A University of York academic has used a series of 'forgotten' cassette recordings to help piece together the plot behind an infamous mail van robbery from the 1950s.
A police image of the suspected ringleader, Billy Hill. Image courtesy of The Postal Museum.
The recordings outline the audacious plan behind the Eastcastle Street mail van robbery in London in 1952, which saw £7.3 million in today's money stolen.
Dr Mark Roodhouse, a historian from the University of York, who is investigating illegal markets and organised crime in mid-twentieth-century London, turned his attention to the unsolved van robbery when Post Office investigation files became available.
He reached out to a retired academic who had interacted with London greengrocer and known criminal, Alexander James Sullivan - known as Sonny -, as part of a potential project in the mid-1990s. The academic's conversations with Sonny had been recorded, but as the investigation into the robbery was closed in the late 1950s, and Sullivan passed away from illness soon after the recording, the material has never been used to understand how this highly complex crime was undertaken.
Meticulous plan
The tapes show a meticulously planned crime that was significantly different to its depiction in police records and media coverage from the time. Planned over many months, the story that Sullivan tells is of a complex crime that had to be revised several times in the planning stage, implicating mail workers, and involving considerable post-crime 'cover-up' strategies for years after the event.
It is argued that the crime, which was covered extensively by the media, with Winston Churchill requesting regular updates from police at the time, paved the way for the Great Train Robbery of 1963, which police suspected may have included some of the members of the gang that raided the mail van.
Confessions
Unlike the Great Train Robbery, however, none of the members of the gang that Sullivan was a part of were brought to justice, despite the ringleader, Billy Hill, alluding to his role in the robbery in a book published about his life many years later.
Dr Mark Roodhouse said the files revealed that the investigators knew a lot more about the robbery than they said in public but not as much as they hinted that they knew.
Dr Roodhouse said: "Despite the Eastcastle Street crime dominating the news for weeks, trying to understand what happened from those press reports and the investigative files was difficult. It seemed that we would never know who was responsible for what was then the largest and most successful cash robbery in UK history, and how they pulled it off.
"It wasn't until I discovered that towards the end of his life Sullivan told his story to a now retired film historian that I thought that the mystery of exactly who did the job and how they did would be solved. Sullivan wanted to set the record straight and secure recognition for the part he played in this job and the 1954 KLM gold bullion robbery - another Billy Hill 'crime production'.
"This was around the time that high-profile criminals, such as the English gangster "Mad Frankie" Fraser, learned they could make more money from writing about their criminal careers than they ever did from their crimes.
"As Hill had died a decade before the recorded 'confession' was made, and Sullivan himself died shortly after the interview, the tapes sat unused and undocumented at the home of the historian. For me, however, they were key to understanding how we have interpreted organised crime over the years - piecing together a picture from media reports, police documents, and court proceedings, and contrasting this with insider knowledge."
Vital evidence
The Eastcastle Street case was unique compared to some of the other organised crimes in the period, in that no arrests for the robbery were made and almost all the money stolen was never recovered. The tape recordings of Sullivan proved vital to demonstrating that many of the media reports were significantly incorrect, and police files had a timeline of events that in no way revealed how complex this crime was.
Sullivan was a well known London villain, who the police wanted to convict but couldn't, who parted with Hill on good terms after a number of years together, and who went into legitimate business for the remainder of his life. He was 45 years old at the time of the mail van robbery, but in the 1990s it was clear that he wanted to secure his place, and that of his boss Hill, in the criminal pantheon of postwar Britain.
Dr Roodhouse said: "Hill who died in 1984 was described as working in demolitions on his death certificate, and according to his former business partner and later rival, Jack "Spot" Comer was the "richest man in the graveyard." Although the police suspected Hill of the mail van robbery and interviewed him, there was no evidence to link him or any other member of the gang to the crime and the case was closed."
In the recordings, Sullivan describes how his role was to research the target and plan how to intercept a mail van carrying bank money through London, following an early morning pick-up from a train station. His findings were reported back to his boss, Billy Hill.
Pay offs
Through his networks he identified a postal worker that he could 'pay off' to gather information on what particular mail vans would be carrying and what route they might take from the train pick-up point through the city.
The involvement of the Post Office insider appears to explain how the robbers knew to go into the front of the van, and not the back, and why the interior emergency van alarm was disarmed. Police were therefore not alerted by the van's security system at the time that the three mail workers were dragged from the vehicle, by men who intercepted it in two vehicles, one to the front and one to back of the van.
Dr Roodhouse said: "Billy Hill, who employed Sonny as a croupier in his illegal gambling clubs, patiently waited it out until a more convenient and softer high value target carrying cash could be found, and had a stroke of luck in the form of road works that diverted the van into a quiet side street which made the ambush easier.
"This along with a plan of how to remove the money from the mail van and transport it safely to a quiet place for the share-out took a lot of thought. The gang created a mobile piggy bank on the back of a flat-bed lorry by building a 'well' structure using apple crates.
"They also had to decide how best to split the money amongst the gang and mail worker informants, launder the money, and assure years of silence from not only the men involved, but anyone they may have possibly told, such as business partners, and wives. This was all thought through and executed carefully."
Post-robbery planning
Dr Roodhouse believes that the focus on the plan post-robbery, was what made this crime successful compared to the much larger crime that followed - the Great Train Robbery - where the majority of the gang was caught and prosecuted and much of the money frittered away or stolen from the robbers.
Dr Roodhouse said: "That the robbery itself was simpler to execute with fewer moving parts than the train robbery meant that the Eastcastle Street team had more time to plan for what happened next and that there was less to go wrong.
"Given that the plan was revised many times, and that it took place in full public view in a busy place like London, you would expect a somewhat dangerous and chaotic event. But the time and patience devoted to planning, experimenting with different approaches, meant that the final plan was a solid one that everyone involved believed in. This generated faith and trust in Hill's leadership among the team with no one harbouring a grudge that police could exploit down the line.
"For our understanding of how organised crime unfolds, it is clear that police records and media coverage gives a very one-dimensional view, but understanding the dynamics of a group of criminals working together and how they plot a successful outcome from someone who has been on the inside, gives us unparalleled insight into how project crimes ran in the past, and helps us understand how criminals approach project crime today."
