It took two nights over the Easter weekend in 2015 for a team of seven burglars to drill 20 inches through the concrete wall of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit vault and help themselves to what was claimed at the time to be around £100m worth of jewels, gold and cash from 73 boxes. Following the convictions of the men responsible at Woolwich crown court the next year, it took only slightly longer for eight different production companies to announce that they were about to make a movie or television series about the heist.

The details of the crime were instantly appealing: most of the burglars were in their 70s or late 60s(and had been enthusiastically dubbed the “Diamond Wheezers” by the tabloids); they had taken a break from the break-in to leave the premises and find a better drill; some of the stolen jewels were hidden in the graves of relatives of one of the team. Among the burglars were Terry Perkins, who had been jailed for his role in the £6m Security Express robbery in east London back in 1983, and Brian Reader, who served time for his role in the £26m Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow airport in the same year (and whom I had met years earlier in my work as a crime reporter).

Brian Reader (left) is out of jail, but in poor health; Terry Perkins (right) died in his cell at Belmarsh. Photograph: PA

In his closing address to the jury, Nicholas Corsellis, the barrister for Carl Wood, another member of the crew, suggested there would be a film, perhaps called Bad Grandpas or The Enfield Expendables. While many of the proposed film projects went the way of most film projects, three have now been made. The first, Hatton Garden: The Heist, came out in 2016 and went straight to DVD. The second, The Hatton Garden Job, directed by Ronnie Thompson and starring Larry Lamb, Phil Daniels and Matthew Goode, came out last year and got a bit of a kicking from critics: “After a while [it] begins to feel like a bizarre, Brechtian joke at the audience’s expense: vast expanses of the film are, quite literally, just boring,” was how a critic in the Telegraph saw it. The third one, King Of Thieves, arrives this month. Just as the main players in the burglary pleaded guilty at the first opportunity – you get a discount of a third off your sentence if you do so – we should immediately declare an interest, as Working Title, the producers of King Of Thieves, bought the rights to my Guardian Weekend article on the burglary. But, hand on heart, it is by far the best of the bunch.

There has not been this level of interest in a similar criminal enterprise since the Great Train Robbery of 1963

It stars Sir Tom Courtenay and Sir Michael Gambon, along with Sir Michael Caine as Reader – more knights in the film than nights in the vault, you could say – as well as Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, Francesca Annis, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Cox, who plays the mystery man, known only as “Basil”, who eluded capture.

More screen action will come soon in the shape of an ITV four-parter with Timothy Spall and Kenneth Cranham. A whole generation of British actors will have profited far more from that Easter weekend than their larcenous contemporaries who did all the heavy lifting.

King Of Thieves, starring (from left) Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone and Paul Whitehouse. Photograph: Jack English

Apart from the films, there have already been four books on the case. There is even a catchy ska song, It’s The Hatton Garden Job, on Arthur Kay and the Clerks’ 2017 album The Night I Came Home: “Wonder what they’re thinking/ If they ever get out again/ Will they buy us a decent striker?/ Or a villa down in Spain?” All that’s missing is the musical and the video game.

There has not been this level of interest in a similar criminal enterprise since the Great Train Robbery of 1963, which led to more than 40 books and a cluster of film and television dramas, including Buster, with Phil Collins, Julie Walters andLarry Lamb; The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery; The Great Paper Chase; Prisoner Of Rio and, most recently, Mrs Biggs. This is despite the fact that Hatton Garden was, in the end, a botched job, with most of those involved ending up behind bars and one of them, Terry Perkins, who had diabetes and heart problems, dying alone in his Belmarsh cell in February this year.

Far removed from the landings of Belmarsh is the London location where I’m watching an exchange between Michael Caine as Reader and Charlie Cox as the enigmatic Basil, talking in an entertainingly roundabout way about the possibility of pulling off this “one last job”. There’s a jazz score playing in the background, and they shoot it a number of times to get the atmosphere absolutely right. Caine doesn’t look much like Reader, but exhibits the same sense of quiet sophistication as the man I knew, who liked the best restaurants, enjoyed travelling abroad and was generally not your typical East End thief.

The director, James Marsh, who is remarkably approachable for a man in the midst of a complex film, also made the Oscar-winning 2008 documentary Man On Wire, about Philippe Petit, who walked on a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York in 1974.

There is a sense that the villains knew they were going to get caught but still went ahead with it

“In many ways, the stories were similar,” Marsh says. “Philippe used to watch heist films, and he approached his adventure as if it were a heist, going into the building beforehand in disguises and assembling a motley crew of accomplices. There was a playfulness and mischief to it. Also, in both films there is a certain sense that, as Ray Winstone said to me when we first spoke about it, the villains in our story kind of knew they were going to get caught but they still went ahead with it. It was a last hurrah.”

A Met police image of the hole drilled in the wall at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit over Easter 2015. Photograph: Getty Images

The script is by Joe Penhall, whose criminal past – that is to say, his screenwriting about crime – includes Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm and, more recently, Mindhunter. Penhall was intrigued by the transcripts of bugged conversations between two of the thieves, Perkins and Danny Jones; police had hidden listening devices in the suspects’ cars in the immediate aftermath of the burglary. The pair went into such incriminating detail, not just about themselves but also about their colleagues, whom they cheerfully bad-mouthed and mocked, that the audio recordings played a major part in the trial. The two were heard chortling over “the biggest robbery in the fucking world – what a book you could write”.

