Free Gangs by Tony Thompson

were made of matchwood.
    Shatford was horrified. It looked like they were going to drive the bulldozer straight into the Dome. Around a hundred visitors, including a party of schoolchildren, were milling around inside. Shatford ordered his men to move as many people discreetly away from the vault as possible. ‘We tried to thin out the crowd as much as we could but there had to be people there otherwise the gang would have suspected something was wrong and aborted the job. We had to let them get into the vault.’
    The bulldozer continued picking up speed as it crashed through a set of locked gates and entered the main grounds of the Dome. Betson made a sharp right turn and headed towards a Perspex shutter that formed part of the outer wall of the Dome itself. It shattered into a thousand pieces as he tore through it at 35 m.p.h. A handful of visitors and two undercover police officers dived out of the way, narrowly avoiding being crushed, as Betson pulled up right outside the vault.
    Cockram and Adams leapt from the bulldozer and ran towards the diamonds, while Ciarrocci jumped down and threw the first of four smoke grenades, filling the arena with a thick blue haze.
    Inside the vault, Cockram reached the tall glass cylinder that held the Millennium Star and pulled the nailgun from the canvas bag slung around his shoulder. He fired six times, making a small star-shaped pattern, then stepped aside to let Adams hit the area with a sledgehammer. After two hefty blows, there was a fist-sized hole in the glass directly in front of the Milennium Star. Using £750 worth of tools, the gang had breached the £2 million security systems in just twenty-seven seconds.
    ‘I couldn’t believe how easily the glass went,’ Adams would say later. ‘I only hit it twice. I was twelve inches from pay-day. I almost had it in my hand. It would have been a blinding Christmas.’
    Watching the scene unfold on the monitors in control room, Shatford barked the order: ‘Strike, strike, strike.’ The ‘cleaners’ pulled guns from rubbish bags; dozens of armed officers in black combat gear emerged from all around and raced towards Ciarrocci and Betson. Utterly overwhelmed, outnumbered and outgunned, they surrendered without a shot being fired.
    Inside the vault Adams and Cockram were oblivious to what was going on until a stun grenade landed at their feet. Trapped inside the vault they knew there was no escape and threw themselves to the floor.
    Outside the Dome, armed officers in police speedboats descended on Meredith while others arrested Millman. A team led by Dolden moved in on Tong Farm and arrested Lee Wenham. In the days that followed, the number of visitors to the Dome soared dramatically as people flocked to the scene of the crime. After eleven months, the boast of ‘one amazing day’ had finally come true.
    As the gang had been caught red-handed, prosecutors expected them to offer little in the way of defence when the case came to court. However, it soon emerged that Betson and his men had planned what to say in the event of being captured almost as carefully as they had planned the robbery itself.
    Under English law there is a subtle distinction between the act of robbery and the act of stealing: the former includes the use or threat of violence and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. A charge of stealing implies the perpetrators did not intend to cause any harm to anyone. The longest jail term available is seven years.
    Betson, Cockram, Ciarrocci and Adams pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal but not guilty to conspiracy to rob. The fact that none of the gang had been carrying guns during the raid – much to the surprise of the Flying Squad – worked heavily in their favour. Only Meredith denied both charges. Millman, who finally succumbed to his cancer, died six weeks before the trial began.
    Once the prosecution had completed their case, Betson took the stand. Cocky and confident, he told the jury that, as borne