12-05-2012, 09:39 PM
And another one, again linking the brutal murder of Morgan with Brinks-MAT.
Again, lots of photos here.
Again, lots of photos here.
Quote:The curse of Brink's Mat: An ex-cop with an axe in his head - and a Great Train Robber shot dead in Marbella
By Wensley Clarkson
PUBLISHED: 22:00, 5 May 2012 | UPDATED: 14:19, 6 May 2012
Comments (57) Share
It was pitch black and icy cold when security guard Richard Holliday arrived to open Unit 7 on a scruffy trading estate near Heathrow Airport.
Inside this nondescript warehouse was one of Britain's biggest secure vaults, used to store currency, precious metals and other high-value consignments.
Four colleagues joined him, but the fifth man rostered for duty, 31-year-old Tony Black, was late and when he finally showed up he looked pale, unkempt and apprehensive.
Aladdin's cave: Unit 7 on the Heathrow trading estate, where the £26 million Brink's-Mat robbery took place in November 1983
Black disappeared, mumbling something about the toilet, but instead went to the front door, where his brother-in-law Brian Robinson and fellow robbers Mad' Mickey McAvoy, Brian Perry and three other men were armed and waiting in a stolen blue Transit van.
Thanks to Black, the robbers knew the vault contained gold, cash and jewellery worth up to £3 million.
They even knew which of the two security guards had the combination numbers for the safes inside.
It was Saturday, November 26 1983, and what followed on that chilly morning still reverberates today.
The Brink's-Mat bullion remains the biggest and most notorious heist ever to take place on these shores.
Worth a staggering £500 million at today's gold prices, the robbery transformed not just Britain's criminal underworld but the face of Britain itself, its tentacles helping to unleash a tide of illegal drugs and accompanying violence.
The double-strength Ecstasy that killed schoolgirl Leah Betts in 1995 was almost certainly brought into Britain using the Brink's-Mat proceeds.
The consequences have been devastating, too, for the gangsters who took part in the crime of the century'.
The Brink's-Mat gold has claimed more than 20 lives so far, with countless more lives ruined. Some have been shot dead as a warning to the rest of the underworld; others disappeared without trace.
As the 30th anniversary of the robbery approaches, there is no sign that the killings are going to stop.
Fugitive: Kenneth Noye, who was jailed for handling the Brink's-Mat bullion, being arrested in Spain in 1998 over the 'road-rage' murder of Stephen Cameron
Only one third of the bullion has been recovered and the case remains open.
Even today, a new generation of British gangsters are locked in a vicious battle for the remaining ingots which, they believe, now lie secreted in the lock-ups of South-East London or the fields of Kent.
One by one those involved have been being picked off like targets in a funfair shooting gallery,' says one of the police detectives involved in the original investigation.
No wonder so many of those touched by the robbery believe they have been cursed.
The first the security guards inside Unit 7 knew of the raid was when a man in a yellow balaclava pointed a semi-automatic pistol at their faces and told them all to hit the floor.
Believing it to be a colleague playing a practical joke, Peter Bentley continued to make the tea.
Without a word, the gunman coshed Bentley with the Browning Automatic and he fell to the floor.
The guards were cuffed and bound at the shins with heavy-duty tape. Cloth bags with strings were then pulled down over the their heads.
The two security men who held the combinations were soon identified.
One of them had his trousers pulled down and petrol poured in his lap. He was warned a match would be lit and a bullet put in his head.
The double-strength Ecstasy that killed schoolgirl Leah Betts in 1995 was almost certainly brought into Britain using the Brink's-Mat proceeds
Terrified, one guard punched in his half of the combination to the vault before his colleague was pushed forward to complete the sequence, but the numbers had just been changed by the company.
Only after 20 terrifying minutes with a gun in his back did he get the code right.
It was shortly before 7am when the gang finally stepped inside the vault, where fluorescent lighting revealed a carpet of drab grey containers, no bigger than shoeboxes.
Inside each container were 12 perfectly formed bars of pure gold. The robbers prised off a few more lids to reveal the same awesome sight.
There were a total of 6,800 gold bars, weighing three-and-a-half tons and worth £26,369,778.
They also found hundreds of thousands of pounds, travellers' cheques and rough diamonds it was an Aladdin's cave of treasure.
The atmosphere was electric as the thugs hurriedly began passing bars of gold to their battered Transit. It was not long before the vehicles axles were bending under the weight.
