Episode 12 Robbed, Raided, Reunited

We're on the case of a crime that's committed once every 44 seconds -

burglary.

Coming up...

I was shaking and crying.

It's just shocking.

We're with the police as they hunt down criminals.

If you're a thief and you come to Hatton Gardens, you'll get caught.

And if you handle stolen property from the proceeds of robberies and burglaries,

we will come and find you.

And we'll see the joy

when what's been stolen has been returned to its rightful owner.

So beautiful.

I really appreciate your work, everybody.

-It's what we get paid to do.

-Thank you. Thank you.

In Shoeburyness in Essex,

a woman has come home to find her house completely ransacked.

I was so frightened, and it's shocking, you know.

I just can't believe what happened to me.

All my things upside down, especially in my bedroom,

and all my things been taken away.

This woman was the latest victim in a series of large-scale burglaries,

targeting Chinese and Southeast Asian families.

But her burglary would be the one that gave the police

the vital evidence needed to stop the crime spree.

In a three-year stretch of offending, a team of two burglars

stole hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of precious jewellery and cash.

DS Rob Kirby of Essex Police was brought in to investigate.

The victim had been out all day and didn't return home until

about six o'clock in the evening.

At which point, she contacted police.

A significant amount of jewellery had been stolen.

It eventually totalled over £90,000.

It's the custom in many Chinese families

to buy expensive jewellery for a newborn.

It's also passed on to sons and daughters when they marry.

For this woman, the jewellery was of huge sentimental value.

Many of the treasured possessions were presents from her parents.

She was particularly distressed to have lost gold jewellery

she'd wanted to give to her children when they married,

and the precious earrings she wore for her wedding to her late husband.

I was very angry.

How can somebody come to my house

and steal all my stuff just like that?

I think it is very...brutal, you know.

Nearly 150 miles away in Lincolnshire,

DC Martin Ryder had been investigating

a very similar spree of burglaries the year before.

There was one weekend in October where we had

five burglary offences in Lincoln

where five Chinese families were targeted.

That's too much of a coincidence.

The distinctive thing about the offences was the nature of searches.

They were ripping off bath panels.

They were searching loft areas to houses, disturbing floorboards

and absolutely turning rooms upside down.

We had no forensic evidence, we had next to no witnesses.

This is not common, this is not the norm.

And for their victims coming home to that on that night,

it would have been a horrendous scene.

This had all the flavours, to me, of somebody coming into Lincolnshire

from the outside, so we immediately started

looking beyond Lincoln.

Martin soon realised these crimes had a lot in common

with those in Essex.

The officers alerted the Chinese communities in both places

and reports came back of two white men with grey hair in smart suits,

posing as businessmen.

They would be friendly, but they'd ask unusual questions.

Then, a breakthrough came when a man was visited

by one of the culprits.

He became suspicious and he followed him to his car.

The gentleman took down the registration number

and contacted Lincolnshire Police.

The car was registered to a Paul White

who lived in Merseyside.

They raided his home, and although they didn't catch him,

they found mobile phone records, bank statements and hotel receipts.

All proved to be vital in making their case against him.

We looked at where the phones had been.

We looked at where financial transactions had taken place,

where he'd withdrawn money from his account,

where he'd deposited money from his account.

That in itself, basically, gave us a dot-to-dot picture of movement.

The hunt was now on to find Paul White.

Police automatic number plate recognition cameras

and CCTV also helped plot his movements.

His car was spotted more than 200 times as he travelled all over the country.

At the time of this footage, he would have just committed

the five burglary offences in Lincoln.

We can see in the footage that he's smartly dressed, shirt and tie.

He would have come across completely legitimately as a businessman.

Martin's team made enquiries with people close to their suspect.

Paul White soon realised he wasn't going to shake the police

and eventually came in for questioning.

When I asked him what he did, he said painter and decorator.

"I'm on the dole and I've just done little jobs, that's it.

"Just enough to get by."

I asked him, "How much do you think you've earned in the last six months?"

His reply was, "A few grand, low thousands."

