With the robbers broadcasting their crime live over the airwaves, it's a mystery why the police never caught the Baker Street gang red-handed.
The safety deposit raid in 1971 is one of the most baffling in British criminal history, and rumours that its true purpose has been covered up by the British establishment persist to this day.
The problem is they should never have gotten away with a penny. In the early hours of Saturday 11th September 1971, as the robbers were tunneling into the safety deposit vault at Lloyds Bank on Baker Street, a nearby amateur radio ham was listening to their every word.
The gang were using walkie-talkies to communicate, and radio hobbyist Robert Rowlands had accidently tuned into their transmissions. Rowlands notified the police, who were slow to believe his claim that he had happened upon a genuine robbery in progress. Eventually persuaded, they set out on a frantic search of hundreds of London's banks in an attempt to thwart the raid.
They didn't succeed. Rowlands had informed the police that the range of the transmissions meant the robbers must be nearby - within about a mile of his Wimple Street flat. For reasons never adequately explained, they decided to spread the net out to a 10-mile radius instead, vastly expanding the number of banks they would have to search. With limited resources and the need to ask the permission of each bank to search it, they failed to stop the gang in time.
The raid at Baker Street branch of Lloyds bank was then Britain's biggest and most ambitious, the thieves crowbarring open 260 boxes and making away with an estimated £30m in today's money. It caused a seismic shockwave across the banking industry and panic amongst the rich and powerful clientele who had their most private, and possibly even illegal, valuables stored in the vaults.
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