More than one eyewitness later reported seeing an old van with a wheezing engine riding very low on its suspension through the streets of Hounslow.
Rather than disappear in the days following the robbery, McAvoy a Bermondsey-born crook and the leader of the gang told the others to make sure they were seen around their usual haunts. If they went to ground it would be sure to alert the police.
None of the gang had experience with gold.
So it was not surprising, as word spread across the underworld, that various top London villains, or faces', let it be known that they would be pitching for the rights' to turn all that gold into ready cash.
The robbery was the simple bit,' one criminal said.
Now the real fun begins.'
The police soon made the connection between Tony Black, the inside man' and Robinson, his brother-in-law. Eight days later, Black admitted his involvement and fingered three of the gang:
Robinson, McAvoy and another South-London hood called Tony White.
Initially, McAvoy was cautious but he then made a classic error by leaving his council house in Dulwich, South London and moving into a mansion on the Kent border.
He also bought two rottweilers and named them Brink's and Mat.
Other gang members were irritated by his clumsiness'.
Eleven days after the robbery, Robinson, McAvoy and White were arrested and later charged with robbery.
Black was sentenced to six years' imprisonment with a warning from the judge: Never again will you be safe . . . You and your family will forever be fugitives from those you so stupidly and so wickedly helped.'
Then, in November 1984, after a month-long trial, McAvoy and Robinson were found guilty of robbery and each sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment. White was found not guilty.
The sheer size of the Brink's-Mat haul of gold bullion had created a huge problem because the gang needed a conduit through which the gold could travel. It had to be smelted, disguised and sold back into the gold industry before it could be turned into cash.
The robbers had to look outside their close circle of associates to find people to handle the gold, and here they made a big mistake.
Villains who had known each other for years were now having to put their trust in people such as Kent crime boss Kenneth Noye, who had convinced McAvoy and Robinson he was the best man to help them turn the gold into cash.
The other main player was a 31-year-old businessman' from Bath called John Palmer. He was dubbed Goldfinger' after he was accused and cleared of dishonestly handling gold from the Brink's-Mat robbery.
At first, Noye was as good as his word. His mob generated a torrent of money for the gang.
In the four months following the robbery, one bank handled transactions of more than £10 million, mainly held in grubby plastic bags.
But it was while Noye was plotting how to convert yet more of the Brink's-Mat gold into cash with a South London crook called Brian Reader that the Brink's-Mat villains hit their second major setback.
By January 1985, Noye, already under suspicion, was being watched by undercover officers, including Detective Constable John Fordham.
When he and a colleague moved on to the grounds of Noye's isolated home in West Kingsdown, Kent, dressed in camouflage gear, disaster struck.
Noye's dogs started barking and Fordham found himself fighting their knife-wielding owner. Fordham suffered at least ten stab wounds and died two hours later. Reader fled.
After Fordham's death, his colleagues discovered a hugely significant piece of evidence linking Noye and Reader to the Brink's-Mat case. Lying in a shallow gully beside the garage wall, were 11 gold bars wrapped in red-and-white cloth.
Some of the same red-and-white material was later discovered in Noye's Ford Granada, and operating instructions for a smelting furnace were also found in Noye's apple store.
Officers were astonished to discover that Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey was primed to play on the stereo system whenever anyone walked into Noye's lounge.
Around this time another of the suspected Brink's-Mat robbers, George Georgie Boy' Francis, was shot in his pub by a gunman who escaped on a motorbike.
Francis survived after an operation to remove a 9mm bullet from his shoulder, but the message had been sent loud and clear to all those connected with Brink's-Mat who had not yet been sent to prison. Keep your trap shut.
By this time, police believed that at least half the gold had been smelted and sold back to legitimate dealers, including Johnson Matthey, to whom, ironically, it belonged in the first place.
Meanwhile the remaining gold, worth at least £10 million, was, they believed, buried and undiscovered.
Detectives eventually traced the proceeds of the robbery to the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Spain and Florida.
Increasing amounts continued to be invested in property in the London Docklands redevelopment boom of the mid-Eighties.
A portion was even used to buy a former section of Cheltenham Ladies' College, which was then converted into flats that eventually sold for £1.6 million. Brink's-Mat money was poured into property developments on the Costa del Sol.
Noye and Reader were found not guilty of the murder of DC Fordham but five months later both were jailed in 1986 for handling stolen bullion.
It was in jail that Noye became convinced that there was a fortune to be made from Ecstasy. The days of armed robberies were numbered.
