, you know, head caps.
[Dave E.] Significant evidence was recovered from there
A lot of evidence that was going to give us some DNA leads.
[Andy] So we separate it, photograph it.
Th-th-there were a number of parts with different skin tone.
One of the skin tone parts just had the words Lee M.
written on the back of it.
So I'm thinking,
this is Lee Murray.
This is starting to look like evidence, but we can't,
we still can't pinpoint anything, it's just got Lee M.
Sent it off for DNA work.
DNA work does not happen overnight.
It takes a few days to see what they can get off.
Whilst this is going on,
another phone rings,
they found the red van,
the ParcelForce van.
And we know now that Lynn and her child
had been taken in a ParcelForce van.
So we said, "Right, let's have it.
Just take it and we'll forensicate it."
Someone has gone and bought an identical van,
put false plates on it, and had it livred up ParcelForce.
We got some information that a chap called Keith Borer
had done some work.
[Keith] It was there, the ParcelForce van that I had done.
It was on the television.
I thought, my God, what have I got involved in here?
Basically, he had made the signs up
because Stuart Royle had asked him to.
Keith Borer said immediately after the robbery
Stuart Royle came to see him and he gave him an envelope
and said, "Thanks for doing that."
There was 6,000 pounds in it, in 50-pound notes.
We start to identify Stuart Royle.
This person ran a car business, you know,
some would use the description of being a con man.
He would sell his own grandmother.
He was just someone that would lie and cheat
his way through, through anything.
[Adrian] We'd already identified Stuart Royle
as a key player very early on.
gentle music
[Andy] Later that night,
around 11 o'clock in the evening,
we get a phone call,
fire brigade reporting two cars on fire, where's that?
Burberry Lane, Langley.
Right, they're our cars.
They're cars from that robbery.
There's a Volvo and a Vectra.
In the boot of the Volvo is Colin Dixon's briefcase.
We find, melted in the dashboard, a magazine
and a load of rounds from a Skorpion machine pistol
and a stopwatch melted into the dashboard.
In the Vectra, we find that it's got blue lights
and a siren fitted.
[Adrian] Now, clearly, a lot of activity was taking place
in Burberry Lane on Thursday night.
And we're keen to speak to anyone
who may have seen anything suspicious.
[Andy] What's the relevance of Burberry Lane?
The most obvious and apparent relevance of Burberry Lane
is if you walked over the fields
from where the cars were burnt out,
you'd get to Stuart Royle's house.
That didn't go over our heads at all.
soft dramatic music
The Vectra,
the person that bought that wrote
Stuart Royle's business address,
115 Tunbridge Road, Wateringbury.
We had the red LDV van and one of the vehicles
had both been bought by somebody
whose name they gave as Mark Scott.
But they gave the address of that person
for Wateringbury Car Sales,
the business premises of Stuart Royle.
Things are starting to stack up.
But it just seemed very convenient that
everything initially points to Stuart Royle.
soft dramatic music
The Friday comes, this is Friday the 24th.
We get another call saying that there is
a load of money in a van
at Ashford International.
It's got two suitcases in it
and it's got a bag in it.
In the bag is clearly a Skorpion machine pistol,
bulletproof vest and a balaclava.
I open up the suitcases
and it's got 1,370,000 pounds in it.
And it's still in the Securitas wrappers.
It took nine hours to count,
and we were using machines.
I can confirm also that a 49-year-old man
has been arrested in relation to that van.
The van was owned by Chris Bowles,
judo instructor, locally, for years.
He'd named Lea Rusha as putting the bags in his car.
What he told us was that he had been found by Lea Rusha,
asked a-a favor.
He was splitting up with his partner
and he was having to move out and can he just store
a couple of bags for him for a while.
So he said, "Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not a problem."
And they arranged to meet at a petrol station.
Chris Bowles goes to the petrol station
and Jetmir Bucpapa jumps in his van and says,
"Oh, he's around the corner."
Jetmir Bucpapa is an Albanian national.
He is a big man.
He likes the gym, pumping iron and stuff like that.
He's a very, very light record,
but definitely was involved in criminality.
So they drive around the corner.
Rusha puts some bags in the back of his van.
Chris Bowles goes off to teach some kids.
When he's in there, he sees another bag.
And he unzips it and sees straightaway
a balaclava and a firearm.
He'd obviously panicked and driven it around,
left it in this car park at Ashford International.
Two of the robbers have clearly gone to him
with some of their money.
