Golden Grab

Historic heist at Heathrow

In the early hours of Saturday morning six gunmen, clad in black jumpsuits and woolen ski masks, raced up to the Brinks-mat Depot No. 7 in a drab row of industrial warehouses near Heathrow Airport, 15 miles west of London. Without apparent difficulty, they slipped past the searchlights and highly sophisticated alarm system that guard the building. Once inside, the intruders overpowered seven security men, handcuffing five of them together. The other two were less fortunate: the gunmen pistol-whipped one; they slashed through the other's shirt, tickled his stomach with a knife and then poured gasoline over his body. One false move, he was warned, and he would be set afire. Finally, one of the prisoners managed to wriggle free of his handcuffs and set off an alarm. But the masked men had fled two hours earlier, taking with them an estimated 6,800 bars of gold bullion valued at more than $36 million.

The robbery was the biggest in the history of a nation famous for high-bracket heists.* By comparison, in the 1963 Great Train Robbery--Britain's most notorious caper and until recently the richest--thieves escaped with a relatively modest $7.3 million in bank notes from the Glasgow-London Royal Mail train near Mentmore, England. This year, however, the records have been falling fast. On Easter Monday, a team of masked men invaded the Security Express depot in London and made off with an estimated $10.5 million in cash receipts. Two months later, five armed men, three of them disguised in monkey masks, forced employees of Bonds jewelers in central London to open their vault and escaped with $15.7 million worth of gems.

The record-setting heist last Easter bore striking similarities to last weekend's robbery. "It might be that there is a link," said a Scotland Yard spokesman, "or it might be that it is a copycat." The gang that raided the forbidding Security Express warehouse, known as "Fort Knox," seized a lone guard in the early hours of the morning, trussed up seven other employees as they arrived for work, and poured gasoline over one of their captives' legs. Once the security vault was open, the thieves loaded their booty into three waiting vans, painted yellow to resemble those used by Security Express, and drove away. Authorities assumed that the crooks were assisted by inside information.

The Heathrow robbery was no less polished. Somehow the thieves evaded all the warehouse's closed-circuit TV cameras. As one of the largest gold transporters in Britain, Brinks-mat was hardly lax about security. "The whole place was alarmed," said a worker at a nearby warehouse. "As soon as one of the vans would arrive, the doors would close behind it." Having penetrated the 150-foot-long warehouse, the crooks headed straight for the room in which the gold was stored. As a Scotland Yard official told TIME: "The gang must have had 'inside information' from someone who knew both how to get into the building unobserved and where the bullion was to be found."

At week's end a group of insurance companies offered a $3 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the gold and the arrest of the criminals. The reward, the largest in British history, was aimed at encouraging an informer from within the gang of six or one familiar with its plans. Police suspected that the culprits would probably lie low for several months, while the gold is melted down and sold. According to a convicted murderer who shared a cell with the celebrated perpetrators of the Great Train Robbery, "Things are very sophisticated now. At one time when a quantity of gold was stolen, it would have been sold at a heavy discount. Now -L- 1 million in gold brings -L- 1 million--and the person who buys it melts it and sells it for at least that amount." Since the gold may already have left the country, Scotland Yard requested the assistance of Interpol in an international dragnet.

Perhaps the biggest puzzle was how the thieves could have made away so cleanly with such a bulky treasure. "They must have had at least a couple of vehicles," said one police officer. Indeed, the Great Gold Robbery seems certain to take yet another place in British record books, this one for the heaviest heist ever. The 76 boxes full of gold weigh an estimated 6,000 lbs.

*In the biggest robbery of all time, thieves spirited $400 million worth of negotiable securities out of the German Reichsbank after that country's collapse in 1945. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.