The Park Lane Club was supposed to fulfil Vasilijs Melniks' fantasy. Instead it became his torment.
Just before 10am on a rainy June morning, a lone man wearing a black balaclava and a blue boiler suit approached the brass-plated entrance of the Park Lane Club in London. The man carried a dark bag up the marble and gold-fronted staircase inside and barged into the casino's reception area. When a chauffeur who was waiting at the front desk began to shout at him, the intruder paused, making a silent but unmistakable gesture with his hand: he was armed, and this was a robbery.
Moments later, the gunman burst into the blinking lights of the gaming floor. Croupiers and waiters panicked and began to flee, running across the casino's swirling green and red floral carpets. An employee sitting behind the cash desk glanced up from his computer at what he thought was a customer and saw the balaclava.
The masked man looked the cashier in the eyes and leapt over the desk, sending the terrified worker crashing backwards into a heap on the floor. The robber then began to stuff his bag with bills from the cash drawer, carefully leaving the £5 notes aside.
After taking the money, the thief exited the casino through a service door connecting to a hotel in the same building. A security guard followed as the man made his way towards a nearby Tube station and watched as he unzipped the boiler suit, removed the balaclava and put on a baseball cap. He tossed his disguise in a bin and disappeared underground.
Even before the robbery, the casino's owner Vasilijs Melniks had appeared increasingly paranoid to staff. The Latvian businessman had hired two mountainous British bodyguards dressed in black suits to shadow him and began to keep his appearances at the casino brief. He had become more and more short-tempered with employees. Security had been instructed to submit customers from certain eastern European countries to stringent background checks. And Melniks had arranged to be able to monitor the casino's CCTV cameras remotely on his iPad from anywhere in the world.
It was the summer of 2017, and the man who robbed Melniks had pulled off the first central London casino heist in decades. It was immediately clear to startled staff that this was no random burglary. The man in the mask had been prepared. He had known small notes are usually marked. And he had used a secret exit. They wondered if the Park Lane Club had been under surveillance and, if so, for how long. Perhaps the crime had something to do with the series of strange occurrences that seemed to torment their boss preceding the break-in. Or, maybe, it had been an inside job.
Few in the discreet world of high-stakes gambling knew much about Melniks when he first arrived in London in 2013. Thickset, standing at over six feet tall and fond of loud Brioni sports jackets and crocodile-skin shoes, Melniks was an imposing figure with an unusually round, almost child-like face. He introduced himself as an entrepreneur who had made his fortune in shipbuilding, and the 46-year-old boasted of having once served as Latvia's youngest-ever finance minister for a few days back in the 1990s.
Even so, Melniks would not have particularly stood out among the international assortment of super-wealthy who frequent Mayfair, the neighbourhood that lends its name to the most expensive property on the London Monopoly board. As new waves of foreign money rushed into the British capital in the 2010s, Mayfair's luxury hotels, private clubs and more garish restaurants began to resemble something like the Star Wars cantina for jet-setters, Middle Eastern sheikhs and Chinese property magnates rubbing shoulders with minor European royalty and smooth-talking con artists.
London was in full swing as a globalised entrepôt. In the champagne pyramid of the pre-Brexit, pre-pandemic British capital — and before China's anti-corruption purges and Russian sanctions — some of the highest glasses, the top of the fountain from which cash flowed into the city, were the private gaming rooms of Mayfair.
Melniks hadn't come to play; he'd come with a dream. Unlike foreign tycoons buying up football teams, luxury hotels or vast mansions, Melniks had his eye on a different type of trophy asset: a casino of his own, one to rival London's storied gambling dens.
Mayfair's casinos have a long history as playgrounds for the rich, louche and occasionally damned. Gaming rooms cropped up in the gentlemen's clubs of St James's in the early 1800s. Following the legalisation of casinos in 1960, a new generation opened gambling establishments such as the now-defunct Clermont Club, which attracted a clientele that included the aristocrat Lord Lucan, artist Lucian Freud, Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli and an assortment of cabinet ministers, earls, dukes and other luminaries of British high society. There was also Crockfords and Les Ambassadeurs, the casino in which Sean Connery first delivered the line "Bond, James Bond" while playing chemin de fer in Dr No.