Why that was split from their stash, I don't know.
We never got to the bottom of that.
This is, uh, the, the first large sum of money that,
that was found during the investigation.
And it was very exciting, it was, it meant
to us that we had a positive lead.
And also, um, the forensic opportunities are massive.
We knew that the, uh, robbers in the depot
were wearing balaclavas.
There's one of the balaclavas.
DNA is there, you know,
we've got to find some-something on it.
So they were sent very quickly.
And they came back with a name,
DNA around the mouth of the balaclava was that of Lea Rusha.
I've known Lea Rusha since he was about 13 or 14 years old.
Lea Rusha was very well known
in Tonbridge, Tundbridge Wells.
He was committing criminal damage,
disorderly behavior in public places.
There was allegations that he'd stabbed someone.
And there was also suggestions that he was involved
in the distribution of drugs,
and becoming a bit of an enforcer
because he was getting stronger and fitter
and honing his martial arts skills.
But he's quite small, he's about 5'6".
He was definitely getting into the mixed martial arts,
of which Lee Murray was part of this.
Good evening.
Detectives investigating the Tonbridge depot robbery
say that they've carried out armed raids across Kent.
[Andy] We'd executed a warrant
at Lea Rusha's house in Southborough.
Rusha is not there.
We don't know where he's gone,
he has fled.
We can't find Jetmir Bucpapa either.
[newswoman] All day, forensic teams have been
systematically removing bags full of material
from this house
in this quiet residential part of Tunbridge Wells.
We had a call, he said,
"You-you're just not gonna believe this."
I said, "What?"
He said, "We found a map of the depot."
"Pardon?"
gentle music
You've got to be kidding me.
And you can't be...
Wh-what's the first thing you'd do with that?
You-you'd burn it, wouldn't you?
It appears he had a habit of throwing his jeans over a chair
that was in the bedroom,
and it slipped out of the back pocket
and went behind the chair.
And it resembled the map that Colin Dixon
stated that he'd been interrogated about.
Unbelievable.
To make it even better,
we also found an mp4 player.
It's got footage on it.
[woman] I'll take my phone.
[Andy] And we recognize a water tower in the background.
It, it looks like a-a flying saucer.
Herne Bay.
We said, "It can't be Herne Bay."
It can't, cannot be Herne Bay.
It's the road where Colin and Lynn Dixon live.
[footsteps]
The video is of Lea Rusha and another woman,
Jetmir Bucpapa's girlfriend.
They were going up, knocking on a door,
trying to see if the woman behind it is Colin Dixon's wife.
tense music
[knocking]
When she was arrested she said,
"Oh, I-I thought it was about collecting a debt
from a man."
Well, you're clearly looking for a lady, aren't you?
You wouldn't say fucking bitch otherwise.
It's a chilling video, isn't it?
The lengths they were prepared to go to.
The thought, preparation and planning,
every second of the night had to be plotted,
left as little to chance as possible,
a fiendishly clever plan,
which, to the, up to the moment in which they drove away
with all the money, had worked flawlessly.
As a military operation, it was incredibly successful.
It was, you know, very well planned and very well executed.
But as a criminal enterprise, it wasn't.
No one with experience of crime
would leave a forensic footprint like this.
[Andy] Lea Rusha was sunk there and then.
[Sir John] The sheer volume of the individual pieces
of this extraordinary jigsaw which the defendants,
by their incompetence and stupidity,
allowed the police to assemble,
that was what was so extraordinary about the case.
You know, there were all sorts of fascinating little sort of
quirks and alleyways associated with it.
[Andy] In a case like this, you have to follow the web.
You follow every strand until it breaks.
Once it's broken, then you can go back
and look at another one.
You have to keep following them,
otherwise, you've not covered the whole web.
[newswoman] Kent Police have now had more than
1,000 calls from the public,
but they are still appealing for more information
as they try to keep the pressure on the gang
in a bid to catch them out.
[newswoman 2] Police investigating the
Tonbridge depot robbery say that they've found
14 cages used to move the stolen cash.
[newswoman 3] They were found in fields
after police were alerted by a farmer.
Those cages were dumped from the back of a white box van
at about 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning.
A lady had seen a white truck backing up to some wasteland
and a man and a woman dumping some cages.
It transpired that that person when we did the investigation
was John Fowler and the woman was actually
Stuart Royle's girlfriend.
[Andy] Stuart Royle's name is coming up again.
