[jefvader]

Is anybody else really, really tired of the focus on their age? I feel like every British media outlet has been churning out the same low-hanging fruit for months now: "Old school gangsters" going after "one last job". I vaguely remember the actual 6 o'clock BBC news making some gag about zimmer frames or hip replacements. Two of them were in their forties for one thing...

I sincerely hope that when I'm of a certain vintage the only remark on any of my achievements* won't be "check out how OLD he is".

*Hesitant to call a robbery an achievement, but in a sense it is.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The rumour is that it was masterminded by a well-known career criminal who was subsequently murdered in his garden by a hit man - possibly because the point of the raid was to find some incriminating evidence that was being kept in the vault, and the gold and shiny stuff was a useful bonus.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3484924/Was-Goldfing...

This is the Daily Mail, so credibility isn't guaranteed - but still an interesting angle.

[chippy]

They did indeed overdo it in the article, but I would say that its a relevant angle - the article actually repeats various quotes from the different criminals saying that their ages were important to put the police off the scent.

Generally I dislike age based stories especially ones that imply that older people should have a different standard of behaviour, or be more intelligent, mature etc. Often I suspect these arguments to come from young people who view those older as more different than themselves. The truth of the matter appears to me to be that people don't become more smarter as they age from middle age to old age, and they don't get any more mature or emotionally more intelligent, however you would imagine that time passed may give a little bit more wisdom in certain aspects (e.g. dealing with grief and personal vanity)

[branchless]

only the boomers buy papers in the UK now so all stories are through the boomer prism.