I asked him when he came to Lincolnshire, who he came with.

He replied, quite simply, "No-one."

So the person in the passenger seat was obviously a fiction of his imagination.

He was being proven to be more and more dishonest

as we went through.

The evidence was still circumstantial

so Martin's team had to release Paul White,

but they were now following his every move

and also looking for his accomplice.

We'd established that within Paul White's phone

he'd got a contact called Uncle Peter.

We looked at his relatives and we identified Uncle Peter, Peter White.

Who, much to our surprise at that time, was on the run

having failed to answer his bail at Crown Court

for a series of Chinese-targeted house burglaries

that Wiltshire Police had investigated.

The picture just got bigger and bigger. Everything was fitting.

Things are starting to come together.

But will Martin and Rob find enough evidence to charge

both their suspects?

We'll find out later.

Burglars will target jewellery whenever they find it.

It's easy to carry and sell for quick cash.

So police are always interested in clamping down on shops

willing to buy stolen valuables with no questions asked.

After a spate of thefts of valuable watches,

Detective Superintendent Raffaele D'Orsi from the Metropolitan Police

is leading a raid to clamp down on the stolen goods market.

Raffaele joined the force 25 years ago

to catch burglars and robbers.

It's exactly what he wants to do today.

OK, what we're going to do now is we're going to take control

of the whole street,

we'll take control of the locations, take control of the individuals

who run the specific premises we're looking to search.

Then we'll progress our search once we're happy with control.

He's sealing off Hatton Garden in London,

the UK's centre for the jewellery, gold and watch trade.

There are hundreds of legitimate businesses in this area,

but amongst these honest dealers are a handful

willing to take in stolen goods to turn a handsome profit.

The reason why we've come down here and closed the road

is to send a message to the whole of Hatton Gardens

that the police are aware there are offences occurring here

on a daily basis.

What we're doing here, I'm looking for stolen items

and I'm going to search you, OK?

So make sure you don't have any items of property on you

which might be stolen, OK?

What property have you got on you? Can I see it, please?

Yeah, course you can.

This is a bit bad because...

But that's why you were drawn to our attention

because of exactly that.

This is actually really bad.

Police want to separate legitimate dealers

from those who cannot account for what they're carrying.

We've got an individual here who, from our own knowledge,

doesn't fit what's going on in the street.

We've spoken to him, he may be a legitimate worker.

He's telling us he's bringing jewellery from one shop to this shop.

He doesn't have any paperwork in relation to that jewellery.

Our difficulties with these sorts of operations is,

quite often, individuals don't carry the paperwork,

but officers are exercising those powers to identify if the property's stolen,

or to identify if this could be a suspect who's bringing property

that are proceeds from crime to Hatton Gardens to sell.

Without any paperwork for his jewellery,

police arrest this man and take him in for more questioning.

The offences are being committed across the Metropolitan Police area,

across London, but also across the UK.

In recent weeks, we've intercepted individuals who were intending

to come down to Hatton Gardens to sell their stolen and robbed watches.

It's great to be able to go through the doors of those individuals

who have been purchasing the stolen goods

and providing a market place for these individuals to go out and commit those offences.

For seasoned burglars, these fences provide them with the means to

continue their trade, making it easy to dispose of their stolen items.

Often they'll be family heirlooms, passed down in generations,

or there'll be people who worked damned hard to be able to afford

to buy the watches.

They range from £1,000, £2,000, all the way up to £20,000.

Raffaele and his officers have now visited a number of premises

and are starting to take away evidence.

It's one building, but there's multiple jewellers and businesses in here.

So the individuals seen behind us are innocent members of the public

and lawful jewellers who are going about their business.

There is a premises which has been specifically searched and targeted,

because we believe them to be handling the proceeds of burglaries and robberies.

If the owner has documentation for the watch, we'll leave it there.

If they can't justify why they've got the watch and its history,

we've taken it.

What we'll do is we'll have a look, compare it to our database

of stolen watches, and if it's stolen, we'll move on from there.

