#CinemaJourney
#BuildingBad
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00:00A criminal gang led by Tommy Carmichael
00:03spends 20 years stealing from Las Vegas slot machines
00:06using homemade instruments.
00:09The cops searched 12 homes around Vegas
00:11and discovered sketches of devices designed for tampering,
00:14and even several slot machines
00:17for testing out the different scams.
00:19Mexican cartels divert millions of dollars' worth of gas
00:23from government-owned pipelines.
00:25Stealing fuel on a massive scale
00:28was not without challenges.
00:30It required expertise in engineering and extraction,
00:34an insider's knowledge of the industry,
00:37and tactical skills to avoid detection.
00:41A team of experienced criminals
00:43execute a daring robbery
00:45at the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company in London.
00:49Whoever was bold enough to rob the company
00:51would need logistical skills,
00:53an intimate knowledge of the security systems,
00:55and decades of experience with elaborate heists.
01:00The world's most inventive criminal minds.
01:04Lawless ingenuity, born out of greed.
01:08From back alleys to the high seas.
01:13Secret structures.
01:15Custom-built vehicles.
01:17High-tech innovation.
01:19What happens when engineering genies
01:22ends up on the wrong side of the law
01:24and starts building bad?
01:27On July 22nd, 1999,
01:42the FBI and New Jersey State Police apprehended Tommy Glenn Carmichael,
01:46the suspected mastermind behind a highly lucrative scam
01:50that involved tampering with slot machines
01:52across the United States and beyond.
01:55That very same day,
01:59on the other side of the country,
02:01Las Vegas police arrested six of Carmichael's associates
02:05after receiving information
02:07that a gang of known slot machine cheats
02:10with prior convictions were up to their old tricks.
02:13The cops searched 12 homes around Vegas
02:17and discovered sketches of devices designed for tampering
02:20and even several slot machines
02:22for testing out the different scams.
02:25These people have been doing their homework.
02:27Authorities believe that the gang had made off
02:29with more than $5 million
02:31in what's considered one of the most sophisticated
02:33and widespread slot machine scams in history.
02:36And it was all thanks to Tommy Carmichael's innovations.
02:39Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
02:43Carmichael had a knack for electronics as a child,
02:46which ultimately led him to open a television sales
02:49and repair store later in life.
02:51The store was a success right off the bat,
02:55as it was the first of its kind in Tulsa.
02:58So there was no competition.
03:00But as time wore on,
03:01more and more businesses that offered the same products
03:04and services started springing up all over the city.
03:07And it wasn't long before bankruptcy
03:09was staring Carmichael in the face.
03:11Well, as the old adage goes,
03:15it's always darkest before the dawn.
03:18And sometime in 1980,
03:20a friend of Carmichael's visited his store
03:23and brought with him some items
03:25that piqued the TV repairman's interest.
03:27A Bally slot machine
03:29and a tool for relieving it of its coins.
03:32Carmichael must have seen his destiny in that moment
03:35because he abruptly closed the store,
03:38moved to Las Vegas,
03:39and spent the better part of the next 20 years
03:42becoming one of the most prolific
03:44slot machine thieves in history.
03:49In 1963, Bally Manufacturing introduced the Money Honey,
03:54widely regarded as the slot machine
03:56that popularized play in modern casinos.
04:00This machine was a game changer.
04:02It had lights and sound effects
04:04and added a little bit more excitement for players.
04:07But the real impact
04:08was that it was equipped with a 2,500 coin hopper,
04:11which was huge.
04:13Because before this,
04:14if a player won a jackpot,
04:15they had to wait for a casino employee
04:17to verify the win.
04:19And then they were paid in catch.
04:21The problem with this system
04:23was that there was a finality to it.
04:25Like the game was over
04:27and the winner would just walk out of the casino
04:29with their jackpot.
04:31But the hopper and the money honey
04:33meant that players could be paid out instantly.
04:36And the odds that they would keep playing increased,
04:38which was advantageous to the casinos.
04:42Eventually slot machines began to bring in more money
04:44for casinos in Las Vegas than any other games.
04:47The first year this happened was 1981,
04:49not long after Tommy Carmichael's fateful meeting
04:51with his friend in Tulsa.
04:54Upon his arrival in Las Vegas,
04:56Carmichael set about testing his friend's tampering device
04:59in the local casinos.
05:01Known as a top-bottom joint,
05:03the tool was a simple and effective way
05:06to trick slot machines.
05:08The top-bottom joint consisted of two parts,
05:11the top and the bottom.
05:13The bottom was a short piece of guitar string,
05:15and the top was a small piece of metal
05:17that was twisted to look like a number nine.
