The heist movie, as a genre, isn’t really my thing. It feels disconnected from the real world, to me, or at least disconnected from my world.
I did have a couple of youthful, personal experiences of failed heists. Those actual experiences no doubt informed my negative subjective perception of the genre.
One of those crimes was in the late 1970’s, at my dad’s camera shop, in Battersea, near the fictitious boarding house in which The Lavender Hill Mob planned their seminal movie heist.
I’m delighted to report that the police foiled The Great Battersea Camera Shop Heist. A few minutes after the crime, a bloodied gentleman presented himself at Bolingbroke Hospital, with several items from my dad’s smashed shop window about his person, having left a trail of blood along the few streets between the shop and hospital.
I remember my father commending the police for their astute detective work in apprehending the photographic equipment fiend. The police officers, without any outward signs of irony in their response, accepted dad’s praise smugly. Thus distracted, the police failed to book my dad for using child labour (me) as assistance for the squalid clean-up operation.
My second experience of a failed heist had the added excitement of cash, contraband and gun violence. This was in the mid-1980s, when I was working, on assignment, in the accounts office, at a large wine & spirits cash and carry warehouse, The Nose, underneath the arches at London Bridge.
One of the administrative employees in that office, I think she was named Diane, was a large, well-built woman. If you had gone to central casting looking for someone to play the part of a 1970s East German Olympic shot-putter, you might have chosen her.
One afternoon, while us office workers were quietly beavering away, we suddenly heard a loud commotion just outside the office. Diane leapt out of her chair and dashed onto the warehouse floor, yelling, “what the bloody hell is going on out here?”
A few moments later she came back into the office. “That’s got rid of them”. Shortly after that, we heard the sound of multiple police car sirens, after which the place was swarming with police for the rest of the afternoon.
Several (I think two) armed robbers had entered the warehouse in search of cash. They can only have been moments away from our office, where indeed they would have found plentiful cash, when Diane, unwittingly, bounded out with her shouty enquiry. The sight and sound of Diane apparently scared the armed robbers into running away sharpish.
Everyone in the office was in a state of shocked relief on discovering what had happened, not least how close we had come to being held up at gunpoint. Diane seemed the least shocked of all of us.
My work at The Nose was connected with an earlier heist of the non-violent kind. The owners were accused (and eventually convicted) of a sophisticated VAT and bonded goods fraud which, at that time, was believed to amount to £3M; then the largest Customs & Excise fraud ever.
My firm’s role was to help get the business back onto the straight and narrow, as the tax and judicial authorities wanted the business to continue trading so that the authorities might recover the defrauded value.
That role, twixt business and authorities, was very unusual. At one point, on the first day of the trial, I ended up dashing to the Old Bailey with an incriminating document I had, in the nick of time, discovered. Richard Ducann QC, strangely more famous for the Lady Chatterley , Last Tango & Fanny Hill obscenity cases than for The Nose case, persuaded the owners to change their pleas to guilty on the back of their self-incrimination.
At that juncture, some of the customs people mistakenly thought I was their stool pigeon (ha-cha-cha-cha). But my firm’s role was to support the business, not to do the authorities bidding.
I had an idea to do forensic accounting using seminal computer modelling techniques (spreadsheets), to ascertain the true value of the fraud. In part, that required me to model the economics of the entire wine trade; someone had to do it. The exercise proved the actual value of the fraud was much less than the £3M the authorities had asserted. Thus I quickly fell from favour with the customs folk.
I learnt a lot and enjoyed doing that forensic accounting assignment. But I soon drifted away from such work, after just one other 1980s fraud case. Yet now, nearly 40 years later, I’m minded to re-assemble the old firm’s investigative team. One last enormous, audacious, forensic accounting case. Just think of the fees. We’d all be able to retire in luxury…and what could possibly go wrong?
The Evening Itself, Including Several Other Heists
It is my solemn duty, in my capacity as The Scribe (aka ‘ammer ‘arris, apparently) to report on the evening.
We ate Moroccan food at Souk, the scene of earlier crimes perpetrated by The Boss and some of his cronies:
After the grub, it was down to business. Usual ThreadMash style – Rohan introduced and linked the pieces. On this occasion he went for some musical links – some funny, some just plain weird.
First up was Kay, whose story started off like one of her rather wonderful childhood stories about spending time with her grandfather, but then got darker and darker, as a heist story emerged from the seemingly innocent fun at the start of piece.
Next up was me – see performance piece above.
Then John Eltham told an intriguing tale from the 18th century, partly based on true events, partly on conjecture, with a mixture of piracy, mutiny, hidden treasure and betrayal. Is it a spoiler to say that, despite the tropical setting, many jewels end up buried where the sun doesn’t shine.
Julie was next. She imagined a family business doing heists to order, with a female member of the family nonchalantly going through the businesses terms and conditions with a telephone enquirer. At least one of the cancellation clauses seemed to be an existential problem in more ways than one. It was a very funny piece…
…as was Jan’s piece, which brought everyone who had assembled that evening into play. The Boss in her piece is a sinister character with a bunch of unsuspecting cronies, who are all writing creative pieces to order, not realising that The Boss is stealing all of their stories and publishing them as his own. Who could possibly stop him? Perhaps the quiet, demure one, who also happens to be The Boss’s moll.
We all chatted together for a while…before The Boss set our next assignment and encouraged his accomplices in Souk to extract money from us.
After that, some of the gang scarpered sharpish – especially those with long journeys. Several of us stuck around to try and put the world to rights. We failed, but at least we tried.
Perhaps we should have debated world affairs over coffee, in the 18th century style. Right at the end of the evening, I suggested same to Kay, as a way of mentioning my Thomas Paine blue plaque project, a mile or so north of Souk, in Fitzrovia, three doors down from the house in which my dad was born.
If/when I pull that off, it won’t be a heist but it will be a bit of a coup.
But for now, I’m just wallowing in the memory of a great evening with good friends and wonderful stories at Souk.