Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language from the start.

What do you know about the World Cup in '66?

Well, you all know that England won it.

We stuck four past the Germans,

with Geoff Hurst scoring a hat-trick.

And what about the trophy?

At some point, you must have seen the Queen, God rest her soul,

handing it to Bobby Moore.

Maybe you know the cup have been nicked a few months before.

You might even heard it was found by a dog.

But if you think that's the full story,

you don't know the half of it.

It just really is quintessentially an English crime story.

You're entrusted to look after the world-famous trophy

and you've lost it!

So many stories about what happened are absolute crap!

Behind the scenes, there's a lot more the general public don't see.

And my dad looked at him and he went,

"What the fucking hell do you think we're going to do with that?"

# Well, a young man ain't got nothin' in the world these days... #

The story of who stole the World Cup begins with the story

of the man guarding the World Cup.

# I said a young man...#

I was 20 years old, I was a struggling actor.

I was in Monty Python, which is my claim to fame.

Ring head office, would you, Norman?

Shall I go through Maintenance? No, you'd better go through...

It wasn't any of these guys, though.

Here he is. This is John.

In '66, John was having a great old time.

He's English, by the way,

he's just spent too long in Canada.

I was living in London.

I shared an apartment in Knightsbridge with my friend.

He was a musician.

Everybody used to come in there. It was crazy.

I remember one night, sitting there, and I opened the door

and there's Keith Moon of The Who

standing there in a spacesuit.

And he had a star on his forehead.

He was a total nutcase.

John's acting career wasn't exactly taking off.

So to fund his nights out,

he'd do security across the city.

Like these fellas.

They were always looking for people.

You wore a nice uniform, did your security work,

made a few bucks and get drunk and get happy.

That was what life was like in those days.

In March, he had a gig guarding the Jules Rimet Trophy.

The World Cup.

Which was on display at a stamp exhibition.

Yeah, you heard that right.

The Jules Rimet Trophy was in the Methodist Central Hall.

Because there was a Stanley Gibbons exhibition of stamps,

and they had asked the FA if they could use the trophy

as an exhibit to attract people.

The Penny Black stamps were worth millions of pounds.

Hugely valuable. And the cup is not really worth very much.

The security company that was supposed to be in charge

of looking after the trophy was called Alsa-Guard.

Their USP was that they had Alsatian dogs

as part of their security detail.

Alsa-Guard Services, whose motto is an alert Alsatian...

But for some reason, they weren't allowed to use any Alsatians

in the Methodist Central Hall.

I don't know, dogs were banned.

Now, John, without his pooch, had started there on the Friday.

On the Sunday, the exhibition was shut,

but religious types could still get into the church.

This hall had hosted suffragette rallies

and speeches by the likes of Winston Churchill.

And it was about to stage another historic event.

24th March, 1966, I came into work.

The actual job was to just walk around the hall,

downstairs, upstairs,

check the doors were secure.

It was very basic, very relaxed.

One of the conditions was that weekends, when the place was closed,

this cup had to stay where it was, on the plinth.

Couldn't be put away in a safe. Had to stay right there.

I came in and the two old guys who were already there,

old-timers, sitting there drinking their tea,

talking about the last war.

Anyway, so I reported to him and he sent me downstairs

to the Post Office's Penny Black stamps.

We wandered around this basement, and finally, at about 12:00,

I went upstairs and I asked these guys, "Do you mind if we swap over?"

So I came out to do my inspection of the hall.

So I went across to where the cup was,

and lo and behold, it wasn't there.

It was gone.

Empty plinth.

# No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. #

I started laughing. It was it a...it was a..

I guess it was nerves.

So I went back down to the basement to these two guys,

who'd just settled down to relax, and I'm still laughing.

I said, "Have you seen the World Cup this morning?"

And he goes, "Why?"

He was starting... His collar was starting to...

And I said, "Well, it's kind of funny, cos it's not there any more".

And he said, "What?!"

I said, "Come on. The cup, did you put it away?"

"No." I said, "Well, you'd better phone somebody".

Within ten minutes, it seemed every copper in the city was in that hall,

as was the media.

The police think the cup was stolen from its case here

at about 11:00 to 12:00 this morning.

This was an inside hall, so it had swing doors.

