Latest news with #Wenham
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
How the Millennium Dome diamond heist actually worked
In 2000, Lee Wenham planned what would have been the world's largest jewel heist, targeting De Beers diamonds valued at more than $500 million. The plan involved a dramatic raid on London's Millennium Dome, an excavator, and a speedboat for the getaway. The Met Police's Flying Squad thwarted the operation, though, and arrested Wenham and his accomplices before they could get to the diamonds. Wenham opens up about his gang's meticulous planning, its surveillance, and the security around the gems. After leaving prison in May 2005, Wenham started a landscaping business. He was the subject of the Guy Ritchie Netflix documentary "The Diamond Heist" and wrote a memoir, "Diamond Gangster." For more, visit:
Miami Herald
20-05-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
As US sets sights on more manufacturing jobs, 3M tries to boost flagging worker pipeline
V Wenham started college with plans for an English degree. Now the St. Paul poet makes her living as a welder at Advanced Exhaust Solutions. "I took a metal arts class, which I loved, and my professor encouraged me to pursue welding," said Wenham, 21, who graduated from St. Paul College on Saturday. "It really changed my life." Long lacking workers, America's skilled trades and manufacturers need to hear more stories like Wenham's. A few million more. At the beginning of the year, there were half a million manufacturing job openings around the country, according to federal data. By 2033, there could be 1.9 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S., a Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute study found. A wave of retirements depleting the workforce will fuel the gap between jobs and qualified applicants. As will the promised boom of more stateside manufacturing from President Donald Trump's trade policies. There might not be enough trained or willing workers ready for the jobs that will already be available in manufacturing and skilled trades in the coming years, let alone if tariffs work as intended. "If the number of people entering and graduating from degree programs that prepare them for high-skill manufacturing trades does not accelerate, the talent gap could widen," the Deloitte study found. "Some manufacturers are taking an active role - and the lead - in addressing talent challenges." 3M senses the urgency. Even after layoffs in recent years and advances in automation, the company routinely has hundreds of job postings at its plants around the country. The Maplewood-based manufacturer recently donated $500,000 to help remodel and outfit two Red Wing High School classrooms for robotics and advanced manufacturing labs, which will be open to all students starting this fall. "How it looks, how it feels, our sense of that is important as we think about some of the trends we see about perceptions of manufacturing," said Michael Stroik, 3M's vice president of community relations. "So we can say to those students, 'Hey, these are exciting fields that you can go into.'" That mindset serves 3M, which makes safety equipment in Red Wing, to build its own talent pipeline amid a broader culture that emphasizes four-year degrees. Stroik said he is seeing more openness and support from school officials, parents and students about going into the trades and manufacturing. The data is mixed. While the number of bachelor's degrees continues to rise in the U.S., the tally of associate degrees issued every year has remained flat since 2011. Certifications rose dramatically during the pandemic, however, and actually exceeded the number of two-year degrees awarded in 2022. "It's push and pull," Stroik said. "The magnitude of it, millions of jobs, keeps me up at night. What built my confidence is getting out to Red Wing and talking to the instructors and seeing the excitement in students who are very clearly going to change the world someday." Many manufacturers are investing in workforce development in Minnesota to boost training efforts from industry groups and governments. Duluth-based Cirrus Aircraft runs its own Cirrus University training program, and window-and-door-manufacturer Marvin worked to bring a mechatronics program to Warroad. Even companies that aren't publicly acting on the issue are probably internally discussing it. Attracting and retaining workers has been a top issue for manufacturers for many years in Enterprise Minnesota's annual state of manufacturing survey. The same is true nationally, though trade policy uncertainty topped the list of concerns to start 2025 in the National Association of Manufacturers quarterly survey. Stroik wants to see more collaboration, a sort of "rising tides lifts all boats" approach across the industry. "It's bigger than one company," he said. For 3M, the company's workforce development efforts extend beyond traditional manufacturing positions. Welders, electricians and others are all necessary to build and maintain machinery. Plus, 3M's auto parts, construction safety equipment and other divisions benefit from helping customers of those businesses fill jobs. The chasm between jobs and