In the 1980s, this sentence circulated in England: “Anyone who owns gold jewelry purchased after 1983 owns some Brink’s Mat gold.” But what is Brink’s Mat? To understand this, we need to reconstruct the history of what was defined as the “robbery of the century” and when the figures at hand actually applied. Although others outside the UK have since stolen the record, Brink’s Mat undoubtedly remains the richest “accidental” heist in history.
A story that, exactly 40 years after November 26, 1983, is still obscure in many ways. Which left a long trail of blood behind (in this context there was talk of the “Curse of Brink’s Mat”). And that became relevant again in 2015 when the Panama Papers revealed where some of the 6,840 gold bars stolen from a storage facility near Heathrow Airport ended up. Ingots that shouldn’t even have been in this warehouse and that, if not for the robbers, would have left for Amsterdam the next day.
CHAPTER 1: The Robbery
At 6:20 a.m. on November 26, 1983, a Saturday, six armed robbers with their faces covered entered Warehouse 7 at the Heathrow International Trading Estate, not far from London Airport. They know that a million pounds worth of Spanish pesetas are being held in the vault of the maximum security camp. What they don’t know, and will soon find out, is that 6,840 bars of pure gold were temporarily stored outside the vault.
The day before, Brink’s Mat, a company that manages the transportation of valuable goods, from gemstones to antiques, loaded three tons of gold owned by Johnson Mattey Bankers Limited into the warehouse. Once landed at Heathrow, the bars are ready for transport to Amsterdam. However, since there is not enough space in the safe, they are “parked” outside.
The robbers take everything they find. In addition to the gold, they loaded 20 kilos of platinum, diamonds, banknotes and traveler’s checks worth $250,000 onto the blue Ford Transit that was parked outside the warehouse. Total value of the stolen goods: 26 million pounds (around 60 billion lire at the time, equivalent to 115 million euros today). It is the richest robbery in history: the “heist of the century,” as the newspapers immediately called it.
CHAPTER 2: The Investigations
The police seem to be on the right track. After all – according to investigators – the thieves did not know that all the gold was in the deposit; and therefore they did not organize themselves to hide the bars in a safe place or to put them back on the market and convert them into money (a process that, as we will see, is not at all easy).
On December 7, ten days after the robbery, Brian Robinson was arrested at his home in Rotherhite, south-east London. “Colonel” Robinson, already known to police for his involvement in numerous robberies, is the brother-in-law of Anthony Black, who works as a security guard at Warehouse 7 at the Heathrow International Trading Estate. The police just had to put two and two together.
On the same day, Mickey McAvoy was arrested in Herne Hill, less than six miles from Rotherhite. The problem, however, is that there is no trace of the other four robbers. And above all, there is no trace of the gold that has already ended up in the hands of the fences that take care of recycling. The area between south London and nearby Kent is nicknamed the “Bermuda Triangle” because anything that lands in it disappears, never to appear again. It will also be the fate of Brink’s Mat Gold.
– 6,840 bars were stolen from the Heathrow International Trading Estate. CHAPTER 3: How to turn bars into money
Bringing three tons of pure gold back onto the market is no trivial undertaking. First of all, it is necessary to delete the serial numbers of the bars, which allow identification. Then you need to buy more bars and get a receipt so you can move the stolen gold piece by piece. Two characters are missing at this point: a gold dealer who disguises the bars by fusing them with small amounts of copper or other less precious metals; and an importer who uses false documents to certify the origin of the gold.
The robbers entrust Kenneth Noye with money laundering. Noye is 37 years old and has a bit of a precedent. He is the right man for at least two reasons. He is Grand Master of the Hammersmith Masonic Lodge, which also grants him protection within the police. And then he lives in a large house in Kent, surrounded by land where tunnels were dug during the war: the ideal place to hide 6,840 gold bars.
Noye, in turn, turns to John Palmer, who supplies important precious metal companies with gold and jewels with his Scadlynn. He also has no criminal record: in 1980 he was sentenced to a suspended sentence for fraud. Palmer begins camouflage gold in the small secret smelter he has set up in his backyard. The neighbors report the strange smoke coming from the chimney to the police, but the gold dealer gets away scot-free: It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last.
CHAPTER 4: The Crash and the Convictions
The story of Brink’s Mat is like a matryoshka doll in reverse: layer by layer, the matter gets bigger and bigger. The first consequence of the robbery was the collapse of Johnson Matthey Bankers Limited, the owner of the stolen gold, forcing the Bank of England to undertake a complex rescue operation in 1984. Johnson Matthey itself, which traded gold and silver, unknowingly bought back much of the stolen bullion and melted it down in the following months – making matters worse.
The first sentences are now arriving. Brian Robinson, believed to be the leader of the south London gang that planned and carried out the robbery, is sentenced to 25 years in prison. The same fate befalls ex-soldier Mickey “Mad” McAvoy, who, along with Robinson, is the only member of the gang to be arrested.