The security there put the chain on the outside.

So all he had to do was undo eight screws.

Whoever did it came in with a screwdriver,

and they undid four screws there, four screws here,

swung the door open, walked in and took the cup.

We were told when the cup went in here

that the most stringent security precautions

were being taken to protect it.

Today, somehow, they failed.

It was so easy.

On his third day on the job,

McLarens was one of the first suspects.

I was there all day. I mean, one person questioned me,

the next person questioned me.

They were just endlessly badgering us.

And of course, they sacked me.

Now, if they were watching it the whole time,

one of them must have taken it.

So therefore, they couldn't have been watching it the whole time.

"Who put that chain on the outside of the doors?!"

It was British stupidity.

It was Monty Python right there.

It could have been John Cleese stealing it.

Er...please don't panic, just hand over all your money.

It was quite the thing.

REALLY was.

What a time it was for the cup to get nicked.

This was '60s London after all.

You could call it a lively place.

MUSIC: All Day and All of the Night by The Kinks

Britain went through a huge transformation in the 1960s.

During the '50s, it was a grey period, it was consolidation,

and in the '60s, it was breaking off the shackles of the war,

and London was at the heart of that.

Music, culturally, economically, politically and sport.

There was a glamour coming around London.

But it was a very murky place, with, er...with criminality.

It was a time and an era where the organised-crime gangs

were still very significant.

They were running the show more like!

The Krays in the east,

you've got the Richardson brothers in south London.

You don't miss about with these fellas!

And then you've got your regular villains all over the place!

There was more money around post-war.

People could go out and buy things that were nicer.

And at the same time, that meant that for thieves,

it was a wonderful time,

cos there was a lot more luxury goods coming in.

And along came the ultimate luxury good.

APPLAUSE

The Jules Rimet Trophy was named after the French geezer

who sorted out the first World Cup.

It already lived a charmed life,

spending most of World War II under an Italian bloke's bed

as he hid it from the Nazis.

The likes of Pele had lifted it,

so you'd think that when it turned up in London in January '66,

we'd look after it.

But did we f...!

APPLAUSE DROWNS OUT SPEECH

Whether they will leave it here permanently

or just temporarily will be seen in July.

It didn't go into the FA's safe,

it ended up in a strongroom in central London.

And it would go around the country on display for people to see.

A man called George Bird

was employed by the FA to manage the cup,

carry it, look after it.

He was a silversmith, and he would take it around

in the basket on the front of his bike.

Sometimes, if he wasn't going back to the strongroom,

he would leave it in his house overnight under the bed,

and then just take it to the strongroom in the morning.

Completely amateurish and unbelievably-poor security.

It's not exactly a surprise

it got nicked from a stamp exhibition then, is it?

And with it happening just 11 days before an election,

it had left the FA, police

and especially the Labour Prime Minister,

looking like right mugs.

Politically, it was hugely embarrassing.

Because Harold Wilson thought the World Cup would be a big winner

for him politically, for him and Labour.

He wants to present Britain as a resurgent,

rising Phoenix from the ashes, everything is going to be better,

and he's lost the World Cup

before a ball's been kicked in the tournament!

And more importantly, Ted Heath, his Tory opponent,

who was very dull,

was all of a sudden able to crack jokes

and make political points at his cost.

The real reserves are down to 88 million.

That's the result of 17 months of socialist government.

And then I saw that the World Cup had disappeared.

LAUGHTER

And I said to myself, "Can they even have got at that?"

LAUGHTER

From the point of view of the police, it's a huge deal,

because they're under massive pressure to get it back.

They want to see one man in particular.

They describe him as being in his late 30s,

five feet, ten inches' tall,

slim build, sallow complexion,

thin lips and dark hair.

Security guard John was no longer a suspect.

Now the police had a description of a man they did want to collar.

So the trophy had gone, and the police had a description out.

With an election around the corner

and less than four months until the World Cup started,

this needed solving sharpish.

So in came the Sweeney.

As in Sweeney Todd, Flying Squad.

Cue Apache!

In the '60s, when I joined the police force,

you wouldn't have known who the Flying Squad were.

All you knew was a load of tough guys

who would suddenly just descend upon a police station

for a cup of tea and a fag

before they went out and did whatever they did.

