This story first appeared in The Australian Women’s Weekly in 2021.
We open on a windowless room with concrete grey walls. The carpet and large L-shaped couch are also grey, adding to the illusion of being inside an underground vault. The room is not quite that heavy-duty, but it is secure, because there is precious treasure being handled. Seven magnificent diamonds have been brought out of the safe to be examined. Among them is a delicate, pink, pear-shaped gem, a brilliant six-carat princess-cut sparkler and a huge, glittering heart-shaped diamond weighing in at a massive 20 carats. Two women sit facing each other – one older, one young. In the background is a spiral staircase, and the disappearing feet of fifth generation jeweller Nicholas Wainwright, who is ascending to his Mayfair showroom to take a call. It’s a decision that will come to be one of the greatest mistakes of his life.
The scene takes place in the prestigious London jewellery store, Boodles, and is part of the March 2016 footage released by London’s Metropolitan Police in their ongoing efforts to track down a gang of jewel thieves. The younger woman on camera, Emma Barton, is a qualified gem specialist at the store. Dressed impeccably, she is comfortable among society’s elite. Prior to joining Boodles, the pretty brunette was a groom for Olympic gold medal dressage champion Anky van Grunsven. The older woman, “Anna”, is also purported to be a gemmologist, hired by a Russian investor to examine the jewels he intends to purchase.
Once Nicholas is out of the room, Anna picks up a padlocked black purse containing the diamonds and slips it into her handbag. Emma immediately reacts, gesturing wildly as she implores Anna to return the jewels. Fifteen seconds tick by before the older woman retrieves the purse from her bag and places it on the table. In that quarter of a minute, it’s done: the most brazen jewel heist London has ever seen. Unfortunately, by the time the Boodles staff realised the diamonds were gone, Anna and her accomplices were already in France. Panicking, Nicholas frantically called the police, who have likened the robbery to a Hollywood movie.
“This was an audacious theft, carried out in plain view of experienced and professional staff at a renowned jewellers. The meticulous planning and execution reveal to me that those involved were highly skilled criminals,” said Acting Detective Sergeant William Man.
A high-stakes sting
The thieves had set their sights on Boodles long before the job was done, homing in on the old money establishment as the perfect mark for their high-stakes sting. Boodles has nine stores, five in London, but the criminals chose the Bond Street location, next to Cartier, in the heart of London’s jewellery district. The family-run company’s chairman, Nicholas, has a penchant for pink ties paired with matching silk pocket squares and socks. His son, Jody, has a Ken-doll jawline and chestnut quiff. The two of them jet-set around the world, scouring for exceptional gems.
In 2013, Jody secured 18 rare Columbian emeralds for a Boodles collection called Greenfire. The centrepiece, a $1.8 million necklace, was worn by Dame Helen Mirren in her role as the criminal matriarch, Queenie, in the action film, Fast & Furious 9. Boodles also counts Emma Thompson among its fans. To attract the very best clientele, the family hosts high society events, like the Boodles Boxing Ball which, in its early years, was attended by Prince William and his then girlfriend, Kate Middleton. For the Wainwright family, relationships are the keystone of success.
“We insist on honesty and integrity, whether we’re buying or selling jewellery. I think that’s terribly important in this day and age. We also like to have a bit of fun,” Nicholas said in a 2013 interview with Gentleman’s Journal. “We want the customers to enjoy it.” So, when he received a mysterious phone call from a broker, and an invitation to Monaco to discuss the purchase of seven diamonds, Nicholas didn’t hesitate. He flew to Monte Carlo where he met a man named Alexander at the luxurious Hotel Métropole, according to the BBC. Police said, “In the weeks leading up to the raid, meetings had been held with Boodles and people purporting to work for the ‘investor’, culminating in an arrangement where a gemmologist named ‘Anna’ would travel to London to inspect the gems. This role was to be played by Lakatos.”
Enter the jewel thief
Lulu Lakatos is a 60-year-old Romanian-born con woman with three convictions for theft in France, where she resides. On March 9, 2016, she arrived in the UK and checked into a hotel in Cricklewood, about eight kilometres across town from Boodles’ Bond Street store. She left her hotel that evening and went to a nearby cafe where she rendezvoused with two men local press have linked to Russian gangsters. The trio then drove to Mayfair to scope out the luxury retail precinct, before the men dropped Lulu at her hotel. Lulu rose early the next morning.
As she travelled to Mayfair, the Boodles employees would have been having their ritual staff breakfast of poached eggs with tea, before opening their doors for the day’s trade. Lulu has distinctive, wiry, grey hair and arrived from France in a light grey parker and eye-catching polka-dot scarf. Before she presented herself as ‘Anna’ on March 10, she changed into a dressy, double-breasted frock coat and a black hat to conceal her hair. The outfit beneath seems to have been some sort of sartorial misdirection.
“She was dressed most extraordinarily, she was wearing the sort of thing a Russian dancer would wear,” Nicholas later said in court. “She had enormous boobs and you could see her cleavage. It was most unattractive.”
Anna had claimed her English wasn’t very good, so it had been agreed her meeting with Nicholas and Emma would be conducted in French. They led her downstairs to a secure part of the store. But from the moment the transaction began, her behaviour was markedly peculiar. When the diamonds were presented, Anna didn’t examine them with an eyeglass, nor did she check their certificates, according to The Times. Instead, she wrapped each gem in tissue paper and placed them in small, individual Perspex cases, with an opaque finish, which she then transferred into a padlocked security purse. The agreement was that once the investor had transferred the payment to Boodles, someone would collect the purse. The seven diamonds were valued at $8 million.