05:21Around this time,
05:23slot machine payouts were triggered
05:25by the completion of an electrical circuit.
05:27Levers with metal contacts on the end
05:29were attached to the spinning wheels
05:31and rested against a fixed circuit board,
05:33also covered with contacts.
05:35When the jackpot was won,
05:37the contacts lined up and the circuit was activated,
05:40triggering the motor of a hopper,
05:42which dispensed the coins.
05:44Top-bottom joints were used
05:46to basically hot-wire slot machines,
05:48tricking them into thinking
05:49a winning circuit had been completed.
05:51The guitar string was inserted
05:53into the bottom left corner
05:54where it came into contact with the circuit board,
05:56drawing a small current and transmitting it
05:58through the inner workings of the machine.
06:01The top piece of metal goes into the coin slot.
06:04That completes an electrical circuit
06:05that's strong enough to trigger the hopper's motor,
06:08and then it spews out all these coins.
06:11On his first day using the top-bottom joint method,
06:15Tommy Carmichael absconded with around $35 in nickels.
06:19While not exactly a huge score,
06:21he sensed an opportunity.
06:23Slot machines contained about $75 in those days.
06:29So if Carmichael ran the scam all day,
06:32he could steal about $3,000,
06:35equivalent to roughly $5,000 in today's money.
06:38Not a bad day's work.
06:40But soon enough,
06:42casinos became aware of the top-bottom joint tampering
06:45and pressured slot machine manufacturers to rectify the problem.
06:48In response,
06:49they rolled out new designs
06:50with what are called slow-blow fuses
06:52that would shut the machine down
06:54whenever someone tried to hotwire it.
06:57Once the new machines started popping up all over Vegas,
07:00Carmichael's operation became less and less profitable,
07:03and he had to spend time searching for old machines to steal from.
07:08This meant that he would sometimes have to hit several slot machines
07:11in the same casino,
07:12which, unsurprisingly,
07:14caught the attention of the authorities.
07:17On July 4th, 1985,
07:19Tommy Carmichael was caught cheating a slot machine
07:22near the Las Vegas Strip.
07:24He was arrested by Nevada Gaming Control Board agents
07:27and sentenced to five years in prison.
07:30Now, you would think that this might have scared Carmichael
07:33into giving up his life of crime,
07:35but the exact opposite thing happened.
07:37He took this as evidence
07:38that he needed to keep stealing from casinos
07:40but just had to find a better way to do it.
07:43Enter the monkey's pot,
07:45Carmichael's first real original invention.
07:47It wasn't much to look at.
07:49Really, just a thin, bent metal rod with a wedge-shaped end.
07:53But what it lacked in aesthetics,
07:55it more than made up for an effectiveness.
08:00Carmichael designed the monkey's paw
08:02to capitalize on a design flaw that he discovered
08:05in the coin counting mechanisms of traditional slot machines.
08:09The tool was stealthily inserted into the machine's payout chute
08:12and then manipulated to trigger the switch
08:14that activated the coin release mechanism.
08:16It was quick, could be done covertly,
08:19and by Carmichael's account, extremely lucrative.
08:21He claimed that he could make $1,000 an hour
08:23using the monkey's paw.
08:25But advances in technology made that tool obsolete
08:28after just a couple of successful years.
08:31New slot machines didn't have mechanical counters anymore.
08:34Instead, they had these optical sensors
08:37that used light beams to count coins.
08:40The machines had a transmitter that would send a beam of light
08:43across the coin's path to a receiver.
08:45The coins were counted as they passed through the beam,
08:48and when the appropriate payout was reached, the outflow stopped.
08:51So, Carmichael had to go back to the drawing board.
08:55In response to the introduction of light beam counting technology,
08:59Carmichael invented yet another simple device
09:02that would allow him to continue robbing the casinos blind.
09:06The light wand, as it was known, was little more than a small light bulb
09:10powered by a camera battery.
09:12But, when it was shined up into a slot machine,
09:14it blinded the sensors so the machine didn't count the coins it was dispensing.
09:18Because the light beam was never broken,
09:20it would just keep spitting out money.
09:22Carmichael would deposit a nominal amount of money in a machine,
09:26say $50, and then immediately request a cash-out.
09:30Then he'd use the light wand to disable the counters
09:33and turn $50 into several hundred,
09:36or whatever he had the guts to take,
09:38all in the blink of an eye.
09:40And, not only did he use the wands to rip off casinos,
09:43Carmichael started selling them off to other cheats
09:46for $10,000 to $12,000 a pop.
09:48Given that they only cost a few bucks to make,
09:50that's a pretty tidy profit.