applicants is just as great with skilled trades as it is in manufacturing. About 30% of electricians will reach retirement age in the next decade, according to a McKinsey study. The churn in welders will be staggering in the coming years. "We're controlling what we can control," said Garfield Bowen a vice president of government affairs at 3M. "We need to be relentless about doing everything we can to fill this gap." 3M sponsored a "signing day" for skilled trades students at St. Paul College earlier this month. Among the students celebrating their commitment to a technical career was Mike Blackwood, who is starting his electrician apprenticeship with the Minneapolis local of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers this month. "I've had a lot of jobs," he said, "but never a career." Blackwood, 37, initially thought it would be too dangerous when he was deciding between trades. But he took the chance: "I've discovered the love of my life." Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Diamond Heist review – Guy Ritchie's thrilling tale of the failed Millennium Dome jewel robbery
I suppose the wonder is that it has taken Guy Ritchie so long to get around to telling the story of the Millennium Dome robbery, in which – way back at the turn of the century, children – a group of south-east London criminals ram-raided a national joke in pursuit of the 203-carat Millennium Star diamond worth £200m, which De Beers had unaccountably agreed to display in the capital's gangster heartland. Strictly speaking, Richie himself is not telling it; the three-part documentary The Diamond Heist comes from Oscar and Emmy award-winning company Lightbox and is executive produced by Ritchie. But the subject matter is so perfectly him that any meaningful separation in your mind as you watch it collapses quicker than a Greenwich exhibition venue's shutters under the weight of a JCB driven at speed by a man intent on a multimillion pound payday. There are charismatic villains, mostly in the form of Lee Wenham. Then in his 30s, he had been following in his father's criminal footsteps since he abandoned school/school abandoned him at the age of 12. Wenham had lived the highlife – he was pulling in about £6,000 a week by his 20s, smuggling cigarettes and 'taking out' cashpoints – but felt he did not yet command the respect Wenham Sr did. Then Wenham Sr introduced him to Ray Betson, a star in the gangster firmament, who was planning a big job and needed some help. Could Wenham find a way to breach the hexagonal, impact-resistant steel vault and remove the Millennium Star and its companions – worth a further £150m – from the impregnably toughened glass cases they were kept in, surrounded by motion sensors and under 24-hour guard? Wenham took his daughter Beth for a day out at the dome. As an exhibition space and entertainment venue he 'thought it was shit'. But there were possibilities offered by the diamond display and the fact that – as the De Beers head of security put it as part of his argument against the company's decision to loan out the jewels – the dome was 'a tent with a flat concrete floor.' The first episode, entitled 'Robbers' puts together the how, in full Ritchie mode – quick cuts, montages, propulsive editing suddenly arrested (if you'll pardon the pun) by freeze frames with names and captions stamped all over them in big bright letters. When it comes to the violence – a failed attempt to rob a security van of nearly £9m with a spike-mounted lorry, and sawn-off shotguns being blasted at police – only pathetic Guardian types, surely, would pause to wonder whether the real-life nature of the material, such as the police officers getting shot at, the security van guards presumably being quite frightened, any passing members of the public being endangered, should have curbed the glamorisation at all. So, assuming you're not one of those berks, you will be thrilled by the ingenuity of the men as they work out the best time and place to make the raid, find a man on the inside who can give them vital details about patrol times and whether repeated shots from a nail gun will weaken the display glass enough for them to sledgehammer the sparkling goods free long before the five minutes it will take for the police to arrive are up, and they can escape down the river in an arranged speedboat happily thereafter. The second episode, especially for those who don't already know the outline of the story, executes a Ritchie-style unexpected rewinding and flipping of the narrative. Entitled 'Cops', this time we hear from members of the flying squad who had been watching the gang almost from the beginning. They're not as charismatic, perhaps, but they do have a nice way with a laconic one-liner. One remembers how suspicions of Wenham took a large leap forward when he went back to the venue without his daughter. 'No one goes to the Millennium Dome twice.' Cameras and officers are secretly installed at the entrance to Daddy Wenham's farm, which is being used as a safe house for the planning and preparations (JCB? Check. Speedboat? Check. Various well-known gangsters going in and out on the regular? Check, check, check). On the day of the raid, other officers are disguised as cleaners and Dome staff and scattered around the vault, which is 'closed for cleaning' so that the public are out of harm's way. In the third episode, 'Cops and Robbers', we go through the aftermath and a couple of final twists ('Motherfuc-' says Wenham, after the denouement, down the lens before we smash cut to the credits). Again, if you put the really quite serious danger aside and all the suffering the gang members must have caused many innocent people during their long and varied careers out of your mind, it's a hugely satisfying tale, brilliantly told. So, don't be a Guardian-reading berk – just enjoy! The Diamond Heist is on Netflix
