The Voice of Spalding and South Holland
Five men will be sentenced next week after a series of ramraids, including ones in Long Sutton and Crowland, which netted a total of £400,000.
Joseph Upton, John Smith, Albert Smith, John Christopher Smith and Alfred Stanley, all from Cambridgeshire or Bedfordshire, carried out raids at 12 banks in 2012.
They used JCB diggers to smash into businesses before ripping out cash machines and then escaping in vehicles they had stolen in burglaries.
On August 2, 2012, they got away with £36,000 from a cash machine at Barclays Bank, Long Sutton, and on October 5, £23,000 was stolen from a cash machine in Crowland.
Further ramraids happened in Reepham, Norfolk; Ruskington, Lincolnshire; Aylsham Road, Norwich; and Fulbourn, Cambridgeshire.
Two homes were burgled in Newmarket and Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, two in Cambridge and Chatteris in Cambridgeshire, and one in King’s Lynn.
In total, they got away with £301,560 from cash machines and stole cars and jewellery worth more than £100,000, Bedfordshire Police said.
They also caused damage to buildings estimated at costing £250,000 to repair.
Upton (43), of Murrow Lane, Parsons Drove, Wisbech, John Smith (39), of Small Lode, in Upwell, Albert Smith (38), of Common Road, Potton, Bedfordshire, and Alfred Stanley (37), of Sandon Close, Sandy, Bedfordshire, had all been jailed in 2013 for a violent burglary at a farmhouse in Bedfordshire, when police began investigating them for the spree of ram raids.
They each pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to burgle when they appeared at Cambridge Crown Court on Friday.
John Christopher Smith (23), of Werrington Bridge Road in Peterborough, admitted one count of conspiracy to burgle.
The five will be sentenced on Tuesday, Bedfordshire Police said.
Det Sgt Stuart Dolan, of Bedfordshire Police, described them as “an organised gang” and said the number of similar offences had “reduced dramatically” since the arrest of the five men.
