London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And crime time.
Because today we’re going to Knightsbridge.
Sloane Street.
September 11th, 1980.
And somewhere in the world today there may be a diamond that hasn’t been seen for 46 years.
A very big diamond.
A very famous diamond.
A very expensive diamond.
The Marlborough Diamond.
And 46 years ago today, two gentlemen from Chicago came to London and stole it.
Not gentlemen, perhaps.
Let’s revise that.
Two mobsters from Chicago came to London and stole it.
And here’s the extraordinary thing.
They were caught.
The diamond wasn’t.
It still hasn’t been found.
So.
Let’s go diamond hunting.
And along the way we’ll pick up our word of the day.
Heist.
H-E-I-S-T.
Heist.
A robbery.
Especially a big, audacious, carefully planned robbery.
It’s an American word. Criminal slang. It turns up around the beginning of the 20th century and is generally thought to be related to hoist.
To lift something.
Which is pretty much what our two gentlemen from Chicago had in mind.
They were going to lift the Marlborough Diamond.
And they weren’t exactly amateurs.
Their names were Joseph Scalise and Arthur Rachel.
Even their nicknames sound as though somebody in Hollywood came up with them.
Joseph Scalise was The Monk.
Arthur Rachel was The Brain.
The Monk and The Brain.
You couldn’t make it up.
They were associated with the Chicago Outfit. Organised crime. Serious men from a serious criminal world.
And in September 1980 they came to London.
Their target was Graff.
Laurence Graff’s jewellery shop on Sloane Street.
And there, sitting in the window, was their prize.
The Marlborough Diamond.
A great colourless diamond with a splendidly aristocratic past.
It had belonged to Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough.
And Gladys is almost a podcast in herself.
An American heiress. Celebrated beauty. Highly intelligent. Friend of artists and writers. Admired by Proust. Painted by Boldini.
And she married Charles Spencer-Churchill, the 9th Duke of Marlborough.
Yes.
Those Churchills.
The Marlboroughs.
Blenheim Palace.
Winston Churchill’s family.
Gladys was one of the great society beauties of her age.
But there’s a strange and rather sad coda to her beauty.
As a young woman she had paraffin wax injected into the bridge of her nose in an early form of cosmetic surgery.
It went horribly wrong.
It disfigured her.
In later life she became increasingly reclusive and eccentric. Eventually she was institutionalised. She died in 1977.
And after her death, her diamond was sold.
It ended up at Graff.
Reset.
Displayed.
And noticed.
Noticed, unfortunately, by The Monk and The Brain.
The size of the stone is one of those details on which accounts irritatingly disagree. You’ll often see it described as a 45-carat diamond. Some accounts give 45.47 carats. Others give a considerably smaller figure.
Let’s not get mugged by the carat police.
It was enormous.
It was spectacular.
And in 1980 it was worth about £400,000.
That’s 1980 money.
The whole haul would be valued at roughly £1.5 million.
So Scalise and Rachel came over from Chicago and did what professional criminals do.
They looked.
They watched.
They planned.
Graff wasn’t somewhere you simply wandered into.
Customers were screened before the door was unlocked.
So our two Chicagoans dressed for the occasion.
And this is where the story becomes gloriously 1980.
They disguised themselves as wealthy Arab customers.
Fake beards.
The works.
They hired a Fiat Mirafiori.
And on September 11th they went shopping.
Except they weren’t planning to pay.
Into Graff they went.
Scalise produced a revolver.
Rachel produced what appeared to be a hand grenade.
Five members of staff and two customers were ordered down.
And the two men went straight for the good stuff.
Not random handfuls.
They knew what they wanted.
Laurence Graff later said they picked out the very special pieces.
Into the briefcase they went.
Including the Marlborough Diamond.
And then they were gone.
The whole thing took less than a minute.
Think about that.
Months, perhaps, of planning.
A flight across the Atlantic.
Surveillance.
Disguises.
A gun.
A grenade.
One of London’s grandest jewellers.
A million-and-a-half pounds’ worth of jewellery.
And the actual robbery is over in less time than it takes me to tell you about it.
A heist.
Our word of the day.
And, at first glance, a very good one.
Except.
There’s always an except.
Coming back from lunch was a Graff accountant.
He saw the two men leaving.
Something didn’t look right.
Fake beard territory.
White gloves coming off.
He followed them.
And, crucially, he got the registration number of their getaway car.
Which was unfortunate.
Especially because the getaway car had been hired in Arthur Rachel’s own name.
The Brain.
Perhaps not his finest hour.
And it gets better.
Or worse, depending on whose side you’re on.
Scalise had a badly deformed left hand.
A useful distinguishing feature if you’re a policeman trying to identify an armed robber.
The pair got themselves out of Britain and onto a British Airways flight back to Chicago.
They must have thought they’d done it.
London behind them.
Atlantic underneath them.
Home ahead.
Except the police were moving rather faster than they realised.
When The Monk and The Brain arrived at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, the law was waiting.
Caught.
The great heist had lasted less than a minute.
The great escape lasted roughly as long as the flight home.
Eventually the two men were extradited back to Britain.
They were convicted.
They went to prison.
Case closed.
Except it wasn’t.
Because there was one fairly important question.
Where was the Marlborough Diamond?
The thieves had been caught.
The loot hadn’t.
And now the story becomes a treasure hunt.
One account has the men getting a London cab driver to post a package to an address in New York.
Just imagine that.
You steal one of the world’s most famous diamonds.
And then entrust it to the Royal Mail.
There were later claims that the diamond had been sent to Scalise’s sister in New York.
Other theories followed.
Perhaps it was broken up.
Perhaps it was recut.
Perhaps it disappeared into the criminal underworld.
Perhaps somebody, somewhere, has it.
Scalise certainly wasn’t telling.
Years later, when he was asked whether the Marlborough Diamond would ever be recovered, he reportedly suggested that if the insurers were prepared to pay enough money, perhaps it could be.
Oh.
So perhaps The Monk knew something.
But he wasn’t saying.
And the diamond?
Gone.
Forty-six years.
No Marlborough Diamond.
Which is what I love about this story.
The men weren’t criminal masterminds.
They hired the getaway car in one of their own names.
One of them had a hand that made him particularly easy to identify.
They were caught almost immediately.
And yet the most important piece of evidence in the entire affair simply vanished.
The criminals were found.
The diamond got away.
And there’s something else rather pleasingly London about all this.
The story begins with an American duchess.
Moves through the Marlboroughs and Winston Churchill’s family.
Passes through Blenheim Palace.
Arrives in one of the smartest streets in London.
Gets hijacked by two Chicago mobsters called The Monk and The Brain.
Involves fake beards, a Fiat Mirafiori, a revolver, a hand grenade and an observant accountant coming back from lunch.
And ends with the Royal Mail.
You really couldn’t improve it.
So, today’s word.
Heist.
A robbery.
A lift.
Something taken.
And 46 years ago today, on Sloane Street, The Monk and The Brain pulled off one of London’s most audacious heists.
They stole the Marlborough Diamond.
The police got The Monk.
They got The Brain.
They got the getaway car.
They got their convictions.
But they never got the diamond.
And somewhere tonight…
Who knows?
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Crime time.
Prime time.
See you tomorrow.