Twelve Jonas “Jocke” Hildeby was riding a commuter train the morning of the robbery, listening to the live reports on his handheld radio. A 27-year veteran of the police force and the RKP, he was unsurprised by the event. There’d been rumors of a big robbery in the works. Now things would get busy. Hildeby has close-cropped gray hair, and his typical uniform consists of jeans, sneakers, and a tracksuit jacket. His particular skill is geographical profiling, and he is often employed in serial murder and rape cases. “If a psychological profiler is telling you who you are looking for,” he liked to say, “my job is to tell them where to look.” Nowadays, geographical profiling often centers on cell-phone analysis. At the RKP, Hildeby held the title of investigation analyst. He was part of a seven-person team, which included two programmers and a former academic, charged with untangling the “where” of complicated crimes. By the end of the first day, Hildeby had in hand a list of all the calls passing through the cell towers within range of the depot that had been made within several hours of the robbery. Fortunately for Hildeby, the robbers had chosen a time of day when most people were asleep. He and his team built a database of the telephone traffic, which eventually included 18,000 telephone numbers and over 300,000 calls. Then they turned the investigation into an elaborate math problem. The key to understanding the cell-phone data emerging from any type of criminal conspiracy, Hildeby knew from previous cases, is finding a closed circuit. Even the dumbest perpetrators watch enough movies to know to use untraceable prepaid phones. But any group sophisticated enough to execute a robbery like this one would know something else: to use those prepaids only to call other prepaids. What Hildeby’s team was looking for was a set of phones that stayed within their own miniature network. “If you get one cell-phone number, you can build it out,” he said. “That number is speaking to three numbers, and they are speaking only to certain others.” Eventually, the circuit closes in on itself. After four days of sifting, the team identified a closed circuit of 14 phones, all of them disposables, and many of them used around the time of the heist. The phones had called only each other in the weeks leading up to the robbery. And after the morning of September 23, none of them had been used again. Hildeby and his team meticulously traced each phone’s call history, then used the cell-tower information to determine where each call was made. Cross-referencing the locations against dozens of call times allowed them to speculate on how each step of the robbery had been coordinated. 2:55 a.m., Myttinge: Phone 1, near the police heliport, calls the organizing phone—phone 5, waiting at a rendezvous point—to report the return of the police chopper from its routine flight. 3:13 a.m., Norrtälje: Phone 2, outside the hangar where the helicopter used in the heist was stolen, checks in with phone 5. 3–4 a.m., Västberga: Phones 8, 11, 12, and 13, on the ground near the G4S depot, coordinate among one another and report back to phone 5 that they are standing by with caltrops and chains. 4:38 a.m., Norrtälje: Just before the stolen helicopter lifts off, phone 2 alerts phone 5 that the hangar has been breached. Five minutes later, phone 2 is airborne, en route to the rendezvous point. 4:43 a.m., gravel pit and Kanaan Beach: Phones 3 and 7 call in from the post-robbery landing sites that the locations are clear to receive the chopper and payload. 4:43–5:02 a.m., rendezvous point: Phone 5 joins phone 2 on the helicopter, along with the other men and the equipment for the robbery. 5:13 a.m., Myttinge: Phone 1 confirms to phone 5 that the fake bombs are in position. The stolen helicopter departs the rendezvous point for G4S, a few minutes away. 5:18–5:50 a.m., G4S: While the robbers are inside, phone 4 communicates with ground teams about the situation outside the cash center. 5:40 a.m., Kanaan Beach: Near where witnesses report hearing boats on the water, phone 7 makes one last call to phone 2, aboard the helicopter, before communication within the circuit ceases for good. Layered on top of one another, the cell traffic created a map of the crime from start to finish. Hildeby’s, however, was a map without faces. None of the phones had been left behind, and the police didn’t know who had used them.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 21:08:23 +0000
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