ONCE upon a time off the Old Kent Road, a gang of armed robbers stole £6million from a security van – with the help of some washing up liquid.
The bandits took just 65 seconds to move two steel cages, each containing £3million in used £20 notes, from the armoured truck into a box van after dousing the floors with Fairy Liquid.
Despite the weight of the cages, the cleaning fluid let the team glide them on to their getaway truck, catching out cops who thought it would take up to eight minutes.
But it did not take long for the Flying Squad to catch up and the robbers were collared at gunpoint moments later as they prepared to move the money to a second truck.
An extraordinary story then emerged . . . the robbers had believed one of the security guards was corrupt and acting as an inside agent for them.
In fact, he was an undercover Met Police officer who had spent 18 months working at a nearby Securitas depot, where information was allegedly “leaking like a sieve”.
After a guard at the hub finally put the undercover officer in touch with a professional team of bandits, the Flying Squad ambushed the gang.
A judge took the trap into account when dishing out relatively light sentences for the 1997 armed robbery, with the seven co-accused being jailed for a total of 43 years.
Because of the guilty pleas by the main defendants, the full details of the case have never come to light before today.
One of the robbers, career criminal Patsy Henderson, is now speaking out — and claims the Fairy Liquid job was a stitch-up from start to finish.
Henderson alleges the undercover officer put pressure on a hapless guard to help him “lose” millions of pounds by arranging for villains to steal it from him.
And Henderson, now 76, insists the organisers of the heist — still Britain’s highest-value cash-in- transit robbery — were none other than the Flying Squad.
The veteran villain tells The Sun: “The Flying Squad engineered it.
“This undercover officer is in the depot and touting to lose the £6million. What he did is get to another driver who was a straight goer [honest person].
“He absolutely drove him mad, saying, ‘I want to lose the £6million. Do you know anybody?’. The guard is saying, ‘No, no, no’.
“But the undercover officer got so close to him, going round his house, to barbecues and getting right into the family.
“It came to light that this security guard had someone in the family who was a little bit hooky, and he ended up telling him and it snowballed from there.”
I’ve got every reason to believe they would have used the guns they had. There’s no reason to believe shots would not have been fired if things hadn’t gone their way.
Former detective sergeant George Rickman
Henderson adds: “I’ve done 33 years in prisons and institutions, but this one really burns me up. I accept that if you’ve done wrong then, naturally, you’re going on your holidays [jail].
“But this job was down to the Flying Squad and it would have been on them if anyone had got hurt.”
The Flying Squad — which is known as The Sweeney and inspired the 1970s TV show of the same name — disputes Henderson’s claims.
Former detective sergeant George Rickman says: “It wasn’t a Flying Squad set-up. This was an operation in which someone within that security depot approached our undercover officer. As a result of that, things progressed from there.”
Rickman adds of the robbers: “These people are ruthless. They value a lifestyle but don’t value life.
“I’ve got every reason to believe they would have used the guns they had. There’s no reason to believe shots would not have been fired if things hadn’t gone their way.”
The operation, at the Walworth security depot, was launched in September 1995 after shots were fired at officers in two previous armed robberies.
Rickman said: “It was apparent from the number of robberies involving that branch that there must be people inside working with the robbers.
“Bob Suckling, a detective inspector at the Tower Bridge Flying Squad office, decided to put an undercover operative inside the depot.”
The plant was given the name John Hardy and, to explain his sudden arrival in the area, he claimed he had come from the north of England to escape domestic troubles. Rickman said: “I’m not aware that anything like it had been done before.
“My role was to see the undercover cop (UC) once or twice a week whenever he wanted to update me. The UC lived in a flat in the Old Kent Road, kitted out with video and audio equipment.
“If he was approached and there were any meetings in that premises, we would have perfect evidence.”
The UC also had a specially adapted mobile phone which could transmit recordings.
Rickman says of the sting: “It had been running for well over a year, but there was a change of management and the chief inspector wanted to shut it down.
“Then, at the 11th hour, an approach was made to the UC and the ball started to roll. Meetings were set up with the undercover operative and the robbers.
“They were generally Sunday lunchtime meets in a local pub in London and they were covered by us. We maintained surveillance for the security of the undercover officer and became aware of the identities of some of the robbers.”
The operation was almost blown when the crooks became suspicious of an unmarked police vehicle.
It emerged a bent Met police worker had run a check on the car on behalf of the gang. Rickman says: “Their planning was as meticulous as ours.”
Securitas guard Fred Gordon, then 47, introduced the UC to villains Dennis Woodham, 50, and Patrick Thomas, 56, a notorious robber. Henderson was the last to be recruited.
