Stephen Lawrence - justice denied by criminal corruption?

[Jan Klimkowski]

Follow the money.

Swindler ran empire with army of thugs

By John Steele

12:00AM BST 24 May 2001

Daily Telegraph


JOHN PALMER, a semi-literate former market trader and scrap dealer, built a reputed fortune of more than £300 million. Some was earned from legitimate timeshare developments and jewellery trading but much, police suspect, came from swindles, violence, racketeering and money laundering.

Until now, he had escaped jail. He was acquitted in 1987 of handling gold bullion from the £26 million Brink's-Mat raid - a case which earned him the nickname Goldfinger - and has twice been given suspended jail sentences for minor frauds.

Yesterday, however, he was jailed for eight years for masterminding a huge timeshare fraud. Palmer rose from a deprived childhood in Birmingham to enjoy a life of yachts - including the £6 million Brave Goose - executive jets, helicopters, fast cars and personal security guards.

He controlled a timeshare empire based in Tenerife from behind a labyrinth of companies and expanded his empire with the help of a small army of thugs. In the mid-1980s, he was one of a group of men thrust into the public spotlight in the inquiry into the robbery of three tons of gold from a Brink's-Mat depot at Heathrow in November 1983.

Police followed the trail of the bullion to the West Country and Scadlynn, a gold and jewellery dealing company set up by Palmer and a fellow director, Garth Chappell. Scadlynn was at the heart of the operation to disguise and pass the bullion back on to the legitimate gold market.

Palmer's British home was a Georgian house, Battlefields, built by the noted Bath architect John Wood the Younger, near Lansdown, outside Bath. He shared it with his wife, Marnie, and two daughters.

He also had a home in Spain, and was living there in 1985 when the police moved in on those suspected of handling the Brink's-Mat gold. He was one of 20 wanted men named later that year by Scotland Yard at the invitation of the Spanish interior government.

However, a new law introduced by Spain stating that fugitives could remain in the country only with a valid passport forced him to look elsewhere when his passport ran out in 1986. After failing to get into Brazil he returned instead to England to face trial for handling Brink's-Mat gold.

Despite a hidden gold smelter at his home, and clear links to Scadlynn, the Old Bailey jury accepted his assertion that he did not know he was smelting Brink's-Mat ingots, and acquitted him. Chappell was jailed for 10 years. Palmer was later forced to pay a substantial sum to loss adjustors acting for Brink's-Mat.

He returned to Spain, where it was clear that he had struck another sort of gold in Tenerife. He had started with £30,000 borrowed from his brother and was by then reportedly investing £5 million in 450 timeshare villas capable of earning him £72 million.

His army of touts, mostly Britons seeking employment, promised free champagne and children's gifts to entice holidaymakers to buy time in the villas. They even persuaded holidaymakers to invest in timeshare apartments yet to be built. Palmer sold time in apartments that could only be built with holidaymakers' money.

The empire was run by intimidation and violence. Intelligence from the National Police and the paramilitary Civil Guard, disclosed in the Spanish media, is said to link him and his associates to swindles, protection rackets and extortion, death threats, violent attacks, as well as money laundering and dealing with the Russian mafia.

His name was a common denominator in cases of violence on the streets and in the shady nightspots of Playa de las Americas and the neighbouring resort of Los Cristianos. Incident after incident involved a group of men identified as John Palmer's "security men". Palmer often wore body armour.

There were attacks with knives and baseball bats, cars were set on fire and properties smashed up. There were also stabbings and on one occasion a Briton was shot dead in a turf war between rival timeshare businesses. Touts from other timeshare companies were forced to pay extortion money to operate and protection money was demanded from bars selling sex and drugs.

If threats or violence from Palmer's henchmen did not work, they could call in two South American heavyweights, who drove around the resort in a black limousine and were known as The Sharks. One of Palmer's companies had sales offices in Russia whose methods, according to a National Police report, "used tactics more appropriate to a mafia organisation than to the rule of law".

In 1994, The Cook Report television programme secretly recorded Palmer offering to launder up to £60 million a year for an investigator posing as a heroin trafficker. Palmer demanded a 25 per cent commission, saying: "I'm not cheap, but I'm good."

The Cook dossier was delivered to Scotland Yard, where sources said there was "cogent intelligence" that Palmer was involved in laundering drug money. But clear evidence also emerged of timeshare fraud. Roy Ramm, then a commander in the Metropolitan Police's specialist operations department, concentrated on the fraud.

"I had to make a decision on what was the best way to spend public money. It's a bit like Al Capone. They got him on tax."

Seven years later, Palmer - representing himself at the Old Bailey - accused detectives of waging a vendetta against him because of his acquittal in 1987. Mr Ramm rejected this in the witness box. At least four times during Palmer's questioning of him, Mr Ramm described Palmer as "a serious organised criminal".

The former officer said yesterday: "It was all a red herring. As a commander, I had a duty to spend public money chasing the criminals who most deserved it. In my view, he was exactly that."

Monday, 26 January, 2004, 17:30 GMT


Following the Brinks money trail


The Brinks robbery remains an underworld legend

Two days after Robinson and McAvoy were jailed at the Old Bailey Garth Chappell withdrew £348,000 from Scadlynn's account at Barclays Bank in Bedminster, Bristol.
Over the next three weeks he withdrew another £1.1m from the same account.

