The Great Pearl Robbery

The case

The parcel that reached Max Mayer's office at 88 Hatton Garden on 16 July 1913 looked exactly as it should: brown paper, string, and his own 'MM' monogram pressed into the wax seals. Inside the box, where a necklace of 61 matched pink pearls should have been, there were lumps of sugar. Mayer, a London pearl dealer, had sent the necklace to Paris in the hope of a sale. When none came, his agent Henri Salomans wrapped it with great care and sent it back by registered post, as dealers routinely did. Somewhere on the way, someone had opened the parcel, emptied it, and sealed it up again with forged seals.

The necklace had taken about ten years to assemble, pearl by matched pearl, and had a reputation as the finest in the world. Mayer had insured it at Lloyd's for £135,000, and the loss became the largest jewellery claim the market had faced. Lloyd's assessors, Price and Gibbs, put up a £10,000 reward and hired Alfred Leach, a retired Hatton Garden police superintendent, to work alongside Chief Inspector Alfred Ward of Scotland Yard.

The answer came from the trade itself. In Antwerp, a London diamond dealer named Leiser Gutwirth dropped hints to a distant relative, the dealer Samuel Brandstatter, about a very large deal he had in hand. Brandstatter connected the hints with the reward notices and wrote back claiming to have a buyer, bringing in his cousin Myer Quadratstein to play the part. In London in mid-August the two men were taken to meet Gutwirth's associates: Simon Silverman, a diamond broker; James Lockett, a jeweller and seasoned burglar; and Joseph Grizzard, a dealer known to every detective in Hatton Garden as the city's most accomplished receiver of stolen jewels.

Grizzard liked theatre. At a tea shop in Holborn he asked Lockett for a match, and Lockett tossed a matchbox onto the table. Inside were three of the pearls. The visitors weighed them against the figures on the reward notice, then went to the Lloyd's assessors. Over the following days, at meetings watched by detectives, a Paris pearl merchant brought in as a further buyer paid for two pearls with marked notes. Grizzard grew uneasy and the meetings stalled, but on 2 September police arrested Grizzard, Lockett and Silverman at Chancery Lane Underground station and Gutwirth at his office. None of them had the necklace.

It turned up two weeks later in a gutter in Highbury. Augustus Horne, a piano-maker, picked up a small parcel with a matchbox inside full of what he took to be imitation pearls. He handed them in at a police station, where they were booked as glass beads before Mayer identified them. One pearl went astray on the way and, by Horne's later account, he found it in his pocket, failed to swap it for a drink, and threw it back in the gutter. Apart from that pearl and the two already bought by the trap, the necklace was complete. The thieves had evidently dumped it once they knew they were watched.

The four men were tried at the Old Bailey in November 1913, prosecuted by Richard Muir. The jury convicted them all. Grizzard and Lockett were sentenced to seven years' penal servitude, Silverman to five years, and Gutwirth to eighteen months' hard labour. A fifth man arrested with them, an elderly acquaintance named James McCarthy, was acquitted.