A career criminal who once robbed post offices with a sawn-off shotgun pulled off what he called his "criminal Mount Everest" in December 2007, leading a gang disguised as police officers into a heavily fortified Verizon data centre in King's Cross and walking out with computer servers containing banking data allegedly worth £100 million.
The story of Terry Ellis and the Verizon heist has now inspired a novel, Cloudthief, by award-winning US writer Nathaniel Rich, about two unlikely partners who steal data from a data centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Eight Layers of Security
The Verizon complex on St Pancras Way, which backed onto Regent's Canal, was protected by eight levels of security: biometric hand-scan entry, a pressurised airlock vestibule, multiple turnstiles, bullet-proof glass, continuously patrolled corridors, and CCTV monitored by an external private security company. Unlike most data centres of the time, the facility stored data that was not backed up anywhere else.
Ellis, who grew up in working-class Camden Town and whose father was also an armed robber, had spent years in prison for offences including post-office robbery and drug smuggling before he was approached by a fixer acting on behalf of a group of US bankers. According to Ellis's 2023 memoir, The Art Of Robbery, the clients wanted to erase evidence of illegal involvement in funding construction projects in Ireland. Ellis said he believed the group was linked to the subprime mortgage crisis that hit less than a year later.
The fixer told Ellis the information could not fall into the hands of the FBI and that the robbery had to look like an opportunist job. The gang would be paid a total of £1.5 million, the equivalent of roughly £3.6 million today, for a night's work. Three previous attempts to obtain the data had already failed.
The Plan Takes Shape
Ellis assembled a ten-person team: himself and four criminal associates, four shady technicians, and a tenth man who knew how to locate and extract the targeted data. For weeks they watched the building from a British Telecom van bought at auction, logging guard movements and mapping camera blind spots. One gang member swam across Regent's Canal and reached the roof via the cameras' single blind spot but could get no further.
The breakthrough came when Ellis witnessed a real police response to a man spotted on a library roof. The incident gave him the idea to impersonate officers responding to a similar call.
The gang obtained five sets of brand-new police uniforms and radios, a fluorescent dog-handler's jacket, a police van and car sourced from a film-props company, and a borrowed alsatian named Buster, described by Ellis as big as a barn door with a menacingly loud bark.
Inside the Building
Just after 9pm on December 6, 2007, their vehicles skidded to a halt outside the Verizon entrance. Ellis buzzed the intercom and told the guards he was from a fast-response robbery squad responding to a report of someone on the roof. When guards hesitated, he banged on the window and demanded entry. They let him in.
Inside the security control room, Ellis told three guards he needed to handcuff them because the suspected intruder was dressed as a security guard and he had to confirm identities. Guards on the second floor were called down and cuffed as well. Ellis then cut the live CCTV feed. Seconds later, the external monitoring company called to ask what had happened. Ellis, pretending to be a Verizon security officer, said a power surge had knocked out the monitors and technicians were working to restore the system within 40 minutes. The caller accepted the explanation.
The technicians used the guards' ID cards to access room 992 on the top floor, where they disconnected the targeted servers and loaded them into 20 large laundry bags. The team also subdued two technicians and four cleaners found elsewhere in the building, bringing the total number of people restrained to 16. A court later heard that several staff members needed treatment for shock after being threatened with the dog.
The gang was out by 10pm. As they passed a nearby police station, a convoy of a dozen police vehicles with sirens blaring headed toward the data centre. Ellis and his team were not stopped.
Arrest and Aftermath
The escape proved temporary. Verizon security guards identified Ellis and his second-in-command, Denis Carr, from photographs shown by police investigating a separate robbery. Ellis was arrested in September 2008 as he headed toward Luton airport carrying a new passport, reportedly bound for Thailand. He had spent three weeks living on a canal boat on Regent's Canal, directly behind the data centre, while police searched for him.
He served nearly eight and a half years in prison for the Verizon heist and three other robberies. Ellis said MI5 visited him twice in prison offering a reduced three-year sentence in exchange for identifying who had recruited him, but he did not take the offer.
None of the Verizon servers have ever been recovered. No one other than Ellis and Carr has been prosecuted. Ellis, now described as a reformed character following a period at HMP Grendon, Britain's only therapeutic prison, said he would not defend what he did but could not entirely conceal his pride that the gang pulled it off.
