Before being sent back to jail for failing to pay back the proceeds of crime, the 78-year-old career burglar gave his only press interview

He was the lookout man in the Hatton Garden £14 million safe deposit burglary. But on Thursday he was told that, for the foreseeable future, he will be looking out of the windows of one of HM’s prisons because little of the stolen loot has been returned.

Kenny Collins, who is 78, was jailed for 2,309 days – just over six years – under the Proceeds of Crime Act and told by the judge, Richard Blake, “It was entirely [your] decision to commit this crime at a time of life when most people hope to enjoy a quiet retirement.”

Collins has already served his time for the 2015 burglary, and this additional “default” sentence comes because neither he nor his fellow burglars have paid back all of the £7.6m demanded of them by the court. Of those convicted, Brian Reader, 80, has been diagnosed with dementia and his case is still to be heard, and Danny Jones, 64, is already serving an additional seven years. Another, Terry Perkins, died in jail last year. As Collins’s lawyer, Nathaniel Rudolf, put it delicately at a previous hearing: “Perkins is serving the ultimate default term.”

While awaiting the hearing, Collins told the Observer why – as someone who had been quite successful in various forms of business, some legal, some most certainly not, for the past 30 years – he got involved in the robbery, rather than, as the judge suggested, enjoying a quiet retirement.

My first offence was in 1951 for stealing bikes when I was 11 years old

“I didn’t want to miss out. I was 74. I thought, fuck it. You’re talking about 10 years maximum and you don’t think you’re going to get caught. The job had been around for a while. We might have done it at Christmas [2014] but Brian [Reader, the ringleader] fell out of a tree, so it had to be put off. I was the last one in. My last one, it would have been.

“My son, Vincent, died a couple of years ago – I might not have went if he was alive. He was special needs. He couldn’t read or write or tell the time, and he never worked. He died of diabetes – he was only 53. That’s the only thing that might have stopped me.”

Collins has a long criminal history. “As boys, we played in bomb sites in Tottenham [north London] and started nicking things. My first offence was in 1951 for stealing bikes when I was 11. I nicked money off the place outside the church where you got newspapers. When I was 16 I worked in the timber trade and got blinding wages – £4 a day – but when it finished I couldn’t get back to what I was making before, so I started thieving. I got done for robbery in 1961 and I got five years.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Collins arrives for sentencing at Westminster magistrates court. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

“I’ve done about 10 lots of bird. I was in borstal with James Hanratty [controversially hanged in 1962 for the A6 murder] and I’ve been in Wormwood Scrubs, Pentonville, Maidstone, Blantyre House, Belmarsh, Brixton, Wandsworth, Parkhurst … 1987 was my last conviction, conspiracy to rob. Since then, the last 30 years, I was selling things – fireworks from China, all sorts of things.”

The judge pointed out that the individual victims of the burglary had suffered significant loss and, immediately afterwards, claims as to the value of how much was stolen ran to £200m. By the time of the trial in 2016, that had been reduced to £14m. So what does Collins claim the burglary was worth?

I would have said the jewellery was worth about £8m retail – it was mostly old

“Nowhere near the amount that they said. They claimed about £320,000 in cash was missing, and that was about right – we each got about £80,000 but that mostly went to pay people for information. But the millions of pounds’ worth of jewellery was ridiculous. I would have said it was worth about £8m retail – it was mostly old. Even if we had had £14m, the figure they claim, we would only have got about 10% for it – £1.4m. I wanted my barrister to call all the people who claimed to have lost so much as witnesses but they said, ‘Who are people going to believe – you or them?’”

Collins has so far paid back £730,000, and his house in Islington, north London, is being sold for £740,000, which will also be forfeited, as will an apartment in Spain, worth £90,000.

What about the suggestion that part of the plan was to break into specific boxes to extract material that might be used for blackmail? “It was complete bollocks that we were looking for a particular box. The story about some papers that John Palmer [the man known as “Goldfinger”, who was murdered in Essex in 2015, not long after the burglary] had in a box that he was going to use for blackmailing the Adams [the north London crime family] – complete and utter cobblers.” What else was found? “No guns, no coke but in one box, there was six passports – now why would you keep your passports in a safe deposit box?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Safe-deposit boxes seen through the hole drilled by the gang in a concrete wall. Photograph: Metropolitan Police/PA

Collins’s role in the burglary was to act as lookout from a building opposite the safe deposit centre and contact the others if there was anything suspicious. He was said to have dozed off on the job.

“They said I had fallen asleep. That was bollocks. And we didn’t have a walkie-talkie like they said. What really happened was that ‘Basil’ [Michael Seed, the electronics expert who was jailed for 10 years in March for his part in the crime], who I only knew as ‘the Boffin’, rigged up the phones between the place where I was and them. I had just gone to the toilet so I didn’t hear it ring.”

He paid credit to the honesty of the detectives in the case: “This lot of police have more or less played the game. Not like some of the ones I’ve had in the past … And it never occurred to us to take any weapons. You don’t need them. If someone comes in, you’re nicked. We wouldn’t have been able to run away! After it happened, I would have left the country straight away, but the thing that stopped me was my dog.” (Dempsey, a Staffordshire terrier, who has since died.)

It never occurred to us to take any weapons. We wouldn’t have been able to run away

He served his time in Belmarsh, the high-security jail: “The young prisoners treated me very well because I was old – and I was one of them. Most people my age are nonce [sex offender] cases.

“Anjem Choudary [the radical Muslim cleric] tried to talk to us about Islam. I don’t suppose he knew who he was talking to – he don’t know us from a bar of soap. We told him to fuck off.”

Collins has diabetes and cancer of the oesophagus. He also suffers from high blood pressure, anaemia and kidney problems, and his memory and hearing are going. He said that prison was now much more violent than in his early days behind bars, mainly because of the prevalence of the drug spice.

The burglary led to three films – King of Thieves, The Hatton Garden Job and Hatton Garden the Heist – a recent television mini-series, called simply Hatton Garden, and six books. What did he think of them all?

“Most of them I never saw but I have to say the guy who played me on television [Alex Norton] did look very like me. They got that right.”

As for the books, he said: “In prison I’ll be reading a bit – but it will be Karin Slaughter and Jo NesbØ.” For Collins’s next few years, crime fiction will replace true crime.

Crime payback



The Proceeds of Crime Act of 2002 allowed police to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of criminals and to jail those who did not comply for up to 14 years.

• The act has been used against Curtis Warren, a drug dealer, who in 2013 was ordered to pay £198m or face another 10 years; and Terry Adams, of the north London Adams crime family, who in 2017 was ordered to pay £730,000 or face prison.

• 3,840 orders amounting to £163m were made in 2018-19, down from 5,357 the previous year.

• According to the Joint Asset Recovery Database, £185m of criminal proceeds were confiscated in 2017-18, of which about £30m was paid to victims.

• According to figures obtained by the Daily Mirror, 4,057 orders made in the past five years were for a nominal £1.