They would only go on a Flying Squad

if they had a good reputation of being good thief-catchers.

Good thief-catchers and living a high life.

Cos, you know, you got very close to the line of being the villain.

The Flying Squad were given that much rope to get stuff done.

Crime was a business, and in that business, there were two firms.

One was the gangs, and the other was the police.

And we know, because of corruption,

they did their own business deals.

A couple of days after the theft,

FA top suit Joe Mears received a ransom note.

Dear Joe.

No doubt you view with very great concern

the loss of the World Cup.

The ransom note said, "We want £15,000

"or it's going to go into the melting pot".

To me, it's only so much weight in scrap gold.

To show that they meant business, the FA were asked to leave a note

in Thursday's evening news personal column

saying they were willing to do business.

"I stress once again that this cup is only so much scrap to me.

"And repeat, do not inform press or police."

So, what's the first thing Mears did?

Informed the police, didn't he?!

In charge was Flying Squad Detective Len Buggy.

Buggy didn't need to be at the top of his game

to work out this was genuine.

In with the letter was part of the trophy lining.

So the message went into the paper.

Now, this wasn't the first shady deal the FA and Flying Squad

had made that week.

Remember George Bird, the bloke pedalling the trophy around?

Well, he wasn't just good at navigating city traffic.

He was the FA's go-to silversmith.

And in a fit of shitting themselves, they paid him a little visit.

George Bird recorded how on the night of the theft,

senior FA officials and Scotland Yard detectives visited him

and said they wanted a replica made secretly.

They knew that he had all the measurements and that he could make

something that looked precisely the same as the original.

FIFA told them not to do this.

Explicitly, they'd said, "No, you mustn't do this".

And the FA just went ahead and did it anyway.

This was a secret operation to make a fake trophy

that they could potentially pretend was the real one

at some point in the future.

So whilst that was all going on,

Detective Buggy was negotiating with a ransomer.

This Buggy didn't like having his photo taken,

but he did like writing statements.

What happened next is in one of them.

You can read it in the National Archives,

but not on a Monday cos it's shut.

It starts with a bloke demanding the cash,

calling FA boss Mears.

Mears tells Buggy.

It's now Friday, five days after the trophy was nicked.

Buggy heads over to the Mears' household.

And by this time, Joe Mears has taken to bed,

because he's got serious heart problems.

This is really stressing him out.

His wife takes over, and she says,

"I'll answer the phone if the guy rings back".

And Buggy says, "I want you to tell the ransomer

"that I am your husband's assistant, Mr McPhee".

He does call again.

Mrs Mears answers, explains that her other half is sick

and hands over to Buggy, AKA McPhee.

The two men agree to meet in Battersea Park.

The ransomer is calling himself Jackson.

So you have a man pretending to be Jackson,

a man pretending to be McPhee,

meeting up to potentially hand over £15,000

for the return of the Jules Rimet Trophy.

Hang on a minute.

So the ransomer's Jackson and the copper's MacPhee.

All right. On you go, son.

What McPhee actually brings is a parcel full of paper, not money.

Just at the front of the parcel are a few fibres shoved in

to try and make it look like it's genuine cash.

But in fact, it's just a bag of paper.

Cheeky... MUSIC DROWNS OUT SPEECH

But it does the job, and Jackson gets in the motor,

saying the trophy's stashed somewhere else.

# Girl, you really got me going...#

They're heading towards south-east London.

This area is well known to be a sort of hive of activity for criminals.

Following them is an undercover van

doing a lousy job of staying undercover.

Jackson can smell a rat.

But on they go, stopping at Kennington Park.

And that's when Jackson bails out.

# You really got me you really got me

# You really got me. #

Now, this Jackson turned out to be a bloke called Edward Betchley.

Betchley was a former docker

who lived around the corner from where he was nicked,

just off the Walworth Road in south London.

Remember that.

Back in the '60s, this part of town was rough. Stand on me.

Don't you think you can call me dirty!

You'll get a smack in the bleedin' earhole!

Camberwell, Walworth

and then, up near the river, Rotherhithe and....

Bermondsey. It's packed with people all living together

in little houses and old buildings,

all trying to make a living as best they can.

Some not making a living at all.

Others helping themselves to what's not theirs.

