1966 оны Дэлхийн цомыг хулгайлсан хэргийн нууц тайлагдлаа

The plaque that marks the spot is as neatly hidden as the World Cup was in 1966.

Unless you’re looking for it, you’d walk on by. It’s tucked away on a flight of steps leading up to the door of a pretty Victorian apartment block in Upper Norwood, south London: “Pickles the dog found the Jules Rimet Trophy here.” Who would have guessed?

A man emptying the boot of a car in the driveway asks if he can help me, sizing me up like I’m lost, looking for somebody, or up to no good.

I explain that I’m writing about the theft of the World Cup, the Jules Rimet Trophy, 60 years ago. He knows the story, right?

“Pickles,” he says, rhetorically. “Yeah. A long time ago now, though.” I wonder if he’s aware of how it was stolen or the name of the man convicted of the crime. “Not really. I’ve heard bits of the story, but I mostly just know about the dog.”

That goes for the average person, too. Pickles, a collie cross, was the hero of the tale, responsible for sniffing out the discarded cup on this very patch of land in March 1966, earning minor celebrity in the process. It had been abandoned beneath a bush, seven days after it was stolen from an exhibition hall in central London. Charges were later brought against Edward Betchley, a petty criminal, who attempted unsuccessfully to extract a ransom for the trophy. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

Pickles poses for photographers in 1966, after finding the trophy (DB dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images)

His conviction ended a detailed investigation, and the case lay dormant for decades, apparently solved. To all intents and purposes, Betchley was the man behind the World Cup’s disappearance — or at any rate, the only individual punished for it.

Then, around 2017, a crime reporter fell into conversation with a contact of his, one with knowledge of London’s organised crime network. They were meeting to discuss another matter entirely, but randomly, the subject of the 1966 trophy theft came up. The architect of the heist was not in fact Betchley, the contact claimed. Somebody else pulled it off. And if the reporter wanted to uncover their identity, he ought to start with the name “Sidney Coo”.

The Jules Rimet Trophy — about 35 centimetres high, made of gold-plated sterling silver, named after the founder of the World Cup and designed in the image of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory — was the original World Cup. FIFA replaced it in 1970 after Brazil won the tournament for a third time and claimed it outright. Retiring the ‘Jules Rimet’ made way for the more recognisable cup used today: the twisting gold stem supporting a globe on top, which one nation will lift after the final in New Jersey on Sunday.

In 1966, with England due to host the World Cup that summer, the Jules Rimet Trophy came to London. Ahead of the tournament, an agreement was reached for the cup to be displayed to the public at a stamp exhibition, at the city’s Central Hall in Westminster, run by the firm Stanley Gibbons.

The irony of the theft that ensued was that the value of the Jules Rimet Trophy — recorded as £3,000 (about $4,000) in police documents at the UK’s national archive — fell far below that of other items on display. A BBC report at the time estimated that certain stamps in the collection would have fetched a seven-figure sum. None were stolen or obviously targeted.

At FIFA’s insistence, guards were assigned to closely patrol the World Cup’s cabinet while visitors wandered around the venue. The exhibition opened on March 19, but the following day, a Sunday, Central Hall was closed, save for those attending a Methodist church service. Shortly after midday, having briefly left the trophy unattended, one member of staff approached a group of his colleagues to ask if they had “moved the cup”. Amid confusion and sudden panic, they rushed to inspect the display case. It was empty, and a door to the rear of the hall was ajar, forced open from the outside. The World Cup was gone.

The hysteria when the news broke was uncontainable. And the hysteria went global. Letters to the UK authorities arrived from members of the public abroad, from France, Germany, Belgium, Brazil, Chile and elsewhere. Some offered their commiserations. Others espoused theories or suggested possible suspects. One writer claimed: “My clock indicates that the gold World Football cup stolen in London, can be found at Wicklow (or in the immediate vicinity) in Ireland” (the translation does not expand on how his clock told him this).

A second, from Austria, advised investigators to search for a man he had marked with ‘X’ on a random photo. A third said, in complete seriousness, that it might be worth speaking to the guards.

The translation of a letter to the Metropolitan Police in 1966, indicating the World Cup could be found in Wicklow, Ireland (UK National Archives)

What ensued in the seven days that followed was a nervous game of cat-and-mouse in which an anonymous source offered to return the trophy in exchange for a cash payment, and the Metropolitan Police worked frantically to track it down, in the full glare of a media frenzy. The risk of national embarrassment was acute.

