It’s hard to comprehend now, as Adam leans over a gleaming glass container holding over £1m in luxury watches, that it was just under three years ago when the 34 year old decided to pack in his career as a rapper and start selling jewellery.
Within a year he’d hustled his way up to £1.2m in stock, give or take, glittering and garish timepieces of the kind you’ve probably only seen in music videos. Then he was robbed, lost it all save for around £80k in thick diamond rings, traded his way back up and got a new store in Hatton Garden. Now he’s here in a lavish mirrored showroom, wearing a full Dolce & Gabbana tracksuit with a lurid blue Lamborghini parked outside, talking to me.
Such is life in Hatton Garden these days, where a crop of young upstarts has upended the legendary diamond district. I first went to the area to report a few weeks ago, on a sodden January evening with an entirely different story in mind. I wanted to understand how a spate of jewellery robberies across London and the escalating prices of precious metals were shaking up the area. I went from shop to shop, expecting to find concerned old timers bolstering their security and scrambling to sell off gold bars. But when I asked jewellers at the north of the street what disruptions they were facing, all they wanted to talk about was the Arcade.
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The shops I visited that day were the gilded wedding ring stores that modern-day Hatton Garden is conventionally known for: twinkling airlocked showrooms meant for loved-up young couples and run by quiet men with soft handshakes. “There is this side of the street,” said one slick-haired jeweller with visible scorn, “and then there is that side”. Openly shuddering at the thought of venturing south past the Arcade, a bazaar-like building in which around 60 metals and jewellery vendors trade out of stalls, he told me about the robberies, stabbings and the steady stream of police visits.
Hatton Garden’s problem child
The Arcade’s most notable brush with virality came after one particularly brazen thief marched into the building last year and yanked a £70,000 Cuban chain straight out of the hands of a vendor before attempting to stride out.
Renato, the building’s surprisingly friendly Brazilian security guard, promptly clamped the assailant into an arm bar — a Brazilian jiu-jitsu move which involves splaying your opponent’s arm out horizontally and bending it backwards against the joint, rendering them immobile. As one of the three million people to have watched this video, I wanted to find out more.
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