We have to wait another two years for Kenneth Noye, the “great weaver,” who managed to turn the stolen bars into money. After an initial acquittal, Noye was sentenced to 14 years in prison for criminal conspiracy to traffic in stolen goods. The sentence that the defendant addressed to the jury after his conviction is famous: “I hope you all die of cancer.”
Also in 1986, John Palmer, nicknamed “Goldfinger” like the famous James Bond antagonist, was deported from Brazil and put on trial: he admitted to melting the gold, but denied knowing that it came from a gold mine robbery and was acquitted. Two years later, nine more people were convicted. Among them is lawyer Michael Relton, who is accused of hiding £7.5 million in banks in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
A similar role to Relton was played by Gordon Parry, a property developer who was arrested in Spain on suspicion of laundering £16 million. The verdict came in 1992: 10 years in prison. Parry’s name would recur years later in the Panama Papers (we talk about this in Chapter 6).
– John “Goldfinger” Palmer in a 2007 Spanish police photo CHAPTER 5: The Curse of Brinks Mat
If the Brink’s Mat trials span a decade, the trail of blood left by the “robbery of the century” is much longer. The first to pay the price was Charlie Wilson, believed to be one of the members of the gang who entered Warehouse 7 at the Heathrow International Trading Estate on November 26, 1983 (his involvement was never proven). In 1990, a young man showed up at his house in Marbella, rang the doorbell, killed him and rode away on a yellow bicycle.
Six years later, the name Kenneth Noye appears in the newspapers again, having since returned to freedom. After a car accident, Noye stabbed 21-year-old Stephen Cameron nine times and fled to Spain. He is deported and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, three other shootings were linked to Brink’s Mat. Among the standout deaths was Brian Perry, already sentenced to 10 years in prison for acting as an intermediary between the Brink’s Mat robbers and the Fences had; Nick Whiting, millionaire, former racing driver and great friend of Kenneth Noye; Keith Hedley, another Noye associate, was killed on his yacht docked in Corfu; and private detective Daniel Morgan, who was found in a pub car park with an ax stuck in his skull. Most of these murders still have no perpetrator.
The blood trail closes John Palmer, who has risen to the Olympus of British criminals thanks to a series of frauds. “Goldfinger” had invested his money in Tenerife, built a tourist empire and amassed wealth: it appears his fortune was £400 million, a fortune similar to that of the then Queen Elizabeth II. On June 24, 2015, “Goldfinger” was found dead in the yard of his Essex home, killed by six gunshot wounds.
CHAPTER 6: The Panama Papers and the Docklands
The Panama Papers is a file created by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that contains detailed information on 214,000 offshore companies. When the contents of the documents became known in the press in 2016, Gordon Parry’s name appeared among thousands of names.
The files reconstruct the method used to clean up the stolen gold. Twelve months after the robbery, an offshore financial brokerage firm in Jersey asks Mossack Fonseca to set up a Panamanian company. In this way, Parry transferred over £10 million from Panama to other front companies through banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and the Isle of Man.
And where does the money go? According to the Panama Papers, Parry used the proceeds from the robbery to buy land in the London Docklands, a private women’s college in Gloucestershire, a farm in Kent for Mickey McAvoy’s lover, and a mansion in Kent for himself. It is precisely the fruitful investments in the Docklands, the area on the banks of the Thames where the Port of London once was and today the financial district of Canary Wharf stands, that will increase Brink’s Mat’s profits.
– A scene from the television series «The Gold», dedicated to the Brink’s Mat case. EPILOGUE: The buried gold and the “myth” of Brink’s Mat
Of the 6,840 bars stolen from the warehouse on the outskirts of London, only 11 were found and buried in the garden of Kenneth Noye’s neighbor. Many others were merged. However, according to the Independent, only half of the gold stolen 40 years ago has been returned to the market; the other half simply disappeared and could still be buried somewhere for all we know.
This aura of mystery surrounding the ingots also helped bring the Brink’s Mat robbery and its protagonists into British popular culture. From 1983 to today, two films, five documentaries, two TV series, various books and podcasts have been dedicated to the “heist of the century”. One of these podcasts, The Hunt for the Brink’s Mat Gold, focuses on a little-told figure: that of fixer Shaun Murphy, the British Virgin Islands man who managed both the money from gold sales and the millionaire proceeds from South American narcos.
The latest release in chronological order is the TV series The Gold, also available in Italy on Paramount+. The series reconstructs the story in six episodes by respecting the historical truth and only allowing small dramatizations. We are light years away from the “heist films” of the last twenty years, from the Ocean’s saga to the cult series La Casa de Papel. There perfect plans and infallible strategists, here robbers who have to place 6,840 bars of pure gold from one day to the next. It’s the story of Brink’s Mat, the richest “accidental” heist in history.