09:52Some hustlers claim that they could earn up to $10,000 a day
09:57using Carmichael's invention.
09:59And industry insiders would later say
10:01that the light wand cost the casinos more money
10:04than any other device in history,
10:06with losses estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.
10:10Obviously, they had to do something to stem the tide.
10:15After the discovery of the light wand technique,
10:18casino owners and slot machine manufacturers
10:21fought back with an upgrade to the light sensor technology.
10:26They introduced a delay so that when a light wand
10:29caused the beam inside the machine to stay on,
10:31when it shouldn't be,
10:32the delay would determine that at that point
10:34there should be no light and the machine would shut down.
10:37It was a nice try, but Carmichael quickly figured out
10:40that if you just turned off the light wand during the lag time,
10:43that delay didn't do anything.
10:45So it was back to business and business was booming.
10:49Tommy was at the peak of his powers.
10:51He was earning huge amounts of money and he was living large.
10:54Maybe all the success made him overconfident
10:58because he got a bit sloppy.
11:01And in 1996, the authorities almost caught him red handed
11:05with a light wand in a casino.
11:07He managed to throw the device across the room
11:10and although security was able to locate it,
11:13there was no way to prove it was his.
11:16And the act wasn't caught on any security camera footage.
11:20It was a narrow escape, but make no mistake about it.
11:24Tommy Carmichael was now being watched very closely.
11:27On top of the increased security from authorities,
11:31Carmichael's scam faced another challenge.
11:34A new generation of slot machines that ran on a cashless payout system.
11:39These were known as ticket-in, ticket-out machines.
11:42And when you won, they didn't give you money directly.
11:44They gave you tickets that you could redeem for cash.
11:47But the thing is, those machines still accepted coins and bills as payment.
11:52So Carmichael bought one and pretty quickly,
11:55he found a design flaw in the optical counting system.
11:58And once again, he built a tool that could fool that machine.
12:03He called it the tongue because it kind of resembled a tongue depressor.
12:07After a coin was deposited, it fell past three counter lights
12:10and Carmichael figured out that he could trick the counter by inserting a tongue
12:14and maneuvering it back and forth in front of the middle light.
12:17By making this light blink, the machine would think the coins were going through.
12:23The tongue was Carmichael's Mona Lisa.
12:26It could trigger a machine into giving hundreds of dollars worth of credits in seconds.
12:31And then all he would have to do was cash the ticket out.
12:35Like having his own personal bank machine.
12:37But unfortunately for Tommy, he would never get to use his greatest invention to steal from the casinos.
12:45In 1999, one of Carmichael's associates was caught using a light wand, which was confiscated and sent to the FBI.
12:55The feds started an investigation.
12:57And when Carmichael's associates' phone records were pulled, Tommy's number showed up all over the place.
13:02So they tapped his phone and they pretty quickly overheard him asking colleagues to test the tongue in casinos to see if there were any potential problems with the device.
13:12At this point, the authorities ascertained that the tongue could cost casinos millions of dollars if put into circulation.
13:20So they had no choice but to put an end to Carmichael's career as one of the greatest slot machine cheats in history.
13:29In 2000, Tommy Carmichael pled guilty to running an illegal gambling enterprise and was sentenced to 11 months in prison.
13:37A lenient sentence because he agreed to show the authorities how his devices worked.
13:42Upon his release, Carmichael was barred for life from entering any casinos in Las Vegas.
13:49He moved back to Tulsa, where he died in 2019, at the age of 68.
13:55On May 4th, 2023, hundreds of government agents raided eight properties connected to a fuel theft terminal in Hidalgo, Mexico, as part of an ongoing effort to stop the rampant stealing of oil and gasoline.
14:18What they discovered led to an even bigger operation and a few surprises.
14:25One of the properties had this hidden entrance to a tunnel that went 12 feet below the surface.
14:30And at the other end, it opened up to reveal a larger area of government owned fuel lines.
14:36The authorities found illegal taps drilled directly into the pipelines and large cisterns carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel surrounding the pipes.
14:46Someone had been secretly siphoning off gas and collecting it in these plastic tanks.
14:53The stolen fuel was not the work of petty thieves.
14:58It was a small example of a billion-dollar industry run by dangerous and powerful Mexican cartels.
15:05Across the country, well-organized criminal groups were devising ingenious ways to outsmart the state-owned gas company and cripple the economy.
15:14Oil smuggling and fuel theft in Mexico go back 100 years to the 1920s, when that country was the world's second largest oil producer.
15:23Back then, most of that oil production was foreign owned by companies like Shell and Standard Oil Company, California.
15:30And that meant that most of the oil got exported and most of the money also left, which meant very little profit for Mexicans.