There was a moment of grim irony when Jones told Perkins of this amazing device a friend had come across that you fit in your car to alert you whenever the police are nearby. “If they come on you within half a mile [it] goes ‘bip, bip, bip’,” he explained enthusiastically. “Nine hundred quid to have it fitted in your motor.” Jones would later come unstuck when he told the police he had hidden his loot in a relative’s grave in Edmonton cemetery – but omitted to tell them he had hidden a larger haul in another grave, which the officers discovered for themselves.

“I was fascinated by the interface of rat-like animal cunning and sheer stupidity – which is the criminal mind laid bare,” says Penhall of the bugged conversations. “It unarguably required immense physical stamina and a certain mad, bent genius. Like most criminals they fantasised about becoming famous and being the subject of a movie. And they knew people would give them a warm wind because of their advancing ages.”

Francesca Annis with Michael Caine as Brian Reader, a career criminal with a taste for the finer things in life. Photograph: Jack English

Penhall reckons that “in this country we have a long history of pillaging and purloining other people’s treasure and then somehow justifying it, so I think people instinctively warmed to them… Also, people love sticking it to the man and they love a bit of cheek. We love the underdog: ‘Bless them, they were old and knackered – good luck to them.’” This was reflected in a comment left on a Daily Mail story about the crime: “I say drop the case and let them go. Nowadays we need to reward hard manual labour and they showed up over a holiday weekend to boot.”

One of those convicted who doesn’t appear in any of the films, but perhaps deserves one of his own, is Hugh Doyle, who at 48 was very much the youngest of those arrested. Doyle was a plumber from Dublin who was alleged to have allowed his premises to be used for sorting out the loot, something he always denied; he was an old drinking buddy of three of the burglars. After the trial, at which he received a suspended sentence, he got a phone call from a relative in Ireland. “She said, ‘Are things getting back to normal?’” recounts Doyle. “‘Let’s see if I can turn it up a notch.’” And a remarkable story unfolded.

‘That must be my dad!’: Hugh Doyle was convicted for his part in the crime. Publication of his photo in the press led to an unexpected family reunion. Photograph: REX Shutterstock

As a teenager Doyle had headed for London, lived in squats and taken on odd jobs. He popped back to Dublin one weekend, and two years later he found out that a brief liaison with a young woman on that trip had led to the birth of a boy, who had been put up for adoption. “She had no idea how to get in touch with me so I didn’t know anything about it.” He tried to track the boy down but had no luck, until “thanks to all the press coverage of the case, he saw me on the front pages. He knew my name was Hugh Doyle and he thought, ‘That looks like me. That must be my dad!’ He’s 25 and studying graphic design, and we’re now in regular contact.”

Doyle also recounts his experience of being arrested and seeing his house searched: “They even sieved my gravel driveway – it looked lovely and fluffy afterwards. I had two one-ton bags of wood in the driveway for my fire. A neighbour told me that there was a policeman literally sniffing and knocking each log. I said to one of the Flying Squad guys, ‘That was surely a job for special branch?’”

His time awaiting trial in Belmarsh high-security prison was educational. “There was a big, tall guy who said to us as soon as we arrived, ‘Anything you need?’” This was Abdulla Ahmed Ali, who had been jailed for a minimum of 40 years in 2009 for plotting to blow up transatlantic flights – which he still denies. “He made one of the best coffees I’d ever had. Then they [he and his fellow inmates] said, ‘We’ve made a surprise for you.’ They came out with a chocolate cake, with nuts and oatmeal, cooked using a portable kettle.”

Ali, a BSc from City University, was doing an Open University politics course and was prepared to engage. “We did a deal - he would read Hitchens and Dawkins (on the delusion of God) and I would read a book he gave me denying the theory of evolution… They prayed a lot and were very into wildlife programmes on TV – great fans of David Attenborough. I think they found it strange that they were there: the plan wasn’t for them to be around to be interviewed by an Irish plumber; the plan was to be in paradise.”

Watch the trailer for King Of Thieves

It was finally accepted in court hearings earlier this year that the total stolen in the Hatton Garden heist was worth around £14m, of which only a third has been recovered. Perkins, Reader, Jones and John “Kenny” Collins, another of the gang’s ringleaders, were ordered to pay £6m each in compensation under the Proceeds of Crime Act, or face another seven years inside. Reader, now out of jail and in poor health, is appealing against this, as he and Wood walked out of the burglary halfway through when the initial drilling failed, and thus did not profit from it. Basil – the name given him in court, the supposed “Best Alarm Specialist In London” – has yet to be unmasked. Some of the accused did not know Basil’s real identity; the others stuck by the old-school criminal’s 11th commandment, “Thou shalt not grass.” One man awaits trial in the new year in connection with the burglary, and is denying all the charges.

As for Hatton Garden itself, Brett Afshar, of the manufacturing jewellers Hearts of London, says that the combination of the burglary and the various films has been great for business. “It has really put Hatton Garden on the map as the centre of the jewellery trade,” he says cheerfully. “We have seen massive growth.” He adds that Bond Street jewellers have told him enviously that they wished they had had the same publicity. While there were victims who lost jewels and money, the fact that it was a non-violent operation was important, he said. “It was a bank holiday and no one was around – no staff were shot, no one came through the window with a sledgehammer.”

Philippe Petit was arrested after his illicit high-wire act in New York, but the charges were dismissed in exchange for him doing a performance for children in Central Park. The Diamond Wheezers could but dream of such benign punishment; but having had their day in court, they now have their days on screen.

• King Of Thieves is released in the UK on 14 September

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• This article was amended on 11 September 2018 to remove some personal details.



