They thought they could pull off what would have been the biggest diamond heist in history – snatching gems worth an eye-watering £350m from the Millennium Dome.
But much like the dome itself, the dramatic raid to steal the stunning De Beers diamond collection ended in ignominious failure.
Months of planning and meticulous preparation went into the audacious heist. It would see a JCB smashing into the dome and a speedboat used to escape.
However, the robbers behind the daring raid were thwarted by an informer who tipped off police – with some 300 officers lying in wait for the gang to strike.
In the end, the diamonds remained safely under lock and key – with the crooks behind the heist also finding themselves securely caged away in prison.
The story behind the Millennium Dome raid, how it was carried out and ultimately foiled, has now been revealed in a new Netflix show, ‘The Diamond Heist’.
Produced by legendary crime film director Guy Ritchie, the three-part docu-drama is the latest true crime smash to hit the streaming giant.
It features first-hand accounts from former gang member Lee Wenham and the Met’s ex-Flying Squad task for catching them.
Pictured is one of the planners behind the heist, Lee Wenham, who was jailed for nine years for his part in the raid. Wenham is pictured on Netflix’s The Diamond Heist
Raiders used a JCB to smash their way into the Millennium Dome as part of the audacious raid
Crookes believed they were just inches away from a mega pay day, smashing through a heavily armoured display containing diamonds using a nail gun and then a hammer
Among the gemstones was the Millennium Star, worth millions of pounds. It had been replace by a fake after police caught wind of the raid
Armed with ammonia and smoke grenades, the gang bulldozed their way into the Greenwich attraction in November 2000.
They intended to seize the fabulous Millennium Star – which was owned by specialists De Beers – along with 11 other blue diamonds rated among the finest in the world, before escaping by speedboat, James Bond-style.
Unfortunately for them, however, their every move had been anticipated thanks to a meticulous and detailed police sting.
The gems had been replaced with fakes. And as the gang smashed their way into the display cases, an army of cops – some armed – were waiting to swoop, with surveillance cameras capturing every stage of the drama.
As one member of the gang ruefully put it at the time: ‘We would have got away with it but for the fact there were 140 police waiting for us.’
The Millennium Dome – which is now known at the London O2 – was opened to huge fanfare in 2000, with VIPs including the late Queen Elizabeth and former Prime Minister Tonty Blair, among those at its launch.
But the attraction was met with a lacklustre reception from the British public, with only half the number of visitors expected to attend actually doing so.
Inside its remarkable curved roof, the dome featured some of the rarest gemstones in the world – including the De Beers Millennium Jewels exhibit, which showcased priceless blue diamonds and the 203.04 carat Millennium Star diamond.
Pictured is the Millennium Dome where the audacious raid was staged in November 2000
Mugshot of Dome gang member (top left), Lee Wenham (top right), Terence Millman (bottom left) Ray Betson (bottom right) William Cockram
A JCB was used as a battering ram to smash through the dome’s defences
Pictured is one of the gang members as they tried to smash their way through the container holding the diamond
This was the damage done to the container which was used to keep the diamonds safe
And it was this glittering array of gems, which would be worth some £700m in today’s money, that caught the eye of the criminal underworld.
By the summer of 2000, south-east London gangsters were already plotting an assault of the dome to snatch the gems.
Gathering experts from the criminal underworld, crooks spent months studying the building’s layout and day-to-day routine of workers, before then seeking to get a JCB and speedboat for the raid.
Much of the planning took place on the grounds of a rural farm, near Maidstone in Kent, with the gang believed to be stealing to order for the Russian mafia.
Despite the farcical outcome of the heist, there was nothing comical about the gang’s background. Detectives described them as ‘extremely ruthless’.
The mastermind, Raymond ‘Black Ray’ Betson, of Chatham, Kent and his righthand man William Cockram, from Catford, south-east London, were jailed for 18 years each.
Regarded by police as ‘career robbers’, they were behind a series of other raids in London and the south east.
Robert Adams and Aldo Ciarrocchi, of south-east London, got 15 years each. Adams, a cocaine smuggler who tried to murder his first wife, belonged to Britain’s most notorious crime dynasty – the Adams Family of North London, who amassed a multi-million-pound fortune through drugs.
Raymond Betson was the mastermind behind the Millennium Dome heist in 2000
Pictured is the scene after police caught the gang of robbers following months of surveillance
Pictured is Lee Wenham after the raid (left) and Wenham in the Netflix documentary (right)
Items, including a gas mask and a nail gun, recovered by police in the aftermath of the abortive raid on the Millennium Dome in November 2000
Lee Wenham, who was part of the gang and was close with Betson, was jailed for nine years for helping to plan the robbery. He proposed using a JCB to breach the dome and even cased the site during a visit to it with his young daughter.
Ciarrocchi, who stayed outside the Dome vault throwing smoke bombs to shield the other robbers, planned to use the £50,000 he was promised for the raid to start a new life in America with his middle-class fiancee, US model Elisabeth Kirsch, 25, who had no idea he was a criminal.