Sticking to the underworld code of honour, he will not discuss his co- defendants’ identity, saying only: “I was told they had a guard and he wanted to lose the money.
“He was going to stop the van and make out it had broken down. The supervisor was going to come with keys to the vault at the back . . . all we had to do was act like robbers.”
An initial bid to rob the van on its way from the Barclays cash centre in Southwark to the Securitas depot was axed on March 6 when the armoured van genuinely broke down.
The plan swung back into action the next day. Woodham stood under the Elephant and Castle flyover as a signal to the UC in the front passenger seat of the security van that “it was on”, and the UC sent a secret message of confirmation to his controller.
He then “accidentally” opened the vehicle’s front passenger door, which automatically brought it to a halt in seconds.
Driver Dean Jeffrey, unaware of the plot, pulled up outside a block of Victorian flats on Falmouth Road, in the shadow of Old Kent Road, just after 10.15am.
The robbers were waiting nearby for depot supervisor Lee Hoadley to arrive with a key to restart the vehicle.
The key also opened the back of the van holding the cash cages.
Moments after the supervisor arrived, Henderson and Thomas, armed with a .410 shot pistol and .38 self-loading pistol, hurriedly approached the van from behind on foot.
I was a millionaire for about two minutes. “One minute you’ve got it and all of a sudden you ain’t got it and your life has gone out the window.”
Patsy Henderson
They pounced from the passenger’s door side, out of view of the camera, but the robbery was recorded in progress on the UC’s wire.
The robbers demanded the keys to the van from the supervisor, while police footage obtained by The Sun showed the gang’s vehicle reversing up behind it.
Henderson recalls: “We took the keys off the supervisor, but we had to give them to the UC to open it up because there was a side door.
He said, ‘I’ve got to go in there and shut this door before I can open the back’.
“So we’ve let him go in. He could have stayed in there, really. He had to go through to take the bolts off to get the shutters up. Then he came round to us and gave us the keys.
“We couldn’t have done it without him. He’s really opened it up for us.”
Two teams of firearms officers in box vans were lying in wait nearby, ready to swoop on the gang.
But one vehicle had taken a wrong turn and was two minutes late — by which time the raiders had struck.
Sweeney detective Rickman says: “It was estimated the robbery would take six to eight minutes. But they squirted lots of Fairy Liquid on the floor and slid the crates straight into the box van. Within a minute or two, the gang had gone.”
Henderson was in the back of the box van with the cash, along with Thomas, now wearing a butcher’s apron.
He said: “It took us 65 seconds to take that £6million with a bit of Fairy Liquid — £3million in £20 notes in each cage.”
But the elation did not last long as Flying Squad detectives pursued the gang to Tabard Square, where the second van was waiting to whisk the robbers away.
Henderson said: “As we were going to the changeover, the sirens came on. I thought, ‘F***ing hell, we’re all nicked here’.
“I was a millionaire for about two minutes. “One minute you’ve got it and all of a sudden you ain’t got it and your life has gone out the window.”
He adds: “The van stopped and we got out and the Flying Squad was there and SO19 came after. We were put on the floor.
“That’s when things started happening in my head. I thought, ‘We’ve walked into this’. “We were charged with armed robbery, but this was a mock robbery.
“Armed robbery is when no one knows you’re going on them and taking a liberty. “You wouldn’t go and rob that van off the cuff because you wouldn’t be able to get into the back.
“I can accept laying down and doing my bird [prison sentence] to a certain degree. But this was different. “The Flying Squad ain’t worth the steam off a tomcat’s p**s.”
THE judge went easy on the seven defendants when he jailed them at Kingston Crown Court in March the following year, telling them: “I take into account you fell into a trap.”
His Honour Judge Austen Issard-Davies jailed Henderson for eight years and another two men for an unconnected crime.
Ringleader Thomas got 12 years for robbery and possession of a firearm.
Securitas guard Gordon was jailed for six years for conspiracy to rob, along with getaway driver Jason Smith, while go-between Woodham got seven years.
Another gang member, Michael Rose, then 47, was sentenced to three years for theft and possession of a firearm while cabbie Michael Sullivan, 27 at the time, was jailed for a year.
Henderson says: “It would have been a lot easier if I had been caught on something knowing it was a fair cop. But when I know they set it up, it turns you over a little bit.
“A lot of people will say why are you doing this story? But f*** it, I want to knock their feet from under them a little bit.
“The Flying Squad . . . pulled the wool over the eyes of the top brass.”
