Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/SHOWTIME Sports
Executing a daring crime is one thing. Successfully getting away with it is another.
Up-and-coming MMA fighter “Lightning” Lee Murray and his English underworld cohorts learned that the hard way in 2006 when they pulled off the largest cash robbery in the history of the UK (if not the world), nabbing £53 million from the Securitas depot, a private facility located in Tonbridge (a town in Kent) that handled distribution and destruction of used Bank of England notes. Also involving kidnapping and hostage-taking, it was a masterful heist that went off without a hitch, and it quickly made front-page news. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, though, their skills didn’t extend to covering their tracks—or, in most cases, to evading justice.
Directed by Pat Kondelis, Showtime’s Catching Lightning (streaming April 7, and airing April 9) is a portrait of crooks at their best and worst, and it revolves around Murray. A product of the hardscrabble South East London neighborhood of Woolwich, Murray had, by age 15, joined the local Barnfield Boys gang. He was different from his mates, however, in that he was physically and temperamentally built for fighting, and he soon became obsessed with making it big in the UFC.