Executing a daring crime is one thing. Successfully getting away with it is another.
Up-and-coming MMA fighter “Lightning” Lee Murray and his English underworld cohorts learned that the hard way in 2006 when they pulled off the largest cash robbery in the history of the UK (if not the world), nabbing £53 million from the Securitas depot, a private facility located in Tonbridge (a town in Kent) that handled distribution and destruction of used Bank of England notes. Also involving kidnapping and hostage-taking, it was a masterful heist that went off without a hitch, and it quickly made front-page news. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, though, their skills didn’t extend to covering their tracks—or, in most cases, to evading justice.
Directed by Pat Kondelis, Showtime’s Catching Lightning (streaming April 7, and airing April 9) is a portrait of crooks at their best and worst, and it revolves around Murray. A product of the hardscrabble South East London neighborhood of Woolwich, Murray had, by age 15, joined the local Barnfield Boys gang. He was different from his mates, however, in that he was physically and temperamentally built for fighting, and he soon became obsessed with making it big in the UFC.
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Trainers Terry Coulter and Remco Pardoel, as well as Cage Rage co-founder Dave O’Donnell, describe Murray as a ferocious prodigy who earned his nickname courtesy of his speed and power (“He punched with bad intentions”) and who struck fear in the hearts of his opponents—or, for that matter, anyone who dared rub him the wrong way. That included not only antagonistic clowns at bars but then-reigning UFC champ Tito Ortiz, who—as recounted by those who were there, including legendary trainer Pat Miletich—was reportedly knocked out by Murray in a chaotic alleyway brawl, thereby bolstering the newbie’s reputation as a bad, bad man.
If Murray tended to dress like a boy band singer (all colorful vests and spiky hair), he was not to be trifled with. And when he handily won his 2004 UFC debut against Jorge Rivera, his path to stardom seemed assured. Alas, that trajectory was halted by a run-in with a crazed road-rage ex-con during which Murray—in self-defense—hit his assailant so hard that the man temporarily died. While Murray wasn’t convicted of any offense, his visa was revoked, costing him additional UFC fights. A subsequent defeat to future title-holder Anderson Silva (interviewed in the film), followed by a nightclub skirmish in which he nearly died thanks to multiple stab wounds, further sabotaged his once-promising career.
Security footage of the robbery.
SHOWTIME SportsCatching Lightning compellingly conveys Murray’s fearsomeness, to the point that it renders talk about him being a kind, compassionate, selfless “gentleman”—delivered by Coulter, UFC vet Tony Fryklund and Murray’s second wife Nicola, whose face is hidden on-camera—less than convincing. Also undercutting such sentiments is the fact that on the night of February 21, 2006, Murray and his accomplices chose to rob Kent’s Securitas depot. Central to their plan was posing as cops in order to kidnap the depot’s manager Colin Dixon as well as his wife Lynn and their eight-year-old son; the latter two were used as leverage to force Dixon to get them into the heavily fortified building. As employees Tony Mason, Alun Thomas and Anca Deiac relay, once inside, the gang—who were dressed in police gear and/or black tactical outfits and masks, and brandished automatic weapons—set about methodically loading a rented lorry with as much cash as it could handle.
That sum turned out to be £53 million, which meant that the thieves still left behind an additional £153 million in the Securitas vault. However, it didn’t take long before Kent detective sergeant Andy Nicoll and assistant chief constable Adrian Leppard pieced this puzzle together. With a public reward leading to hundreds of tips, law enforcement swiftly unraveled the conspiracy, recovering tens of millions of the stolen loot and arresting seven individuals (Lea Rusha, Jetmir Buçpapa, Roger Coutts, Emir Hysenaj, Stuart Royle, John Fowler and Keith Borer) who were accused of directly concocting and/or performing the robbery, and an eighth (Michelle Hogg) who used prosthetics and makeup to mask the culprits’ identity. Led by mellifluous prosecutor Sir John Nutting, the Crown had mounds of damning evidence against these suspects, and when Hogg flipped, many of their fates were sealed.
Murray and his best pal Paul Allen, meanwhile, escaped to Morocco, inspiring Kent law enforcement to work with that country’s officials to nab the duo—this despite the fact that the two countries didn’t have an extradition agreement with each other. After various machinations that seem ripped out of a Michael Mann movie, Catching Lightning becomes an international thriller, ultimately concluding with an ironic twist of fate: To fight being sent back to England, Murray became a Moroccan citizen (courtesy of his dad, who was Moroccan) and wound up being tried in Morocco, where he received a stiffer sentence than he would have in the UK. His wife Nicola and friend “Mus” bemoan the unfairness of this turn of events, but their protestations about his unjust persecution ring hollow, as do their (and Murray’s own) claims that he wasn’t the mastermind behind the heist, but merely an equal team member.
Bolstered by never-before-heard prison phone calls with Murray, as well as functional dramatic recreations and tremendous archival material (including security footage from the heist), Catching Lightning is a character study of a man whose wilder instincts provided him with a brief shot at fame and fortune and, then, led him to commit a raid whose risk was as tremendous as its reward. In the series’ bombshell audio, Murray refutes many of the charges leveled against him. Yet on the basis of what’s presented by director Kondelis, his declarations prove far from convincing, and certainly less intriguing than the suggestion that Dixon may have been involved in the crime—a notion that Nicoll and Leppard forcefully dismiss, positing Hysenaj as the gang’s sole “inside man.”
What is irrefutable is that Murray and his crew were undone by sheer incompetence, leaving behind a trail of breadcrumbs that was so long and wide that Nicoll and company were bound to see it. Even if £32 million of the pilfered cash has yet to be found, Nutting hits the nail on the head when he states, “This was more Keystone Cops than The Italian Job.”