15:39In 1938, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas signed an order that expropriated most of the foreign-owned assets.
15:46And he created a single state-owned company called Pemex.
15:49One of the main goals of Pemex was to consolidate and control the fuel industry and to keep most of the profits in the country.
15:57And by that metric, Cardenas was successful.
16:00Pemex grew into one of the world's biggest oil companies, boasting billions in revenue and a network of over 400 miles of pipeline.
16:08But the massive success of Pemex came with unforeseen consequences.
16:15Since 2013, Pemex had lost 19 billion dollars due to fuel theft.
16:21To maintain its business, the company had to borrow 110 billion pesos a year from the central bank.
16:29Between 2004 and 2009, there was an average of 271 thefts per year.
16:34But between 2018 and 2020, the average was 12,000 per year.
16:39So the question is, how do you account for the sudden jump in fuel theft?
16:43And how are the cartels getting away with it?
16:46In the past, Mexico's fuel thieves consisted of small bands of outlaws who operated independently.
16:53You'd have a single person stealing fuel in a really rudimentary way.
16:57They'd have basic tools.
16:58They would shovel out a pipeline.
17:00They would drill a hole.
17:01They would siphon gas into a bucket or a jerry can.
17:04And then they would just sell that stolen gas on the black market for a reduced price.
17:08Basically, they were distributing fuel to poor Mexicans at a fraction of the cost.
17:14However, there was a limit to how much an individual could make with basic tools and methods.
17:20By the early 2010s, the small bands of outlaws were overtaken by larger criminal organizations.
17:27There was potential for big money to be made, if you could get away with it.
17:33So powerful and dangerous drug cartels like Los Zetas moved into northeastern Mexico
17:38and started to take control of the illegal fuel trade.
17:41The cartels put the smaller gas thieves out of business in the usual way.
17:45They used violence.
17:46They used fear.
17:47They used intimidation.
17:48And very quickly, they discovered that the fuel business was just as profitable as drug smuggling.
17:54And it didn't mean you ever had to get close to that U.S. border.
17:58But stealing fuel on a massive scale was not without challenges.
18:03It required expertise in engineering and extraction.
18:07An insider's knowledge of the industry and tactical skills to avoid detection.
18:13The cartels used large crews made up of locals, including many former fuel thieves who already had hands-on experience drilling and siphoning pipelines.
18:24One main extraction method was called hot tapping.
18:27The laborers would dig or chisel out an underground PEMEX pipeline with picks and shovels, then solder a valve directly onto the pipe's surface.
18:36Then they'd use an auger to drill a hole right through the pipe to the gas.
18:40With high-pressure gasoline spewing in their faces, they would then screw a hose onto the valve to control the flow and direct the gas into a large plastic tank.
18:49It took only a minute to fill a tank capable of holding over 300 gallons.
18:54The filled tanks were then loaded up into pickup trucks and driven to the various black market distribution centers.
19:00Most of the day's profits went directly to the cartel bosses, and all those people doing all of that work were only getting about 40 bucks a day.
19:09It was dirty and dangerous work, and the workers frequently paid for it with their lives.
19:15Any gasoline spills could ignite in a flash. All it took was a single spark or a cigarette butt. The entire area could go up in flames.
19:22On one occasion, a huge pipeline fire scorched the town of San Martin Tesmalucan, when a spark turned the streets into rivers of fire.
19:3029 people died, including 13 children.
19:33With incidents of fuel theft skyrocketing, Mexican authorities started to suspect the cartels were getting help from the inside.
19:42They were right.
19:44Hammock's employees at all levels, from engineers to executives, were acting as paid informants.
19:49They provided maps of pipeline networks as well as tip-offs to let the cartels know when to expect fuel to be flowing.
19:55When police discovered a pipeline that had been vandalized and drilled, they frequently found evidence of specialized valves, professional equipment that could only have been supplied by Pemex employees.
20:06Between 2006 and 2015, over 100 of them were arrested in connection with fuel theft.
20:12At its peak, the illegal fuel trade was responsible for over 23,000 barrels of stolen gas or oil every single day.
20:22More cartels were moving in to exploit the system, like the deadly Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
20:29In 2018, the government unveiled a strict policy to help stop the hemorrhaging of gas and oil.
20:36The first step was a series of investigations of Pemex employees and a restructuring of that whole company to root out corruption.
20:44Hundreds of miles of Pemex pipelines were also closed temporarily, and then when they reopened, they were heavily guarded by the Mexican military.
20:52To beef up surveillance, drones like Arcturus T20s were used to catch thieves on site in real time.
20:58These drones can detect the presence of hydrocarbons and send alert signals to the police.