Telegraph
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The man behind Britain's most daring diamond heist: ‘Regrets? Obviously, not getting away with it'
The Millennium Star is one of the most exquisite diamonds ever mined. Discovered in what was then Zaire in 1990, it took three years for it to be cut into its flawless, pear-shaped 203.04-carat form. So spectacular was the two-inch-long jewel that De Beers said it would be unmatched for 1,000 years. It formed the centrepiece of a £350million collection of gems at the Millennium Dome, where visitors to the exhibition space in Greenwich, south east London, could admire its beauty up close as the world celebrated the dawn of the 21st century. Inevitably, it was not just tourists who took an interest in the Millennium Star. On November 7, 2000, a gang of thieves drove a JCB digger through the flimsy wall of the much-mocked Dome in an audacious attempt to make off with the treasures. Four men wore body armour and carried sledgehammers, a nail gun and smoke grenades. One of the gang members waited with a speedboat on the River Thames to spirit them away. Fortunately for De Beers, and that day's Dome visitors, the Flying Squad was onto the heist and managed to thwart what would have been one of the biggest robberies in history (the haul would be worth £650 million now, taking inflation into account) inside the diamond vault. After being convicted the following year, seven of the gang members were sentenced to a combined 80 years in prison. As with any notable crime, the story of the botched raid has now been given the documentary treatment. Unlike most true-crime series, Netflix's The Diamond Heist counts Guy Ritchie as an executive producer and stars Lee Wenham, one of the gang's leaders, as he gives his side of the story. Ritchiean touches abound: early talk of the money to be made is accompanied by noisy 'kerchings', there are character comparisons to Scorsese gangster films and TV's The Sopranos, while the soundtrack includes The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up and Nothing but the Best by Frank Sinatra. It is surprising to have a convicted criminal fronting a glossy Netflix series, and when I meet Wenham himself at the streamer's London office he admits that he took some persuading to get involved. 'I was a bit dubious about doing it at first, to be honest. All the other documentaries that have been done are all very serious, and it's all about the police, how wonderful they were in catching us,' he says. 'But when they told me Guy Ritchie is going to be involved in it and they wanted to make it more of an entertainment thing, I was on board.' Wenham's East End patter and bruiser's physique is straight out of the Ritchie casting book. Though he is now 57, he looks as though he could still handle himself if needs be. Has Wenham had the chance to meet Ritchie yet? 'He hasn't got a chance to meet me yet,' he zings back. 'I would like to meet him, to be honest. I do like his stuff: Snatch, Lock Stock and The Gentlemen, I really enjoyed that.' A dyslexic child who left school at 12, Wenham followed his father, James, into the criminal underworld and says that, by his 20s, he was earning £6,000-a-week by, for instance, smuggling cigarettes. Coming from a gypsy family, who grew up in watering holes with gangsters, Wenham says his motivation for taking part in the raid was a mixture of money and prestige. 'Obviously I wanted to impress them. They'd all been there and done it and earned their stripes, shall we say. And so I had to earn mine,' he says. 'Coming up to these robberies, it was a chance to make a name for myself.' The potential haul was even bigger than he imagined: Wenham says he thought that the gems would be worth £40 million at most, and only discovered their true value after he was arrested. He had earmarked how he would have spent his share of the spoils in advance of the raid, though: following his dad's lead, he would buy flats in Marbella, Spain, as well as land in Britain, that he would rent out. 'It would have been the last very big job,' he says. After being foiled by the Flying Squad, following a tip-off and long-term police surveillance, Wenham pleaded guilty to involvement in the Dome raid (plus another failed robbery in Aylesford, Kent) and was sentenced to nine years behind bars. He was released midway through his term. Having come so close to making off with millions, the robber says he replayed the raid and what went wrong in his head only until he was banged up for nine years. 