The £25million of jewellery stolen from Tamara Ecclestone's mansion was the biggest domestic burglary in Britain. Here, the Mail examines a tantalising new suggestion

Daily Mail​

25-04-2025

'I don't believe in that kind of luck, not for a second,' Jay Rutland tells us. For the first time in our interview, his face scowls at the notion that the thieves who smashed through his home had simply been 'lucky'.
'I don't know what the hell happened that night, but I don't believe in luck to that degree,' he says. 'If they were lucky, they really were the luckiest bunch of bandits ever.'
More than half a decade has passed since an audacious gang of international thieves broke into the fortress-like west London mansion where Jay lives with his wife, F1 heiress Tamara Ecclestone, and their young daughters.
The burglars managed to make off from the property on 'billionaires' row' in Kensington – one of the most secure streets in the country – with £25 million worth of diamonds, jewels and watches.
It remains the biggest domestic burglary in British history and, to this day, almost none of the stolen goods have been recovered.
What's more, both the police and those close to the thieves believe that they have not been melted down. Wherever the items are, they remain intact.
We have been digging into this extraordinary heist since the day it broke in December 2019.
It has taken us across Europe and into the Serbian underworld, where we uncovered a plot that could have been lifted straight from heist film Ocean's 11.
We followed a trail that eventually led us to the front door of the elusive mastermind, a phantom with 19 aliases who has continually evaded some of the finest detectives across Britain and Europe.
Scotland Yard's elite Flying Squad, which was in charge of the investigation, insists that the raid was not an inside job.
But every detail we gleaned seemed to back up the feeling Jay and Tamara had when they discovered their fortress had been breached: that this gang was too knowledgeable about their home, their timing was too perfect to have happened by chance, without help from someone with inside knowledge. There were just too many coincidences.
This week we launched a five-part podcast series on the case, Heists, Scams & Lies, which pieces together the most complete picture yet of what happened that night and afterwards.
Drawing on interviews with the detectives leading the investigation in Britain and Europe, on hours of conversations with Jay, and on meetings with affiliates of the gang, we follow the diamond trail across the Continent.
While you will have to listen to the series to find out where it leads us, today we take you through the perplexing questions about how the thieves got in – questions that remain unanswered.
And we introduce you to Ljubomir Radosavljevic, the suspected mastermind who eluded us for six years, and perhaps the only man in the world who can answer the question: Where are Tamara's stolen diamonds?
When reading about a raid on one of Britain's wealthiest and most famous couples it is easy to dismiss the impact it has had on the victims.
But sitting down with Jay, the anger in his voice is palpable when talking of the men who broke into his family's home on December 13, 2019.
The 44-year-old former City trader was on a Christmas holiday in Lapland with Tamara, 40, and their elder daughter Sophia, who was just six at the time. (They have since had a second daughter, Serena, four.)
He was woken by a knock on his hotel room door at 1am and told to urgently call his head of household, John, who had been desperately trying to reach him.
'My immediate thought when I was asked to call him was, 'Who's died?' Jay tells us. 'When you get woken up in the middle of the night and get told 'Can you call John?', clearly something's wrong.'
For 24 hours from that moment he did not sleep, as he was continually on the phone to solicitors, police and friends trying to work out what on earth had gone wrong.
All the while, he tried as best as he could to protect his wife and young daughter from the horror that had unfolded in their home – a place they had always felt was their only retreat and solace, away from the prying eyes of the public they face each time they step outside.
'We did our best to try to shield [Sophia] from what was going on,' he says. 'But it was very difficult, because we were staying in a hotel room in Lapland.'
He is intensely protective of his daughter, and does not wish to speak of the toll it has taken on her given she is now old enough to access the internet, but he previously told a court that Sophia would continually ask her parents 'if the burglars are coming back'.
It is clear she and her mother are still rocked by the raid. 'It affected her much more than it affected me,' Jay says of his wife, the daughter of F1 tycoon Bernie Ecclestone.
'She's much softer. So for her, the idea of people coming through her house and that violation of them going through our possessions... she was more bothered about that.'
For Jay, though, one question still troubles him the most – just how did these thieves get into his home?
'Those people should never have been able to get into our house,' he tells us, an indignant fury still simmering beneath his distinctive Essex drawl.