A copy of the letter to Joe Mears (Credit: UK National Archives)

A letter and a small part of the World Cup arrived on the desk of Joe Mears, the chairman of Chelsea Football Club and the Football Association. The trophy would be returned, the letter said, if a payment of £15,000 was guaranteed. Otherwise, it would be melted down. A man going by the name of “Jackson” planned to oversee the exchange.

A letter, written in German, to the police asking them to investigate a man marked with a faded ‘X’ (far right) in a photo – and below, the translation by Special Branch (UK National Archives)

Posing as a close friend of Mears’, and going by the name “McPhee”, the Met’s Detective Inspector, Charles Buggy, agreed to a meeting at Battersea Park. He took the ransom with him, but what looked like a stack of banknotes was in fact mostly scrap paper. Jackson duly joined Buggy in his car, but spooked by a van which tracked the car and contained other police officers, he tried to make a run for it and was arrested in the street.

In custody, he was recognised as Edward Betchley, a 47-year-old who served as a Lance Corporal in the British army during the Second World War and then traded as a second-hand car dealer. He had a prior conviction for receiving stolen goods, back in 1954.

Betchley did not have the trophy in his possession, and he denied stealing it. He did not directly reveal the identities of any accomplices either. According to archive material, he promised to retrieve the cup if the police granted him bail, and he played down the likelihood of the trophy being melted down. Three charges were brought against him, including one of breaking and entering to commit the theft, and another of demanding money “with menaces” from Mears.

As the wheels of justice turned in the background, the world awaited news that the trophy had been found. Oddly, on the morning of Sunday, March 27, the Sunday Mirror newspaper published a story with the headline “World Cup ‘back in 48 hours’,” predicting that police would soon lay their hands on it.

That evening, David Corbett, a 26-year-old lighterman, was taking his dog, Pickles, for a walk when he saw “a package at the side of a bush” by his front gate. It was wrapped in newspaper, and when Corbett tore into it, he realised what he had found. “I felt sure it was the cup,” he said, and he took it straight to the nearby station at Gipsy Hill. The blue plaque in Upper Norwood today preserves the moment for posterity.

The Jules Rimet trophy after its discovery in March 1966 (UK National Archives)

Despite the charges brought against him and his subsequent sentence, Betchley was never found guilty of the theft per se. He was convicted of demanding money with menaces with intent to steal and sentenced to two years. His death in 1969 drew a line under the saga, or so it seemed.

Mears, meanwhile, suffered from acute angina while the recovery effort was ongoing and died on June 30, 1966, less than two weeks before the World Cup started and a month before England lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy after the final at Wembley. Mears’ family have never dined out on his role in finding the cup. His grandson, Chris, told The Athletic that 60 years on, he had limited knowledge of events.

“I was eight years old when Grandad Joe passed away,” he said. “I don’t remember much about it, although I do know he received the ransom note and was subsequently involved in its recovery.”

Bobby Moore lifts the Jules Rimet trophy later in 1966 after England won the World Cup (Bettmann/Getty Images)

There was ample evidence that if Betchley was involved in the theft, he was not acting alone. At least one suspicious or unknown individual had been spotted inside Central Hall shortly before the theft took place. An attendee at the Methodist service, Margaret Coombes, picked out Betchley at an ID parade — but one of the guards, Frank Hudson, identified a different individual from the same line-up.

More than once, Betchley had used the word “we” while spelling out demands for the return of the cup. In 2006, a relative of Betchley’s was quoted by the Observer newspaper as saying: “Let me tell you, there’s a twist that has yet to be revealed.” It was not a story without loose ends.

Tom Pettifor, the crime correspondent for the Daily Mirror newspaper, had not seen the Observer’s quote when he sat down for a meeting with a source some 11 years later. As a point of interest, the theft of the World Cup was not on his radar at all. But when his contact made a throwaway comment about the 1966 heist, it hooked Pettifor’s attention. Irrespective of Betchley’s part in the crime, he wasn’t the instigator, his contact claimed. The source told Pettifor as much as he knew, and the rough basis of a name to pursue.

