The Diamond Heist is the latest addition to Netflix’s library of intriguing true crime documentaries, as this three-part docuseries tells the story of what was perhaps the most daring heist attempted in the history of the United Kingdom. The series introduces us to Lee Wenham, one of the primary culprits who masterminded the outlandish operation to steal a precious diamond worth at least 300 million pounds, and then also to the police team that investigated the gang and attempted to stop the heist before it was executed. Overall, The Diamond Heist is a thoroughly entertaining watch, both because of the almost unbelievable true story behind it and because of its craft, since Guy Ritchie himself has been involved with the production.
Who is Lee Wenham, and what inspired him to plan the heist?
The Diamond Heist opens with an introduction to Lee Wenham, the main perpetrator behind the heist at the center of this docuseries, as he eventually talks about his life and previous jobs, all of which had a distinct tinge of criminality to them. Born and raised in Kent, Lee was always intrigued by his father, and particularly by his profession, which was not the most straightforward job in the market in the 1960s and 70s. James Wenham happened to be a professional criminal who had built his life through thefts, armed robberies, and seemingly other violent acts, all of which brought him money as well as a fair deal of notoriety. Hailing from a nomadic family who moved around from place to place and committed petty crimes as part of their routine, James was apparently never interested in a normal life where he would have to earn a wage and so had chosen to go big in the criminal world with his own gang.
As a result, James Wenham became quite a popular figure among the masses in his locality in Kent, and there were enough people who respected him and his way of life. It can be sensed that anyone with anti-government and anti-authority sentiments supported his cause, and this is exactly what appealed to Lee, who had closely seen his father from a very young age. He would often accompany James during his visits to clubs and bars, where people looked up to the man as a great hero, maybe because he had a reputation of helping friends and neighbors in need. Therefore, after receiving some very basic education, Lee dropped out of the normal routine of life and joined his father’s business when he was a teenager, of course with some encouragement from James.
He recalls how he would be woken by sounds of police sirens and loud bangs on his door when he was a boy, since their house was raided by the authorities almost every two weeks. It is therefore not much of a wonder that Lee grew up with a great disdain for the police and other institutions of authority and so had no apprehensions entering a world of crime and violence. The very first crime that Lee had committed independently was the theft of a JCB bulldozer when he was just 15 years old, in 1983. The thrill he could achieve in carrying out thefts and robberies became very apparent to him from this very time, and so he continued committing more such acts as he grew up.
In July of 2000, just four months before the heist at the Millennium Dome, Lee and his friends had attempted another bold robbery, targeting a security van while it was en route to deliver 8.2 million pounds to a bank. By this time, precise planning and unusually bold moves had become a staple for Lee, and so he and his crew had spent months drawing up every detail of this robbery. While two men parked their car in the middle of the road and essentially brought the security van to an unexpected halt, a big truck came in from the other side, blocking the security van from both sides and forcing it to stay in place. The robbers then pulled out guns and also fake bombs to threaten the security workers to not activate the emergency button in their vehicle, while the truck in the rear squeezed them in even tighter. Interestingly, a steel spike had been fixed to the back of the truck, meaning that as it moved towards the security van, the spike pierced into the van’s metal body, creating a hole through which the money inside could be stolen. But Lee and his men could not ultimately pull off the plan, as the police were alerted soon after they began, meaning that they had to flee the scene without the money in order to avoid getting caught. Although they had gotten away literally by waving goodbye to the police officers, the frustration of not having been able to steal the money lingered.
As Lee eventually moved on from the sorrows of this failed attempted robbery, he was introduced to a man named Ray Betson, who was self-admittedly working on a major heist plan and wanted Lee’s help with it. Known to the world as a charismatic businessman with a lot of connections to the legal and criminal world, Ray was actually a criminal with involvements in robberies and heists, and he was now planning to steal the precious Millennium Star diamond from the prestigious De Beers company, which was kept on display at the Millennium Dome in South East London. In order to carry out this outlandish heist, Lee and Ray put together an entire gang, with each member given different responsibilities.
Bob Adams, a handyman with prior experience participating in robberies, was brought into the team to figure out how to break into the safe inside which the De Beers diamonds were being exhibited. Bill Cockram, a hot-headed goon with numerous assault charges to his name, was recruited to ensure that there was enough muscle on the team in case things went out of hand. Aldo Ciarrocchi was a young man with almost no criminal experience, but he was easily convinced to help the team with the technical aspects of the heist. Lastly, a highly notorious and violent robber, Terry Millman, was brought in as well, and the gang started to plan the highly outlandish heist that would make them rich as well as popular.
What was Lee’s exact plan for the Millennium Dome heist?
When Lee and Ray decided that they were really about to pull off the heist at the Millennium Dome, their plans began with first surveilling the exhibition building in question. Built to celebrate the beginning of the new millennium and also as a symbol of Britain’s financial strength, the Millennium Dome is a dome-shaped building that is described by the experts in The Diamond Heist as a flimsy exhibition hall essentially covered by tarp, at least according to what it was like in 2000. Although it was supposed to have been a tourist attraction, the place’s novelty was fading very quickly, but Lee visited the building with other plans in mind, even once with his two young daughters. This day out for the children was basically about Lee scoping out the place and realizing that the security measures in the overall building were rather weak.
