It was an ordinary Sunday night on a school week in October when masked men scaled a 6ft fence at Windsor Castle. The Prince and Princess of Wales and their children were in residence, asleep at Adelaide Cottage in the grounds. “They must have been watching the castle for a while,” a source told The Sun of the break-in on October 13. The two thieves entered Shaw Farm, inside the castle’s security zone, and raided farm equipment, using a stolen truck to ram a security gate as they fled. No arrests have been made.
Thankfully the royals were undisturbed. Yet audacious high-profile burglaries are on the rise in Britain, targeting the rich, from celebrities in their pristine mansions on quiet London streets to Premier League footballers in their mock Tudor piles in Cheshire. Not all victims are so lucky as to be unaware. Recently it emerged that the actress Anya Taylor-Joy and her husband, Malcolm McRae, an actor and musician, had fallen victim to a break-in while staying at a property in north London. Masked intruders forced their way into the home and attempted to gain access to the couple’s bedroom while they were inside.
The February 2023 break-in could not be revealed until this past November, when reporting restrictions were lifted after a nine-month legal battle by The Standard newspaper. The case will go to trial next September. Meanwhile, earlier this year about $1.25 million worth of jewelry, along with cash and thousands of dollars of designer clothes, was stolen in a series of raids including on the home of the Newcastle United striker Alexander Isak in Northumberland.
Footballers provide a rich seam for professional thieves. The homes of the England players Jack Grealish, Raheem Sterling and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain were ransacked while they were playing televised away matches, while the former Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Dele Alli was less lucky: in 2020 he was held at knifepoint by masked raiders who broke into his north London home, interrupting his game of pool and taking watches worth almost $450,000.
Often operations are carried out by highly organized criminal gangs, who surveil their targets from afar, using social media as an asset inventory (taking note of the painting in the corner of the kitchen of an Instagram post or an expensive trainer collection), as well as a way to scope out entry points and track their marks’ movements.
“Lots of things that were taken are basically irreplaceable to me because they have so much sentimental value,” Tamara Ecclestone told me when I made a BBC documentary about her burglary, which at $32 million was one of the largest hauls in English history.
When Ecclestone and her husband, Jay Rutland, were boarding a private jet to Lapland with their daughter Sophia and chestnut maltipoo Teddy in 2019, the F1 heiress documented the trip online. “Pretty excited the holidays are here,” Ecclestone posted to Instagram. Hours later, on December 13, while their security guard was on a break, burglars scaled the adjoining properties and broke a window to enter their home.
The thieves ignored a towering Banksy in the breakfast room and a custom Tracey Emin neon in the sitting room. They went straight to Ecclestone’s steel-reinforced dressing room, which was lying open. They smashed glass cabinets and swept armfuls of jewelry into a stolen Birkin bag. They used tools to destroy Rutland’s black leather dressing island, seemingly aware that it contained secret compartments that concealed a collection of luxury Patek Philippe watches. Only the black toilet paper in the en suite bathroom was untouched.
Ecclestone minded less about the material worth of some of the items, she said, than their meaning. The bracelet her husband gave her upon the birth of Sophia had been taken, and so too the diamond earrings belonging to her late mother that she was given in her twenties. “Those are the things that I guess hurt the most because they are memories,” she told me.
I asked Ecclestone whether the burglary had affected her approach online. “I don’t post locations of where I am on social media and I try not to show too much of the inside of this house,” she said. “I would never film another TV show where the inside of this house was shown. I don’t think it’s relevant at all to what happened to us but, at the same time, I don’t think I will do that again.”
Only the black toilet paper in the en suite bathroom was untouched.
It’s not just wealthy Britons who are being targeted. According to Michael Sleeckx, the chief inspector of Antwerp federal police in Belgium, organized high-value thefts are on the rise in Europe as a whole. Sleeckx has better insight than most: high-value stolen jewelry — from Manchester to Milan — often ends up on his patch, the Antwerp diamond district. This rather drab cluster of brutalist grey buildings with quaint shopfronts is spread over little more than a square mile but is home to approximately 1,700 diamond firms, with an annual turnover of $54 billion. Most of the traders are legitimate, though some are not, and the area’s large cash reserves and expertise make it a place where distinctive items can be sold quickly.
The diamond district is believed to be the place where thieves attempted to sell Kim Kardashian’s jewelry in 2016. The Kardashian heist is thought to have been the first of the wave of European burglaries in which criminals targeted celebrities and used social media to facilitate their crimes.
When two masked raiders wearing police armbands barged into Kardashian’s Parisian penthouse, brandishing a gun, they had one urgent request: “La ring, la ring!” — the $3.8 million wedding ring gifted to her by Kanye West, and debuted on her Instagram account just four days earlier.
Kardashian was taken completely by surprise. Pascal Duvier, her private security guard, was at a party watching over her sisters Kourtney and Kendall. Alone in the apartment, she was hauled from her bed and forced to hand over the wedding gift at gunpoint. The thieves stuffed whatever other jewelry they could find into a bag and made off on bicycles, accidentally dropping a $32,000 diamond-studded platinum cross on route.
The Kardashian burglary case is finally expected to come to trial next spring in Paris — though a date has yet to be set. Meanwhile, three men were charged for the Ecclestone burglary and sentenced in 2021. They had links to a Roma settlement at Via Monte Bisbino on the outskirts of Milan and had flown in for a burglary tour of Britain, also robbing the homes of the footballer Frank Lampard and the Leicester City chairman Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha. They were jailed for a total of 28 years.
Ecclestone’s jewelry has never surfaced. For stolen gems that do make it to Antwerp, they are typically bought for between 10 and 40 percent of the real value — as opposed to the retail value.
“The profit margin is so high that [a corrupt jeweler] can make €100,000 [$104,000] in one day,” Sleeckx says. “It’s illegal to buy stolen goods. But, of course, you have to know that they’re stolen. And this is the excuse they often use.”
Ben Bryant is a freelance journalist and filmmaker