Pettifor’s investigation into the theft of the World Cup, published at length by the Daily Mirror before the 2018 finals in Russia, stemmed inadvertently from another notorious crime: the 2015 Hatton Garden heist, in which a gang stole millions of pounds worth of jewellery, precious metals, and cash from safety deposit boxes in a vault in central London. He and a colleague began writing a book about the mastermind behind the Hatton Garden plot, Brian Reader — a project which led to Pettifor’s underworld source proffering details about the Jules Rimet Trophy.

“I knew the vague story of the theft of the World Cup,” Pettifor says. “By that, I mean I just knew about Pickles. It was a strange story that didn’t seem to make total sense, in terms of the trophy being randomly found by a dog. But the book we were researching had nothing to do with that. It was focused on Reader.

“One day in 2017, I was having a cup of tea and a chat with a source about characters like Reader. During that conversation, he casually mentioned ‘the guy who stole the World Cup’ — as in, who actually stole it.”

The details given to Pettifor were patchy: that the person responsible was called ‘Sidney Coo’ or similar; he had a brother named Freddie; and he lived in an area of south-east London which was well known historically for criminal activity. “I put ‘Sidney Coo’ and different spellings of the surname into our databases but found nothing,” Pettifor says.

“I went down to that part of London to see if any of it rang any bells with anyone, but I knew this guy would be in his 80s or 90s, assuming he was still alive. It was a long shot, and it went nowhere. As a journalist, it’s easy to let these projects go when that happens.”

As something of a last resort, Pettifor sent a post to a closed Facebook page, run by somebody who, in his words, had connections to the circles men like Reader moved in. Did any of the posters recognise “Sidney Coo”? “I’m not sure I expected anything to come of it, but one night I came back to a message saying ‘this could be Sidney and Freddie Cugullere’. As soon as I put Sidney’s name into Google, it came up with an appeal court judgement about mailbag theft in the 1950s. I thought ‘wow’ — like it had to be him.”

Sidney Cugullere, according to Pettifor’s findings, was known as “Mr Crafty” in the London crime scene. Pettifor tracked down and knocked on the door of an old friend of Cugullere’s “who was in the shower when I called and told me to f*** off, but then decided to phone me on a number I left with his wife”. The two men met and Pettifor got chapter and verse on the theft, or as much background as the source could give him.

Cugullere had stolen the World Cup and purely for the hell of it, or simply because he could (the trophy, remember, was worth more in sentimental terms than financial terms). He dressed in brown overalls to sneak inside and cut through the lock which sealed the display cabinet. What he didn’t do was brag about his crime recklessly. A different brother, Reg, was present in Central Hall while Cugullere pulled the raid off. The journalists were able to trace Reg’s son, Gary, who confirmed the story — but said Reg was unaware of what was in Cugullere’s possession until they exited the building.

A picture of the display case where the World Cup was due to be housed before the theft (UK National Archives)

The nature of links between Cugullere and Betchley isn’t wholly clear, but Pettifor found enough evidence to suggest they were associates and had crossed paths. It’s possible that Betchley was merely a middleman, tasked with returning the trophy and negotiating a ransom in the bargain. Police arrested him on Friday, March 25. The working theory goes that over the next 48 hours, the cup was dumped in Upper Norwood by men who by that stage wanted nothing more to do with it. So it was that Pickles the dog stumbled across it on a routine Sunday night walk.

How confident is Pettifor that the tale was true; that Cugullere and his brother hadn’t invented their part in it for notoriety?

“You couldn’t discount that possibility,” he says, “but it seemed highly unlikely. I spoke to enough sources to feel sure about it, and by the end of the investigation, I was happy that Sidney was the man behind it all.” Nobody disputed or pushed back against the version published by Pettifor in his Mirror article. Both Sidney and Reg were long since dead when Pettifor first began pursuing his tip-off.

As if to provide confirmation of their involvement, Gary produced photographs of wreaths laid at their respective funerals. The wreaths were of the Jules Rimet Trophy.

Was the original World Cup cursed? It’s a fair question. Stolen for the first time in 1966, it was stolen again from the Brazil Football Confederation (CBF) headquarters in 1983 and is still missing to this day. A replica is on show at England’s National Football Museum in Manchester. The precise ins and outs of the 1983 theft will probably never be known. The truth behind the 1966 heist might well have been uncovered — but only those who are no longer with us could say for sure.