For most people around here, the docks were the centre of the Earth.

Hard men doing hard work.

And some of them ended up doing hard time.

And when you were in the sort of pickle that Ted Betchley was in,

there was one man you needed to call.

Written on one of the cell walls was,

"If you want to get out of here, call for Baldwin".

My dad was involved in the case

cos he actually acted for the man

who was accused of stealing the World Cup.

Freddie Baldwin was bigtime.

In '63, he had represented Christine Keeler,

the woman at the centre of the Profumo affair

that rocked the Tory government.

My father was involved in every high-profile case

that was going on in south London, if not London.

A lot of the local criminals would go to see him

because they all knew him. You know, it was like a little community.

Everybody knew each other, including the police and the criminals.

But even Baldwin has his work cut out with Betchley.

The old bill charged him with the theft

and were putting the squeeze on.

They know that this guy knows,

or knows somebody who has the cup.

So it's their only lead, and they're going to go at it 100%.

The investigations into the cup's disappearance

reached a flurry of activity early this morning

when Flying Squad raided several houses in south-east London.

In the area where he was arrested,

the Yard just flooded it with officers.

There were 200 officers in and around Camberwell and Walworth Road,

and they were going in, smashing down doors,

pulling up floorboards, making absolute nuisances of themselves.

So whoever had taken this cup would be under even more pressure now.

Not just from the Yard, but from fellow criminals,

because the last thing they want is a load of coppers turning up,

smashing their doors down

and arresting them for all the other stuff that they're up to.

Betchley denied nicking it,

saying he was acting as a middleman.

And to be fair, he didn't exactly match the ID.

But he did say he knew where it was.

So if somehow, word could get out,

like through his solicitor,

then maybe the trophy could magically reappear.

And then maybe Betchley could get an easy ride in court.

I don't think my father would have been involved in anything illegal.

I think he had licence to do

whatever deal was needed to get the cup back.

He was acting for Betchley. Betchley had been accused of stealing it.

That's what my father was acting for, as his solicitor.

It turning up seemed like an open secret.

Even the press knew!

As it happened, it took far less than 48 hours for it to appear.

Thanks to a man who worked on the docks, and his canine friend.

Woof!

It's probably all most people remember about it.

The World Cup gets stolen, Pickles the dog finds it.

I was just going out to make a phone call to me brother.

There was a phone box across the road,

so I said to my wife,

I'll take the dog out for a walk while I'm doing it".

So I said, "Come on, Pix, let's go".

You know, every dog wants to go out.

A neighbour's car was parked there,

and he went over to the car.

He was sniffing around here and I saw the parcel.

He's sniffing this newspaper-wrapped package.

What the hell's that?

It's about that size, so...

Picked it, I felt it was very weighty.

I pulled a bit off.

And I could see the top of the statue.

And I looked back and I seen, "Brazil '62",

and that's what sort of clicked in me mind.

And, of course, you know, being a football fan,

and front-page news and TV...

I went...

.."I think this is the World Cup!

On Sunday, 27th March,

exactly a week after the trophy was nicked,

a mutt called Pickles sniffed it out in his front garden.

How bleedin' British!

So Corbett jumped in his motor

and ended up at the Gipsy Hill police station.

I still got me slippers on!

I only went across the road to do a quick phone call.

And I just pull up and jump out,

push through the doors.

HE PANTS BREATHLESSLY

Bosh!

I said...

"I think I've found the World Cup".

"Hmm." And he's,

"Doesn't look very World Cuppy to me, sonny".

After a few checks, they decided that actually,

it did look World Cuppy.

And that's when the questioning really started.

I'm being interviewed and then it strikes to me...

Oh!

I'm going to be number-one suspect, ain't I?

The summer of '66.

A golden time for any England fan.

The final of the World Cup.

But we're not there yet.

We've only just got the cup back!

That was thanks to Dave Corbett and his dog.

But what tends to happen when you hand something in that everyone's been looking for

is that people start to think that you're the reason it went missing.

No-one's contacted me at all about the award.

Everything else, but nothing about the reward money.

I told them what happened, how I found it and all that,

but from going back home,

for the next two to three weeks,

they was round every other day

asking me this question,

"Do you know this person? Do you know that person?

"Have you been here? Have you been there?"

