It was the daring sleight of hand that netted more than £4 million in diamonds and was likened to Hollywood heist movie Ocean's Eleven.
As unlikely 60-year-old femme fatale Lulu Lakatos starts a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence, we reveal the full story behind the audacious 2016 raid on society jewellers Boodles – the largest-value act of shoplifting in British history.
All good heists need an alluring femme fatale, and the mysterious foreign woman responsible for the audacious theft of £4.2 million of diamonds from society jewellers Boodles was one for the ages.
She went by the name of Anna, appeared to be in her mid-50s, and was wearing a sober camel coat, silk scarf and designer hat when she arrived at the quintessentially English retailer's Bond Street HQ at 11.09am on Thursday, March 10, 2016.
Having met the family firm's boss, Nick Wainwright, a posh, silver-haired 73-year-old who is renowned in moneyed circles both for his brilliant salesmanship and salmon-pink socks and ties, Anna removed her outer layer of clothing.
Underneath was a low-cut black dress, which barely restrained her ample bosom.
Unlikely 60-year-old femme fatale Lulu Lakatos (pictured) starts a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the audacious theft of £4.2 million of diamonds from society jewellers Boodles
'She was most unattractive,' Mr Wainwright later said in court. 'She was overweight, she was wearing the sort of thing a Russian dancer would wear. She had enormous boobs.'
Anna's look was, in other words, garish and perhaps tawdry. But it was also distracting. And that may help explain why, when she and her cleavage sauntered out of the luxury store, neither Nick Wainwright, nor any of his employees, noticed that she had replaced a bag of gems with an identical one filled with pebbles.
The missing loot, which included a stunning 20-carat heart-shaped diamond worth £2.2 million and the size of a Fox's Glacier mint, had, via remarkable sleight of hand, been secreted in a false compartment in her designer handbag.
It is the largest-value single incident of shoplifting in British history and has been variously compared to the plots of an Ocean's Eleven film and the 1981 movie, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, in which hero Indiana Jones replaces a valuable golden idol with a bag of sand.
Five years on, the diamonds have yet to be recovered but, with two members of the gang who masterminded the heist behind bars, a jury at Southwark Crown Court spent the past week considering one final question: who, exactly, was the mysterious Anna?
Their verdict, announced yesterday, was that the ice-cool woman's real name was Lulu Lakatos – crucially, the very individual who happened to be standing in the dock, with frizzy grey hair tied in a ponytail. She was sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
The diamonds have yet to be recovered, but a jury spent the past week asking a final question: who was the mysterious woman, who went by Anna, that stole the loot? (stock image)
The woman (pictured left in Boodles with expert), who went by Anna, replaced a bag of gems with an identical one filled with pebbles without any of the Boodles employees noticing
Lakatos, 60, has an unlikely pedigree for a criminal mastermind. A former cleaner and school catering assistant, she was born in Arad, Romania, to parents of Hungarian ancestry, before moving to France, where she honed her craft stealing clothes from shops and was jailed for a series of minor thefts dating back to 2002.
Working alongside a younger sister named Liliana, she committed offences across France and Switzerland, where Liliana – who appears to have died in a motor accident in October 2019 – was previously wanted over a bank heist that bore remarkable similarities to the 'Boodles Job'.
Liliana was also a central figure in this month's trial – thanks to the ingenious defence mounted by Lulu who, before her arrest on a European warrant in September, was living in Saint-Brieuc, a commune in northern Brittany.
Lulu insisted she was an innocent victim of mistaken identity, and the late Liliana was the real owner of the bosom that bamboozled Boodles.
Her defence was helped by the fact that DNA taken from the store showed the femme fatale could have been either sibling, while fingerprints taken from a table could not be matched to Lulu.
The scam dates back to February 2016 when Mr Wainwright was contacted by a 'Simon Glas', who said he was interested in buying high-value diamonds as an investment on behalf of some wealthy Russians, and over the ensuing days managed to convince Mr Wainwright to travel to Monaco for a face-to-face meeting with a group of investors, where a deal was struck to buy seven specific diamonds.
However, to verify they were the specified size and quality, the Russians asked for their
