The Millennium Dome raider who left crime for middle-class family life
One of the Millennium Dome raiders' comfortable middle-class family life has been revealed.
Aldo Ciarrocchi was jailed for his role in the failed attempt in 2000 to steal the £350 million Millennium Star diamond from the south-east London venue.
The 55-year-old is now a millionaire father-of-two married to an American former fashion model.
Ciarrocchi was responsible for setting off smoke bombs as a distraction during the failed heist. But the Metropolitan Police had been tipped off by an informer and snared the gang of seven in the act.
Ciarrocchi, then 29, was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment.
The priceless diamonds the gang were targeting were switched for fakes – and the plot has now been depicted in Guy Ritchie's The Diamond Heist on Netflix.
Ciarrocchi now runs a reclamation site in Poplar, east London, with his model wife Elisabeth Kirsch, 49.
'I took a chance, I did something dumb,' he told MailOnline of the attempted robbery. 'I was young and I was stupid.'
Ciarrocchi declined to take part in the Netflix hit but admits to 'forcing himself' to watch it.
'I know how the business works,' he said. 'They want you to tell your story and they're all over you for 20 minutes and you make out you were the mastermind of the operation, but I didn't want to get involved.'
'A suicide mission'
He added: 'Good luck to them, the police making out they were like the SAS and all that, but at the end of the day, we did a dumb thing, and when you do something as high profile as that, you're never going to end up in Spain with your feet up.
'The police are going to get you sooner or later – only in our case, it was sooner! The cops were so well informed, we were going into a suicide mission, we just didn't know it.'
Ciarrocchi was forced to come clean to his daughters about his criminal past in 2020 when Ross Kemp presented a documentary about the robbery.
'We've raised two middle-class girls whose lives are as far away from my upbringing as you can imagine, but I just sat them down and told them the truth,' he said.
'It was sooner than I would have wanted to tell them, but that was unavoidable. I was an idiot and made a huge mistake. We didn't glamourise it and didn't try and make out it was clever.'
Ciarrocchi was born to an Italian father and British mother in Bermondsey, south London.
He left school with few qualifications and met his wife, a New York-born model, when he helped her move flat in 1998.
She vowed to stick by him despite his imprisonment and the couple remain married to this day.
'You're wondering what an upper middle-class girl like me sees in a bit of rough,' she said after his sentencing in 2002. 'The fact that Aldo tried to steal the diamond doesn't outweigh all the good in him.'
She added: 'I know that this is the last time he will be involved in crime.'
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