Melniks, several former business associates say, had become captivated with a fantasy version of this world. He told friends that owning a Mayfair casino would be the perfect way to establish himself in London. "It was the dream of having his name up in bright lights," says a former casino executive who knew Melniks. "Imagine the networking opportunities . . . He was thinking, I will meet this sheikh, this king, this queen." Melniks did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Veterans of the casino community didn't know what to make of the newly arrived Latvian. Dave Allen, a frankly spoken Yorkshireman who built a gambling and nightclub empire in the north of England that later expanded to central London, recalls meeting Melniks for the first time when the Latvian enquired about possibly buying one of his casinos. "I've been in this business for 50 years. I was brought up in it. I'm steeped in it," he says. "I could immediately tell he wasn't."
It was also clear Melniks had money. With no permanent residence in London, he based himself in various high-end hotels, frequently staying in a suite at The Dorchester and being shuttled around Mayfair by chauffeur. A magazine article published in his native country noted he arrived at a prestigious event in Riga in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, wearing a dark pin-striped suit, his wife holding a red Hermès Birkin bag worth more than €50,000 ($83,000).
Melniks' English was heavily accented and, in meetings, he would make the sort of authoritative gestures with his large, ham-like hands natural to men accustomed to being in control. He had reason to be self-confident. As head of the Latvia-Russia Co-operation Council, he had built connections with powerful Russian oligarchs.
Melniks had no experience running a casino, so he enlisted the help of Robert Walker, a smooth-talking veteran who had started in the industry in the 1980s. Walker was old-school in his demeanour, and charming. "Bob always looked great in a suit," says the former casino executive. "Like the sort of guy you would see in a movie about a casino."
Walker had previously been employed by Aspinall's, the casino founded by John Aspinall, a 1960s gambling impresario who made a fortune separating feckless British aristocrats from their inheritances. Mayfair's elite institutions — centred around the holy trinity of Crockfords, Les Ambassadeurs and Aspinall's — still operate on the same business model. Unlike mass-market casinos that run on huge quantities of small bets, top gambling establishments generate up to 95 per cent of their revenue from a tiny pool of "whales", or ultra-high net worth gamblers. It is a volatile business model, by which an entire year's profits can be destroyed if one millionaire or billionaire has a lucky night.
Each whale has to be treated like royalty, every whim catered to. One notorious high roller, the Syrian-born Fouad al-Zayat — known to staff in Mayfair's casinos as "the Fat Man" — gambled £91.5 million ($179 million) in Aspinall's alone over a span of 12 years. Whales like al-Zayat were highly sought after and highly demanding. Some could even refuse to pay their bills. "If you go to a restaurant and you do not like the food, you do not pay," al-Zayat once remarked of his approach to settling gambling debts. "If you go to the whorehouse and do not get the pleasure you were seeking, you do not pay." (Al-Zayat never gambled at the Park Lane Club.)
The business model at Melniks' prospective casino was going to be similar, with a focus on emerging-market tycoons at play in London. But first, Melniks had to get hold of a gambling licence. Casino licences in the UK are strictly controlled by the country's gaming regulator, the Gambling Commission, and only a fixed number are available in each area. Melniks had learnt through Walker of the chance to invest in a company that owned a dormant licence in Mayfair, and he pounced, buying it for £8.4mn.
Next he needed a venue, and Walker told Melniks he knew the perfect location. The Park Lane Hilton, overlooking Hyde Park and moments away from the embassies of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, was willing to lease some space on the first floor of the hotel. It was close to the heart of Mayfair, with a second-floor terrace overlooking Les Ambassadeurs, and located only a short walk from the Four Seasons, a hotel favoured by Middle Eastern royalty.
By the summer of 2014, Melniks' dream began to look like reality. With the venue secured, his company applied to the Gambling Commission for approval. Sixteen weeks later, Melniks had become the first eastern European businessman to own a casino in London.
Walker scrambled to assemble a team. He began to headhunt floor managers, croupiers and waiters from other casinos, pitching them the potential of what was going to be the newest, most exciting gambling club in Mayfair. Some gave up jobs at established outfits for the chance of a promotion. Others had to be trained from scratch. He hired Craig Murray, an experienced surveillance officer originally from Essex, as his head of security. Overall, the staff would grow to a total of 164 people.