To begin to understand just how lucky these thieves would need to be to ransack his home and emerge unscathed, you need only to glance at Kensington Palace Gardens.
This is 'Billionaires' Row', home to some of London's most desirable properties, and one of the most heavily protected streets in the country.
Guards sit in a security hut overseeing everyone who comes in and out, operating a barrier that blocks the entrance to the private road.
At the time, the then-Chelsea FC owner and Kremlin whisperer Roman Abramovich was among residents, as was the Sultan of Brunei, so you can imagine the calibre of private security firms on patrol.
Armed police keeping a watchful eye on the Israeli and Russian embassies also pace the tree-lined street, which overlooks Kensington Palace – once home to the Prince and Princess of Wales.
In short, it is impossible to get on to Billionaires' Row without being eyeballed by some of the world's most elite operatives in security and law enforcement – and that is before you even get to the £75 million Ecclestone mansion.
Jay's home is itself a former embassy. It is patrolled 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by the finest security guards money can buy.
At the time, there were two former British military men on watch, employed by a firm that works with the CIA and the US justice department and which protects celebrities including Amazon owner Jeff Bezos.
The property is alarmed. Whenever the family is out, every single internal door of the 50-room mansion is locked.
Jay's watches – one of the most expensively assembled private collections in the world – were held in an intricate, hidden cabinet that is almost impossible to detect.
Meanwhile Tamara's most prized possessions were in her own dressing room – itself a safe room, with a six-inch reinforced steel door that is normally locked at all times.
As Detective Constable Andrew Payne, who led the probe for the Flying Squad, tells us on Heists, Scams, and Lies: 'On paper, you wouldn't touch it. You wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.'
Yet somehow, on a cold December night, three burglars sneaked in undetected through the back garden while an accomplice sat in an adjacent Chinese restaurant keeping watch.
Not only did they breach the fortress, breaking in through a garden window on the ground floor, but for nearly 60 minutes, they ransacked the place.
They used a crowbar to break down each locked door, going room to room, pillaging jewellery and stuffing bags full of loot until they were almost overflowing.
Eventually, they were rumbled, but after a scuffle with a guard, they spilled into the street, flagged down a black cab, and left town with millions of pounds worth of diamonds, gems, and watches. A vast fortune which has not been seen since.
It was not the celebrity status of the victims that saw DC Payne and his men assigned to the case, nor even the amount of valuables taken, but the fact that a gang who British authorities knew nothing about had executed such an 'impossible' raid.
In the first two episodes of our podcast, DC Payne details the phenomenal police work that eventually brought three of the four thieves to justice: Jugoslav Jovanovic, Alessandro Maltese and Alessandro Donati.
He has also managed to unpick the mechanics of how they got in. Yet each of these details only leaves more perplexing questions.
Indeed, Jay still cannot get his head around just how many things played in this gang's favour.
'There were lots of coincidences that night which in isolation you'd probably raise an eyebrow at,' he tells us. 'But when there's three or four coincidences on the same night… it definitely asks some questions.'
For a start, just before the burglars struck, one of the two guards left the house to fill up the family Land Rover and grab a snack from Tesco.
This was a normal errand, but presented the thieves with the perfect opportunity to strike. Not only because there was only one guard in, but also because a quirk in the security system meant whenever one left, the alarm system had to be temporarily deactivated.
The gang wasted no time and broke in at the rear, undetected.
Once inside, CCTV footage showed they had an uncanny feeling for the layout of the house, too. 'It certainly feels like they knew exactly where they were going,' Jay said.
If you were to walk into the Ecclestone mansion as a guest in daylight hours for the first time, you would struggle to navigate it alone without getting lost.
Yet this gang used crowbars to smash through each locked door in the dead of night and head directly to where the most valuable items were kept.
They made a beeline for Jay's watch collection, in the master bedroom on the first floor, somehow knowing exactly where the secret cabinet was, whilst leaving other drawers undisturbed.
They also targeted Tamara's fortified dressing room. But, as we discover in the podcast, this really was the burglars' lucky day – because the door had been left unlocked.
Let us pause to consider just how fortuitous these circumstances were. For context, it took an elite band of six veteran burglars three years to plan the infamous Hatton Garden heist in 2015.
