What I like about this event is that it happened in the mid 1980s. Some of us were on the internet (my email address hasn't changed since then) but in reality it was a pre internet era, but also "pre CCTV". LHR now is absolutely covered with cameras, there are about 8 in the First Wing alone, but that wasn't the case then. So while it was HUGE at the time, all the newspapers covered the perpetrators, and there were lots of sad face photos in the press as BA's baggage handlers were carted off to Wormwood Scrubs, now mostly it's all on the Second Floor of the British Library (formerly Colindale). UPI digitalised its archive, hence this lonely scrap of news takes us back. So in contemporary terms, the mid 1980s never happened. But the Thiefrow label - which the OED says started in 1973 - nevertheless stuck. Suffice to say in most places, airports aren't good places to steal things.