A thief who stole £25 million value of money, jewelry and gems from Tamara Ecclestone’s house in Britain’s biggest-ever housebreaking was caught after sending an unsolicited dick pic.
The socialite and heiress and her artwork gallery proprietor husband Jay Rutland have been the victims of a raid at their Kensington Palace property in December 2019.
The theft is the topic of a brand new BBC Three documentary, Who Stole Tamara Ecclestone’s Diamonds?, which reveals the shocking means through which one of many thieves was caught.
Three criminals broke into the property, regardless of around the clock safety, after hiding behind a Wendy home and slipping in via a window.
When police started investigating, they’d lower than 15 seconds of grainy black-and-white safety CCTV footage to work with, however managed to seize pictures of the lads.
One detective, appearing on a hunch, made a breakthrough when he requested to see the information of company staying at a south London resort on the time of the burglaries.
A receptionist who labored there advised of how she remembered a gaggle of males “vividly”, as one among them had despatched her colleague inappropriate messages on the resort’s out-of-hours iPhone, together with a ‘dick pic’.
That they had then saved his quantity as “wierdo” earlier than blocking it.
The invention of that telephone quantity led them to search out out that the person had used his id card to examine into the resort.
The picture on this then matched pictures of one of many males from the CCTV footage, enabling to establish their first suspect, Jugoslav Jovanovic.
Metropolitan Police by way of PA Media
They later caught the 2 different burglars, Alessandro Maltese and Alessandro Donati.
The trio – who have been additionally behind robberies on the houses of Frank and Christine Lampard and late Leicester Metropolis FC proprietor Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha – have been sentenced in November final yr.
Jovanovic was jailed for 11 years, whereas Maltese and Donati have been every sentenced to eight years and 9 months in jail.
Who Stole Tamara Ecclestone’s Diamonds? is out there now on BBC iPlayer.
