2006 heist in Tonbridge, England
The 2006 Securitas depot robbery in Tonbridge, England, was the UK's largest cash heist. It began with a kidnapping on the evening of 21 February 2006 and ended in the early hours of 22 February, when seven criminals stole almost £53million. The gang left behind another £154million because they did not have the means to transport it. 
After doing surveillance and placing an insider at the Securitas depot, the gang abducted the manager and his family. The same night, they tricked their way inside the building, and tied up 14 workers at gunpoint. The criminals stole £52,996,760 in used and unused sterling banknotes, the property of the Bank of England. Most of the getaway vehicles were found in the following week, one containing £1.3million in stolen notes. In raids by Kent Police, £9million was recovered in Welling and £8million in Southborough. By 2007, 36 people had been arrested in relation to the crime.
At trial at the Old Bailey in London in 2007, five people were convicted, and received long sentences, including the inside man, Emir Hysenaj. A woman who had made prosthetic disguises for the gang gave evidence in return for the charges against her being dropped. Lee Murray, the alleged mastermind, had fled to Morocco with his friend and accomplice Paul Allen. He successfully fought extradition to the UK and was imprisoned there for the robbery. Allen was extradited and after a second trial in 2008 was jailed in the UK; upon his release he was shot and injured in 2019. By 2016, £32million remained unrecovered, and several suspects were still at large.
Depot.
The Bank of England prints pound sterling (£) banknotes in Debden, Epping Forest. In 2006 it was outsourcing the distribution of currency to five companies, Group 4 Securicor, Halifax Bank of Scotland, Post Office Ltd, Royal Bank of Scotland and Securitas. There were 28 centres across England and Wales holding new currency and which stored used currency as it was returned, either to be redistributed or destroyed. Until 2001, Barclays had stored its own supplies of cash; it had built the depot at Medway House, Vale Road, Tonbridge, in Kent, in 1980, choosing the location because it was close to three police stations that were always open (at Royal Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks and Tonbridge itself). Medway House was just away from the Tonbridge station and was also near the Angel shopping centre. The first building on Vale Road was a Kwik Fit garage and the second was the depot.
Barclays outsourced the distribution of money to Securitas Cash Management (a subsidiary of Securitas) in 2001, and by 2006 Securitas was running the Tonbridge depot. It operated non-stop with 80 full-time staff split across three shifts; most of the work was sorting and counting banknotes which arrived by armoured transport and were sent out again to restock cash machines. The cash was bundled into bricks, which were wrapped in differently coloured plastic according to denomination: £5 bricks were green (£2,500); £10 bricks were blue (£5,000); £20 bricks were red (£5,000); £50 bricks were yellow (£12,500).
The manager of the depot was Colin Dixon. He lived in Herne Bay with his wife and their young child. Owing to the nature of his job, he had been trained not to tell his colleagues where he lived and to drive to work every day using a different route. The family owned two cars, and he would alternate which car he used. He had been told that if he was ever stopped by the police when driving that he should stay in his car and give the officers a piece of paper describing his job, then follow them to the nearest station, where he would co-operate with their enquiries.
Conspiracy.
A criminal gang began to study the depot with the intention of robbing it. Men later convicted of conspiracy included Paul Allen, Jetmir Buçpapa, Roger Coutts, Emir Hysenaj, Lee Murray, Stuart Royle and Lea Rusha. Albanians Buçpapa and Hysenaj were childhood friends who met at school in Bajram Curri. They did not mention this in court, claiming not to know each other at all. Lea Rusha, a roofer and cage fighter, met Buçpapa (a bouncer) at a mixed martial arts (MMA) training session run by Rusha at the Angel Centre, near the depot. Rusha also knew Lee Murray through MMA; Murray was stopped by Kent Police on 28 July 2005 while in his car on a road overlooking the depot, together with two unidentified men. As well as being a cage fighter, Murray was also a drug dealer.
Hysenaj signed up with a recruitment agency which supplied workers to Medway House. He was first given a job at Royal Victoria Place shopping centre in Royal Tunbridge Wells, and then at the end of 2005 offered work at the depot. At his training he asked questions about security measures and passed the information to Buçpapa, who told Rusha. On 6 January 2006, mobile phone records displayed at trial indicated that Allen, Coutts, Murray, Royle and Rusha were present at a meeting at Royle's house. Murray visited a surveillance shop in Derbyshire to buy a spy camera and recording device, with the intention of giving it to Hysenaj. Despite warning by the shop owner to be careful not to get glue on the lens of the camera when placing it in position, someone from the gang did precisely that, so Murray sent his friends Allen and Keyinde "Kane" Patterson back to the shop to get it replaced. The shop owner fixed the camera and attached it to a belt, which Hysenaj used to film inside the depot. On their way back, the men were stopped by Nottinghamshire Police for driving at . Allen had broken the speed limit while driving on an expired provisional licence, and was in a car he did not own which had no MOT and no insurance, so it was impounded by the police.