HE SIGHS DEEPLY

To be fair, you can see why.

Corbett worked on the docks,

just like the bloke in custody, Ted Betchley had once done.

And they were both south London boys.

But Corbett checked out.

And as a reward, he pocketed over 100 grand in today's money.

Money enough to buy himself a new gaff!

Lucky, lucky bastard!

And Pickles? He became a national hero.

Pickles, the 14-month-old mongrel, found fame

when he sniffed out the missing World Cup.

But for the suddenly world-famous pooch,

there's more glamour to follow.

He's been signed up to appear in a film. The title?

The Spy with a Cold Nose.

The owner was lucky to have that dog.

Made a fortune out of that dog.

Got fame out of that dog.

It was paraded around on TV.

Became the most famous dog of its time.

Well, this is Pickles.

He didn't come when his master called,

so Mr Corbett went to see what Pickles was doing.

It's like Lassie meets the Italian Job,

meets some kind of Ealing comedy.

It's just too perfect for the reporters.

We love shaggy dog stories,

and it just shifted the entire focus away.

And you stopped thinking about the incompetence

and the daft things that had gone on earlier.

All of a sudden, it turns what was a disaster into a triumph!

The PM had thought his days were numbered,

then the cup turned up before the election.

What a lucky boy!

In the end, Harold Wilson was smiles all round.

That little wave of almost euphoria, relief, happiness,

which you want to go into the polls. It actually helped him.

So joy for Labour and gloom and doom for the Conservatives.

He came out with a 98-seat majority.

Bigger than Boris Johnson got in 2019.

Pickles did him proud.

Around that time, Ted Betchley was at Bow Street Magistrates.

Betchley was facing charges of stealing the cup and ransoming it.

Back then, this could have meant a life sentence.

What he got was two years, with the theft charge dropped.

That lawyer, Freddie Baldwin, must have done one hell of a job.

The British legal system doesn't do plea deals.

Perhaps in the 1960s, things were a little bit...

a little bit less black and white.

Perhaps they just wanted to get a conviction and move on.

I think the reason my father got him quite a short sentence was,

I think there was a deal going on

behind the scenes to get the cup back,

again, because it was such a huge embarrassment

to everybody all round.

After Betchley's trial, the question of who stole the World Cup

was forgotten.

Life was back to normal.

Well, as normal as it can be when England are about to face Germany

in a World Cup final.

The trophy had turned up and someone was doing time.

Even though the time he was doing wasn't for lifting it.

The Old Bill hadn't even spoken of anyone matching

the description they'd put out.

But they ignored these minor details and settled down for the football.

Police interest in the investigation was suspiciously brief.

And once that trophy was returned, they didn't really want to know.

You would have thought when you've lost the Jules Rimet trophy,

the World Cup has been stolen and the world

has been looking at you, laughing at you, mocking you,

you'd really want to nail who did that?

But they didn't.

They'd got the trophy back, they weren't really interested

in anything else.

And I think they wanted very much to brush the embarrassment,

embarrassing story under the carpet as quickly as they could.

We got the trophy back, now let's deal with that.

The purpose now is to make sure it doesn't happen again.

You're going to have to repeat that...

..to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Now, that sounds pretty obvious, but what lengths do you think

the suits at the FA, Scotland Yard and Westminster would go to

to make sure it didn't happen again?

Well, let's see...

The final of the World Cup.

The cream of the world's players battle for the honour

of playing on this arena on this afternoon.

We all know this part!

England took the lead in extra time thanks to the linesman.

He's called Tofiq Bahramov, by the way,

and as a stadium named after him in Azerbaijan.

But I digress...

Hurst scored another...

Bobby lifted the cup...

..and Nobby Stiles danced across the pitch holding it.

What a time to be alive.

They then showed it off at a posh hotel in Kensington.

Well, they showed off something?

That morning, a young PC and two other coppers

had been sent to FA HQ.

We walked into the office on cup final day...

..and on the desk were two boxes.

And this is the real trophy that was one, he opened it up.

And we've had a replica made.

You're just taking it in, really, you don't ask questions,

you're taking it in, and this is what you're going to do,

we want you to take these two with you today.

You get to the stadium, you give the real one...

..to the stadium security...

And you retain the replica with you all the time.