To decorate the premises, black marble and red velvet screens were installed throughout, and the bathrooms' toilets were fitted out in fake gold. Melniks spent lavishly on his new venture, importing fittings and materials from around the world. He was especially proud of his pièce de résistance, a glass crystal ceiling made up of multicoloured shapes designed to look like giant precious stones. The former casino executive described the end result as not looking much like "traditional Mayfair. The carpets were especially wacky."
By the autumn of 2014, the Park Lane Club was ready for opening night. It was a low-key affair; Walker said a few words to a small group of Melniks' friends and clients, and the tables opened for play. One businessman from Kazakhstan brought the Latvian a holographic ornamental pistol in a box as a gift to mark the occasion. Melniks spent the evening drinking at the centre of the bar, quietly surveying his new empire. "He was sitting there," one junior member of staff recalls, "making sure everyone knew who he was and exactly who was in charge."
The trouble started almost immediately. In October 2014, a group of Israeli businessmen claimed they were owed a stake in the casino as a result of payments they made to the previous owner of the licence. Melniks' company later alleged in court filings that one of these men threatened him by showing him photographs of "prominent Chechen nationals".
One of the men in the pictures was Ramzan Kadyrov, the notorious Prada-wearing warlord who was later sanctioned by the US. Melniks would have known exactly what was being implied, as Chechen gangsters under the control of Kadyrov had built a reputation as ruthless enforcers for Russian organised crime and were linked to a string of contract killings across Europe. The man, Melniks claimed, told him that these Chechens wanted to invest in the club and wanted access to casino credit lines. He refused.
Two months later, Melniks was walking out of the Mandarin Oriental in central London when two men he had never seen before tried to bundle him into a car. One of them issued a warning about the casino in Russian: "You are keeping what is not yours." Melniks managed to escape, but he was shaken. It was clear that someone wanted to take his casino, and they were willing to use violence.
Five days after the attempted kidnapping, Walker was working in the Park Lane Club's back office, the hidden nerve centre of the operation crammed with video surveillance equipment. Suddenly, one of the Israelis came in accompanied by a man Walker didn't know. They demanded to see Melniks, who wasn't there, and proceeded to lay out a proposal to relay to the boss: if Melniks agreed to hand over a stake in the casino that day, they "would only take 50 per cent". If he waited until the following day, they would force him to transfer 70 per cent. Melniks' wife and children, they told Walker, were in danger too. And if he didn't comply by the end of the week, "there would be no casino".
Walker asked the men to leave, which they did, and he called the police. Melniks later claimed in an English court that the Russian-speakers who tried to kidnap him were working on behalf of the Israelis who'd barged in on Walker. He reported the extortion attempt to the Metropolitan Police but, according to information Melniks' lawyers submitted in court, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service did not pursue the case because of a lack of evidence. It must not have felt that way to the Latvian who, though the Park Lane Club was barely up and running, had already reported a disorienting barrage of events.
Botched kidnapping and threats notwithstanding, 2014 was a good time to be in the Mayfair casino business. It was the first year, for example, that elite croupiers reported seeing customers betting £1 million ($1.95 million) per hand in baccarat, according to the former casino executive. "Maybe it had happened on a superyacht in the ocean somewhere in a private game of billionaires. But in a licensed operator, nobody had ever bet those stakes." Annual revenues for table games at Mayfair's six high-end casinos rose 85 per cent from 2011 to 2014, hitting £297 million ($581 million), according to Dan Waugh, a gaming consultant.
If the Park Lane Club was going to do more than mop up its famous neighbours' leftovers, it was going to have to tempt high rollers. Melniks instructed Walker and his staff to work all of their contacts to attract VIP clients. And, at first, it seemed to work. Premier League footballers made appearances around the club's roulette tables. Other visitors were businessmen from the former Soviet Union, including the Azeri-born tycoon Telman Ismailov, who threw himself a lavish 50th birthday party at which he was serenaded by Jennifer Lopez.
Luring whales into the casino was one thing, convincing them to play another. In May 2015, a Croatian businessman named Juste Puharic finally accepted an invitation to gamble at Melniks' club. Walker had been courting him for more than a year, even showing him around the casino before it opened to the public. Puharic, who had a fondness for high-stakes roulette and sometimes walked into Mayfair casinos with as much as £20 million ($39 million) on hand, was exactly the sort of customer they needed.
