Many of the clientele were families who had fled turmoil, pogroms, coups and wars and long had a cultural preference for locking away money and jewels, building up a vehement distrust for the integrity of traditional banks. Here, stepping down the spiral staircase at the back to the darkened boxes below, they felt reassured that their most important possessions were safe. One survivor of Nazi Germany in his seventies told us how he had placed a bag of diamonds there - security if ever he or his descendents needed to run again.
'My wife and I had escaped from Germany with nothing but these gems,' he said. 'She sewed them into our clothing before we crossed occupied Europe, reaching Britain by ship when the jewels were snipped out and locked up.'
There was a rabbi too, Yitzchak Schochet, of Mill Hill Synagogue, who said: 'Safety deposit boxes are supposed to be confidential. The whole situation was very unsettling and an intrusion of privacy.'
Another client, an Indian millionaire entrepreneur with connections to the House of Lords, described how he was 'treated like a convicted man just because I had wealth in cash'.
A Hindu priest described to Live how his family's valuables had been carried in the Sixties from Madhya Pradesh, India, to London 'in a gunny sack'.
Among the possessions seized by the police were elaborate handcrafted bracelets, gold rings set with uncut stones, and a bejewelled wedding tikka ornament to be draped on the forehead of a new bride. 'These items had always been in our family,' the priest said, 'We had cash in there too. But now we had to prove how we bought them and where that money, saved over the years, had come from.'
Under POCA, the burden of proof lay with the box-holders. Finding evidence for wartime treks across Europe, or charting migration stories from the Partition of India and beyond, would cost many of the box-holders tens of thousands of pounds.
Mark Richardson, a former military intelligence officer and now a forensic accountant, who has been employed by several box-holders to explain their wealth, told us: 'We had to get one family's diamonds carbon-dated at great expense to demonstrate to the police that they had been cut in the Thirties, which tallied with their story of fleeing Germany before World War II.'
Alright, let's see the receipt for those diamonds you swallowed when you fled Germany. Otherwise, they go to the police widow fund, you low-life!
(Although I doubt you can carbon date a diamond.)
Warning that the police were lagging behind in meeting targets set to seize criminals' assets, it stated: 'To achieve the target a further £36.6 million of assets need to be seized in the remaining nine months.' This was 'a challenging target'. However, 'with the emerging results from Operation Rize, the seizures are likely to make a major contribution toward the final total.'
Red light cameras? That's for pikers. Show some imagination!