Organised Crime - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

2000: The Diamond Heist That Was Really a Trap: Police Foil a 350-Million-Pound Raid on the Millennium Dome

A seven-man gang planned to smash into the Millennium Dome's diamond exhibition, grab a haul worth 350 million pounds, and roar off down the Thames on a speedboat. It was a bold escape plan for a bold crime, but the gang never got the chance to use it.

Police had been watching for weeks. Surveillance cameras had already filmed members of the crew casing and videoing the exhibition beforehand, and on this day in 2000, a 100-strong police operation was waiting the moment they struck, ready to close in before the gang could reach the river.

Had they somehow broken through and made it to their boat, there was one final twist waiting for them: the diamonds on display that day were fakes, the real stones having already been quietly removed for safekeeping.

02 Arena in London. London, UK - January 21, 2014: The O2 Arena in London at sunset. The venue contains shops, bars, cinemas, clubs and often holds entertainment concerts. | ID 36920457 © Mike Clegg | Dreamstime.com — ID 36920457 © Mike Clegg | Dreamstime.com

⬅ See all events from 7 November

Heist London Organised Crime Police Robbery UK

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2005: The First Murder Convictions of the Melbourne Gangland War: Keith Faure and Evangelos Goussis Convicted

Lewis Caine was shot dead amid the underworld bloodletting that tore through Melbourne through the late 1990s and 2000s, a conflict that would eventually claim dozens of lives across the city's criminal networks. Keith Faure and Evangelos Goussis stood trial for his killing, two men drawn into a war where old scores were settled with bullets rather than courts.

On this day in 2005, a jury found both men guilty of Caine's murder, making them the first people convicted over any of the gangland killings that had gripped the city for years. The verdict was a rare moment of legal reckoning in a saga otherwise marked by unsolved shootings and whispered reprisals. Faure and Goussis both lodged appeals against their convictions.

Gangland: more than a dictionary definition in Melbourne, 1998–2010.

⬅ See all events from 3 November

Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Trial VIC

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2018: Whitey Bulger: Boston's Most Wanted Mob Boss Beaten to Death Within Hours of a New Prison Transfer

James "Whitey" Bulger ran Boston's underworld for decades while secretly informing for the FBI, a betrayal that let his gang operate almost untouched. He vanished in 1994 after a tip-off from his own handler, spent sixteen years as a fugitive second only to Osama bin Laden on the FBI's most wanted list, and was finally captured in California in 2011. Convicted in 2013 of racketeering and involvement in eleven murders, he was handed two life sentences.

Five years later, the 89 year old and wheelchair bound Bulger was abruptly transferred to a high security prison in West Virginia, his medical status quietly downgraded just weeks earlier. He arrived on 29 October 2018. Within hours, on this day in 2018, he was found beaten to death in his cell, attacked with a sock wrapped padlock and a shiv so savagely a law enforcement official called him unrecognisable.

Mafia hitman Fotios Geas was later identified as the man behind the killing and in 2024 was sentenced to 25 years for voluntary manslaughter. A relative of one of Bulger's own victims summed up the reaction of many: "He died the way I hoped he always was going to die."

James Joseph Bulger Jr portrait photograph 1953

⬅ See all events from 30 October

Gang Murder Organised Crime Prison USA

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1927: Squizzy Taylor Buried in Melbourne as a Morbid Crowd Forces Police to Intervene

Joseph Theodore Leslie "Squizzy" Taylor, Melbourne's most notorious gunman, had died days earlier in a shootout with rival criminal Cutmore. He was buried in a polished oak coffin with gold mountings at Brighton Cemetery on this day in 1927, while hundreds of onlookers, mostly women, crowded outside his Richmond home to watch the coffin leave.

What followed was described in the press as a disgraceful exhibition of morbid curiosity. Traffic was blocked for half an hour, and just before the funeral began a crowd surged at the gateway, forcing police to be called to clear a path. At the graveside few of Taylor's former associates could be seen among the throng of sightseers. Cutmore, the other man killed in the same gun battle, had been buried the previous day at Coburg.

The Squiz: Leslie 'Squizzy' Taylor, police identification photographs July 1924 [collection of the Public Record Office of Victoria, Central Register for Male Prisoners 31530 - 31927 (1907-1909)]

⬅ See all events from 29 October

Australia Gang Melbourne Murder Organised Crime Scandal VIC

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