Brian Henry Reader (28 February 1939 – September 2023) was a British gangster, who has been described as "one of the busiest crooks in the British underworld", and a "ringleader" of the Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary in 2015.
Early life and career Born in Cressingham Road, Lewisham, on 28 February 1939, to Henry and Doris Reader, his father fought in World War II but had deserted his family by 1955. Reader would later tell how his first experience in crime was thieving-to-order from the South London docks, an occupation he learned from Henry, who both worked and stole there. Reader first appeared in court in 1950 when he robbed five shops in East London, aged 11. Accused of "stealing tins of fruit by means of store breaking", he received a criminal discharge. As a child, he had a variety of local jobs such as butcher's boy, until he left school at 16 and joined British Rail as a fireman. However, he was soon in court again, this time charged with stealing £4 15s. 6d. from a beach hut in Brighton, for which he was given another discharge.
Early career In late 1958, Reader made his first appearance at the Old Bailey, which the investigative journalists Tom Pettifor and Nick Sommerlad have said "mark[ed] a serious escalation in his offending". He received a relatively light sentence for several offences of grievous bodily harm with intent. Perhaps because of this escalation in his crimes, his mother arranged for him to enter National Service. Posted with the Royal Engineers, he was based in West London, and this allowed him to return home every night. Discharged from the army the following year, his character was assessed as "good". Around this time, Reader made the "conscious decision" to earn a criminal living—notwithstanding his recent purchase of a dump truck with which to enter the haulage industry—and was soon fined for possession of an offensive weapon.
By the 1960s, Reader was working with what investigator Paul Lashmar has called "a flexible group of Britain's top robbers and burglars", responsible for the theft of millions. The gang comprised men such as Tony Hollands, a safe-cracker, John Woodley, an expert "alarm man", and John Goodwin, an intelligence gatherer. Others included a lock picker and journalist. Lashmar further described them as "the best group of burglars in the country. This was the London team. The Old Bill knew about them, but they were pretty careful." By now Reader had also established himself as a fence as well as a burglar. He particularly specialised in selling on stolen jewellery through the less ethical traders in Hatton Garden. Reader was busy enough planning, meeting and surveying jobs that he complained to a compadre that he "never got a day off". Although the vast majority of Reader's crimes at this time are today unknown, some, such as the Albemarle Street post office—which gained Reader's gang £500,000—are known to have put him near the top of a wide-ranging underground black market network.
Later career In May 1971, Reader was almost killed planning a bank robbery in Reading, Berkshire. Having broken into the local telephone exchange—through which banks' burglar alarms to local police stations were routed—he was interrupted by the local constabulary. Attempting to escape out of a window, he slipped, fell, and landed on his head, recovering consciousness under a police guard in hospital. Suffering minor brain damage, Reader had to learn to walk again due to his sense of balance having been badly affected. Later in the month, he was convicted of burglary with intent and fined £35 at the Magistrates' Court.
Baker Street robbery
Having only left hospital a few weeks earlier, in September 1971, over two weekends, Reader took part in another robbery. The target was another bank: this time, the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank. It was Reader's biggest job yet, and for the first time he appears to have led the gang himself. Reader brought in an old friend from his youth, Bobby Mills, though, and this appears to have caused friction with established members of the gang, some of whom thought Mills a liability with no area of expertise. Ultimately Mills proved an embarrassment to Reader, as he refused to enter the bank—supposedly on doctor's orders—and so was made a look out instead. He continued causing problems in this capacity also. Firstly he claimed that he needed over eight hours sleep a night and later stated that, in any case, that would be impossible on the roof "cos it's freezing cold and everything up here now". The robbery involved tunnelling from two doors down and breaking into the bank vault from below. They successfully emptied hundreds of safe deposit boxes and escaped with over £8 million. Given their "strikingly similar" modi operandi—including tunnelling—Lashmar has credited the Baker Street robbery as acting as a blueprint for the Hatton Garden heist over 40 years later. Reader, he says, "was key to both". Reader later claimed to have found several paedophiliac photos in one of the boxes, which he believed to have been owned by an unnamed but prominent Conservative Party Member of Parliament and cabinet member. He left the photos scattered around the floor to ensure they could not be missed by the police. Pettifor and Sommerlad argue that "not for the last time, Reader and his cronies were causing the Met acute embarrassment". Only three members of the gang were ever brought to book for the robbery. Reader escaped to Spain with his wife and two children, although not before discovering that one member had conned him and the rest of the gang out of £150,000. It has been speculated that corrupt police officers enabled Reader's escape abroad, and this probably included Detective Inspector Alec Eist, who was "by reputation the most corrupt Yard officer of the 1950s to mid-1970s which was no small achievement in such a packed field".
