A man with a stopwatch yells orders to the crew as they unlock vaults and pile money
into the truck sitting at the loading dock. The robbers are heavily armed;
they have locked the Securitas staff in metal cages as they expertly maneuver their way
through the building. Piles and piles of cash are loaded into the getaway vehicle.
The Securitas Depot Heist is under way. It will be the largest cash robbery in British history,
but who is the mastermind behind it?
The man with the stopwatch calls out timing and coordinates the movements of the robbers.
Then, as suddenly as the heist started, it’s over. The robbers leave the facility
without tripping a single alarm or alerting the authorities in any way. As they drive
away the man with the stopwatch around his neck removes his mask
and smiles. It is UFC fighter Lee Murray. He’s stolen over £53 million.
Lee Murray was an MMA fighter who had a chance to make it big in the UFC. But how
did this once famous fighter end up carrying out the biggest bank heist in British history?
Why did he do it? These questions and more will all be answered, but first let's take
a look at what created the fighter turned bank robber Lee Murray in the first place.
Murray grew up in Woolwich, South East London. At an early age he joined a gang called the
Barney Boys, named after the Barnfield Estate housing projects they lived in.
Murray was incarcerated as a juvenile at the Feltham Young Offender Institution for
selling marijuana and crack-cocaine. It was in his rough early years that he learned how
to fight, not because he wanted to, but because he had to in order to survive.
Lee Murray was known as a ferocious puncher. In fact, Robbie Lawler, a former UFC welterweight
champion, remembers Murray during their time training at Peacocks Boxing Gym together.
In an interview with Sports Illustrated Lawler said "Murray had world class punching power.”
He would hit the mitts and it would sound like gunfire.
Murray fought in several smaller promotional fights before receiving a contract with the UFC.
His record upon entering the Ultimate Fighting Championship was 8-2-1. Although Lee Murray
only ended up competing in one UFC fight, he did not disappoint. Murray entered the arena
to a screaming electric guitar playing over the loudspeakers and wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.
In his one and only UFC appearance, Murray won against Jorge Rivera
in the first round using a triangle choke/armbar. However,
he never got to fight in a UFC match again. There were complications with
his United States visa because of an ongoing criminal investigation against him in Britain.
The crime that Murray was being tried for was a vicious assault during a road rage incident.
Lee Murray continued to fight in different MMA promotional events such as Cage Rage,
but his fighting career came to an end when he was stabbed multiple times in a bar fight. This event
happened at a birthday party for TV actress Lauren Pope, at a bar called Funky Buddha. Murray stated
that the fight broke out when one of his friends got into an altercation with another group of men.
Murray tried to step in and help his friend who was being pummeled by six other guys.
The chaos escalated when one of the attackers pulled a knife and stabbed Murray in the head.
Murray recalls thinking the stab was actually a punch, so he wiped the blood from his face,
and kept on fighting. Then he got stabbed again and again, not noticing until the fight came
to an end. Murray looked down at his chest to see blood literally shooting out of it.
The irony is that this was not the first time Murray had encountered a knife at Funky Buddha.
A week before the almost fatal stabbing Murray got into a fight with another gentleman at the
bar who pulled a knife and slashed off one of Murray’s nipples. You would think that would
be enough to keep Murray away from the bar for a bit, but as it turns out, it was not.
These two stabbing events put an end to Murray’s traditional MMA career. He would not be able to
enter the ring for many months, and even when his wounds did heal, there was most likely permanent
damage that would prevent him from fighting again. His days of mixed martial arts were over.
Over the course of the next year Murray and others in his gang planned a bank heist.
It would be the largest robbery in British history. On February 21, 2006
Murrary led his gang of robbers on a job that stole £53,116,760 from the Securitas Depot.
The setup for the crime was done weeks in advance. Murray had one of the members of
the gang named Ermir Hysenaj interview to work the night shift at the Securitas Depot.
A few months before the heist Hysenaj sat down for a ten minute interview;
Hysenaj was hired on the spot for 11 dollars an hour. This inside man wore a camera on his
belt buckle and recorded all the going ons inside of the holding facility. With this information,
Murray and his accomplices made a plan on how best to steal the money within the walls of the vault.
The heist started not at the depot itself, but on a backcountry road leading to the
house of Mr. Colin Dixon. Dixon was a high level manager at the depot and had security access to
all the parts of the facility Murray needed to get into. On February 21st
Murray and one of the other robbers dressed up in fake police uniforms
and outfitted a car with blue flashing lights to disguise it as an unmarked police car.
Dixon pulled over his car; two uniformed men approached the driver side window.
One of the phony officers flashed a fake badge and ordered Dixon to step out of the vehicle.