And after the game, we want you to switch them.

You bleedin' what?

So those were the lengths the powers that be would go to!

Jesus, Mary and Jimmy Greaves.

We stayed with the replica throughout, in the tunnel.

We were standing by the side of the tunnel

when the players walked by me.

That's what just took you over, really, and you just...

..washed over everything with excitement.

There was no plan.

There was nothing, nothing like that at all.

It was up to you, use your initiative.

It wasn't until it actually disappeared into the dressing room

area, that then the decision was, you go and get it.

So that was the case, go and get the trophy out of the wooden box.

And I walked into the dressing room with it under my tunic.

Luckily, dear old Nobby was sitting there,

glazed eyes, bless him.

We'll have that, you have this.

And that's how it was, so I just turned with the real trophy,

under my tunic, out the door, into the car.

We'd done what we wanted to do.

In the dressing room and later at the dinner and on the balcony

of the hotel in front of the fans.

They haven't got the trophy they've just won.

They've got a replica that was made in case the stolen World Cup

was never found.

I think it showed incredible disrespect

for the players and actually the watching fans and public.

It's an incredible deceit.

Any picture you've seen of English players holding the Cup

after it had left the dressing room, that trophy is a fake.

The real one didn't leave a police safe until they added it

to Mexico for the next tournament in 1970.

It's incredible, it's an incredible tale.

But of course, it's not the full tale.

The full tale means knowing who actually nicked it.

It wasn't Betchley who was banged up,

it wasn't security guard, Mclarens, or Pickles' owner Corbett.

Who was the five foot ten fella with black hair

and a sallow complexion?

More than 50 years later, his identity

would finally be revealed.

# What's your name?

# What's your name?

# What's your name?

# Shooby-do ba-ba-da #.

I'm the crime editor at the Daily Mirror.

For my job, part of it is speaking to people trying to build trust

in relationships with people.

And slowly but surely, you can sometimes start to find things

that have never been revealed.

I've been told by sources the identity of the man

that stole the World Cup.

The source said that it was a man called Sidney Coo, who came

from the Walworth Road area.

So that was what I had to go on.

I went through all the newspaper cuttings and started going back

through the National Archives just to look at the story

of the World Cup and through all the police files, just to gather

as much information as I could.

The name didn't come up, but Sidney Q's manner did.

Most of this story played out in South London.

And where was Walworth Road?

Correctamundo.

It just added to my belief that this tip off had a lot to it.

But the more I looked at it, the more I thought it was true,

the more I became obsessed.

But even after some more digging, the name didn't show up.

So Pettifor did what all good reporters do when they get

themselves in a bind...

Resort to social media.

One evening I was sitting down, I checked my messages

and there was a message saying "This must be Sidney Cugullere."

C-U-G-U-L-L-E-R-E.

Cugullere, that is one hell of a name.

When I did searches through the birth records, I found

that he'd been born in 1926 in Woolworth, that he was the eighth

of nine children, and he'd lived in real poverty.

He'd been jailed in the early '60s for stealing mail bags.

Released in 1964, so crucially, he was free at the time and living

in the Walworth Road area in 1966.

A crook? Yes.

From South London? Yes.

In his late 30s in 66?

Also, yes.

This was certainly looking like our trophy lifter.

Now, if Cugullere had nicked it and Betchley ransomed it,

they must have known each other, right?

If only there were something or someone to show

that they were connected, like solicitor, Freddie Baldwin.

So South London's finest legal brain had represented both of them.

Coincidence? Coincidence my...

He was well known to my father and my father had acted for him.

He was a regular in the office in Jamaica Road.

He was always popping in for cups of tea, so the whole thing

fitted quite well with him, Cugullere and Bletchley.

All Pettifor needed now was someone who knew Sid, and who knew

what he used to get up to.

Specifically on say the 20th of March 1966?

With a name like Cugullere, it didn't take long to find someone.

I open the door and there's this lad standing there.

I said, "Hello, how can I help you?"

And he said, "I'm from the Mirror newspaper."

He said, "Do you know anything about the World Cup?"

I burst out laughing, my wife burst out laughing,

so I couldn't really hide it.

And he said, "Would you mind telling us the story?"

Sidney was my uncle, my dad's brother.