The team have taken away property with a potential value

of over £140,000.

But DS Neil Johnstone wants everyone to know that this is not

just about money, nor were these victimless crimes.

Some of the thefts have been horrific.

There have been people attacked in the street

and had watches ripped off their wrists.

Some of the offences have been people in their own homes,

having people come through the door or through the windows

and having them taken from them whilst they're in the house.

Really, really upsetting for them, and hopefully we can reunite

the property with the owner.

That's the main aim, and that will be as satisfying as arresting somebody.

The maximum sentence for handling stolen property

is actually the same as burglary itself - 14 years.

The message has come quite clearly to everybody,

if you're a thief and you come to Hatton Gardens, you'll get caught.

If you handle stolen property from the proceeds of robberies or burglaries

we will come and find you.

And the police in Essex and Lincolnshire

are on the trail of jewellery thieves too.

They're working on building a case against two members of the same family

suspected of carrying out burglaries throughout the UK,

targeting Chinese and Southeast Asian families.

The men, Paul and Peter White, had a liking for luxury

and kept up their burglary spree to finance a lavish lifestyle,

staying in expensive hotels and buying designer clothes.

And for Paul White, the spending didn't end there.

We noticed the fact he was affording foreign holidays,

that he was spending £1,100, £1,200, £1,300 a time on clothes.

When somebody's a painter and decorator on £2-£3,000 a year,

the sums don't add up.

But the jewellery thieves weren't invincible.

Peter White was eventually caught by the police

after being on the run for several months.

They proved that he'd been carrying out burglaries since at least 2008,

and he was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail

for six burglaries in three counties.

His nephew, Paul White, was still a free man.

But to keep up his life of luxury, he carried on offending.

His greed will take over.

He will want to continue with this lifestyle and unless he's prepared

to work hard, he will need to commit more crime.

All the investigating teams were on high alert and it wasn't long

before Rob in Essex got a tip-off that Paul White was in his area.

We established the hotel Paul White was staying at

and we felt at that time there was a possibility that he may be in Essex

to commit another burglary.

Rob was right, and it wasn't long before another burglary occurred,

this time, the final one, in Shoeburyness.

Upstairs, everything was turned upside down.

The drawers are out and there's such a mess.

All my jewellery boxes were completely broken

and all the things had been taken away.

I instructed officers to go to the location we knew he was staying at

in an attempt to try and locate any of the jewellery

and arrest him for the offence.

-Police officers!

-Police!

Unfortunately, Paul had already left.

It was a blow, but Rob knew that Paul White was due to

appear in court in Lincoln the very next morning,

charged with stealing cash and jewellery from a former girlfriend.

When he got to his hearing,

White was promptly arrested for the burglaries as well.

When he was in custody in Lincoln,

they searched the suspect and they found one item of jewellery on him,

and we were able to speak to the victim in Essex

who positively identified that item of jewellery as being hers.

So, really good, strong evidence that linked him to that burglary.

Paul White had finally slipped up.

He'd forgotten all about that small, but important, piece of jewellery

he'd hidden in his pocket.

It was a gold pendant and was a cherished present

from the owner's father.

Having finally caught up with their suspect,

Martin and Rob both took the opportunity to interview Paul White.

It's just a shame these people don't realise what these items of jewellery

mean to the victims.

It isn't about being paid out by insurance companies.

It would have helped his case if he'd have assisted the police

in telling us where, what he'd done with the items.

The police now had their suspect and could link him

to at least one stolen item from Shoeburyness.

All they wanted now was to prove that he was there

at the scene of the crime as well.

The suspect was very thorough in that he often used to wear gloves,

so we struggled to find fingerprints at the address.

What we did find was a footprint on a piece of glass that he'd broken.

This was forensically looked at and a comparison was made

to what footwear that could have come from.

The police then searched the room where Paul White had recently been

staying in Essex, and found exactly what they needed.

We were able to positively identify the trainers found within the bedsit

as being the trainers that left the footprint on the glass

at the scene of the burglary.