Stuart Royle has a business partner at that time
and there's a lot of shady dealings going on
with a bloke called John Fowler.
And they basically have run a business together.
They've been in trouble together previously.
[Chris] John Fowler was quite a successful car dealer.
He owned a farm and an amount of land.
And, uh, he had a lot of connections in London and Kent
on the fringes of the underworld, put it that way.
Everything is-is pointing at-at Stuart Royle
and-and John Fowler.
So what we do is we get a-a-a team behind Royle.
We moved in and we arrested him.
He was in a blue BMW at the time, driving on the M2.
[newsman] Officers shot out the wheels of the car
before pulling a man from the vehicle and arresting him.
Stuart Royle, he said, "I didn't think you'd get this far
whilst I was still alive."
Either he was gonna get killed or he-he didn't know,
he didn't think we'd find him.
We charged him and his associate, John Fowler,
with the conspiracy to rob, conspiracy to kidnap,
and conspiracy to carry firearms.
We're moving in the right direction.
Monday, the 27th of February, 2006.
We had found Lea Rusha and Jetmir Bucpapa.
They were in a vehicle traveling through South London.
Firearms fires what's called a Hatton round.
And we can stop an engine with a Hatton round.
Bucpapa and Rusha, they are arrested
and brought into custody.
[newswoman] At Maidstone Magistrate's Court today
two more people were remanded in custody,
Lea John Rusha, a 33-year-old roofer from Tunbridge Wells,
and earlier today Jetmir Bucpapa,
a 24-year-old unemployed man from Tonbridge.
Both are charged with conspiracy to commit robbery.
[Adrian] We're gaining valuable forensic evidence,
and I remain confident that we'll both catch
and convict the people responsible for this.
[Andy] After their arrest,
we move into John Fowler's premises,
a place called Elderden Farm,
very lovely rural farmhouse.
What was powerful was that the,
the compound right next door to the house
fit the descriptions given by Lynn Dixon.
That could, this could be the place, the-the stronghold,
the villain stronghold, as we called it.
The workshop smelled of paint when you went in there.
Colin Dixon smelled paint.
And there was a green tarpaulin over a car.
Colin Dixon described a green tarpaulin
with a map stuck to it.
Yeah, we're getting more and more excited
about this, this place.
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[Chris] There was media, helicopters flying over it
and it was just all over the news.
They were basically saying we found the-the robbers' lair.
[Andy] Again, the pressure's on, isn't it?
You know, you've got the media saying,
"What are you doing there?
What are you searching for?"
[newswoman] Officers have been searching
the sprawling grounds of the remote farm,
sealing off areas and examining vehicles.
They searched through bins and files,
no doubt hoping this farmland investigation
would give them more clues about who stole this money
and where they've put it.
[Andy] We found the hire agreement
in John Fowler's office.
Fowler has hired a lorry.
And on a woodpile in a field,
we found a black plastic bag.
It's got 120,000 pounds from Securitas in it.
John Fowler said he found the money in a car.
And he thinks, "Oh, for safekeeping, I'll go and hide it
in a log pile in my back garden."
Not something I'd do, you know.
I don't think I'd do that, really.
[newsman] Tonight, arc lights were brought in
so the search of the farmhouse could continue
through the hours of darkness
while police officers staged road checks,
confident the last 24 hours have brought them closer
to tracing the robbers.
[newswoman] Detectives say there could well
be more dramatic developments to come.
They have now, however, finished their forensic examination
of the Tonbridge depot.
Workers will be allowed back in tomorrow.
[newswoman 2] After an audit, the owners of Securitas
revealed the final figure.
Securitas have finished the final audit.
And that figure now stands at 53 million pounds.
That is the total amount stolen in this robbery.
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[Andy] Everyone says 53 million,
but in fact it was 52,990,760 pounds.
$92.2 million.
Amazing, this was the biggest cash robbery
in the world's history,
ever.
At six o'clock, the depot robbery is bigger
than we thought.
I have to say that when he announced that final figure
of 53 million pounds, everyone's jaws just dropped.
This anonymous warehouse on the edge of Tonbridge
will now go down in history.
[Duncan] We now live in a cyber world where that level of money
that you need a lorry to take away,
a lorry, not a van or a satchel, a lorry,
you're never gonna get that kind of money
in that quantity again.
[Adrian] The robbers had only taken a quarter
of what was in that depot.
They left nearly a quarter of a billion dollars
still in the depot.