A fifth man, speedboat driver Kevin Meredith, from Brighton, who was cleared of conspiracy to rob but convicted of conspiracy to steal, was jailed for five years.
Behind the cheeky Cockney image presented during their trial, was a gang ruthlessly determined to succeed.
After investing tens of thousands planning the heist they stored the equipment they needed at a disused commercial yard in Plumstead, south-east London, and two remote Kent farms near Maidstone.
A JCB was chosen as a battering ram – the gang guessing a digger would not attract unwelcome attention near the dome because of constant building work going on nearby.
As they continued their build-up – using ‘pay-as-you-go’ mobile phones to arrange meetings – they even posed as tourists with their families to film the object of their desires in the Money Zone.
Ammonia gas was purchased to knock out any potential ‘have-a-go heroes’, and smoke bombs bought to cause chaos.
They were certainly not short of confidence.
Gang member Terry Millman – who died of cancer while awaiting trial – used the name ‘T. Diamond’ when he handed over £3,700 in cash to buy the getaway speed-boat at a yard in the seaside town of Whitstable, Kent. In the weeks before the raid two aborted attempts were made to steal the diamonds.
John Swinfield, a detective chief inspector in the Met’s Flying Squad which busted the gang
This was the stunning diamond that was among those crooks wanted to steal
On October 6, 2000 the plan was called off after the speedboat developed engine problems.
A month later on November 6, the second raid was cut short when the Thames tide meant a getaway would be impossible.
But the following day they put their plan into action shortly after 9am.
Once inside the dome the gang faced what should have been their most difficult problem in overcoming the ‘impregnable’ diamond display cases.
Built to resist the force of a 60-ton ram raid, the explosive-resistant glass was also designed to foil any ‘known tool’ for at least 30 minutes. Cockram, however, had the answer. The idea was to weaken the glass with three shots from a powerful Hilti nailgun. Robert Adams would then use a sledgehammer to break the ‘warmed’ glass.
As Adams smashed his way through, the plan appeared to be working to perfection. The world’s most fabulous collection of diamonds was within arm’s reach in just 27 seconds.
‘I was 12 inches from pay day,’ Adams later said. ‘It would have been a blinding Christmas.’
Within three minutes the gang should have been ferried by the 55mph speedboat across the Thames to a rendezvous with Russian gangsters at the Mayflower pub in Rotherhithe. But the police had other ideas.
Gangsters Bill Cockram (left) and Ray Betson at a celebration for Millennium night 1999 in New York ahead of the heist at the dome
The policeman who oversaw ‘Operation Magician’, Detective Chief Superintendent John Shatford, traces the story of the dome raiders back to another audacious robbery attempt three years ago.
In February 1999 armed men tried to pull off a £10million raid on a security van in Nine Elms, South London.
Gunmen had stopped a cashladen lorry by blocking off both ends of Nine Elms Lane. The plan was to use a lorry carrying Christmas trees nearby as a battering ram.
In fact, the foliage camouflaged a huge metal spike welded into the chassis with which the thieves planned to split open the security van’s rear doors.
However, an irate motorist who was late for work removed the ignition keys from the unattended Christmas tree van. At a stroke, the robbers’ plan had been left in tatters and they fled emptyhanded, making their escape in an inflatable speedboat.
‘What that day did was inform me that there was a gang with a sufficient organisation and capability to carry off a robbery of an intense magnitude,’ said Mr Shatford.
Fifteen months later a gang tried to pull off another multimillion-pound robbery using similar techniques.
Details of this unsuccessful attack, which cannot be revealed for legal reasons, gave detectives a vital breakthrough.
Police tracked some of the vehicles used in this raid to two isolated farms in rural Kent and the properties were immediately put under 24-hour surveillance.
Police followed the gang on CCTV as they made their way towards the dome in a van
By now officers had also received a tip-off about the Dome raid from an informer, whose identity remains a closely guarded secret but is thought to be an associate of Brink’s-Mat robber and M25 road rage killer Kenneth Noye.
Two months before the raid, Betson and Cockram were caught on film visiting the Dome posing as tourists. Their intention suddenly became clear.
At a meeting of detectives hunting the Nine Elms robbers, a detective inspector who had recently visited the Dome quipped: ‘Maybe they are after the Millennium jewels?’
‘Christ, that’s it’ cried another. The penny had finally dropped and the police counter-attack was put into action. More than 100 officers from the Flying Squad were placed on constant standby, backed up by armed officers. But Mr Shatford admits: ‘What I did not know – and I never knew until it happened – was how they were going to do it.’
The four men found guilty of the robbery charge had admitted the lesser charge of conspiring to steal, which carried a maximum sentence of seven years.
Meredith denied conspiracy to rob and conspiracy to steal.
The jury of seven women and five men reached majority verdicts after almost seven days of deliberation. Betson and Cockram showed no emotion as they were led off to start their 18-year sentences.
Judge Coombe told them: ‘It was a wicked and highly professional crime. It was a very well-planned and pre-meditated attempt to rob the diamonds’ owners, De Beers, of what would have been the most gigantic sum in history.’
- The Diamond Heist is available to stream now on Netflix.