My dad was called Reg and Reg and Sid were brought up

on Walworth Road.

Times were really tough on them.

They started off stealing at a very young age.

Sid kind of looked after my dad.

Sid was a... As he got his name, Mr Crafty,

but he was the crafty one.

So did he pitch the bleedin' thing or what?

It was my uncle Sidney Cugullere, who stole the World Cup.

They told me they didn't actually go to steal the World Cup.

If they were asked to do a job for someone,

for a certain amount of money, they'd go and do it.

So they went there to steal the stamps.

They were going to weigh the job up, see what's what,

where everything was, go back, steal them.

Well, Sid picked the lock, spotted the World Cup,

put it under his jacket and walked out.

"Come on, Reg, let's go."

Just a spur of the moment thing.

As they got out of the place, he opened his jacket and he said,

"Here, Reg, look at this."

And my dad looked at him and he went,

"What the fucking hell do you think we're going to do with that?"

So there you have it.

More than 50 years after its theft and after a ten month investigation

by a Daily Mirror journo, we know who hoisted the World Cup.

Sidney 'Mr Crafty Bastard' Cugullere.

Him and his brother, Reg, they were pretty proud of that pinch.

I was about, I think, 16, and I remember him telling me

and my mum come in and went, "Reg, stop it, enough's enough."

And then he'd tell me a bit more.

And then Sid would say something and the story

sort of grew from there.

With all those bedtime stories, we also know about the little trip

the trophy took while it was missing.

After he stole it, apparently he took it back to his house

just off the Walworth Road, where he lived with his wife, Nell.

And he put it on the mantelpiece and said to her, "Look, darling,

"I've got you this lovely decorative cup."

The police think the cup was stolen from its case here at about...

And then later in the day, the theft of the cup came on the news.

The story goes, Nell saw it and said, "What the fuck are you doing?

"You've just stolen the World Cup, get that out of my house,

"you bastard."

Sidney realises obviously that he's got himself into a bit

of a sticky situation.

And him and his brother Reg decide to take the cup up to Reggie's

father in law's house in Luton.

And then apparently they're stopped on the way by the police

who have a look at them and decide to let them go.

Too hot to keep, they stashed it in the father-in-law's cold bunker.

And after they find out it wasn't actually solid gold,

it made its journey back to South London.

And was dumped outside Dave Corbett's gaff.

One of Corbett's neighbours even spotted someone looking like Sid

a day or two before it was found.

Visiting an old friend, was he?

He come from Walworth didn't he?

I wouldn't go near Walworth, oh, dead...

Oh, no, oh, that's a no-go area for us lot down there.

Yeah.

The pickle story, I think, is...

Is, yeah, it's a good story.

It's what happened.

So, I mean, lucky dog, but...

Yeah.

If only Pickles could explain what went on.

But he's buried outside the house Corbett bought

with the reward money.

He couldn't talk either, to be fair.

The only thing he didn't like was cats.

And that was his downfall.

Pickles met a rather unfortunate end.

A year after finding the trophy he's chased a cat up a tree

and strangled himself with his lead.

Poor bastard.

This dog changed my life completely.

He was...

He was not only a friend...

He was...

He was...

And, he give me...

..this house and my future.

He changed my future completely.

Sidney Cugullere died in 2005, aged 79.

He even at a nice little Jules Rimet style flower arrangement

at his send-off.

Sid always used to brag that he was the first Englishman

to lift the World Cup, yeah.

During his life, Sid was sentenced to over 20 years of jail time.

This theft set off a chain of events more unlikely than the plot

of a London gangster film.

The whole story is completely bizarre and just

unbelievable, really.

It was a farce, the whole thing should never happened.

If you take it too seriously, it would do your brain,

because you think, No, that's nonsense.

You couldn't make it up, really.

Victory or snatched from the jaws of defeat with a dog, Pickles.

So what happened to the cup then?

Well, after Brazil won it for the third time,

they got to keep it.

The beautiful trophy went off to Brazil.

And then in 1983 it was stolen.

During the night there was an armed robbery and it disappeared.

And it's never been seen since.

Maybe we'll find out who pulled that job off in another 50 years.

# Dirty old river

# Must you keep rolling

# Rolling into the night...#

Subtitles by Red Bee Media