“She was wearing the sort of thing a Russian dancer would wear.”
Nicholas said he was watching Anna “like a hawk” but once the diamonds had been secured in the padlocked purse, he received a phone call. It was Alexander ringing to discuss the purchase. Alexander said the phone reception was bad in the below-ground upstairs so they could hear each other clearly. With his customer’s happiness always in mind, Nicholas obliged. Emma told the court that, as soon as Nicholas’ back was turned, Anna “grabbed the bag and stuck it in her handbag. I said, ‘No, you can’t do that. Please take the diamonds out of your handbag. I have to be able to see the diamonds at all times’.”
The Switcheroo
“Lakatos used the apparent language barrier to cause a delay, before appearing to produce the same locked bag containing the diamonds from her handbag,” police said. When Nicholas returned, Emma told him what Anna had done, but a search of her handbag turned up no sign anything was amiss, and she was allowed to go. “Having committed the ultimate sleight of hand, Lakatos simply walked out of a Mayfair luxury jewellers with more than $8 million worth of diamonds in her handbag,” Crown Prosecutor Thomas Short said.
“Oh my God, it’s pebbles!”
Everybody at Boodles was unsettled by what had happened, but they had no evidence anything was wrong until the following day, when the payment failed to come through. “The following day, Boodles had the locked bag in their possession x-rayed. While the items inside appeared to be the same size as the diamonds, they did not appear quite right,” police said.
Nicholas told one of his staff members to break open the security purse and, upon doing so, the staffer cried out: “Oh my God, it’s pebbles!” The diamonds had been switched for seven ordinary stones.
Boodles immediately raised the alarm but by the time London’s specialised robbery unit, the Flying Squad, had arrived, the thieves were long gone. Nevertheless, the Flying Squad sprung into action. Officers
quickly pulled CCTV footage from the store and the surrounding area.
Moments after she left Boodles, Lulu was captured on camera falling into step with two glamorous-looking women as she hurried down Bond Street. Disguised as tourists who would blend in around
Mayfair, the accomplices wore chic leather boots, coats trimmed with fur, and carried shopping bags from high-end stores. The two mystery women had spent the entirety of the robbery across the street in the Ralph Lauren boutique, with a direct line of sight into Boodles. The footage reveals that as the women brush past Lulu, she hands one of them the purse containing the gems. Lulu then hops in a cab to Victoria Station, where she changes out of her bizarre gemmologist costume and back into her dowdy parker before catching the Eurostar home to France. Less than three hours after swapping the diamonds, she is speeding away from the scene of the crime and out of the country.
The Flying Squad swoops in
But the police were on her tail. The Flying Squad was hot off the success of another major bust. The very day of the Boodles diamond heist the Flying Squad had jailed three career criminals for their role in an audacious break-in which involved abseiling down a lift shaft and drilling through a concrete wall into the Hatton Garden safe deposit facility. The crooks had taken $26 million worth of cash, gold and jewellery from the vault, but were nicked because their getaway driver foolishly used his own car. In the days and weeks after the Boodles theft, the Flying Squad saw all seven members of the Hatton Garden gang off to prison, closing a case so extraordinary it was turned into a Hollywood film starring Michael Caine.
Despite their expertise, the Flying Squad had their work cut out for them connecting the dots in the Boodles case. It was painstaking, meticulous work, but slowly they began to piece together the clues to get a sense of what had gone wrong. The first bandits they identified were the so-called Russian businessmen who’d been dealing directly with Nicholas. French national Mickael Jovanovic and Albanian Christophe Stankovic had been loitering outside the jewellery store during the raid. Like the Hatton Garden case, it was a car that helped police bring them in, via rental forms for a Citroen they drove in Paris. Lulu proved more elusive, but in December 2020 she was arrested in France, extradited and ordered to stand trial at the Southwark Crown Court. The evidence against her was damning. It seemed the jig was up.
However in a final twist, Lulu pleaded not guilty, saying it wasn’t her, but her sister, Liliana, who had lifted the jewels. Liliana Lakatos was a far more notorious crook. The last of Lulu’s three theft convictions in France was in 2006, and she said she’d since been earning an honest living as a cleaner, while Liliana had nine convictions for theft and money laundering in France, and a 2013 conviction for shoplifting in the
UK. In fact, Liliana was wanted for an almost identical crime to the Boodles robbery in Switzerland after allegedly swapping an envelope containing $640,000 for one filled with paper. As in the Boodles case, Liliana is alleged to have made the switch while the Swiss banker was distracted by a phone call.
Mistaken identity?
Lulu’s lawyer, Ioana Nedelcu, told the court Liliana was an “intentional thief of international calibre” suspected of a crime using “exactly the same modus operandi” seen in the Boodles robbery. “It’s not diamonds, it’s cash, but it’s exactly the same,” she told the court. Lulu said Liliana had taken her passport to travel from France to London, and that she’d coloured her hair grey to disguise herself as someone older. According to Lulu, Liliana had planned on giving herself up to the police but was killed in a car accident in Romania in 2019. While DNA evidence taken from Boodles showed a very strong link to Lulu, there was also a possible link to Liliana. The jury, however, had seen enough and in July this year, Lulu was jailed for five-and-a-half years.
Despite this success, the Flying Squad is still working to bring the thieves involved in the Boodles conspiracy to justice. The two mystery women who received the gems remain at large, and other members of the plot may yet be identified. It’s unclear who masterminded the raid. More importantly, the diamonds have never been recovered. “While [Lulu] played a key role in this theft, it’s clear she didn’t work alone and enquiries remain ongoing to identify all those involved,” Acting Detective Sergeant Man said. The Flying Squad continues its chase.
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