Thus, the gang decided that the best way to break into the building by avoiding the security personnel would be to literally break into a portion with the help of a JCB bulldozer. Lee accordingly stole a bulldozer from the construction site around the Millennium Dome and kept it ready at the Tong Farm, owned by his father. Their next plan of action was to figure out how to enter the super-security vault inside which the diamond exhibition was taking place. The walls of this vault were immensely thick and damage-proof, so much so that nobody could do anything even by driving any heavy vehicle into it, and its gates also had to be opened by two security personnel together, and only at certain specific times of the day. Hence, Lee and his team decided to conduct the heist during the early hours of the morning, after the Dome was opened up for the public, but there were hardly any visitors at the place yet. They also tried to rope in Ray’s brother-in-law, a Met police officer posted at the Dome at the time, named Michael Wearing. The plan was to have Michael give them inside information about the situation in the building and the vault before the heist so that there would be no unexpected surprises for the gang.
Once three of the men would enter the vault, they would start breaking the seemingly unbreakable thick glass chambers inside which the diamonds were exhibited before getting away with all the precious stones and, most importantly, the Millennium Stone. It was Lee who came up with the plan of how to break open the chamber, as he realized that the glass needed to be weakened first using a Hilti nail gun and then could be easily shattered with a sledgehammer. This whole operation would be carried out in a matter of minutes, following which the three men would run out of the Dome and escape the area on a speedboat, which would be arranged beforehand.
Lee and his men had successfully escaped the law on two previous occasions by using a speedboat and therefore decided to use the river as an escape route once again. Finally, when they would cross the Thames and get away from the crime scene, the three men and the speedboat driver would be picked up by Terry in a van and driven away from London to their safehouse in Kent, where they would distribute the haul. This was the ultimate plan that Lee and Ray had come up with, with Lee supposedly even deciding to move away to Spain with his daughters, where he would live with the money from the heist, retiring from a life of crime forever.
How were the police already prepared for the heist?
The Diamond Heist also introduces the other fascinating side to the Millennium Dome heist, which revolved around the police officers of the Flying Squad special unit of the Metropolitan Police in London. The Flying Squad unit had already come under a lot of flak as a few of its members had been exposed to be corrupt, because of which the squad was seemingly at the brink of being disbanded. John Swinfield, the detective chief inspector of the Flying Squad, reveals that they were already on the lookout for a heist at the Millennium Dome because they had actually been tailing Lee and his men for a few months. It all started when Lee attempted to steal money from a security van in Nine Elms in South London by using an extremely bold tool—a steel spike attached to a truck to penetrate the metal body of the van.
The robbery failed because a civilian had heroically removed the keys to the car being used by the robbers, because of which they had had to flee on a speedboat. The gang then tried a similar heist on a security van a few months later, this time in Aylesford, and this is when the police became alerted, and they’d had to flee once more, using the same speedboat plan. Thus, the Flying Squad officers started keeping an eye on Lee and planted security cameras, as well as surveillance officers, near his home. It was based on this surveillance that the police found out about him visiting the Millennium Dome multiple times, which was quite suspicious by itself, and also about him gathering a gang to carry out a heist.
When the authorities got in touch with the De Beers company, they learned that the expensive diamonds would soon be taken on an exhibition tour, because of which they would be driven from Southeast London to Heathrow, and John Swinfield felt that this would be the time that the robbers would strike. Since Lee had always tried to steal from moving vehicles on the road earlier, Swinfield thought that this would be the modus operandi once again. Therefore, he and his team prepared for extensive security on the day the gems were transported, both to prevent the theft and also to catch the perpetrators. But they ultimately realized that the robbers had never planned to steal the diamonds at this stage and eventually found out about the real plan. Thus, along with the robbers, the police were also now waiting for the day of the heist to arrive, with the two sides having different intentions, obviously.
What happened to the gang of robbers?
On the 6th of November, 2000, the Flying Squad officers were alerted to the JCB bulldozer and the speedboat being moved from Kent to London, which confirmed that the heist would be carried out the very next day. A special team was posted at the Millennium Dome on the morning of the 7th accordingly, and although they did not exactly know what the plan of the robbers was going to be, the only surprise that the police received was when the robbers used the bulldozer to ram into the exhibition building and then enter the vault on foot. It took the trained police personnel mere minutes to bring down the perpetrators and arrest them inside the vault, while two other units arrested the drivers of the speedboat and the getaway van. About an hour later, Lee was also picked up from the farm, and the heist had ultimately failed.
After the perpetrators were caught and put on trial, they tried to argue that they were not robbers but rather thieves, which was a legal loophole that they wanted to use in order to get reduced sentences. However, the prosecution were successful in proving that the gang had enough intent to harm people and were therefore armed robbers, meaning that they deserved stricter sentences. Ray Betson was ultimately sent to prison for 12 years, after which he once again tried to rob a cash depot and got arrested once more. The authorities had made an offer to Lee Wenham in which his father, who was falling sick at the time, would be released if he confessed to his crimes, and Lee immediately confessed to all the charges against him.
Lee was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the Millennium Dome heist and his previous robbery attempts, but his good behavior while in prison meant that Lee only had to spend four and a half years behind bars. The Diamond Heist ends with information about the Millennium Stone as well, which, by the way, had been safely removed from the exhibition at the Dome and replaced with a fake replica when the police had notified the De Beers about the possible heist. This meant that even if the gangsters had managed to steal the diamonds, they would not have earned anything significant from it. The precious diamond was then sold to an anonymous buyer in 2006 and is rumored to be kept safe somewhere in Asia at present.