There was now strong evidence for the Shoeburyness burglary,

but the police also suspected he was responsible for a number of others.

He's travelled the entire length and breadth of the country,

and it so happened that every time there was a burglary

with a Chinese victim, the suspect was in that area.

The following day, he paid some money into his account.

Every time he made a transaction, he was giving me more evidence.

He was the master of his own undoing.

Discover later what happens to Paul White

and if the victims are ever reunited with their precious jewellery.

87% of people who've been burgled

say they've been emotionally affected by what happened.

It's common to feel angry and shocked

and to be left feeling vulnerable in your own home.

And that's something PCs Adam Broughton and Alex Dorlin

of South Yorkshire Police know all about.

They're part of the Burglary Unit and they've been called

to an attempted break in just outside Rotherham.

Alex joined the force seven-and-a-half years ago

after a career in the Royal Marines,

and Adam's been an officer for nine years.

He thinks hard-working people get a bad deal from criminals

and particularly cares about the elderly victims of burglary.

Snow can be a hindrance to us,

but sometimes it can help us with footprints,

so we'll bear that in mind when we're approaching the door.

It were the lock that gave it away!

Are these any of your footprints?

They're mine, I've been to the gas meter, yeah.

-Were there any there before?

-No.

Unfortunately, the clear prints in the snow are not the burglar's,

but belong to the homeowner's daughter.

Phillipa discovered the break in when she came to visit her mum, Jennifer.

You only found it, didn't you?

We were dashing to the doctor's this morning

and me daughter went out to take the meter reading.

And then she came back and I heard her say, "Oh, my God!"

I said, "What's the matter?", and she said, "Somebody's tried to break in."

-What time did you discover that?

-Nine o'clock, yeah.

Nine o'clock this morning.

I mean, I have to admit, it's scared me stiff.

I'm absolutely... I couldn't believe...

I was just...shaking like a leaf.

The thing that's worrying, like my daughter just said,

they'll probably come back tonight to finish it off.

Which I shouldn't have said, it was a stupid thing to say in hindsight.

I mean, we can't say they definitely won't come back,

but the chances are they won't because they know you'll find that,

and generally people, when stuff like this happens,

they phone the police and they're more vigilant

and they get extra security.

We've not had many burglaries in this area for a while, so...

-Haven't you?

-No, so it's not a crime hotspot.

-No.

It's just a bit of reassurance for you, you know.

Burglars come through a door or window at the front

of the house in just over half of all break ins.

Older-style PVC doors are not as secure as newer models.

Jennifer has been lucky because the thieves

have not been able to completely break the lock.

They've obviously removed the fascia here

and that exposes this locking barrel.

But for some reason they haven't managed to snap it.

You can see the tool marks at the side of the locking barrel.

Once you've got a new lock on there,

your door's going to be fairly secure.

New anti-snap locks, they'll see the anti-snap locks

and they'll think there are easier targets out there and move on.

When you get to 73, you don't want shocks like this.

-Of course you don't.

-They're not very good for you!

You don't want them at 23 or 73!

My heart must be stronger than I thought it was.

I'm sure once you've got the new lock on there

and a new door, I'm sure that will be a bit of reassurance, won't it?

A new lock will cost Jennifer about £20, but the attempted burglary

is not an experience she's likely to forget.

It's just completely knocked the wind out of my sails.

I just can't describe it.

I was shaking and crying.

Really, really, it's just, yeah, shocking.

I am scared, but once I get the lock on,

I shall be fine.

I'm not sure. Got a good family.

They'll all rally round.

-Thanks ever so much.

-OK.

We'll be in touch, Jennifer, all right?

This chain, I suppose this is rubbish anyway?

-It's worth putting on. I'd keep it on all the time.

-Would you?

You'll get a good lock sorted, won't you?

-With that on as well, you'll be fine.

-Thank you ever so much.

I'd probably, you know this light here,

might be worth getting a nice modern light just to shine.

My son gave me hell the other week.

Very vintage that, in't it?

It looks as though it's even older than me, don't it?

