The mastermind of the Hatton Garden heist, Brian Reader, has died, aged 84.

The infamous gangster, from Dartford, made more than £200 million from a series of raids including the robbery which took place over the Easter weekend in 2015.

Known as “The Guvnor”, a death certificate shows he died in September last year, after being diagnosed with colon and prostate cancer, but The Sun has reported his family tried to keep it a secret.

Leader of a gang known as the Diamond Wheezers, he and his crew were responsible for one of the most infamous robberies in British criminal history when they stole gold and gems worth around £14m in a bank heist from a vault in Hatton Garden.

The burglars worked through a four-day weekend over Easter drilling through the 50cm walls of the vault.

Reader was jailed for six years and three months after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit burglary.

In 2016, he was moved from Belmarsh Prison to an intensive care unit at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich.

He appeared in court a year later in a wheelchair having suffered a stroke while also fighting prostate cancer.

Reader was halfway through his sentence in 2018 when he was released due to health issues and was later ruled too unwell by a judge to return to prison for failing to pay back £6.6m.

He had handed over just 6% of his multi-million cut despite being slapped with one of the biggest confiscation orders in Scotland Yard history.

The heist was so big it captured the imagination of filmmakers and was the inspiration for three movies including 2018’s King of Thieves, starring Michael Caine, Ray Winstone and Michael Gambon.

Reader was the oldest member of the Hatton Garden gang, working alongside John “Kenny” Collins, Daniel Jones and Terry Perkins, who died in prison aged 69.

Reader had convictions on his record dating back as far as the 1960s including the equally infamous Brink’s-Mat robbery in 1983 where £26m – £500m in today’s money – was stolen from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport.

He served eight years for his involvement in that heist, with the crime being dramatised in the BBC’s The Gold.

In June last year, Reader was reported to have sold his Dartford estate for £2.5m.

He had been ordered to sell his homes in 2019 by the Court of Appeal.

A total of three homes were sold – the Pentire, which reportedly went for £900,000, and houses named Laurel and Holly which went up for £800,000.