On his first night at the Park Lane Club, Puharic bought £450,000 ($880,000)-worth of chips and lost £200,000 ($391,000). The odds were working, as they should, in Melniks' favour. But the following evening Puharic returned to the casino and doubled down. He embarked on a marathon five-day gambling session, betting more than £27 million ($52 million) on roulette. In the end, the Croatian won £1.4 million ($2.7 million), according to evidence given to the English High Court. That year, its first full year of operations, the Park Lane Club made a loss of £1.8 million ($3.5 million).
Violent swings in fortune are part of the high-end casino business, but Melniks had a habit of becoming infuriated when gamblers won. After another customer managed to spin £10,000 ($19,500) into more than £150,000 ($293,500) on roulette — a statistically improbable feat given the stakes he was playing for — Melniks decreed he'd never gamble in the Park Lane Club again. To the veterans working for him, this broke the golden rule of casino management: when a customer gets lucky, they should be showered with attention and every effort made to get them to gamble their winnings. Over a long enough horizon, the house always wins.
Melniks usually flew into London from Latvia once a month, staying for a few days at a time. But as losses mounted, he began keeping a closer watch. He steamed into the casino with his bodyguards at a moment's notice, sending staff into a panic. Inspecting the gaming floor, his anxious managers trailing behind, the Latvian frequently spotted something to his displeasure.
Sometimes, he chastised his staff in slightly garbled English they believed to be Russian proverbs. If Melniks said, for example, "Don't look in my pocket, look in your own," that meant "don't question my decisions, and mind your own business". Other times, he simply lost his temper. "You are fucking me with my own money!" one ex-employee recalls Melniks shouting after learning that a manager had offered a winning customer an incentive bonus to play at the casino. On another occasion, Melniks became irate after learning that additional slot machines had been installed without his knowledge, accusing the staff of turning his "beautiful casino into a Turkish bazaar".
Even when he wasn't in London, Melniks loomed. He once called from abroad to demand a croupier be rotated out of her position on the gambling floor. Melniks was watching the casino's CCTV from his iPad and noticed that a customer on her table was having a hot streak playing blackjack. "He was extremely paranoid," says the former junior staff member. "He thought that people were stealing from him."
As the club struggled, it became clear to some employees that Melniks had significantly underestimated how hard running a Mayfair casino would be. "The whole way the casino was being run, it was a recipe for disaster," the junior staff member says. One ex-employee says that some managers berated staff in front of customers. Morale among the Park Lane Club's workers plummeted.
In Melniks' drive to win over whales there were signs that the Park Lane Club was cutting corners. So-called politically exposed persons, or customers seen as risks for bribery and other forms of corruption, were not being properly vetted. The UK's gambling regulator later found that one man with a "reputation as a significant player" had been given a £2 million ($3.9 million) cheque cashing facility by the club based on a single meeting in a hotel with a Park Lane Club manager. The client had presented a letter from their bank to prove their wealth but, later, the casino was unable to provide relevant documentation to regulators. Another customer was allowed to remove £800,000 ($1.5 million) in cash from the casino in stages without being adequately vetted.
Even after a warning from regulators, the casino allowed such lapses to continue and was eventually found to have failed to perform sufficient due diligence on 61 of its customers and two politically exposed people. By then it was clear British authorities weren't the only ones watching.
One Thursday morning in June 2017 at around 11am, a female croupier was walking through Mayfair on her way to work. Like most employees, she arrived each day via an underground car park located at the back of the Hilton. She approached a door to the casino, which was inaccessible to hotel guests. Standing a few feet away from her was a lone man, lurking inside an adjacent staircase. He was dressed in a blue boiler suit and was wearing a white hard hat. The woman unlocked the door and, sensing his chance, the man raced down the stairs towards the entrance. But he was too slow, and the door slammed shut. No one else had noticed the man skulking around the casino that morning.
Five days later, at 10am, the gaming floor of the Park Lane Club was quiet. The last customer from the previous evening had cashed in their chips in the early hours, and the staff on duty were waiting at empty roulette and blackjack tables. Then the doors swung open. A female croupier looked up to see a man in a blue boiler suit, a balaclava covering his face. Her first reaction was to drop to the floor. As she hid under the roulette table, she heard one of her colleagues "kiss up" — the kissing sound dealers use when they want to get colleagues' attention.