Security vans were monitored with radar by the police, and it was virtually impossible to rob a bank.
As a result, drugs were emerging as the main criminal currency. Ecstasy could be sold to teenagers as user-friendly, although its known side effects, including panic attacks and heart problems, soon became evident.
Noye and the Brink's-Mat team could smell a real earner with E. It had the potential to give them a return of ten times on the gold bullion money they would invest in it.
Moreover, the investigation into Brink's-Mat was progressing; bank accounts and assets were steadily being frozen.
Inside Swaleside Prison in Kent, Noye soon spread the word. From the late Eighties to early Nineties, Brink's-Mat cash would deluge Britain with Ecstasy.
One of the detectives involved in the Brink's-Mat inquiry explained: There is absolutely no doubt that the flood of Ecstasy into Britain started largely because of the Brink's-Mat cash that was floating around.'
The Ecstasy tablet that killed 18-year-old Leah Betts after an evening out in Raquel's nightclub in Basildon, Essex in November 1995 had been supplied by a gang controlled by Pat Tate, Noye's associate and minder' when the pair were in jail.
Leah's friend Stephen Smith had obtained four tablets and gave one to Leah because it was her birthday. Neither had realised the tablets were double-strength.
The gang's contacts inside Kent Constabulary and the Metropolitan Police remained invaluable.
While still in prison, Noye was tipped off that, together, the police and the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) were targeting him along with other members of the Brink's-Mat gang.
Noye was told that they almost had enough evidence to implicate him in a huge drug deal. Noye pulled out of the deal and a costly six-month investigation was abandoned.
On his release from jail, Tate ran Essex's main Ecstasy supply route after getting financial backing from Noye and other Brink's-Mat gang members.
The gold from the heist was almost single-handedly helping finance the huge influx of the designer drug into Britain.
In 1995, Tate was one of three men found shot in a Range Rover in the Essex countryside. They had been lured there by another Brink's-Mat associate to inspect a landing site for aircraft carrying Ecstasy.
Interviews with the police and criminals suggest that Tate wasn't averse to horse-trading with the police. Was the Brink's-Mat gang's involvement in the Ecstasy trade one of the titbits' that he offered them?
The death toll of those linked to the Brink's-Mat robbery continued to climb as the years went on. In 1987 ex-policeman Daniel Morgan was found with an axe embedded in his skull in a South London car park.
It was known that he had encountered Noye and his associates. The Brink's-Mat curse even touched on the Great Train Robbery gang of 1963.
One of them, Charlie Wilson, found himself in trouble when £3 million of Brink's-Mat investors' money went missing in a drug deal.
In April 1990, he paid the price when a young British hood knocked on the front door of his hacienda north of Marbella and shot Wilson and his pet husky dog before coolly riding off down the hill on a yellow bicycle.
Over the next three years, four more shootings were connected to the Brink's-Mat raid.
Noye was released from prison in the summer of 1994 but in March 2000 was jailed for life for the M25 road-rage' murder of motorist Stephen Cameron, committed four years earlier.
From 1994 to 1997, five more gangland deaths were attributed in some way to Brink's-Mat.
The murder of a witness in the Noye road-rage case in October 2000 left another bloody mark.
In November 2001, the shooting in broad daylight of Brink's-Mat robber Brian Perry, 63, as he got out of his car in Bermondsey, South-East London, sent a shiver of fear through the underworld. Perry had been murdered right in the heart of his home territory'.
One source close to the gang told me: Certain people wanted their share of the gold and when it wasn't there waiting for them, they started getting very upset.'
The cycle of death continued. A few months after Perry's murder, two of his oldest associates were murdered separately near the Kent ports of Chatham and Rochester.
Then, on May 14, 2003, Brink's-Mat gang member George Francis, 63, was gunned down at point-blank range as he sat in his car outside the courier business he ran in South-East London.
When, more recently, a bodybuilder confessed to being the dismemberer' for the notorious Adams family, it became clear that some of the bodies he had disposed of were murdered because of their links to Brink's-Mat.
Stephen Marshall, 38, had originally been arrested after stabbing a former work colleague to death and cutting his body into pieces. When the body was first discovered it led to the case being known as the Jigsaw Murder.
Marshall stunned detectives by alleging that he'd hacked up four other bodies while working for Terry Adams one of the men responsible for laundering the Brink's-Mat gold.
