25 years after what could have been the biggest diamond heist of all time, the thief behind the bold move has spoken for the first time in a Guy Ritchie documentary
A robber who attempted to steal a £350 million diamond from the Millennium Dome has spoken about the audacious heist for the first time in a new Netflix documentary by Guy Ritchie.
Lee Wenham was part of a sophisticated gang who smashed into the Dome in Greenwich, south London, with a JCB digger in what would have been the biggest heist of all time.
The three-part series, produced by The Gentleman and Snatch director Ritchie, reveals amazing detail about the raid on November 7, 2000, which has been described by cops as “like something out of the movies – it was as if they’d been watching too much James Bond.”
The Dome – now the O2 music venue – had been a New Labour project to celebrate the Millennium and featured exhibitions including a diamond display by De Beers.
Wenham told the documentary: “In hindsight, it was a bit of a p***-take putting the diamond in that bit of London which is a rat race for thieves. It’s like putting it in the lion’s den so obviously we thought, ‘We’ve got to have it’.
“It was going to be my last job. It was a little bit far-fetched, too out there, too much attention around the Dome, but Ray told me if we could pull it off it was going to be the biggest heist of all time.
“I wanted to be involved in something really big and it couldn’t get much bigger.”
The diamond was kept in a vault that had three-feet walls and motion sensors so sensitive they would be alerted by a fly landing.
Tim Thorn, then head of security at De Beers, said: “A demented person with an ice axe might be able to penetrate the glass after half an hour. I felt it was fairly impregnable. There’s aIways someone who can break in but I felt it would be a very special team to do that.”
The gang – led by hardman Ray Betson – used a nail gun to shatter the glass before throwing smoke bombs to distract the public and attempting to flee on a speed boat on the Thames.
The robbery itself went like clockwork – but the Flying Squad were lying in wait for them.
They’d been surveilling them since they carried out two failed Securicor van robberies which were similarly audacious and would have been worth up to £9 million.
They used six-foot concrete spikes to spear a hole in the bullet-proof vans and nab the cash. They then stuck ‘bombs’ on the side of the vans – but hilariously, Wenham reveals he came up with the idea of making fake bombs made from spray-painted FRAY BENTOS pies.
Wenham said: “We didn’t want to hurt anyone, and you don’t want it to be like the Italian Job where you blow the whole thing up. We just wanted to scare the security drivers into doing what we wanted”.
The gang were arrested at the Dome within seconds of the raid, other than Wenham, who was back at their safe house in Kent waiting to receive the 203-carat jewel. He was arrested shortly afterwards.
Wenham was sentenced to nine years for the attempted van heist and four for the Dome robbery but only served four and a half years.
He said: “Prison changed me. It makes you think about things before you do them. I was very young then. I was just thinking about the money. I’m a good boy now.
“But looking back on the robbery now, I don’t regret having a go at it. It was a good plan, good people doing it. The only thing I’d change is that we’d got the diamond.”
* The Diamond Heist premieres on Netflix from April 16.
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