At the exact same time, a second group of kidnappers were sent to
Dixon’s house to collect his wife and son. The family was transposed to Elderen Farm
and threatened at gunpoint to either cooperate or die. The family, along with the armed robbers,
were loaded into the back of a large transport truck and drove to the Securitas Depot.
Murray and his gang of robbers reached the depot just after midnight on February 22nd.
The truck was accompanied by the fake police car that pulled Dixon over the previous evening.
Dixon was brought to the door of the facility accompanied by a man dressed in a fake police
uniform. Dixon and the robber were buzzed in. As they entered the facility the fake
police officer overpowered the security guard and buzzed in the rest of the gang.
They entered the facility wearing masks and brandishing machine guns, shot guns, and pistols.
As the robbers made their way through the facility with their high powered weapons,
Dixon ordered the workers of the graveyard shift to think of their families and surrender
willingly. Luckily for the robbers none of the workers tripped any of the alarms, which meant
they would not be disturbed by the authorities that night. 14 people were taken by the robbers,
tied up, and secured in metal cages for money transport as the gang plundered the depot.
Once all of the workers were rounded up Murray forced Dixon to shut down
the security system completely and hand over the keys to the vault. At this point
the truck that the robbers had ridden to the depot pulled up to the loading dock.
The team of robbers loaded bags of cash into the truck as the man with the stopwatch,
who was later identified as Lee Murray, yelled timing and orders. It was clear that this was
a well thought out heist that took time to plan and coordinate. The robbery went off without a
hitch. No one was physically injured, and not a single shot was fired. The alarms remained off
for the entirety of the robbery. Once the truck was loaded up with over £53 million worth of bank
notes, the gang left. The workers and Dixon family were kept locked in the money cages.
Around 3:00 A.M. Dixon’s son was able to squeeze through the bars of the cage
he was being held in and call the police. But at that point it was too late. Murray and his
gang of robbers were long gone; no one had any idea who they were or where they went.
The police immediately set out to find the criminals offering massive
rewards to anyone who had information that would lead to the arrest of the robbers.
The large reward for information, along with missteps from members of the gang,
led to arrests only days after the robbery. After ten days five people were charged and
millions of pounds were recovered. Later in the investigation a make-up artist who had made
prosthetic masks for the robbers turned on the gang and testified against them. It was later
reported that the gang put a bounty on her head for 7 million pounds to stop her from leaking
any more information to the police. Things were unraveling quickly. But the main piece of evidence
that helped the police track down the robbers came from none other than Lee Murray himself.
Days before the bank heist Murray crashed his bright yellow Ferrari. After the accident Murray
left his cell phone in the car. On it was a recording of him talking about the robbery
with other members of the gang. Now the police knew who the mastermind behind the Securitas
Depot Heist was. Unfortunately for the cops, Murray was already one step ahead of them.
When members of the gang started being picked up by the police Murray fled to Morocco.
Once in Morocco Murray was protected from British authorities because there was no
extradition treaty between the countries at the time.
Murray’s father had been born there, which granted Lee Murray automatic citizenship.
Once safely in Morocco, Murray began living a life of luxury. He bought a one million dollar
mansion and then dumped hundreds of thousand of dollars into renovating it. He had a massive mural
painted on one of the walls commemorating his only fight in the UFC. Murray drove around in a
gold Mercedes-Benz and installed a multilevel, fully equipped, gym in his mansion. He also
commissioned bronze and gold statues of himself that he used as decorations around the house.
This extravagant lifestyle didn’t come without its pitfalls. The British and Morrocan
authorities began working closely together to keep surveillance on Murray at all times.
Eventually, Morrocan police arrested Murray on drug charges. Then, in 2009 while in jail,
British authorities became involved in his case. Murray knew he was in trouble. He attempted to
escape prison using small saws that were smuggled inside a plate of biscuits. This escape failed.
A year later, Lee Murray was charged and convicted for his
part in the Securitas Depot Heist. He was sentenced to ten years in jail,
which was eventually extended to twenty five years to be served in a Moroccan prison. Other
members of his gang who made it to Morocco were sent back to Britain to serve their time there.
Lee Murray’s story is unlike any other. He had a rough childhood being raised in a gang run
neighborhood where he learned to fight or die. He spent time in jail as a juvenile because of
his affiliation with the Barney Boys and his job as a drug runner. Then he used his fighting skills
to earn notoriety. He fought hard and made it all the way to the UFC, living the life
of a playboy along the way. When everything came crashing down after being stabbed numerous times,
ending his fighting career, Murray went back to what he knew from his childhood,
crime. He was able to pull off the largest bank heist in British history
where he and his accomplices stole £53,116,760. Unfortunately for Lee Murray,
he eventually got caught and is now serving his twenty five year sentence in a Moroccan jail.
Now check out Largest US Cash Heist Ever - How They Pulled Off Insane Armored Truck Robbery.
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