Several days before the robbery, Murray went clubbing in London and crashed his yellow Ferrari 360 Modena sports car on the New Kent Road the next morning. Murray fled the scene and was arrested by four police officers nearby. He was charged with assault in a case that never came to trial. When he had abandoned his car he left behind two burner phones containing numbers of other gang members and three photographs from the club, which showed him associating with Allen and Patterson. The police later recovered these items from the impounded car. Murray had accidentally recorded himself on one of the phones, talking to Rusha about how to carry out the robbery.
Robbery.
In the early evening of Tuesday, 21 February 2006, Dixon was driving home along the A249 when he was pulled over just outside Stockbury, a village northeast of Maidstone, by what he presumed was an unmarked police car. The Volvo S60 had flashing blue lights in its grille and one of the two uniformed officers came to Dixon's window, asking him to turn off his engine and leave the keys in the ignition. Breaching protocol, Dixon followed the officer's order to step out of his car and to sit in the other car, where he was handcuffed. His car was moved off the road and the Volvo travelled west on the M20 motorway to the West Malling bypass. The criminals play-acted driving him to a police station before revealing their deception and threatening him with a gun at Mereworth. He was tied up and transferred into a white van which drove to Elderden Farm near Staplehurst.
The two men impersonating police officers next drove to Dixon's home in Herne Bay and spoke to Lynn Dixon, telling her that her husband had crashed his car and that she and her son should accompany them to the hospital as quickly as possible. When she got into the car Lynn Dixon realised it was not a real police car and the men told her she was being abducted; they took her to the farm as well. Colin Dixon was then interrogated about the layout of the depot and warned at gunpoint that the lives of his family members depended upon his actions.
Around 01:00 on Wednesday, 22 February 2006, three vehicles headed to the depot. Lynn Dixon and her son were held in the back of a 7.5 tonne white Renault Midlum lorry; Colin Dixon and the other gang members travelled in a Vauxhall Vectra and the Volvo. The vehicles split up, and the Volvo arrived at the depot at 01:21. Dixon and a gang member dressed as a police officer got out of the car and walked towards the pedestrian entrance. Dixon rang the bell and looked through the window at the control room operator. Instead of querying why Dixon was returning at night or why he was with an officer, the inexperienced operator opened the door and let the two men through the airlock into the building. The entire robbery was filmed on the building's CCTV and when Kent Police later reviewed the footage, they nicknamed this gang member "Policeman". "Policeman" subdued the operator and, without being asked, Dixon pressed the button which opened the gate and allowed the vehicles to enter the yard.
The rest of the gang now entered the building. One man was later nicknamed "Stopwatch", because he was wearing a stopwatch to time the robbery in an echo of the film "Ocean's Eleven". Others were called "Shorty", "Hoodie" and "Mr Average". The criminals' faces were hidden by balaclavas and they were armed with handguns, shotguns, AK-47 assault rifles and a Škorpion submachine gun. Dixon urged staff to comply with the gang's commands, and 14 workers were tied up. Nobody pressed an alarm. The seven members of the gang attempted to load metal cages full of banknotes into the lorry and found they were too heavy, so one criminal tried to drive the Lansing Linde power lifter and the rest shoved the hostages out of the way. It was difficult to manoeuvre the lifter and a Securitas worker was ordered to drive it; when he kept deliberately crashing it, Dixon was told to use a pallet mover. The worker then wedged the power lifter between the tail lift of the truck and the loading bay, rendering it useless. When Dixon pumped the pallet mover up, "Hoodie" became suspicious and pointed a gun at his head; frustrated by the slow progress, the other gang members grabbed bundles of money in their hands and filled up shopping trolleys. The criminals stole £52,996,760 in used and unused banknotes; another £154million would not fit in the lorry and they had to leave it behind. In total they took seventeen cages and three trolleys full of banknotes.
The staff workers were left locked up inside empty cages, as were Lynn Dixon and her son. No alarm had been set off and the gang ordered the staff to stay still when they left at 02:44. At 03:15, when they were sure the robbers had gone, the staff triggered an alarm which called the police. The police arrived and began the investigation by interviewing the staff and taking their clothes and their DNA profiles.
Investigation and arrests.
The following day (Thursday, 23 February 2006) Securitas and their insurers offered a reward of £2million for any information about the heist, which Crimestoppers stated was the largest reward ever offered in the UK. Securitas gave the Bank of England £25million as an initial reimbursement. Kent Police said the heist had been meticulously planned by organised crime and that at least £20million had been stolen, possibly as much as £50million. By the evening of 23 February, two arrests had been made in South London: a man aged 29 and a woman aged 31 were detained at separate houses on suspicion of conspiracy to commit robbery. A third person, a 41-year-old woman, was arrested at a branch of the Portman Building Society in Bromley on suspicion of handling stolen goods. This woman was innocent and she told "The Guardian" she was planning to sue the police on account of "the most distressing experience of my life". As news of the robbery reached the newspapers, Hysenaj was told he had the day off work and went to see the Levellers at the Assembly Hall Theatre in Royal Tunbridge Wells with his girlfriend.
The same day, police discovered some of the vehicles