Hatton Garden - Season 1

It's April 2015 and the start of the long Easter Bank Holiday weekend as the vault in the basement of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company is locked up and closed for business.

The light is just beginning to fade as 76-year-old Brian Reader watches the front of the building from around the corner, waiting for the building to empty. The last security guard locks up ready to make his way home for the weekend. This is the cue for Reader and the rest of his gang to spring into life...

After an eventful, stressful and agonisingly unsuccessful nights' work, the Hatton Garden gang are all back at home, replaying their individual mistakes and failures from the night before. Reader's number two, Perkins, tries to persuade ‘the master' as Reader calls himself, to go back in. The two men go back a long way, and Perkins tells Reader this is his last job. He badly needs it to be successful. Reader won't be moved so, behind his back, Perkins rallies the team and they decide to try again. First they replace the broken air ram that failed on Thursday night, then they go back in. At the last moment Wood cries off, leaving them two men short.

Against the odds, they pull it off. Basil and Jones wriggle through the hole they've drilled into the vault and begin to funnel tray after tray of jewellery, cash and bullion to Perkins, who is left waiting on the outside. The night almost ends in disaster when Perkins, a diabetic, keels over. But they manage to revive him and get everything out. The haul is conservatively estimated at £30 million, the biggest burglary in British history. But their plan to stash it at Collins' (Alex Norton) house is thwarted by his wife being at home (two days earlier she had been away). They are forced to leave it in wheelie bins outside his house, lined up along with all the neighbours bins ready for collection. The haul is hidden in plain sight. But soon, Perkins reflects, Reader will find out about what has happened…

Two days have passed since the gang escaped from the Hatton Garden Safety Deposit Vault with millions in stolen goods, and everyone is just arriving back to work on the Tuesday morning after the long Easter weekend, when the burglary is discovered by a security guard walking into the vault to see the havoc left behind.

A police surveillance team has found Collins (Alex Norton) through his white Mercedes, after it was captured on ANPR driving to and from Hatton Garden in the build-up to the raid – against Reader's express instructions. For DCI Johnson and his Flying Squad team it's now just a question of following Collins and seeing where he leads them. And they don't have to wait long. With Reader putting Perkins under pressure to cut him in on the haul, Perkins begrudgingly agrees to meet him. Perkins is minded to give Reader a slice, but when the older man overplays his hand, Perkins loses his temper and tells him he's getting nothing. Police watch everything from a distance and even manage to video the meeting.

The gang are slowly destroying themselves from the inside, and all their conversations and meetings are being bugged by the police. Perkins, worried about Reader trying to make a grab for the remaining loot, decides to break his own cardinal rule and bring the final divvy-up of the haul forward. His plan was to leave it for six months, by which time the police surveillance operation would be scaled down. But he distrusts Reader. This is now the moment the Flying Squad has been waiting for – the gang and the haul all in one place at the same time and they make their move to swoop in.