The floor manager began to shout, telling staff to run. Workers fled to the back of the casino, scrambling to find a place to hide. Frantic, they bundled into the restroom and crouched down inside the locked toilet. The women hugged each other as the emergency lights began to flash. One took out her phone and dialled 999. There was something terrible happening inside the casino, she told police. The staff were in danger, especially the cashier who was stuck behind his desk. He had been left on the now-deserted gaming floor, alone with the man in the mask.
On the other side of the casino, the cashier was trembling on the floor, his head slumped, hands shielding his face. Between the cracks of his fingers he could make out the silhouette of the man in the boiler suit stuffing bank notes into his bag. He could also see the man was not fumbling around. He didn't appear to be searching. He had gone straight for the only drawer in which cash was normally kept. And he'd left behind the "bait money," small notes marked specifically in the event of theft. When he finished, the robber vaulted back over the cash counter and was gone.
Though a relatively small amount was taken, just £36,000 ($70,000), the heist appeared to be the final straw for Melniks. He had already endured dismal financial results, attempted extortion and kidnapping and threats to his and his family's personal safety. Two months after the robbery, the private UK company through which Melniks' owned the Park Lane Club filed paperwork requesting protection under an obscure British law that allows a shareholder to become anonymous if they are "at serious risk of violence or intimidation". It was an admission that, in effect, the Park Lane Club had become too dangerous for him to own.
Melniks had come of age in a Latvia that was transitioning from former Soviet satellite to EU member. But the country was still dominated by Russia and its security services. Latvia in the early 1990s, according to Yuri Shvets, a former senior KGB officer who supervised the Soviet spy agency's activities in the Baltics, was "literally run by KGB agents". In English court testimony given last year, Shvets described how Russian intelligence went about deploying a network of deep-cover agents in the newly independent Latvia, establishing control of banks and businesses.
In 1994, when Melniks was just 27, he was elected to Riga's city council. He also joined the Riga privatisation board as Latvia began to sell off state-controlled assets. The following year, when the Riga Shipyard was privatised, Melniks acquired a significant stake. He also made sure to keep men from the KGB close, hiring as his head of security Andris Strautmanis, a former head of the investigation division of the Soviet spy agency in Latvia. (Last year, Strautmanis was arrested in a scandal involving a Latvian MP accused of spying for Russia.)
Melniks also began to develop relationships with Russia-aligned businessmen and officials in the government of the Moscow-backed Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. In 2011, the Riga Shipyard signed a transformative deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars to sell a floating oil platform to Ukraine's state-owned gas company. Three years later, Melniks was awarded the Order of Friendship, one of Russia's highest honours for foreigners, by president Vladimir Putin.
In 2014, the year that the UK Gambling Commission approved Melniks' ownership of the Mayfair casino licence, the Yanukovych government collapsed. Accused of siphoning off billions of dollars in corrupt payments to his inner circle, the Putin-aligned president fled to Russia. With Yanukovych gone, Ukrainian prosecutors began to dig into the oil rig transactions, eventually alleging that Melniks received US$15 million for his role in brokering part of the deal. In 2018, Ukraine's state prosecutors ordered an international freezing order on his assets. This consisted of more than 100 acres of land, a quad bike, a jet ski, a yacht and the shareholdings of 10 Latvian companies, including the ultimate owner of the Park Lane Club in London.
At the time, Melniks told Latvian media the Ukrainian government's attempt to freeze his assets was "illegal", saying the investigation was politically motivated. He denied any wrongdoing.
But the problems in Ukraine had put Melniks' ownership of the casino in jeopardy. In October 2018, he formally resigned as a director of the Park Lane Club and was replaced by a Swiss-Italian banker named Riccardo Tattoni. The casino's lawyers would later tell an English court that, from that month, the sole owner of the Park Lane Club became SOGIP Services Geneva SA, a small Swiss private bank run by Tattoni.
Tattoni is a silver-haired, cigar-smoking financier who arranges polo competitions on his estate in Tuscany in his spare time. He says he was first approached by clients who wanted to finance an investment fronted by Melniks in 2014. The identity of the clients who backed the Latvian, he adds, has to remain anonymous due to Swiss bank secrecy laws.
