Terry Ellis's criminal capers and his new life in Hampstead

Terry Ellis has been pondering his legacy. Before Christmas, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His treatment was successful and in summer he was given the all-clear. But it left him considering how he'll be remembered when his time does come.

He is many things: a businessman, an author, a philanthropist - and a criminal mastermind. Now 59, he has gone straight. A born-again Christian, he runs a legitimate business and devotes his spare time to good causes. But all anyone really remembers him for, he says, is his the Verizon heist - an audacious heist, in which he and his crew breached the headquarters of the telecommunications firm and made off with more than £100 million worth of bounty.

Raised in Hampstead, Terry spent his adulthood moving around Camden Town, Kentish Town and Highgate. He was quite “transient”, he said, owing to his criminal lifestyle – but he projected an image of professionalism and success. He and his crew lived in nice houses and fraternised with celebrities. By day, Terry ran a courier company and an executive car business.

But he was living a double life, moonlighting as a robber-for-hire, stealing vast quantities of cash and drugs. Between the daring heists, he let off steam by snorting cocaine and guzzling Captain Morgan’s.

“It all went hand-in-hand: drink, drugs and women,” he recalls. “All my kids were with different mothers. I lived a lifestyle that afforded me the opportunity to do exactly what I wanted. I was selfish.”

After a brush with cancer earlier this year, Terry said he was even more determined to ensure he spent the rest of his years doing good and leaving behind a positive legacy (Image: Charles Thomson) Early in his criminal career, he had been a drug-dealer himself.

“I worked in Spain for a number of years, running puff,” he said, nonchalantly. “I used to buy it, pack it and sell it.”

He relocated to Amsterdam for a few years “doing other nefarious things”, then moved to France, into the illegal cigarette trade.

“I could make 40 grand a month, easy, on the cigarettes – and I lost count of how much money I made on gear. I made a few million over the years – and lost a few million," he said.

But he was best-known among the criminal fraternity as an ingenious thief, able to penetrate any building – a skill he developed, pretty much by accident, as a child.

“I was dyslexic as a kid, but what I lacked academically, I made up for criminally,” he explained. “I always had a knack of being able to look at something, see a way in and see money. I got noticed by certain people in the underworld who would come to me to retrieve things for them. Most of it was money or gear they’d lost.”

Most criminals lacked finesse, said Terry, whereas his methods were more considered. At one time he acquired a BT van and used it to stake out his targets.

“I would know who the keyholder was, who the alarm guy was, how many people worked there, who was first in, who was last out. I would figure out a way to target that place, take everything out and get away without anyone even knowing.

“If you just run into a gaffe with a gun, you’ve got a 50-50 chance of getting caught. Our jobs, 99.9% we got away with, because we would do our homework.”

Terry and his robbery crew sailed past security at Verizon's headquarters in Kings Cross, then strolled out an hour later with a bounty worth more than £100m (Image: Charles Thomson) But in 2007, Terry pulled off a heist so audacious that it could have been an episode of the BBC drama Hustle – and it would prove his undoing.

He and his gang walked in through the front door of Verizon’s Kings Cross headquarters, raided it, then simply strolled out again an hour later. 

“We stole £5 million worth of motherboards and £100 million worth of data, if not more – and all with no guns and no weapons,” he said. “One thing security guards respect is authority – seeing a uniform. Even a postman’s uniform, or the gas board – they let you in.”

So his crew sailed past security by dressing as police officers, supposedly responding to reports of intruders.

“We went as a first response robbery squad,” he explained. “We had police vans, cars, uniforms. We even had a fake police dog handler with an Alsatian.”

Once inside, they handcuffed staff, disabled the CCTV and set about their mission.

“We were approached by an underworld figure on behalf of a banking syndicate that wanted us to go in,” he explained. “The idea was to make it look like a theft of motherboards and leave no trace of what data we had taken. We were the first people on mainland Britain to pull something like that off - the first people to take data and know the value of it.”

But he was arrested a year later – and once he was caught for the Verizon heist, he said, his modus operandi was so unique that it put him in the frame for other past offences.

In 2009, he was sentenced to 17 years behind bars after being linked to two additional thefts carried out while posing as a police officer.

Terry, who spent years moving around Kentish Town, Camden Town and Highgate, said he loves his new life in Hampstead, walking his dogs every day across the heath and not having to constantly look over his shoulder (Image: Charles Thomson)

“I think my sentence – which should have been eight or nine years, with no weapon – reflected the fact that they knew I had got away with so many others,” he said.

With good behaviour, plus time served on remand awaiting trial, Terry was released in 2016. But under the Proceeds of Crime Act, “They took my houses. They took everything.”

Today, he has built a new life in Hampstead.

“I love the people. I love walking on the Heath with my dogs. It’s a completely different life to the one I had before,” he said. A proud born-again Christian, he writes books and runs a company called Scoff Meals with his daughter.

“We do nutritious meals for people that want to change their lives,” he said. “We have a 6,000 square foot premises and 14 people working for us. Our turnover is a few million pounds a year. It’s an honest living and I don’t have to look over my shoulder all the time. I love every single hour that I work.”

The pre-cooked meals are delivered nationwide, with different plans to achieve different goals, like weight loss or muscle gain. The company also provides children’s lunches for hard-up families during school summer holidays.

“We do those at cost,” Terry said.

In his spare time, he volunteers at a food bank in Primrose Hill, mentors ex-prisoners and gives talks to young people about the perils of a life of crime. Also a criminal justice campaigner, he participated in Channel 4 show Banged Up: Stars Behind Bars last year, which saw celebrities and MPs experience life in prison.

Now a campaigner on criminal justice matters, Terry was among the delegation who handed a petition to 10 Downing Street in September, calling for government intervention in the case of Jason Moore, serving life for a murder he insists he didn't commit (Image: Charles Thomson) He credits his reinvention to two-and-a-half years at a therapeutic prison called HMP Grendon.

“I actually found out a lot about myself,” he said. “I don’t look upon that sentence as anything other than it completely changed my life for the better. I haven’t taken any drink or drugs for 20-odd years now.”

At Grendon, he realised his crazy lifestyle had been propelled by feelings of boredom and inadequacy.

“The more daring and dangerous it was, the more I loved it because it was an adrenaline rush,” he said. “You don’t get that euphoria in any other game. I created a monster. 

"I was chasing love. I thought the more sex I had, that equalled love; the more people I had around me, that equalled love. But the underworld aren’t your friends. I just had a set of skills they wanted to use. The underworld are parasitic. They just use you until you get nicked and then go on to the next one.”

Another major factor in his lifestyle change, he said, is his long-term partner Anna, who is “about a million miles away from what I used to be”. She too is a born-again Christian and works with special needs children. The couple met in 2016, after his release, when he was staying with a friend in the block of flats where she lived.

“She’s got a heart of gold,” he said. “I was such a bad person that I thought I would never have what I have now. But after I started going to church when I came out of prison, I remember someone coming up to me and saying, ‘Do you know what, mate? You’ve got a special glow about you that only Christians have’. That was when I knew I had changed. Until that moment, I thought I was just masquerading as someone good.”

His brush with cancer has left him even more determined to leave a positive mark on the world.

“I want to be known for something other than Verizon," he said. "It’s a part of my life and it got me to where I am today. I wouldn’t have my wonderful girlfriend or be working with my daughter. But I have come out of the other end a different person.”