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They won just one medal at the Torino Olympics and the shipping company P&O, which once held the Empire together, has been sold to an Arab sheikdom, but the British still lead the world in heists. Since the Great Train Robbery in 1963, a succession of raids — each seemingly larger than the last — has provided a stream of ripping yarns for crime writers. Last week's entry into the genre, which may have netted £40 million ($70 million) or even more — the precise figure has not been revealed — will doubtless spawn its own literary offspring. It's certainly got the goods: a daring robbery, a terrified family, a collection of pub names that a novelist couldn't improve upon, and, if the many early breaks in the case continue, a quick win for the police.

The business started with what's known in the trade as a "tiger kidnapping." (The tiger, see, stalks its prey.) Colin Dixon, 51, the manager of a security depot that stores money for commercial banks and the Bank of England, was driving past the Three Squirrels pub in Kent, southeast of London, when a car with men disguised as police officers forced him off the road. Two other fake cops went to the man's house, where they told his wife and young son that Dixon had been involved in an accident. All three were then taken to a safe house where the family was threatened and Dixon forced to cooperate. After midnight, the gang took Dixon to a depot in nearby Tonbridge, run by Securitas, a company that handles about 40% of the cash deposits made in the U.K. Once inside, the gang tied up 14 staff members and started to load the loot into a white truck.

It's a racing certainty they didn't know what they'd got. With big robberies, that's more common than you might suppose. In a number of the most famous British heists — notably the Brinks Mat bullion raid at Heathrow airport in 1983, when thieves took gold worth $45 million — police and underworld lore insists that the gangs had no idea of the value of their haul. For a crook, an unexpectedly large payday can be as much a curse as a blessing. You have to do something with stuff you've stolen, and if you've stolen a lot of it, your problems multiply. More people know that there's hot money or goods around, so security is compromised; that gives fences the chance to demand a larger cut for laundering cash. Then the authorities offer a bigger than usual reward — in the Securitas case, $3.5 million, enough to turn the head of many villains, or villains' wives. Most dangerously, you have to physically shift the stolen goods — and the Tonbridge robbers had a lot of baggage to haul around. "If you have £40 million in £50 notes," says Jeffrey Robinson, , an expert on money laundering and organized crime in London, "you are talking about 800,000 pieces of paper. That would weigh 900 pounds. The immediate problem is, what the hell do you do with it?"

The most likely answer: bury it, quick. But whatever was done with the money, it couldn't have been done in a few minutes, or with only a few people knowing what was up. As the police started to search for the gang, leads came in. Two people were detained the next day on suspicion of involvement in the crime, then a woman was arrested after trying to deposit $10,500 that appeared to have come from the Tonbridge haul at a southeast London bank. By the weekend, all three had been released on bail. But another two were arrested on Saturday, and a number of vehicles thought to have been connected to the raid were detained in Kent. Dixon's Nissan was found at the Cock Horse pub, and a red van that the gang is thought to have used turned up at another inn, the Hook and Hatchet. (We are not making this up.) On Friday, following a tip-off — that big reward talking, maybe — the police picked up yet another van in the car park of the disappointingly named Ashford International Hotel, this one with cash inside it.

Two days after the Securitas job, there was a copycat raid in Belfast, where a gang held a bank employee's wife and child hostage while they rifled the safe. But don't expect all this to start a trend. Among villains, bank raids are old hat. The tricky thing about robbing banks is, you have to actually go somewhere (risking witnesses and cctv cameras) and steal things that have a real weight and presence, like jewels or money. These days, it's easier and safer by far to sit in some semi-tropical Margaritaville, fire up the laptop and do a bit of identity theft or credit card fraud. Banks are for those with eyes bigger than their brains. "Bank robbers," says Robinson, "are basically idiots. They went in and they found £40 million sitting there and they got greedy. If they had taken £4 million they could probably have walked away and disappeared." But who'd write a true-crime novel about a miserable four mil?

• MICHAEL ELLIOTT
• British thieves pulled off a heist for the ages last week, but stealing money is becoming a drag