The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [16]
But in September 2005, while training for an upcoming fight at Wembley Stadium, Murray attended a birthday party for a British model at Funky Buddha, a trendy club in London’s Mayfair district. At around 3:15 a.m., a street brawl broke out. Murray was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, suffering a punctured lung and a severed artery. As he explained in a 2005 interview with the website MMAweekly.com, “One of my friends got involved in the fight. I tried to help him because about six or seven guys was on [him]. That’s when I got stabbed. I got stabbed in the head first. I thought it was a punch. When I felt the blood coming down my face, I just wiped the blood and just continued to fight. Next, I looked down at my chest and blood was literally shooting out of my chest…. It was literally flying out of my chest like a yard in front of me…. I died three times. They said, ‘Because you’re an athlete and all the training you put your body through, that’s what saved your life.’”
In the same interview, he casually noted that he had been stabbed outside the same club a week earlier. On that occasion, he’d “only” had one of his nipples sliced off. “It was just a minor stabbing, like these things happen every night of the week,” says Andy Geer, a British promoter for Cage Rage. “He had stab wounds, bullet wounds. He was a proper from-the-streets kid.”
Three weeks after the stabbing, though covered in zippers of scars, Murray had resumed his training in the gym. But realistically, his promising career was threatened. Particularly as mixed martial arts was becoming gentrified, what promoter would permit a man with such serious injuries to fight again? What if a scar opened during a fight? Murray may have realized as much, and that could have been an incentive to turn to crime.
THE THIEVES TOOK too much money. Had the Securitas gang made off with, say, a few million pounds, it might have been one thing. But the magnitude of the heist was such that overnight it became an international cause célèbre. Even the most staid British newspapers covered the case breathlessly and exhaustively. The surveillance video from the depot was televised nationally and, inevitably, made it online. Hundreds of British policemen were immediately deployed to investigate. Hefty reward money provided an incentive to anyone with any knowledge to come forward. “The gang had no chance,” says Howard Sounes, the British author of a forthcoming book on the heist.
The suspects, though, also did plenty to hasten their demise. Mirroring Murray’s fighting career—disciplined and methodical in MMA; arrogant and unthinking in street brawls—the same thieves who had been smooth and poised in the actual pilferage could scarcely have been sloppier in the aftermath. Some gang members boasted to friends about the heist. One of the vehicles used in the crime was set afire in the middle of a field, attracting attention. The money was poorly hidden. Oceans 11 quickly devolved into a comedy of errors that recalled the Al Pacino classic Dog Day Afternoon. “That’s what happens,” says Bruce Reynolds, the convicted mastermind of Britain’s Great Train Robbery of 1963 and now something of an armchair analyst of British crime. “All the planning