The Red-Faced League

It should have been elementary, but it did not turn out that way. Just a short stroll from 221B Baker Street, London, where Sherlock Holmes once dwelt, a bold gang broke through the floor of a closed handbag shop, dug a 40-ft. tunnel, and cut through two feet of concrete into a vault containing about 1,000 safe-deposit boxes in Lloyds Bank at 185 Baker Street. It was a case similar to the episode in which Holmes captured two tunneling bank crooks in A. Conan Doyle's The Red-Headed League --"a three-pipe problem," as Dr. Watson would have called it. But although policemen could actually hear the real-life heist taking place over a ham operator's receiver, they took nearly 36 hours to locate the scene of the crime. By then, the thieves had made off with at least $500,000 in valuables.

Short-Wave Sherlock. The first clue that something was afoot came late on a Saturday night two weeks ago. In an apartment on Wimpole Street, no more than half a mile from the bank, a ham radio operator named Robert Rowlands twirled the dials of his receiver to 27.15 megacycles. He quickly realized that he had accidentally tuned in on an exchange between bank robbers. They were communicating via two-way radio sets with their lookout, who was posted on the roof of a high building near by. But when Rowlands telephoned the local police station, he got only a polite and skeptical response.

Over the next two hours, the shortwave Sherlock continued to monitor and tape what he heard. The thieves in the vault were apparently worried that the fumes from their heavy-duty cutting torches would alert security guards, and they wanted to knock off for the night. Said one of the gang: "Look, the place is filled with fumes where we was cutting. And if the security come in and smell the fumes, we are all going to take stoppo and none of us have got nothing. Whereas this way we have all got 300 grand to cut up when we come back in the morning."

The lookout, however, complained that his eyes were "like organ stops" from "using bins [cockney slang for binoculars] all night" and wanted to complete the job. "I suggest we carry on tonight, mate, and get it done with," he said. "I'm not going to be any good tomorrow morning." Besides, he added, "money is not my god this much." The lookout was overruled and the gang --four or five men and a woman --caught some sleep while Rowlands tried to get the police to listen to him.

Sensitive Equipment. Eventually a local policeman called on Rowlands, but he left unconvinced. Then came a second officer, and Rowlands asked him to turn off his walkie-talkie so that the thieves' taped conversations could be heard more clearly. Soon four other constables and a sergeant closed in on Rowlands' flat, fearful that their mate might be having his "head kicked in" because they could not reach him on his walkie-talkie. The six policemen left Rowlands to his monitoring and took no action.

Desperate, Rowlands called Scotland Yard in the morning. A sergeant and a constable from the Yard spent two hours ponderously copying extracts from the tapes in longhand and dictating them over the phone; two other Yard detectives soon arrived to listen in. During this farce, one of the burglars could be heard saying: "Everything is going well." Not until 12:20 p.m. on Sunday, an incredible 13 hours after Rowlands first tuned in on the heist, did the gang permanently go off the air.

It was another 40 minutes before a detective inspector appeared at Rowlands' overcrowded flat with a post office radio engineer, whose sensitive equipment could have located the site of the transmissions. But the radio was now dead. Finally, police began checking hundreds of banks throughout London. They even stood outside the time-locked vault at Lloyds, but did not bother to obtain official permission to open it because it appeared to be undisturbed.

On Monday morning, there was a red-faced league of policemen when Lloyds officers opened the vault to discover that about 250 safe-deposit boxes had been looted; one of them alone was missing $50,000 in jewelry. Scotland Yard officials sheepishly ordered an inquiry into the laggardly sleuthing. They also sent squads out looking for the gang, declaring confidently that they recognized some of the thieves' voices from the tapes. At week's end, however, nobody had been apprehended. A four-or five-pipe problem, perhaps?

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