'I thought about it a lot then, and I thought about what I would be leaving behind at home,' says Wenham, whose two daughters were then at primary school. 'But as soon as I was sentenced, it was a big weight off my shoulders and it's like, 'Right, just get on with it.' And I didn't give it much thought after that, to be honest.' In the series, Wenham says that he was cheered into prison by his fellow lags for having tried such an audacious raid. What was it like after that? 'People who haven't been to prison fear prison, obviously. Everyone does, it's the ultimate punishment in British law,' he says. 'But I found it okay, I've got to be honest. I adapted very well, very quickly in prison, got on with a lot of people. I'm not boasting!' Despite the raid ultimately being a failure, Wenham says he did succeed in boosting his own prestige in the underworld 'because I took a shot, I had a go... It sounds silly but you do get a little bit more respect from people. When I came out [of prison] they talked to me slightly more differently, a little bit more respectful. I walked in the pub for instance and people would say, 'I'll get that'.' Not that Wenham wants to glamourise a life of violent crime. He says part of the reason why he took part in the series – and wrote a book, Diamond Gangster, which will be published next month – is to serve as a warning to his daughters and the nine grandchildren he shares with his partner. 'So they can see that crime doesn't pay… it doesn't work.' Did he ever want his kids to follow him into the underworld, as his father did? 'No, no way. I didn't even want my kids to know what was going on. I had daughters as well,' he laughs. 'I want them all to be straight.' Wenham laughs a lot, but does not seem entirely comfortable being interviewed and is wearing an obviously box-fresh black shirt for the photoshoot. He also has a surprisingly diva-esque demeanour: he drove to central London from his Kent home because he does not take trains and, when the Netflix publicist brings him a can of sparkling water, he says: 'I'm gonna be a pain here, can I have a glass? I don't drink out of cans, sorry.' Since coming out of prison two decades ago, Wenham has avoided returning to his previous life, and today runs a landscaping business. He rolls up his sleeve and shows me a small tattoo of a diamond on his right wrist, which he says is a 'a little reminder – don't do anything'. He needs to resist going back to that adrenaline-fuelled world. 'There's no drink, there's no drug, there's nothing that compares to it. It is something else: I can't even explain the feeling. It's just better than anything,' Wenham says. 'And I've got to be honest, there are times where I walk out into the garden on my own, everybody's inside talking, and I think, 'Cor, I wish I was doing something now.' It can just happen, because life does sometimes get a bit boring – but I've not done it!' He laughs again. When asked about what he thinks of the police, Wenham immediately and proudly says 'they're a bunch of c–ts', but has a sort of grudging admiration for the people who thwarted his ingenious scheme. 'To us now, it's all very serious. I suppose we shouldn't have, but we had a lot of fun doing it,' he says. 'We liked taunting the police, and it's a game of cat and mouse, and at the end of the day it's their job, and this is our job.' Does he have any regrets about the escapade? 'Obviously not getting away with it, I'd have rather had it that way. The only [other] regret really was the effect it had on my family and my children. Being absent for four-and-a-half, five years of their lives.' Even if the would-be thieves had escaped from the Dome, they would not have succeeded. Knowing that a raid was in the offing, De Beers swapped the real diamonds for replicas. What the gang would have made off with would have been worthless. Perhaps crime really doesn't pay. The Diamond Heist is on Netflix from April 16; Diamond Gangster by Lee Wenham is released on May 22
The Guardian
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
David Wenham on the return of Johnny ‘Spit' Spitieri: ‘Every second day someone comes up to talk about him'
David Wenham avoided wearing thongs for 22 years. That's ever since an iconic scene in the 2003 heist caper Gettin' Square, in which he slapped his way down a suburban street in thongs and leopard-skin briefs, on the run from cops. If you've ever tried running in thongs, you'll appreciate the lasting limping. 