Yet their haul, some £14 million, is a little over half the worth of the valuables these international thieves stuffed into holdalls that night.
As for evading detection for nearly an hour, however, that is perhaps easier to explain.
The Ecclestone mansion is over six stories and, given it's a former embassy, has three-foot-thick concrete walls.
DC Payne conducted a sound test which proved you could make one hell of a noise without the guards being able to hear from their station.
But the burglars made such a racket the sound did eventually carry to the basement security room, and the two guards sprinted to intervene.
The thieves smashed their way past, hitting one with a fire extinguisher, sprinting to a tiny 30cm window which they managed to squeeze through with their bags of loot.
They made a clean break, leaving behind only broken glass, debris, some screwdrivers and two Nokia burner phones.
In the aftermath, the Flying Squad interviewed staff and security personnel and ruled out any inside job.
But the sheer number of people Jay and Tamara have had in their house over the years still weighs heavily on their minds when considering the supposed good fortune of the thieves.
'It could be anybody, from the people who refurbished the house when Tamara bought it, to any one of the many different staff who have worked in that house down the years – from housekeepers to security staff to house managers,' Jay says.
'It's been 12 years since Tamara's owned it and then, even separate from that, you've got a whole bunch of contractors who have been in and out the house.
'Many who have been in those rooms [that the burglars raided]. So I mean, who knows? I'd love to know.'
These were the same burning questions we sought to answer in Milan and Belgrade in the winter of 2021.
Jovanovic, Maltese and Donati had just been sent down at Isleworth Crown Court in London following an incredible police operation coordinated by DC Payne.
But the mysterious 'fourth man' – the mastermind – remained at large. At the time he was believed to be Daniel Vukovic, lying low in Belgrade where Serbian authorities refused British requests to extradite him.
We discovered his gang also had extensive links to Italy, where they were well known to police following a string of raids on celebrities and footballers including Sulley Muntari and Patrick Vieira in 2009.
Following a paper trail, we knocked on countless doors across a number of countries, and eventually managed to make acquaintances with some near his inner circle.
They unmasked the suspected ringleader not as Mr Vukovic, but as Ljubomir Radosavljevic, the latest in a long line of master thieves from a Roma community outside Belgrade.
The boy who would become one of Europe's most prolific burglars was named after his grandfather, Ljubomir Radosavljevic, a legendary Fagin-esque figure who taught local children how to rob and steal from the wealthy.
From childhood, Ljubomir Jr was taken around the continent, and taught how to steal from the most secure mansions without getting caught.
Over time, he grew into a local legend – the Serbian Lupin – returning to the impoverished village where he grew up in Ferraris and Porsches, and cementing his status there.
He modelled himself on his hero, Danny Ocean – George Clooney in the film Ocean's 11 – living the high life in Italy driving flash cars and frequenting the finest casinos where he would spend the money he had stolen from the uber-rich.
This allegedly led him to the biggest job of his life, the raid on the Ecclestone home, where he reportedly used a method to extract Tamara's diamonds that would have made Clooney's character proud.
It involved flying in a string of beautiful escorts to Britain from across Europe, dressing them head to toe in designer clothes, before the escorts used a very, shall we say, unorthodox method to conceal the goods and fly out again business class.
Once in Europe, we were told, the jewels were gone – nobody could find them. 'They are buried, as is the gipsy way,' one affiliate told us.
We travelled to the camp in Italy where the jewels had passed through. We visited Ljubomir Radosavljevic's Milan stomping ground. And we even tracked down the man himself, who was at home when we knocked on his door.
What we uncovered in 2019 was a true crime story that had everything – flash cars, beautiful women, an elusive protagonist and an impossible raid.
Last year, we sat down to document what we had unearthed for a podcast. But, just as we did, the phantom's past caught up with him. Out of nowhere, Serbian authorities arrested Radosavljevic in a dramatic dawn raid.
Within days, what was a series looking back on an old story, turned into a live treasure hunt.
Sources close to the gang, emboldened now he was in the slammer, came to us with wild theories about where the loot might be stashed.
So we set off once more to try and find the answer: Where are Tamara's stolen diamonds?
If you want to join us on the search for the hottest stolen goods in the world, listen to Heists, Scams & Lies wherever you get your podcasts.
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