【DAY237】朗读版：哈顿花园惊天大劫案——幕后黑手是英国“爷爷天团”？

关注趴趴云课公众号，后台回复“喜马拉雅”获取完整版精读笔记

精讲版同步更新中英文本和中文知识点

The “bad grandpas” and the last great British heist

THE TEN-TONNE, bomb-proof door of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company has never been breached. But over the long Easter weekend of 2015, an ingenious gang found another way into the closely guarded vault beneath London’s jewellery quarter. They made off with wheelie-bins full of gold, cash and gems worth more than $20m.

The Hatton Garden burglary was “the last great British heist”, in the words of the prosecutor who eventually convicted the men behind it. It was also one of the oddest, as Dan Bilefsky, a correspondent for the New York Times, explains in his entertaining and detailed account of the caper. The fearsome crew behind the crime of the century turned out to be a gang of grandpas, led by a 76-year-old who travelled to the raid using his senior citizen’s bus pass. 

The grandpas were “1980s criminals who committed a crime in the 21st century”, as one of their defence lawyers put it. They used the same mobile phones after the robbery, forgot to throw away their public-transport smart-cards, and boasted about the crime in their favourite pub, where the police were filming them and passing the footage to a lip-reader.

Eventually the cops swooped, catching the men red-handed with Lidl bags full of loot. “It’s overwhelming I suppose, innit?” conceded one of the gang when police confronted him with the evidence. It was: the grandpas pleaded guilty and were sent to a high-security prison, some of them straining with their hearing aids to hear the judge’s sentence.