21:03But once again, the cartels devised ingenious methods to bypass both the military and drone technology.
21:11Since security forces on foot patrol could only be effective above ground, the solution required the cartels to go underground.
21:18The new plan involved the creation of a drainage system that could divert fuel from pipelines to a secret holding or storage area through a network of connected tunnels.
21:28The tunnels were built anywhere from 10 to 25 feet below the surface, and they were reinforced with wooden planks and beams.
21:35That meant they were structurally sound. They were also well lit and they were ventilated so the thieves wouldn't get sick from the gas fumes.
21:43Once a pipeline was successfully hot tapped, they ran a series of thick hoses through the tunnel system and up to tanks inside a storage house.
21:53These anonymous looking warehouses were either built by the cartels, or they simply set up shop in abandoned buildings, sometimes just 150 yards from the main Pemex refineries.
22:06By 2020, Mexican authorities were starting to catch up to the cartels new approach to fuel theft.
22:14A series of raids across northeastern Mexico revealed just how entrenched the cartels operations were in the area.
22:21And you have to understand, these cartels are so big that they become part of the economic system.
22:30Locals are hired to do the dirty work, executives get paid off, and of course regular citizens start to rely on these lower gas prices that they can get on the black market.
22:40And this is part of what makes it such a complex problem. As much as people hate all that violence, there are tangible benefits for them of having a cartel in their community.
22:50So what evolves is a classic Catch-22. The more fuel that's stolen, the more the gas companies are forced to raise the price at the pumps, which just increases demand for the cheaper stolen product.
23:05In the case of the 2023 raid in Hidalgo, police arrested 10 people found in the tunnel.
23:12But one raid, or even a series of raids, can only do so much when the cartel's stranglehold on the region remains airtight.
23:20On April 7th, 2015, security guards from the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company in London returned to work after Easter weekend to discover the entire underground vault had been raided and ransacked.
23:45The sheer audacity and scale of the heist left authorities stunned.
23:52Over 70 safety deposit boxes had been opened and cleaned out. And these were all basically mini-safes that had to be cracked apart.
24:01The thieves made off with gold, cash and jewels worth roughly 18 million US dollars.
24:08To access the vault, the robbers bypassed the massive door to the safe entirely. Instead, they just bored directly through the six-foot reinforced cement wall, creating a hole large enough for anyone to climb in and out.
24:23Not surprisingly, the heist caused a media frenzy and immediately sparked a high-profile investigation.
24:30In the days that followed, both the public and the police had questions, starting with, how did the thieves commit such a brazen theft from a notoriously secure location?
24:40The Hatton Garden heist was the work of a small gang of career criminals in their 60s and 70s.
24:49And they pulled it off with careful planning, an expert knowledge of surveillance technology and engineering.
24:55Hatton Garden was London's renowned jewelry district, essentially the symbolic centerpiece of jewelry commerce in the UK.
25:04The Safety Deposit Company was a long-standing institution in the district, in part because its clients appreciated the amount of discretion, anonymity and security the company promised.
25:16After hours, the vault was protected by a large combination-coated door and thick cement walls.
25:23The rest of the building was outfitted with CCTV cameras and alarm systems.
25:28And both doors leading into the building were kept locked.
25:31Based on the security protocols alone, the Safety Deposit Company was not an easy target for the would-be thieves.
25:38Whoever was bold enough to rob the company would need logistical skills, an intimate knowledge of the security systems, and decades of experience with elaborate heists.
25:48Decades of experience was exactly what Daniel Jones, Terry Perkins, and John Collins brought to the table when they met at a North London pub to plan the ultimate robbery.
26:01The Castle Pub was a semi-regular spot for these career criminals to get together and scheme.
26:0867-year-old Terry Perkins was the former ringleader of the famous 1983 Security Express job.
26:16He'd escaped from prison and had been living under the radar ever since.
26:21Danny Jones was a 60-year-old eccentric with a passion for the latest tools, techniques, and tricks in the crime business.
26:30He was also an army fanatic and kept himself in top physical shape.
26:35John Kenny Collins, who clocked in at 75 years old, was a fireworks importer with an extensive criminal past.
26:43He had a reputation as a classic London villain, and despite being semi-retired from a life of crime, he wanted to get back in the game.
26:50The three crooks identified the Safety Deposit Company as the perfect target.
26:57It contained enough cash and valuables in one location to ensure their economic security.
27:04Plus, they would be out doing other recent heists, thereby cementing their notoriety in the criminal world.
27:12To maximize their timeline, they decided to stage the robbery over the Easter holiday weekend.