'I probably would have done that more than 50 times. Jonathan likes many takes,' Wenham says of the film-maker Jonathan Teplitzky. The scene made Johnny 'Spit' Spitieri the most endearing and memorable character in Gettin' Square, despite hot young talent Sam Worthington playing the central protagonist, Barry. Now everyone's favourite heroin addict is back for a sequel, Spit: while his straggly mullet is now balding on top, the too-short shorts are familiar (Wenham sourced Spit's wardrobe from the women and children's sections of op shops). And though Spit's now off the gear, he still has to do the odd runner. Gettin' Square only made $2.1m at the box office, but went gangbusters on video and DVD, says Wenham, who won an Australian Film Institute award for best actor for his performance: 'One of the major reasons I agreed to come back was at least every second day I have someone coming up to me and talking about the character. The amount of people who've seen it is quite incredible.' There are other returning actors – David Field as crooked cop Arne Deviers; Gary Sweet as gangster Chicka Martin; Helen Thomson as Marion Barrington – and the Gold Coast, once again, is its own gaudy character. Teplitzky is back at the helm and many of the same crew have returned, which Wenham says created a school-camp feel, particularly when they bunkered down for weeks at the Covid quarantine centre at Toowoomba, which stands in for an immigration detention centre. The shoot 'was one of the happiest creative periods I've encountered', Wenham says. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning This time, Spit is unofficially running an English language program at the detention centre, having re-entered Australia on a false passport after skipping town at the end of the first film. He has other personal dramas to deal with – punctuated by a cold sore that appears on his lip whenever he's stressed – but finds the time to be a mate to the refugees he's inside with. 'He's genuinely an unjudgmental character,' Wenham says of Spit. 'He takes everybody on face value, irrespective of who they are. I think that's a pretty fabulous characteristic.' The first time he read the Gettin' Square script, he could hear Spit's voice and see the rhythm of his movements. 'I lived in and around Kings Cross for nearly 30 years, so I'd seen many characters like Johnny Spitieri,' he says. But the character was created by Chris Nyst, a criminal lawyer who wrote both the films and a bunch of crime novels besides. In his mind, Spit has street smarts and plays everything by his own rules: 'People in the criminal milieu do tend to be aspirational people, in the sense that they want a real life, but they don't want to work 20 years to get there. They want to cut corners, and in that sense, we can probably all identify with people like Johnny Spit at some level.' Spit reminds Nyst of some of the Aussie battlers he's had as clients, but also Norman Gunston, the artless character played by Garry McDonald in The Aunty Jack Show, who interviewed and irritated celebrities. Nyst is the man responsible for the ingenious dialogue that is the cornerstone of both films. If you saw Gettin' Square you may remember Timothy Spall's character's calorific point system of booze, or the ridiculous coded conversation that Spit has about double-scoop vanilla ice-cream when he's trying to sell drugs. Then there's the infamous courtroom scene where Spit stymies the stiff proceedings with his whining insistence that he must be provided the $20 bus fare home. 'When I first was writing my novels, if somebody said something I would often write it down on a little piece of paper and put it in my wallet,' Nyst admits. 'Your old-time Sydney and Melbourne crooks did have a great turn of phrase and some old Aussie sayings that they used to death.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Nyst was obsessed with movies as a teenager but his father convinced him to be a lawyer; his dad's case being helped by the fact that Perry Mason was big on TV at the time. Sometimes his father would take him to the criminal courts for a day out, and Nyst greatly appreciated the theatre of it. His father was born and bred in France and spoke many languages, but growing up in postwar Australia, Nyst and his brothers were keen to adopt as many Australianisms as possible. Having this upbringing gave him the impetus to make Spit a commentary on the debate around immigration. 'There was a lot of negativity around immigration and that seemed crazy to me, particularly because we're pretty much all immigrants in this country,' he says. 'It seemed unfortunate that it was being made a political football, particularly given our national ethos of mateship and egalitarianism. I wanted to find a non-abrasive context to remind people of Australian values.' Wenham admits to being 'slightly nervous' when he initially read the script. The well-meaning Spit changes the name of Jihad (played by Arlo Green) to Jarod, and teaches the inmates how to integrate, real Aussie style. 'The majority of the people who played the inmates are either refugees or offspring of refugees,' says Wenham, who sat in on the casting sessions with Teplitzky. 'The surprising thing for me about this particular storyline was the actors themselves completely embraced the way that those characters were being portrayed … They said, for the first time, we're not just portrayed as refugees. Some of them felt frustrated that in many depictions in cinema and in literary pieces, they're deified – that's the word they used.' Whereas Gettin' Square was dead-set comedy, Spit has more gravitas. Wenham says the modus operandi was to make a film with more layers: 'It will hopefully have you leaving the cinema with a big smile on your face and some faith in humanity.' Q&A preview screenings of Spit are being held around the country now; see here for dates. Spit is out in Australian cinemas from 6 March
