'Gangster Grandad' caught in £350m Millennium Dome diamond heist has only one regret

He may not have got away with stealing the d, but thief Lee Wenham still proudly remembers the sound of the standing ovation lags gave him as he and his gang were banged up in Belmarsh.

Police compared the raid to a James Bond movie, and London’s criminal underworld greeted them like brothers in arms. “The whole place was standing up and clapping,” says Lee with a wry grin. At his trial, the judge even commended Lee on his plan. Even now he feels pride in a good job, well done. “I suppose so, yeah. You’ve got to, innit,” he says.

It was 25 years ago that Lee and his father James ‘Jimmy’ Wenham along with other gang members , South London, to steal the 203-carat de Beers diamond on November 7, 2000.

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Unbeknown to them, 200 police officers dressed as cleaners and Dome workers lay in wait, and instead of his promised £1million cut, Lee ended up getting nine years in jail. “Yeah, what an idiot,” he laughs, not sounding entirely sorry.

In fact, when Lee was arrested at gunpoint by cops, his first thought was not one of regret. “If I’m really honest, it was, ‘Sh*t, I’ve lost all that money,” he says in a friendly, cockney accent.

Lee’s story will be told for the first time in his new book Diamond Gangster, and a three-part documentary by Guy Ritchie, The Diamond Heist, drops on the streaming platform next week.

Until that moment, he had been a successful career criminal and had never been nicked before. Brought up on his traveller dad James ‘Jimmy’ Wenham’s farm in Kent, Lee never learned to read and write and school at 12.

“I come from a gypsy family and we were always moving around. As a child, my dad always had villains and gangsters around. Every month getting raided by the police. It was the only life I knew.”

His life of crime started early. “I stole a JCB aged 15,” he says. He soon progressed from nicking cars and plant machinery, to cash jobs and drugs.

“By the time of the heist, I was earning decent money as a criminal. I was doing cash points, Securicor vans, smuggling cigarettes, selling ecstasy tablets. I was into everything really.” They say crime doesn’t pay, but Lee bought his first Lotus Esprit aged 17 for cash.

“My best car was a 1963 Corvette, which I got because I wanted to be like a gangster Billy Hayward from Deptford who’d been involved in a shoot out in a bar where the Krays’ cousin, Dickie Hart, got shot. I liked the way he carried himself and how everyone had respect for him.

“He came up to my dad’s farm in his 63 Corvette in 1979. He and my dad had a speed factory in one of my dad’s farm buildings.” Lee’s dad’s farm and scrap dealing yard in Yalding, Maidstone, in Kent, was the centre of criminal excellence, and was where villains would go when they needed safe houses.

“I first knew about the heist when a gang came down to my dad's farm and wanted to rent a building so we just got on straight away and they asked me to get involved in it – so I did.”

Speaking from his comfortable home in Wadhurst, in East Sussex, the family man has gone straight. Now 57, he lives with his partner who has stood by him all these years. He has two daughters, Emma, 33, and 29-year-old Beth, and three grandkids, who like to tell stories about their ‘Gangster Grandad’.

“My kids love it. They absolutely love it,“ Lee chuckles proudly. “And my grandchildren, my eldest one, Iona, who’s 11, her grandmother tells her, ‘Don't say anything at school,’ but she just tells everyone!”

Lee wanted a different life for his own children. “All my own kids and grandkids had proper schooling and all got normal jobs.”

But nevertheless, he admits he had big plans for the cash. “My dad had some villas in my bar in Spain that he was renting out, and I was gonna buy a couple and rent them out too,” he sighs. Instead Lee was convicted of conspiring to steal the gems, as well as for participating in an earlier failed robbery attempt of two Securicor vans.

The gang all worked separately on their jobs as they planned the heist, and Lee was in charge of logistics and problem solving. The whole thing went like clockwork – until it didn’t.

“Everything went on roller skates,” says Lee, still slightly unbelieving of his bad luck. The Dome, now the O2 music venue, famously had a diamond display by De Beers to celebrate the Millennium. In hindsight, a 203- carat diamond kept in a vault in South London, was just asking for trouble.

“It was like putting it in the lion's den so obviously we thought, ‘We’ve got to have it’,” says Lee. The gang, led by Ray Betson, used a nail gun to shatter the glass before throwing smoke bombs to distract the public and attempting to flee on a speed boat on the Thames.

But cops had been watching them since Lee and his gang carried out two failed Securicor van robberies, which would have been worth up to £9 million, and switched the real gems for fakes.

Again in a plot worthy of a Hollywood move, they’d used six-foot concrete spikes to spear a hole in the bullet-proof vans, and stuck fake bombs, which were spray-painted Fray Bentos pies, on the vans.

Lee recalls the moment he came up with the bomb idea. “I went into a shop one day to get a snack and I saw the pie and I was just looking at it and thought, ‘That would make a brilliant bomb.’” Cops had also caught Lee scouting the security gate and visiting the jewel display before the heist.

“I visited the Dome three to four times to check if the JCB would go through the security gates,” he says.“And I went once with Bill Cockram to look around the vault, but I took my partner and my daughter at the time as a cover. She didn’t have any idea of what I was doing.”

Four members of the heist gang Ray Betson, Robert Adams, Bill Cockram and Aldo Ciarrocchi were arrested at the Dome within seconds of the raid, while Lee was driving around, waiting for news of the raid.

“I was often a getaway driver but I didn’t need to be there on this one. I woke up in the morning feeling a bit anxious, and I was just driving around, listening to the radio , but there was nothing.”

“I had to go back to my dad’s farm because they were coming back there after the robber and I had to get rid of vehicles.

“But as I turned into the farm, I looked down the road and it just black with police cars everywhere. As I drove in, the doors were just ripped open and guns pressed to my head.”

After being rounded up by police, the gang were locked up in Belmarsh in South London, and he was put in a cell with his dad. “He wasn't doing too well, so Dad was put in with me. I couldn’t wait to get rid of him! Police did everything they could to stop him being bailed, but he got out.”

Lee’s dad died, aged 76, of Parkinsons in 2018, but Lee says he never regretted his life of crime. “Dad made a lot of money out of it, and never went straight.”

After the trial, the gang was separated and he hasn’t seen them since.

Lee has forged a new life for himself, as a landscape gardener, and having lived under the radar for the last 20 years, his clients will get a shock when they realise who’s been mowing their grass.

“I started up a landscape business when I got out of prison, and it’s done well, although it won't be after this, I'm probably destroying it now,” he says, sounding a bit sheepish.

He left Kent for Wadhurst in East Sussex to make a fresh start. When asked what made him turn his life around, he jokes, “Who says I have?” and laughs, hinting that you might take the criminal out of Kent, but old habits die hard.

“Nah – I just stayed out of trouble as much as I could. I had a long time to think about it all. You see what it does to your kids and your family.”

• Diamond Gangster by Lee Wenham ( Books, £9.99) will be released May 22nd. Pre-order on Amazon now at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Diamond-Gangster-inside-million-Millennium/dp/1917439016