27:18Security guards were likely to set the alarm on Thursday, April 2nd, at around 6pm, and not return until the following Tuesday morning.
27:27Perkins, Jones, and Collins each had their part to play.
27:31But they had to add more members to the gang to fill in some of the key responsibilities.
27:37The first ex-con they chose was Brian Reeder, nicknamed the Governor.
27:42Brought in as a veteran of multiple high-profile burglaries.
27:46They also needed someone with up-to-date expertise in picking locks and jamming security systems.
27:52And the best man for that job was this mysterious figure known only to the thieves by the name Basil.
28:02The team completed.
28:03The first challenge facing the Hatton Garden gang was accessing the Safety Deposit Company building without attracting attention or setting off alarms.
28:12John Collins spent several weeks gathering intelligence for potential weaknesses in the security system.
28:19And carrying out reconnaissance on the layout of the building.
28:22He parked his Mercedes at a distance to monitor the routines of the staff, customers, and other merchants in the area.
28:29To bypass security protocols and disable the alarms, the team needed a jamming tool or device that could disarm the system without tampering with its electrical supply.
28:41To that end, Basil provided a dummy alarm panel, which was originally used for training purposes and had a mobile jammer built right in.
28:50For the basement vault, Danny Jones had spent the previous couple of years researching industrial tools and drills mostly by watching YouTube videos online.
29:01He landed on a heavy-duty diamond tip drill called a Hilti DD350, which cost just north of $5,000 US dollars.
29:11Once inside the vault, the team would need a powerful tool to knock the safety deposit boxes off the wall.
29:18Since the boxes were bolted directly into the concrete, they acquired a hydraulic battering ram for the job.
29:26On Thursday, April 2nd, the gang was ready to strike.
29:30Shortly after 9pm, Basil slipped into the Safety Deposit Company building without setting off any alarms.
29:37Basil used a bypass tool to enter the building, a skeleton key device that is available to consumers for about $16 US dollars.
29:47Once inside, he entered the security code which he'd gleaned from early reconnaissance.
29:52This was the first of several weaknesses in the company's system.
29:56They hadn't changed the code for over seven years.
29:58From there, Basil disabled the main elevator, which was sitting on the second floor.
30:05He shimmied down to the basement and pried open the metal exterior elevator doors,
30:11which created access for the rest of the team and their equipment, including several wheelie bins for carting off the stolen goods.
30:20The advantage to going in that way was that it bypassed two regular doors and a stairwell and all the alarms that were connected to all of that.
30:27But just to make sure, Basil cut the antenna and the wires of that alarm before letting the other gang members inside.
30:37Despite the extra precaution, Basil's initial breach of the exterior elevator door sent a weak radio signal to the security company monitoring the system.
30:47When the security company called the owner of the safety deposit company, he alerted one of his guards to go check it out.
30:55And here's where the team got lucky.
30:57In a plot twist straight from a Hollywood heist flick, the security guard arrived to find both exterior doors closed and locked, just the way the team had left them.
31:07So he'd called in a false alarm.
31:11Now safely inside, the team arrived at the vault door and affixed Danny Jones diamond tipped Hilti drill to the cement wall and drilled three adjoining holes just large enough for one man to squeeze through.
31:25Once they got inside the vault, they prepped and positioned the hydraulic ram to knock the safety deposit boxes clear of the wall, but then they hit this massive problem.
31:34The ram's pump was broken, which meant the entire battering ram was out of commission.
31:40They needed to replace that pump and they needed to do it fast.
31:45Just 11 hours after they first entered the building, the Hatton Garden gang emerged on Good Friday morning without a single jewel or stack of cash in their possession.
31:54Jones and Collins traveled to Twickenham to replace the pump and the team returned to the scene on Saturday night with Collins arriving first in his Mercedes to make sure the coast was clear.
32:04They were successful on their second attempt and the powerful ram knocked the entire wall of the deposit boxes to the ground.
32:13With crowbars and handheld angle grinders, they jimmied open more than 70 boxes and quickly stuffed empty sacks with jewelry and gold,
32:22which they then ushered up and out in wheelie carts.
32:27But the journey was far from finished.
32:29With 70 boxes worth of stolen goods in their possession, the Hatton Garden gang faced another major challenge.
32:36They've got bricks of gold, they've got expensive jewelry, they've got stacks and stacks of cash and it's all very valuable, but it's also really cumbersome and it's really conspicuous.
32:49Exactly how to transport, store and launder all of that loot while avoiding detection was now their number one job.
32:59They decided to break up the treasure into smaller amounts and find unusual but secure temporary hiding spots from inside casserole dishes to beneath covered burial plots and tombstones.
