Baker Street robbery

The Baker Street robbery was a robbery of the safe deposit boxes of Lloyds Bank at the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road, London, on the night of 11 September 1971. The robbers had rented a leather goods shop named Le Sac, two doors down from the bank, and tunnelled a distance of approximately convert|50|ft|m, passing under the intervening Chicken Inn restaurant.cite web|url=http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2008/02/16/bank-job-that-opened-the-door-on-a-royal-sex-scandal-89520-20320893/|title=Bank job that opened the door on a royal sex scandal|publisher=Daily Mirror|date=February 16, 2008] To avoid being overheard they only dug during weekends.

Robert Rowlands, a radio ham operator, overheard conversations between the robbers and their rooftop lookout at about 11 pm. He contacted police and tape recorded the conversations while the robbery was in progress, but there was insufficient information to identify which bank was being robbed. At 2 am a senior police officer decided to take his report seriously, and alerted radio detector vans to track down the gang. Police checked the 750 banks within 10 miles of Mr Rowlands' receiver, including the Baker Street bank. At the time, the thieves were still in the bank, but the police failed to realise the fact because the security door was still locked. The thieves got away with £500,000 and valuables from safety deposit boxes.

In the following days the recordings were made public in the hope that the thieves could be identified. However, after four days of news coverage, British authorities issued a D-Notice, requesting that news coverage be discontinued for reasons of national security, and the story disappeared from newspapers. The purpose for the D-Notice was never disclosed, and its existence was not confirmed until recently. Various rumours circulated about it, notably that some of the security boxes contained embarrassing or nationally sensitive material. It has been speculated that the purpose of the request was to protect a prominent member of the British Royal Family. [cite web|url=http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2031266,00.html|title=Untold story of Baker Street bank robbery|publisher=The Guardian|date=March 11, 2007]

A fictionalized version of the robbery is the subject of the 2008 film "The Bank Job", which portrays it as having been set up by MI5 to secure sexually compromising photographs of Princess Margaret which were being kept in a deposit box at the bank by Michael X.

References

ee also

*List of bank robbers and robberies