"Mr Melniks used part of the loan to buy Park Lane Club and started operating it, I think successfully," Tattoni says. He claims he only learnt of the problems in Ukraine in 2018. By then, Tattoni had decided it was in everybody's best interest if SOGIP took control of the casino. "He claimed he had nothing to hide; he was more clear than a diamond; it was a political attack due to his past," Tattoni says. "The version of Melniks that he was a political victim was not wrong, I think. But I cannot say; I don't have the proof. The due diligence we could do locally was very limited."
Tattoni's bank took control of the Park Lane Club; Melniks was out completely. Meanwhile, a hunt was under way to find who was behind the robbery.
Craig Murray, the Park Lane Club's smartly dressed and clean-cut head of security, had got the best look at the robber. At the time of the break-in, Murray was walking down the street outside the Hilton. Two cleaners who had fled the casino rushed towards him. He could see they were in distress. One of them frantically pointed at the hotel's revolving doors, where the man in the boiler suit was emerging. Murray began to follow him.
Using his umbrella to hide his face and being careful to keep a distance of 6 metres or so, Murray watched the man turn the corner and enter a small square nearby. The suspect stopped. He took off the boiler suit, peeled off the balaclava and put on a hat. Murray messaged a colleague inside the casino, asking if the police were on their way and if he was going to have any back-up. He knew the man was likely to be armed.
The robber began moving again. Murray followed him down into an underpass leading to Hyde Park Corner. The two men, still 6 metres apart, emerged on to the other side facing the green. The rain was heavy now, and Hyde Park was deserted.
The man walked into a wooded area not far from an 18-foot-tall statue of Achilles and crouched down. Murray slowed his pace, but tried to stay close. It struck him how calm the man was. Not once, since he'd left the casino, had he run. He'd walked at a moderate pace the entire time. He'd never even looked back.
Stressed and trying to appear innocuous, the security guard lit a cigarette. The man was still crouching and seemed to be adjusting his clothing. But before Murray could know for sure, he started off again toward a Tube station. Just before reaching the underground entrance, the man stopped briefly to toss some items in a bin. At that moment, Murray finally got close enough to get a look at the thief.
In a statement given to investigators on the day of the crime, Murray described the man as "very thickset" and as "eastern European, around six foot and a half, well built and clean shaven". There were plenty of potential suspects for investigators to look into: the Chechens who had apparently wanted to invest in the casino by force; the anonymous Russian-speaking men who tried to abduct Melniks; the Israeli strongmen who threatened his family; perhaps an old nemesis from the mess in Ukraine.
But police started in the park, combing the area for evidence. An officer reached into the bin Murray had seen the thief linger over and discovered a black bag. Inside, she found a silver-coloured plastic gun, which had masking tape around the handle. The bag also contained a single black sock.
Surveillance footage of the crime wasn't especially helpful; the robber had been heavily disguised and had acted quickly, making it impossible to identify him. But Murray knew whoever had robbed the casino almost certainly had to be a professional, or what he and his security team called "an inside agent". A smoothly executed day-time break-in requires careful casing and detailed planning. The criminal had not only demonstrated intricate knowledge of the club, but hadn't exhibited the slightest hint of nerves.
The Park Lane Club's head of security pored over the casino's membership list to see if anybody had recently joined with the possible intention of stealing. The search returned nothing. Murray and his colleagues began to watch hundreds of hours of CCTV footage taken in the weeks before the robbery took place. The security team obsessively studied the grainy surveillance images, as Melniks once had.
Then Murray spotted something on a few frames of video recorded five days before the theft. There he was: the man in the blue boiler suit, rushing toward the casino's back door. Although the footage was fuzzy, Murray could just about make out the man's face. He was stunned. Murray realised the person who'd robbed Melniks wasn't an eastern European, as he'd initially told police. He wasn't a gangster, or a professional hit man. He was his friend.
On January 21 2019, a 41-year-old British man stood up in front of a judge at Southwark Crown Court in London and pleaded guilty to robbery and possession of an imitation firearm. The man was Stuart Wigley, a former casino employee. Wigley, the sentencing judge said, had carried out "a professionally planned, commercial robbery" against his former employer. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
The staff of the Park Lane Club were shocked. "Casino robberies are exceptionally rare, but a robbery involving a manager — that has never happened before in London," says one former Park Lane Club senior executive. No one was more baffled than Murray, who had spoken to Wigley on a near-daily basis. They had frequently taken coffee breaks together. They were close.