And the only reason they left it behind
was they couldn't get any more on the lorry.
If they'd only hired [laughs] a 20 or 30-ton lorry,
they could have taken the lot.
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[Andy] At this stage now, that we're five days into this.
We have arrested Michael Demetris,
Michelle Hogg,
Stuart Royle,
John Fowler,
Lea Rusha,
Jetmir Bucpapa.
There's six people.
We're still missing money.
And we're still missing a lot of money, over 50 million.
A tip, some information that went into the Met Police,
"We think you'll want to come have a look at this."
So we then go up to a repair shop,
which belongs to a man called Roger Coutts.
Roger Coutts was a, a lifelong friend, really,
of Lee Murray's and Paul Allen's,
lived in Buttmarsh Road when Lee Murray lived down there.
They'd known each other since school days.
They were close mates.
Inside one of these containers is 9.5 million pounds.
So imagine counting out nine and a half million,
it takes days.
tense music
The lab rang us and said,
"The cable ties used to tie up all the hostages,
eight of them have got Roger Coutts's DNA on them."
In the footage, the man described as Mr. Average
is bent over, cable-tying all of the hostages.
And he can't possibly have held all the cable ties
in his hand and tied everybody up.
He probably put them in his mouth.
[newsman] Roger Coutts, a 29-year-old garage owner
from Welling is to be charged in connection with
the 53 million pounds Securitas robbery in Tonbridge.
[Andy] There was clearly different plans
for different stashes of cash that came from that robbery.
We use the word,
it's a slaughter.
It's an old police-y word,
they split up all the cash, basically.
And they put it into lumps
with various little bits going off in other directions.
Some people had decided what they were going to do with it
and had been organized, others hadn't.
[Chris] I don't think the police would ever have solved it
without informants.
Ninety percent or more of the, uh, the breaks
that the police got were from tip-offs,
tip-offs were what blew the case wide open.
[newsman] Another day, another leap forward
for the investigators.
[Andy] After Rusha and Bucpapa have been charged,
a guy started to get a bit jittery and scared
because he rented his garage
to Lea Rusha's cousin.
And he knew that Lea Rusha used it.
[newsman] Police were so surprised by how much cash
they found in the garage,
that they called in Securitas
to remove the money under armed escort.
[Andy] There was about 8.7 million pounds.
And one of the houses had CCTV on it,
and we see two vehicles going to the lockup
just after the robbery,
Rusha and Bucpapa,
emptying the money from the back of a van into that locker.
If you put them all together,
we've retrieved approximately 20 million pounds back
of the 53 that were stolen.
Obviously, a lot's still outstanding.
But to be so successful so early was
good for the investigation.
The biggest concern probably was recovering the money.
So, I think that was their biggest task,
and I think maybe they didn't have all the evidence yet
to point to Lee, I don't know.
Lee Murray and-and Paul Allen were clearly
in the investigation early on.
And by the 24th of February, we were raiding their houses.
But they weren't there.
We don't know where he is.
We were looking for them around South London.
I don't know if they were looking for him,
I don't know.
They obviously weren't looking in-in the right place.
dramatic music
[Andy] That night a crossing was booked.
The following day, Murray and Allen crossed into France
via a ferry from Dover in a Mercedes.
[Adrian] It's easy to look back on hindsight and say,
"Why didn't you close the borders?"
You've got to be very clear about the person
before you start putting out a closure to a port.
You've got to have almost the evidence
to convict someone for that.
We've got intelligence saying Lee Murray did it.
That's all we've got.
You'd think they'd maybe follow him for a few days.
But, no [chuckles]
he slips through the net.
We're doing some inquiries into him.
And someone says, "Well, he got nicked recently."
And we find out that he's been arrested
on the 16th of February.
This is like five or six days before the robbery.
He's been out, he's had a few beers.
He's in his yellow Ferrari and he's crashed it.
And he tries to leave the scene.
So they try to arrest him and he basically kicks off.
[Adrian] He gets arrested for drink driving.
The car gets seized and impounded,
and he's released, but without his car.
"Where's the, um, the Ferrari?"
"It's at Charlton Pound."
"We need it searched, is there anything in there
that might be of use to us?"
We found a photograph, Lee Murray, Paul Allen,
a man called Kane Patterson,
taken the night of the crash,
and a couple of mobile phones.
So we're very interested.
The DS is listening to one of the phones,
what's that?
