FOUR men have been jailed after detectives smashed a gang that robbed bank vans in York.

The group twice targeted vans in Acomb. Handing out sentences totalling 27 years, the Recorder of York, Judge Stephen Ashurst said: "This is a case which has the hallmarks of professional planned commercial robbery."

York Press:

Clockwise from top-left: Cooke, Benjamin, Hawksby and Herrington

Geraldine Kelly, prosecuting, told him Martin Cooke, 26, formerly of Walmgate and Acomb, had led part of the gang across the Pennines to Liverpool, where Merseyside accomplice Marlon Otis Benjamin supplied them with stolen cars which they drove back to York arriving after midnight on April 18, 2012.

Within hours, the vehicles were used by three masked men who attacked a security guard as he delivered £25,000 cash to the Lloyds branch in Acomb. Immediately afterwards, Cooke headed back to Liverpool.

The serial criminal also returned to Liverpool in October shortly after a similar raid on a second security guard, as he delivered £25,000 to the HSBC branch in York Road in Acomb.

Jailing Cooke for eight years, the judge said he played a central role.

Benjamin, 25, of Springfield Place, Wallasey, was earlier jailed for eight years for the Acomb conspiracy when he was sentenced for that and other similar offences in Liverpool.

York Press:

Police pictured after one of the robberies

Adam Herrington, 26, formerly of Ordnance Lane, Fulford, had accompanied Cooke to Liverpool to collect stolen cars and was jailed for four and a half years. Matthew Hawksby, 24, of Newbury Avenue, Acomb, provided Cooke with a safe house the night before the April raid and was jailed for three years.

Both Herrington and Hawksby, like Cooke and Benjamin, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to rob.

The three masked men who attacked the guard at Lloyds have not been identified, but the judge said all the male defendants bore some responsibility for the robberies.

Kieran Luke Charles Guildford, 21, of Gale Lane, York, who drove a stolen car from Liverpool to York, denied conspiracy to rob but was convicted by a jury at Sheffield last autumn. He received a two-year prison sentence suspended for two years on condition he did 12 months' supervision. The judge had read what he called "compelling powerful mitigation".

A friend of Benjamin, mother-of-five Lisa Johanne Gardner, 37, of Rudgrave Place, Wallasey, was given an 18-month prison sentence suspended for two years on condition she did 12 months' supervision and 150 hours' unpaid work. She had admitted assisting an offender.

Sheffield Crown Court heard she took Benjamin and Cooke back to Liverpool after the second robbery, believing she was only collecting Benjamin.

POLICE PRAISED

The judge gave commendations to Detective Inspector Andrea Kell, Det Constable Tom Hoban, Det Sgt Mandy Grundy and analysts Bryony Seawell and Vicky Turton for their painstaking work in building a successful case against the six defendants despite having no forensic evidence from the robbery scenes to identify the robbers.

He heard they used telephone records, numberplate analysis and other data.

Detective Inspector Kell, welcomed the praise which she said showed how important even small apparently innocuous pieces of evidence could be and urged anyone who saw anything suspicious to contact the police.

At the trial of gang member Guildford, jurors heard how members of the public found the gang's abandoned getaway cars in Kirk View, Acomb, off Beckfield Lane, Acomb and on Scackleton Bank near Terrington, Ryedale, and another saw the conspirators preparing the cars before the first raid after midnight in a secluded Acomb cul-de-sac.