33:12Unfortunately, a combination of some costly errors plus good detective work eventually caught up with the gang.
33:21While they had successfully disabled the safety deposit buildings interior cameras, Basil and the rest of the team failed to identify security cameras outside the building.
33:32Not only were the robbers caught arriving and leaving the scene, but their vehicles and license plates were captured and identified linking them to their owners.
33:44To make matters worse, back when John Collins and Danny Jones had replaced that busted ram pump on Good Friday,
33:50Well, in his haste, Jones had signed the paperwork V Jones and written down most of his actual address.
33:59Armed with the suspects' names and locations, police discreetly placed probes and bugs on Collins and Perkins' cars.
34:07In a matter of days, the two crooks were caught on tape boasting about the heist and discussing how they were planning to divide the proceeds.
34:14On the day of the scheduled exchange of goods and funds, police moved in and arrested the veteran criminals in their cars and homes.
34:23In March of 2016, the five men were sentenced to a combined 34 years in prison.
34:31In March of 2021, a massive joint police operation between Belgium and the Netherlands intercepted 14 tons of cocaine and seized over a million dollars in cash from European drug traffickers.
34:54The sheer scale of the coordinated effort was unprecedented for the two countries.
35:01The operation was carried out by about 1,600 officers who searched more than 200 premises.
35:07In addition to the drugs and cash, police confiscated 15 illegal weapons, eight luxury vehicles and various stolen police uniforms.
35:16In total, nearly 50 people were arrested.
35:19The bust wasn't the result of a police informant or this undercover agent sting operation.
35:25What happened is the police had been tracking and monitoring encrypted messages among the traffickers for several weeks because they had hacked into their secret communication network.
35:36The key word here is encrypted.
35:37The criminal syndicates were able to communicate smuggling operations on custom engineered phones, confident that the messages were private and secure because they were encrypted.
35:49That is, the sender's message would be indecipherable to anyone but the recipient.
35:53Encrypted phones and the companies who made them all offer the same thing to its customers, messages that were secret, safe and secure.
36:03The challenge for the designers of the phones was to create the most sophisticated security system possible and to stay one step ahead of police interception.
36:13Encrypted phones are also referred to as PGP phones for pretty good privacy.
36:19They looked just like a regular smartphone, but they were engineered for one function and one function only to allow users to communicate without a third party being able to read messages.
36:28The encryption process was pretty straightforward. Every sent message was automatically changed into a series of random numbers and digits.
36:36The scrambled message was sent to a server where it waited for the intended recipient to decrypt the message with a private key.
36:42The PGP devices could only send messages to each other, so you can't send a message from one of them to a phone and you can't send one from a phone to the PGP device.
36:50Plus, all the apps and functions on those PGP phones are taken off. There's no camera, there's no Bluetooth, there's no microphone.
36:58And that means that the phone user can't be tracked or spied on because of the phone itself.
37:04Creators of encrypted phones frequently installed a wipe or kill switch, a secret code that, when entered, erased all the phone's data.
37:12This was useful for criminals who, for example, were suddenly trapped or caught by police. It essentially destroyed all the digital evidence.
37:21Encrypted phone devices were entirely legal and available to any consumer who valued their privacy.
37:27But the technology was soon adopted by organized crime syndicates as the most effective way to avoid detection.
37:35There's an impressive history of codes and keys being used by crooks to disguise or hide their activities from the police, going back to the invention of the wiretap in the 1890s.
37:45The wiretap was the creation of a police officer and former telephone company employee who suggested adding a secret circuit to the phone lines used by known criminals.
37:54The New York City mayor approved it, and for two decades, the use of wiretapping flourished without the public's knowledge.
38:00When news of that practice leaked to the public in 1916, they howled in protest.
38:06Plus, that meant criminals got quickly to work devising new methods to avoid detection.
38:11And one of those involved creating a coded language, or a cipher, written on a small piece of paper.
38:16Basically, for these messages, the letters of each word were shifted three places in the alphabet.
38:22In the 1990s, many Mexican drug cartels adopted encryption methods to scramble communication on their regular cell phones.
38:30They were using open source software, which meant anyone had access and could use it if they knew how.
38:37By the late 2010s, the encrypted phone industry was big business, since the manufacture and sale of the devices was technically still legal.
38:47As it became clear that encrypted phones were being used by criminals all over the world, the real question became one of responsibility.
38:54Is the provider company responsible for how their product is being used, especially when they're notified and warned by law enforcement?
39:00It's a legal question, but that's also a moral question.
39:04The Dutch company Enicom is a good example of a PGP phone manufacturer that was ultimately convicted of purposely facilitating crime by selling encrypted phones.
