The “mastermind of Britain’s biggest cash robbery”, “from the streets kid” and “scary son of a b**ch” Lee Murray was born in Greenwich and nicknamed (much to his displeasure) ‘The Alien’ by fellow members of what was known as the ‘Buttmarsh Boys’ gang. He “liked punching people almost at random in the street”, turned to crime in his teens and most notably received a sentence of twenty-five years in prison in 2010 for his part in the robbery of £53 million ($64.6 million, €61.1 million or درهم 237.4 million) in cash from a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent in 2006.
After what many called “the crime of avarice of the decade”, 6’3” tall Murray – a one-time rising star mixed martial arts fighter and “friend and rival” of Katie Price’s ex-husband Alex Reid – fled to Morocco (where his father had been born and attempted to claim nationality to avoid British justice) but was convicted of drugs offences in Rabat in 2007. A bid to return him to Britain in exchange for a suspected terrorist wanted in regard to the 2003 Casablanca bombings later came to nothing.
In 2011, “caged cage fighter” Murray – who is said to have fathered a child “by a woman visitor who was not his wife” inside Salé prison and was put in “the hole” for six months due to being caught with a laptop computer in his cell – was amazingly able to give an interview via text message from his cell to the Middle Easy website. In it, he claimed being in a Moroccan jail is “better than being in a UK prison any day”, thanked those who’d created ‘Free Lee Murray’ T-shirts (but claimed he’d only instead wear one saying: ‘Free OJ’) and stated: “I have no regrets on any part of my life, the way I lived my life has made me the man I am today I’ve done a lot of things a lot of other people would regret but I don’t think you should regret anything in life, just learn from it instead”.
Less than half the money stolen by Murray and his associates has ever been found and still to this day the former drug dealer, when asked, is said to state: “I was a millionaire before that heist, my friend”.