In 1974 Reader was offered the chance to take part in the robbery of the Bank of America in Mayfair, which he turned down due to his not trusting other gang members. It is likely, although unproven, that Reader bribed police officers when he had to, as the practice was extensive in the 1970s. Reader managed to stay out of jail until 1980, mostly avoiding arrest fleeing abroad whenever he suspected the police were close to him.
By the mid-1980s, now living in Grove Park, Reader fenced some gold with Kenneth Noye, which brought them both around £200,000. The following year, Reader was tried for complicity in several robberies with John Godwin, which netted them £1.3 million, but the trial collapsed after allegations of jury tampering. At the later "jury-nobbling trial", as it was dubbed in the media, one witness told how she was visited by two men offered £500, and asked to influence a fellow juror. One of these men was Godwin, and the other "was called Brian and that she had never seen him again". A contemporary "supergrass", Michael Gervaise, also stated that police had asked him to implicate Reader in his statements. Although a retrial was ordered, Reader and his wife Lyn went to Spain. This was to become a familiar technique of Reader's and one he employed whenever he felt the police closing in on him; by escaping abroad at short notice, he was able to keep his criminal record relatively clean. The year after leaving for Spain, Reader surreptitiously returned to England due to a family illness. However his return did not go unnoticed, and he was re-arrested.
However, in 1980 he was named in a supergrass trial, arrested and bailed for £40,000. On the day he was due to appear in court he escaped by telling the clerk "I'm off to park my car", and promptly disappeared back to Spain via Dover and France. Reader returned in 1983 by way of an associate's private yacht to Jersey and on to Britain where he took part in the turning over of another Lloyd's Bank, at Holborn Circus.
Brink's-Mat and death of DC Fordham
In November 1983, the Brink's-Mat robbery occurred at the Heathrow International Trading Estate. It was one of the largest robberies in British history, with approximately £26 million worth of gold bullion, diamonds, and cash being stolen. Reader was subsequently convicted of handling stolen goods and money laundering. He was jailed for eight years and was also convicted of fraudulently conspiring to evade VAT. He received a further year in prison after it was discovered he had dishonestly handled another £66,000.
Although they had taken no part in the robbery itself, they were involved in what has been called its "bloody aftermath" as the robbers attempted to fence the gold. Author Wensley Clarkson has suggested that Noye and Reader had, by now "taught themselves everything there was to know about gold". They renewed their acquaintance playing squash at Brenda Noye's club in Dartford, and here they set the price of the gold and established sale terms. While the terms were not particularly profitable to Reader as a fence, "it was clear a VAT fraud was being carried out" to go towards making up for it. Reader regularly stayed around gangster Kenneth Noye's house, and was later described by Justice Lowry as Noye's "vigorous right-hand man"; they had grown up close to one another in Southeast London. Suspicion had coalesced on Noye over Brink's-Mat, and he was under constant police surveillance, as was his house in West Kingsdown, Kent.
By early January 1985, Reader had personally processed £3.66 million of Brink's-Mat gold. On the night of Saturday, 26 January 1985, around 6.30 PM, Reader was with Noye and his wife. Chief superintendent Brian Boyce, responsible for the gold hunt, later said it was Reader's arrival—as a "known fugitive from justice"—at Noye's house that forced him to launch a covert search of Noye's grounds that night. Boyce was already uncertain as to the precise number of transactions that Reader had carried out, as in many cases, he had received parcels in return. This confused the case against Reader to some degree.
Fordham and a colleague thus entered the property by way of a convenient tree. When the Noyes' two dogs began barking, Reader accompanied Noye into the garden on the night Metropolitan Police Constable John Fordham was stabbed 12 times to death in Noye's garden. Fordham was part of the investigation into the Brinks-Mat robbery and was carrying out close-quarters surveillance on Noye, possibly looking for signs of bullion in Noye's grounds. By the time Fordham was on the ground, and Noye ran back to the house, his wife had collected a shotgun from the cabinet and was loading it as she came downstairs. Reader took the gun from her.
Reader's role was as a go-between between Noye and John Palmer who was smelting and moving the gold bullion. Reader travelled between Noye's house and Bristol Airport—where transport abroad awaited it—approximately 30 times in 1984. Reader possessed multiple vehicles in which to make the journey. Aware that he was being kept under police surveillance, Reader regularly drew his tails on a wild-goose chase; he also went on dummy runs, swapped cars en route, and performed u-turns to throw off potential followers. He and other conspirators met in a variety of locations, including Bexleyheath pub car parks, the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury, Farringdon cafes, and a fish and chip shop in Swindon.