Murray had pressed the recording button
and they were discussing who was going to go
with Colin Dixon,
the manager of the Securitas Depot,
to the gate and gain access to the depot itself
on the night of the robbery.
There was evidence planning the robbery.
I-I mean, it's almost unbelievable.
It was just gold dust.
We've got the London gang head,
the Kent gang head,
Lea Rusha and Lee Murray,
the two Lees,
the two pivotal players in, in the, the whole gang,
talking about this robbery together.
dramatic music
It then tells you, very importantly,
who two of the other robbers are,
Paul and Kane.
[Rusha] Paul or Kane, someone, anyone, I don't care.
[Sir John] And also, discussing reconnaissance
within the depot,
secretly recorded of what the depot looked inside.
And it also tells us they've got someone inside the depot
as an inside man.
[Paul] One of the key elements here was to get somebody
inside the depot in a position where he could film it
so they knew exactly where the money was kept
and these are the-the routes that we have to take.
[Adrian] We were pretty convinced
there was an inside man.
The question is, who was it?
We had officers looking at the CCTV, all of it.
And there were 84 cameras in this place.
That's a lot of footage to look at.
And they were looking at it and they were looking at it,
and then one of the DCs comes up and said,
"You just need to look at this and tell me what you think."
Ermir Hysenaj is a person of habit.
So what he would generally do is he would turn up
within a microsecond of his shift starting
and go straight into, to where he was supposed to be working
sitting down at a desk,
counting money.
He'd never been early.
It's the 16th of January
and Ermir Hysenaj is 20 minutes early.
He walks up the stairs.
He walks into the staff room
and he comes out and he walks down the corridor,
he goes to the very end to the top of the stairs
and he turned.
Clearly see a belt, his shirt is tucked down.
He would generally walk around and his shirt was untucked,
virtually all the time.
He goes through the air lock
into the main part of the building.
He gets rid of his coat in the changing rooms,
comes back out, and then he-he stands
and looks at the control room door,
he's square onto it,
then goes out to the back where he works
and he stands right in front of the window
in the loading bay.
He's filming,
he is filming.
He then stands right in front of the air lock
on the loading bay.
tense music
Go back later on and look at the phone records,
two minutes after he leaves that depot,
he's on the phone to Jetmir Bucpapa.
Lee Murray's phone pings
in Southborough at the same location.
Lea Rusha's as well and they then start to move
down to Tonbridge,
obviously going to watch the footage.
And he returns and his shirt's untucked,
completely untucked, from his trousers.
But it's absolutely certain what he was doing.
There's no doubt about it.
The gang decided they needed someone inside that,
that depot to see what it looked like.
They put him into that depot.
The gang orchestrated him being employed there.
[Paul] Hysenaj, an Albanian who'd been in this country
since the age of 10,
a person who had no overt criminal past
and so he was perfect in terms of if Securitas were going to
have to pass him to the police for vetting,
that he would not arouse suspicion,
and that worked perfectly.
[Alun] I did a lot of the interviews.
All I remember of him is he just seemed a normal,
like quiet, quiet guy.
Ermir Hysenaj,
a critical component part of the conspiracy,
became employed in December, 2005,
so two months before the robbery.
The last block of evidence that was significant
was the DNA evidence with the prosthetics
found from Miss Hogg's bin.
soft dramatic music
[Adrian] Forensics takes some time to come back,
particularly DNA evidence.
But most importantly,
we find DNA linked to Lee Murray.
[Andy] Lea Rusha's DNA is on some of the latex.
And we find DNA from Paul Allen on the cigarette butt.
soft dramatic music
There was so much in there.
Thank goodness we didn't let the trash man take it.
It would have been lost.
We know that Lee Murray was one of the robbers.
We know from the phone call.
[Paul] That was a horrendous blunder,
which absolutely [laughs] pins him
to the center of the conspiracy.
We know he was one of the robbers.
So then line your robbers up,
is he the driver of the lorry?
I don't think so, not unless he's eaten his sofa.
The driver was Stuart Royle,
Hoodie is Paul Allen,
Mr. Average is Roger Coutts,
Shorty is Lea Rusha,
Hi-Vis is Jetmir Bucpapa.
Kane was the man going into the depot with Colin Dixon.
He's actually got the correct uniform.
He's got a Kent Police hat,
Kent Police badge on it,
a fluorescent jacket,
and he's got a Motorola radio pinned to his lapel,
which is something that we had.
Kane Patterson, um,
we're, we're still looking for him.