The withdrawals were actually going on throughout the trial.

In total about £13m was paid into the account of Scadlynn.

The money was paid by respectable gold merchants, such as Johnson Matthey and Engelhards, for large amounts of gold.

Unbeknown to the buyers, the gold had been smelted from the high-grade Brinks Mat gold - using a smelter purchased from a foundry in Worcestershire - and mixed with copper to disguise its origins.

The Assay Office in Sheffield, which is responsible for handing out hallmarks to jewellers and gold merchants, had been an unwitting accomplice in the scam.

Scadlynn approached the Assay Office with the newly smelted gold and received a seal of approval, effectively given the "dirty gold" a clean bill of health.

While police were soon onto the robbers - Micky McAvoy and Brian Robinson were arrested 10 days after the raid - it took them much longer to get a lead on the gold.


Noye was acquitted of murdering PC Fordham

In January 1985, as they closed in on Kenneth Noye - one of those brought in to help with the smelting and laundering process - he stabbed to death PC John Fordham in the grounds of his Kent home as he conducted surveillance.

Noye was later acquitted of murder on the grounds of self-defence, having argued he thought the masked man in the darkness was a burglar.

But Noye, along with Chappell and two others, was later jailed for handling stolen gold.

The conviction of Noye and Chappell was by no means the end of the affair.

Brian Perry, an old friend of McAvoy, and his pal Gordon Parry began taking flights to Jersey, the Isle of Man, Switzerland, Spain and the United States.


Anthony White was found personally liable for £26m

A crooked solicitor, Michael Relton, also became a major conduit.
They paid money into newly created bank accounts, purchased plots of land on the Costa del Sol.

One account, in a bank in Liechtenstein, was in the name of the Moyet Foundation. Perry apparently named it in honour of his favourite brand of champagne, Moet & Chandon, but misspelt it.

In 1985 Anthony White, who had been acquitted of the robbery the previous year, bought a £146,000 house in Beckenham, Kent with cash.

Mr McCunn said: "In the autumn of 1986 the police had discovered the property empire created using the robbery proceeds, and the involvement of Relton.


The proceeds of the robbery are still circulating and have gone up 10 times in value. The cash has been invested in everything from ecstasy smuggling to building projects.


"Almost his first reaction on being arrested was to talk to the loss adjusters. We assumed he feared a long sentence, and hoped to reduce it by co-operating and assisting in the recovery."

Relton provided the police and Shaw & Croft with detailed information about bank accounts and property and gave the latter letters of authority to overseas banks so they could collect evidence directly.

He stopped co-operating after receiving threats, but Shaw & Croft already had enough detail - and the crucial letters of authority - and they went about freezing various bank accounts and assets both in the UK and abroad.


Gordon Parry: Took frequent flights to Zurich

Most of these - including an oil well in Kansas - were eventually recovered by Mr McCunn's team.

But Noye's biographer, Wensley Clarkson, told BBC News Online: "There is still a lot of gold which has never been turned into hard currency.

"The proceeds of the robbery are still circulating and have gone up 10 times in value. The cash has been invested in everything from ecstasy smuggling to building projects."

He said: "The value of the robbery - £26m - would be worth about £100m in today's terms and it has not all gone on parties and drugs."

But Mr Clarkson said there was something of a curse on the money: "A lot of people have paid the ultimate price for keeping hold of the money. Some people were upset that they did not get their fair share of the loot."

Conman keeps £33m after court blunderComments

[URL="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-182085/Conman-keeps-33m-court-blunder.html#ixzz1us3OfIwe
"]Daily Mail[/URL]

Fury has erupted after a blunder by judges allowed Britain's biggest conman to keep £33 million he swindled from vulnerable pensioners.

Fraudster John "Goldfinger" Palmer had the money seized after being jailed for eight years for a bogus Tenerife timeshare scam. Palmer's slick salesmen ripped off an estimated 17,000 victims - many of them pensioners who lost their life savings hoping to enjoy their retirement in a holiday home in the sun.

After being jailed for eight years at the Old Bailey and losing his cash, Palmer ordered his lawyers to go to the Court of Appeal last July over a £33,243,812 confiscation order and the cash was given back on the basis that there had been crucial flaws in the procedure followed.

On Friday, Lord Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice, ruled that the court had "misunderstood and misapplied" the law and Palmer's case had been "wrongly decided".

But Palmer will still keep his cash.

Appeal judges last November blocked an attempt by the Director of Public Prosecutions to take the case to the House of Lords - the only court with power to quash the ruling.

As a result they cannot overturn the decision to quash the confiscation order - so Palmer will keep the proceeds from the crime.

Norman Brennan, a serving police officer and director of the Victims of Crime Trust, said: "Who has got any faith left in the British criminal justice system?

"Who said crime doesn't pay? It's never paid so well for Palmer. A lot of vulnerable people, who worked hard all their lives lost their life savings and at the end of the day his sentence, eight years, was not that long anyway."
Palmer, in Belmarsh Prison, south London, is now the richest category A high security inmate in prison history.