BRITAIN: The Red-Faced League

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Desperate, Rowlands called Scotland Yard in the morning. A sergeant and a constable from the Yard spent two hours ponderously copying extracts from the tapes in longhand and dictating them over the phone; two other Yard detectives soon arrived to listen in. During this farce, one of the burglars could be heard saying: "Everything is going well." Not until 12:20 p.m. on Sunday, an incredible 13 hours after Rowlands first tuned in on the heist, did the gang permanently go off the air.

It was another 40 minutes before a detective inspector appeared at Rowlands' overcrowded flat with a post office radio engineer, whose sensitive equipment could have located the site of the transmissions. But the radio was now dead. Finally, police began checking hundreds of banks throughout London. They even stood outside the time-locked vault at Lloyds, but did not bother to obtain official permission to open it because it appeared to be undisturbed.

On Monday morning, there was a red-faced league of policemen when Lloyds officers opened the vault to discover that about 250 safe-deposit boxes had been looted; one of them alone was missing $50,000 in jewelry. Scotland Yard officials sheepishly ordered an inquiry into the laggardly sleuthing. They also sent squads out looking for the gang, declaring confidently that they recognized some of the thieves' voices from the tapes. At week's end, however, nobody had been apprehended. A four-or five-pipe problem, perhaps?