Casino employees are watched for signs of potential problems, such as gambling addiction, alcoholism or drug use. Wigley, people who knew him say, exhibited none of these and had no previous convictions or criminal history. At the sentencing, even the judge noted it was hard to comprehend "why a man of good character should suddenly, at the age of 39, commit such an offence".
Wigley had worked in London casinos for almost two decades, starting in his early twenties and rising up the ranks to become a pit boss, the manager responsible for supervising the gaming floor and keeping track of how money is moving around the tables. In 2014, he was headhunted to join the Park Lane Club and tasked with training some of the new staff before the casino opened.
Wigley had initially seemed highly ambitious and keen to be promoted to full manager. However, he resigned from the Park Lane Club a year after it opened. In a statement to police, Murray said Wigley had quit "because he felt like he was not progressing as quickly as he should be, and the management felt he was not meeting the standards required" for promotion. Murray declined to comment for this story. He left the Park Lane Club for a new job after the heist and later received a Metropolitan Police commendation for "courage and investigative ability" for his role in solving the crime.
After being arrested, Wigley declined to say anything in interviews with the police. He began to build a defence, claiming he had never been at the casino that day. He also submitted multiple information requests to the police to try to prove he had been driving his van at the time the crime took place. Wigley declined to comment for this story.
On the day of the trial, Wigley suddenly changed his plea to guilty. Data from his phone indicated it had remained at home the entire time the robbery took place. But tests showed that the sock found with the plastic gun contained his DNA. Wigley's lawyer told the court that his client had been driven to commit the crime in a panic caused by needing to have a colonoscopy for stomach cancer the day after the robbery took place. He later discovered he was perfectly healthy, and the sentencing judge said the court had "struggled to understand how that factor could seriously have motivated him to commit this offence". (Healthcare in the UK is free.)
After the meticulous security preparation, the paranoia, the surveillance, the boss's shouting and his employees' stress, all it had taken to breach the Park Lane Club was a threadbare costume and a toy pistol. Melniks wasn't in the courtroom to see Wigley plead guilty. Had he been, he might have been relieved it wasn't any of his formidable antagonists who broke into the casino. Or perhaps embarrassed. But the Latvian had stopped coming to London.
Around the golden roulette tables of Mayfair anyone can become someone else for a night. But Melniks' dream of permanently reinventing himself had died. And the London awash in foreign cash and foreign ambition that had made him believe it was even possible was, in retrospect, fading too. Gilded ages tend to be short, and they tend to end abruptly.
A sorry little coda to the saga of the Park Lane Club occurred towards the end of 2020. With its new Swiss owners unable to satisfy the British gaming regulator about its "source of funds", the casino founded by Melniks suffered the ultimate ignominy: its licence was suspended. It was the first time the Gambling Commission had ever revoked the licence of a bricks-and-mortar casino.
Yevhen Yenin, Ukraine's deputy interior minister in the Zelensky government and previously the country's deputy prosecutor-general, celebrated the decision. "The licence for this casino was purchased with stolen money from the infamous oil rigs," he wrote in November of that year in a Facebook post. "All that remains is to return the money stolen from the Ukrainian people (or part of it) to Ukraine."
Melniks, however, was never charged with a crime in Ukraine. He successfully appealed to overturn the freezing of his assets and the case against him lapsed. The investigation into the oil-rig deals, like almost every corruption probe relating to the Yanukovych government, was never concluded. After the Russian invasion, it may never be.
Tattoni, the Swiss banker, says the Park Lane Club is now on the market. (The casino has been allowed to lodge an appeal with the commission, meaning it can continue to trade.) He hopes the club can have a happier future under new management. Post-communist businessmen like Melniks who came to try their luck in Mayfair may be gone now, just like many of the flush Chinese billionaires and a generation of British aristocrats who came before them.
But Tattoni believes it's only a matter of time before new money washes into London. "The location is perfect; the name is there," he says. "The Park Lane Club, run by the right person, is a tremendous opportunity."
Written by: Miles Johnson
© Financial Times