39:13The Enicom network was used by around 19,000 people, most of them based in the Netherlands.
39:19All communications ran through Enicom's own infrastructure, which made it more difficult to intercept users' messages, but it also aroused suspicion from the authorities.
39:30The Dutch national high-tech crime unit discovered that Enicom servers were actually housed in Canada.
39:36So they obtained a search warrant from Canadian authorities to copy all the server data, and Dutch analysts were able to decrypt the messages.
39:43In 2016, Enicom's owner Danny Manupasa was arrested and sentenced to four and a half years in prison, along with several of its users, which included drug traffickers, hitmen, and convicted murderers.
39:57Prosecutors were able to prove that Manupasa purposefully facilitated crime, as the company was well aware that its user base consisted mostly of people engaged in illicit activities.
40:10The fall of Enicom should have served as a warning to would-be criminals to treat PGP phones with caution.
40:16But other provider companies were paying close attention as well, so they devised new technologies to make their phones even more secure.
40:23One of Europe's most popular providers was a company called EncroChat, which boasted a wide user base, including around 10,000 users in the UK.
40:32The devices had a wipe function that could delete all messages instantly, and a dual boot, which allowed users to toggle between regular phone use and the secure mode.
40:41EncroChat was marketed to users as having its servers housed in a secret, secure, offshore location.
40:48But, as was the case with Enicom, they weren't being totally honest.
40:53In fact, the servers were located in a well-known data center in France, in the city of Roubaix.
40:59In January of 2019, the French National Gendarmerie, along with Dutch police, executed a warrant to secretly copy EncroChat's servers.
41:11But they went one step further.
41:14In April 2020, they hired engineers to create and deploy malware into the EncroChat network.
41:20But it was disguised as a software update that went out to all the user phones.
41:25This malware disabled the wipe feature and gave authorities access to all the stored texts.
41:30That's a lot of data and a lot of evidence.
41:33The malware also allowed police to read messages coming into the server in real time for a period of two months.
41:39It was like the police were all sitting down at the table with the crooks as they discussed and planned their illegal drug shipments.
41:45By July of 2020, the owners of EncroChat discovered that their network had been infiltrated and hacked by the police.
41:52So they quickly shut down the entire network.
41:54But by that point, the authorities had all the evidence they needed to make thousands of arrests.
42:002800 in the UK alone.
42:04By the late 2010s, the cocaine business in Europe was outpacing the heroin trade.
42:09Ever since Colombian cartels lost control of the North American markets, they shifted their focus to Europe.
42:16The cocaine business effectively became a shipping business.
42:19Customs officers estimated that fully half of Europe's cocaine was arriving through two main seaports.
42:25Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Antwerp in Belgium.
42:28Thanks to intelligence gathered from criminals' decrypted messages, authorities learned that smaller European ports were fast becoming major hubs for cocaine shipment.
42:37Like Livorno in Italy and Vlissingen in the Netherlands.
42:41And the police were using this intelligence to intercept shipments and arrest the traffickers.
42:45It was like a tech war between the traffickers and law enforcement.
42:48And once again, the European drug syndicates had to look for new and more secure communication networks so they could just stay one step ahead of the police.
42:56One of those networks was a provider called Sky ECC.
43:03The Vancouver Canada-based Sky ECC was so confident in its ability to provide secure connections that it offered a $5 million reward to anyone who could hack one of its phones in a 90-day period.
43:15Some of Sky ECC's security features included the ability to wipe a device remotely if the phone got into the wrong hands.
43:24It was also impossible to physically extract data such as contacts, messages or call history from the device.
43:32By March of 2021, Sky ECC had around 70,000 users. Amazingly, and much to the surprise of the French police, the company's servers were also located in Roubaix, France, along with EncroChat.
43:45But instead of using malware to hack the network, this time the police launched what is known as a protocol attack, which is essentially a way of tricking or deceiving the phone into revealing its private keys or codes.
43:57So they managed to dismantle its number one security feature.
44:00When the protocol attack proved successful, authorities intercepted and decrypted an enormous amount of exchanged messages.
44:08Millions of them, literally millions of communications between thousands of criminals.
44:12And many of these, the police were receiving in real time.
44:15Which meant the most serious ones, the dangerous ones, required a police response as fast as possible.
44:21The Belgian and Dutch authorities set up command posts in Antwerp and Brussels to respond to decrypted messages revealing threats to life.
44:29It was overwhelming, the task of simply assigning threat levels to each and every message.
44:34Jean Ypres, CEO of Sky ECC, was ultimately indicted in the US for racketeering and the distribution of narcotics.
44:44The business was shut down, but chances are, another service will pop up in its place.