The glamorous new life of a member of the notorious £350 million Millennium Dome – now the O2 Arena – diamond heist has been immortalised on Netflix after he swapped crime for running a successful business.
Wealthy father-of-two Aldo Ciarrocchi, was a member of the gang that plotted to steal the Millennium Star diamond as part of a doomed raid in 2000. But 25 years on, he has swapped his life of crime for a running a successful business. He now lives in a £1 million home and is married to an American ex-fashion model. IT expert Ciarrocchi served time in jail and even proposed to his wife in the visitor’s room at Belmarsh Prison using a ring taken from a can of Coke.
But he has done very well compared to other members of the gang, one of whom died in prison following the robbery, and another who served 12 years before being imprisoned again for an additional 13 years following a bungled robbery shortly after his release, MailOnline reported.
During the heist, Ciarrocchi – given the nickname “The Technician” – sat and waited outside where he set off smoke bombs as the rest of the group tried to smash the glass cabinet inside which sat the 203-carat Millennium Star diamond. The estimated value of the diamond was believed to be around £200 million.
Ciarrocchi, 55, and his wife Elisabeth Kirsch, 39, have since started up a successful reclamation site in south London and also own a large warehouse site that was even featured in the Sunday Times. The former criminal has since reflected on the failed heist – now the subject of Guy Richie’s Netflix smash hit “The Diamond Heist” – branding it a “suicide mission.”
“I know how the business works,” Aldo told MailOnline. “They want you to tell your story and they’re all over you for 20 minutes and you make out you were the mastermind of the operation but I didn’t want to get involved.”
Despite months of planning, the raid ended in failure after an informer tipped off police with some 100 armed officers waiting for the gang. The diamonds they were set to steak had also been swapped for worthless fakes.
Ciarrocchi also admitted to “forcing himself” to watch the show, which he declined to be a part of. This is despite his famiyl firm, Encore Reclamation, having helped to fir out Mr Ritchies west end pub, the Lore of the Land.
Ciarrocchi added: “Good luck to them, the police making out they were like the SAS and all that, but at the end of the day, we did a dumb thing, and when you do something as high profile as that, you’re never going to end up in Spain with your feet up. The police are going to get you sooner or later – only in our case, it was sooner! The cops were so well informed, we were going into a suicide mission, we just didn’t know it.”
He added he and Elisabeth needed to tell their teenage daughters about his criminal past five years ago when Ross Kemp presented a documentary about the heist. Ciarrocchi added: “It wasn’t easy. We’ve raised two middle-class girls whose lives are as far away from my upbringing as you can imagine, but I just sat them down and told them the truth.
“It was sooner than I would have wanted to tell them, but that was unavoidable. I was an idiot and made a huge mistake. We didn’t glamorise it and didn’t try and make out it was clever. I also stressed how dumb I was, taking that chance with my life, and how I’d since learned that the only way to make it is to work hard at school and keep working hard later on.”
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