That saying, there aren't many things left older than me!

It's a deterrent, in't it?

Adam is always keen to give crime prevention advice,

even to his own family.

I'm always having a go at my parents and grandparents

to take extra security measures, but a bit of common sense,

a few lights, extra security on your doors, don't leave your doors open,

don't leave things on show, shut your curtains.

Things like that, it's all basics.

We just offer that simple advice to people, really.

To do those little things, and you'll be surprised

what these little things do to prevent people targeting your address.

Two prolific burglars, Paul White and his uncle, Peter,

devastated families all over the UK when they stole

thousands of pounds worth of precious jewellery.

Police nationwide worked together and tracked them down.

In the burglaries that we were investigating,

I would estimate about half a million pounds worth of property

was stolen, and I can't say for certain what happened before that.

But I'm fairly convinced these guys have been doing this

for a matter of years.

So, naturally, I think these people are responsible for

multimillion pounds worth of burglaries across the UK.

Despite there being hundreds of pieces of jewellery still missing,

and many pieces unclaimed, Martin has been able to recover

a precious diamond pendant stolen from a house in Hampshire.

He's on his way to reunite it with its rightful owner.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-DC Rider. Are you well?

Come in.

The diamond pendant belongs to Deng Ji

and was a present from her late mother.

It's of huge sentimental value.

I've had it for about 23 years.

So beautiful.

I'm happy to have got it back.

I'm sad. Quite a lot of things that they took it from me.

I've got my two granddaughters,

I've got nothing to give them because they took everything.

Deng Ji and her husband Myint were burgled five years ago,

but the trauma the break in caused hasn't left them.

After that burglary happened,

I'm so afraid.

I check the door, front, back, every time.

-And now, of course, it's all right now.

-Time heals.

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

-Thankfully.

The first couple of months, I am so afraid.

I don't want to stay at home on my own.

But thank you very much.

I really appreciate your work, everybody.

It's what we get paid to do.

Thank you, thank you. I really appreciate it.

And in Essex, DS Rob Kirby is also able to return some recovered

jewellery to the victim of Paul White's Shoeburyness burglary.

Missed them for long time.

It's two years now, isn't it, nearly?

Life has been tough since the burglary.

She lost her only daughter in a car crash.

And the treasured jewellery she intended to give her

was stolen by Paul White.

But at least the police can reunite her

with one precious reminder of happier times -

the earrings she wore on her wedding day to her late husband.

-These are my wedding earrings.

-Oh, your wedding earrings?

Yeah, Chinese wear white in the Chinese tradition.

-So, you wore these on your wedding day?

-Yeah.

These are my wedding day earrings.

And something else was returned because Paul White had forgotten

all about a small piece of gold jewellery he'd stolen from her.

He put it in his coat, so when he was arrested,

-we searched him and that was in his pocket.

-Very good.

-So, erm...

-I'm very pleased to know that lead to his arrest.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Very good. Very good.

The owner could now be reunited with the precious gold pendant

she'd been given by her father.

I feel really pleased.

He has been arrested and put in jail.

So, you know, I feel a bit comforted, you know.

You know, and really good job, you know.

I'm very pleased. Very good. Thank you so much.

It's not often we're able to return some items to the victim,

so it's been really nice to be able to do that.

And just to see the look on her face is just priceless.

It's moments like that why you join the police in the first place.

It's been great.

There's just time for an update on today's stories.

After the attempted break in at her house near Rotherham,

Jennifer tightened her security and changed the locks on her front door.

But she's been so deeply affected by what happened

that she's decided to move.

After the Hatton Garden police raid,

a further four arrests have been made

and the investigation is ongoing.

And in the nationwide hunt for the prolific burglars Paul and Peter White,

the police eventually got both their men.

On the 28th November 2012,

Paul White was sentenced to seven years and four months in prison

for a series of nine burglaries.

His uncle, Peter White,

who was already serving four-and-a-half years in prison,

was given an additional six years for his part in four burglaries.

We'll see you next time.

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