Meticulous armed robbers thought they'd never be caught until it all went wrong

An infamous mob ofalmost got away with an before they were tracked down and brought to justice in a huge police operation.

Notorious Salford outlaw, Lee Tansey, showed up at hospital on June 5, 2009 after thieving £43,000 from a branch in Darwen, Lancashire, and was told he was an hour from death. With blood soaking through his clothes, he and - but the calculated criminal made sure to wipe all DNA evidence from the premises before they all made their getaway in a stolen Audi.

It wasn't long before the gang were back at it again. On June 18, 2009, they armed themselves with a machete, crowbar and sledgehammer as they threatened a security driver taking money to a LloydsTSD in Elland, near Halifax. This time, the mob made off with £175,000. The same three weapons were used for the next target - a HSBC in Marsh, Huddersfield - just a week later.

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The violent gangsters forced their way into the staff section, hit one of them on the head with the flat side of a machete before plundering £300,000 from the safe and made off in a Vauxhall Combi van. The assaulted victim later said: "My first thought was, 'This could be the day that I die, and I don't want to die'."

But as the gang fled the Elland job and made they way back to they were picked up by police. Driving at speeds of up to 80mph on 30mph roads, Tansey tried to shake off their pursuers during a high speed chase across the Pennines.

Police video later played in court showed Tansey running red lights, swerving into oncoming vehicles and weaving through traffic.

A judge later described it as 'as bad a piece of dangerous driving as I have ever seen'. The chase ended at the multi-storey car park of the Arndale in Manchester city centre when the gang dumped the van before running off through the shopping centre, reports the

Tansey then went on the run to the Costa Del Sol, where he spent two years evading justice. But his time in the sun came to an end when police spotted him in photographs taken at a Spanish nightclub.

He was arrested in Malaga and extradited to the UK where he was met by police at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool. In June 2011 Tansey, then 33, and of Pegwell Drive, Salford, was jailed for 11 years after he pleaded guilty to three armed robberies at Leeds Crown Court.

But that wasn't the end of his crime spree. After serving around half his sentence Tansey was released in 2016.

And within days he was back up to his old tricks again. This time he helped stage a string of gunpoint heists at banks and jewellers across the North.

In a series of meticulously staged robberies - the gang would disguise themselves as builders in a white van so they could 'hide in plain sight' - they made off with hundreds of thousands of pounds. In one terrifying raid, gunmen pounced on two women as they arrived for work at Janet Isherwood Jewellers on Kay Street in Rawtenstall, Rossendale.

One of the staff was grabbed by the throat and pushed up against a wall, after one of the robbers jumped over a side gate and threatened them with a handgun. His accomplice, who was brandishing a sawn-off shotgun, joined in and the pair fled with more than £200,000, using a getaway Chrysler driven by a third man during the July 2016 robbery.

The trio, dressed as builders in hi-viz jackets, escaped and the getaway car was later found burnt out. In another raid, on September 21, 2016, the three-strong gang carried out a bank robbery in Horden, County Durham.

Two of the men, armed with a crowbar and sledgehammer, took thousands of pounds from a staff member while an ATM was being filled with cash. 'Fuelled by greed' and 'arrogant in the fact they were never going to be caught', further robberies were also carried in , and Blackburn.

But once again the police were on Tansey's trail. Investigations by GMP's Serious Organised Crime Group linked the gang to the raids.

And as they carried out final preparations for a robbery in New Mills in Derbyshire in January 2017, detectives swooped. Tansey and his two accomplices were arrested and charged over their roles in six armed robberies.

In March 2018 they were jailed at Minshull Street Crown Court after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit armed robbery and possession of firearms. Tansey, then 40, was sentenced to 21 years behind bars.

Speaking after the case Det Sgt Rick Castley said: "These men conducted extensive recces on premises and victims, identifying lay-up points and escape routes prior to the robberies. They attempted to leave no forensic trace and avoid detection by switching vehicles, using numerous cloned registration plates, setting fire to vehicles following offences, using unregistered phones and wore construction-style clothes during the planning stage to hide in plain sight.

“Through covert surveillance, painstaking hours of telephony work and extensive vehicle enquiries, we managed to step in and stop them from not only hurting anyone else but also stealing more money. [They] were clearly fuelled by greed and as they became more and more arrogant in the fact they were never going to be caught, we were building a strong evidential case against them."