And who's got the nastiest, biggest gun in the gang?
Stopwatch, he's got an AK-47.
That's the worst weapon you can have.
And he's orchestrating it.
Lee Murray is Stopwatch.
I am certain that who I've said
played each part is that person.
[Adrian] The links were coming together and we could not just
have intelligence, but actually have the evidence
to prove it at court.
We know that we are very interested in Lee Murray now.
He's gone,
we can't stop that.
All the evidence that we gleaned about him
was secured after he'd-he'd fled the country,
so he's gone.
gentle suspenseful music
[Fryklund] England, Cage Rage, Fight Day,
I was the main event with Anderson Silva.
So I warm up,
doo, doo, doo, doo,
a little knock on the door and the door cracks real slowly,
and there's this dude in a fucking little burgundy
fucking three-piece suit and he's got a fucking cell phone
that's already flipped open.
And he goes like this, he goes,
I go, "Shut the fuck up."
He goes, "Yeah" he goes, "Take it, take it."
And I go, "Are you there?"
He goes, "Hey."
I go, "Oh, my God, what the f-?"
It was Lee, it was Lee's voice.
"You getting ready to go on?"
I go, "I'm the next fight."
He goes, "Oh, watch out for his fucking left side.
Stay away from his left side."
He's going on and on, I go, "Dude, get off the phone.
What are you doing?"
"Ah, it's fucking fine, it's fucking fine, I'm good.
It's fucking hidden."
I go, "Wh- get off the phone."
And he goes, "Ah, it's fine, they're not gonna find me.
D-don't worry, don't worry."
"Fucking go, bro, you're gonna go.
Is this being, are they tracing this one?"
He goes, "Nah, it's fucking fine.
We're gonna get rid of it, we're gonna get rid of it."
I go, "Okay, okay, I, okay, I love you, brother, okay.
Fucking bye, bye, bye, bye."
He goes, "Okay, I love you, mate, fucking smash him."
And I, and I'll, I-I think I said,
"Don't fucking call me again."
Because I don't w- I-I honestly, that shit, fucking ah.
[stammers] I think I said,
yeah, I said, "Don't call me again"
because I didn't want, I didn't want him to get caught.
That's why, fuck, yeah.
I didn't want him to get caught,
I remember that.
I blocked that out, I said,
"Don't fucking call me again, dude."
Dang it,
fucking dang it.
[Andy] Sit down and think about it.
Let's work out, what do you need?
We know that he's absolutely glued to Paul Allen.
They have families in this country.
So let's keep an eye on the families.
This is Siobhan, Lee Murray's wife at the time.
And it soon became apparent that both Siobhan and Stacey,
formerly Paul Allen's other half,
had booked the same flight from London to Spain.
They went to Malaga and they got in a cab and, uh,
two of our operatives went with them,
we followed them.
There's no, no way to kind of, uh, get around it.
That's wh- that's what we did.
And they kept going further and further.
Where are they going?
You know, where are they going?
And then we're getting excited.
We think we might actually find Paul Allen and Lee Murray.
They keep going and they come to the town of Algeciras.
And it has a ferry service.
They can't be, they-they can't be.
You don't think they're in Morocco, do you?
He has got a Moroccan father, Lee Murray.
They were going to Morocco.
The two operatives jump on the ferry as well.
But we have no extradition treaty.
We have no treaties in place
with the Moroccan authorities at all.
They can't make an incursion onto Moroccan soil,
not in an official capacity.
You just do not do that.
So there are a series of hurried calls
from embassy to embassy, the British government,
to Morocco and the embassy.
They got permission to continue on their journey.
They landed in Tangier.
Our officers are met by people
from the intelligence service in-in Morocco.
So they're just waiting for the protocols.
There are certain things you can and can't do
in different cultures.
The two officers, they have to leave it to the Moroccans
at that point.
And they were taken down to Rabat, the capital of Morocco.
They were booked into a hotel.
You cannot go out and make your own inquiries.
It's warm, it's sunny, so there's a pool,
so, what to do?
Well, they go and sit down, have a-a
glass and just caught some rays at the pool.
They become aware of other people clearly English-speaking
coming towards the pool.
To their incredulity, they look up and they see
that it is Siobhan and Stacey.
And they are with
Paul Allen and Lee Murray.
You couldn't have bet on that.
I know there was a big gulp
by the two British officers thinking,
"Oh, shit," [laughs] "in the same hotel!"
Luck.
dramatic music