As one senior detective who worked on and off on the Brink's-Mat investigation for more than 20 years commented: Nothing really surprises us any more when it comes to Brink's-Mat.
These villains were out of control, many of them off their heads on drugs bought with their new-found riches.
The trouble was that when that money either ran out, or in the case of some of them, never materialised, there was only one way to respond and that was to kill people to show others that even 25 years after the robbery was committed, if they dared to cross the gang they would still pay for it with their life.'
The Brink's-Mat villains' epic conversion of gold into cash brought more money into this country than any other gang of criminals in history.
And when they spent it, they often helped keep legitimate businesses afloat in the poorer areas of South-East London, as well Spain's Costa del Sol.
At most detectives only ever laid their hands on about 30 per cent of the stolen gold. The rest of it has gone up more than one hundred-fold in value since the heist in 1983.
There remains a hard core of 250 premier league' criminals at the top of the British underworld, many of whom are constantly tracked by the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS).
This includes at least three members of the Brink's-Mat gang, still active after all these years.
But Brink's-Mat also marked the end of an era in British crime. Robbery was overtaken by far more lucrative, straightforward enterprises such as drugs, arms dealing and racketeering, even people smuggling.
One former detective, who spent five years working on the Brink's-Mat inquiry, is convinced that a large amount of gold from the robbery lies hidden, and that at least two of today's younger London gangs have started breaking a few arms' in a bid to locate it.
He said: It's well known that some of the gold is still out there and I understand a couple of really nasty gangs of younger villains have decided to do everything in their power to find it,' he said.
It's going to go on long after every single bar of gold has either been recovered or turned into cash because there are a lot of people out there who believe the Brink's-Mat robbery owes them a living.'
TURNING INGOTS INTO UNTOLD MILLIONS Melting pot: The smelter found at the home of John Palmer
The Brink's-Mat gang quickly realised that gold bullion is no use if you can't spend it, so Kenneth Noye had no difficulty in convincing them that he could help them turn the gold bars into hard cash.
It was a complex operation involving both money laundering and the melting down of the gold. But there seems little doubt that the money it generated helped the Kent crime boss turn his favourite Mediterranean haven in northern Cyprus into a smaller but much more dangerous version of the Costa del Crime.
Money from Brink's-Mat was used not only to set up timeshare resorts and build hotels in Cyprus, but also to help gangsters with links to the robbery to buy mansions on the island.
Along a five-mile stretch of the coast between the port of Kyrenia and the town of Lapta, South-East London villains adopted a champagne lifestyle behind the gates of their luxury homes, similar to that once enjoyed by British crooks in southern Spain.
Among them was the secluded £2 million villa of Dogan Arif, unofficial leader of the Arif gangland family who terrorised South London with their robbing and drug-trafficking operations in the Eighties.
They also played a role in handling much of the Brink's-Mat gold.
One of the problems with the gold was that its purity would quickly arouse suspicion if attempts were made to sell it to legitimate traders.
That's where Noye and his knowledge of the smelting trade came in.
The high-grade ingots were melted down and mixed with copper to disguise the quality.
The trick was so successful that the Assay Office in Sheffield even stamped its seal on some of the cleverly doctored gold.
A smelter was later found at the home of Bath businessman John Palmer, but he was cleared of any involvement.
Palmer, who often wore body armour, was eventually convicted of timeshare fraud and was jailed for eight years.
Quote:DEADLY ROLL CALLDONALD URQUART A money launderer who was taken out by a professional hitman in West London.
DANIEL MORGAN Ex-cop who delved too far into the Brink's-Mat aftermath and got an axe through his head.
CHARLIE WILSON
The Great Train Robber lost £3m of Brink's-Mat money on a drugs shipment and was shot.
NICK WHITING
It was claimed he had opened up' to police. His mutilated body was found stabbed nine times and he'd been shot.
JOEY WILKINS
Fraudster and vice king. Secretly acted on behalf of the police. Died mysteriously after an apparent robbery.
JON BRISTOW
Made the mistake of knowing one of the robbers and it cost him his life. Bought a boat shortly before his death.
JOHN FORDHAM
The detective constable was stabbed to death at Noye's Kent mansion in 1985.
STEPHEN CAMERON
Stabbed to death by Kenneth Noye in front of girlfriend Danielle Cable, pictured with him.
SOLLY NAHOME
Financial adviser to the notorious Adams family. Gunned down by a motorcyclist in London in 1998.
© Wensley Clarkson 2012.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."
Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war