Men jailed for £700,000 circular saw cash machine raids
Four men have been jailed for a year long campaign of raids on supermarket cash dispensers using a circular saw.
Noel Reilly, 33, David Holmes, 31, Darren Buckley, 35, and 33-year-old Simon Phillips, got away with nearly £700,000 in more than 30 raids.
The men, of no fixed address, raided stores in 17 English counties, from Devon to Lincolnshire, from November 2010, Birmingham Crown Court heard.
Their first raid was at a Co-operative store in Maidstone, Kent.
The men, who all pleaded guilty, went on to steal from more than 30 other Co-operative stores and one garage.
Reilly and Holmes were jailed for seven years, Phillips was ordered to serve a five-year term and Buckley received a sentence of five years and seven months.
Four of the raids took place in Worcestershire, three in Oxfordshire, and three in Birmingham and the Black Country.
Other stores were targeted in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Staffordshire, Suffolk and Warwickshire.
The court heard the gang wore facemasks to cover their identity as they used axes and hammers to smash through the doors of stores.
They then used a petrol-driven circular saw, normally used to cut railway tracks, to break into the cash dispensers.
Insp Warren Hines, of West Midlands Police, said: "To aid their getaways they stole an array of high-powered cars and would regularly swap cloned number plates on the vehicles."
He said two of the gang were caught on CCTV at the store entrance before their final job in Bridport and could be seen "trying to obscure their faces with their hands".