At the resulting trial, the jury found him not guilty. Scotland Yard quickly discovered the family connection and Black confessed to aiding and abetting the raiders, providing them with a key to the main door, and giving them details of security measures.

The bad checks eventually caught up with him and he was arrested in Medellin. Rowley was put in the Buenavista prison in Medellin, where he spent over five years. This is when The Mick and Rowley started a correspondence. Rowley didn’t hang around for the drama that followed the robbery.

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According to the police spokesman, the bars were gold-coated tungsten counterfeits, and therefore could not be Johnson Matthey’s stolen gold bars. He said that the arrested men planned to fraudulently claim they were from the Heathrow robbery. No explanation was given as to how the counterfeiters obtained the unpublished bar serial numbers, nor the likely benefit of counterfeiting stolen property in this way. Attempts by McAvoy to strike a deal to give back his share of the money in exchange for a reduced sentence failed, as by then the money had vanished. In January 1995, the High Court ordered McAvoy to make a payment of £27,488,299, making him responsible for the entire sum stolen. Gang leader Micky McAvoy was arrested and sentenced to 25 years. Also arrested were Brian Robinson and security guard / inside man Anthony Black.

Noye served eight years for handling the bullion and later copped a life term for a 1996 road rage attack. But it nearly ended in disaster when the van broke down and a police car drove by.” As well as the gold, the robbers stole 20-kilo bars of platinum, travellers’ cheques and cash worth around £400,000. At that time, Robinson was a 40-year-old career criminal who had served several prison sentences and was on a Flying Squad list of London’s 20 most prolific armed robbers. McAvoy wanted members of the Arif crime family, specialists in armed robbery, on the job. In 1990, the former treasurer of the Great Train Robbery, Charlie Wilson, had moved to Marbella, Spain, where he was suspected of being involved in drug smuggling. Engaged to launder some of the proceeds from the Brink’s-Mat robbery, he lost the investors £3 million. On 21 December 1983, less than four weeks after the robbery, police in Austria arrested five men, four Italians and an Austrian, at a Vienna hotel.

The bullion was the property of Johnson Matthey Bankers Ltd, which collapsed the following year after making large loans to frauds and insolvent firms. Two men were convicted, contra asset account and the majority of the gold has never been recovered. Insurers Lloyd’s of London paid out for the losses, and several deaths have been linked to the case.

The bank had made very large loans to fraudsters and insolvent businesses over several years, and had serious and unexplained gaps in its records. The fraud squad micky mcavoy was called in to investigate the bank and certain customers. In January 1985 he killed a police officer, DC John Fordham, who he had discovered in his garden.

Chappell was found to have withdrawn £348,000 from the company accounts only two days after the armed robbers, Brian Robinson and Micky McAvoy, were put in jail. Over the course of the trial, a total withdrawal of £1.1 million had been taken from the account. First NameMickyLast NameMcAvoyNationalityBritish»Mad» Micky McAvoy is a convicted English armed robber who was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1984 for heading up the Brink’s-MAT robbery.

Palmer had made his way from market trader to a multimillionaire through fraud, money laundering, and racketeering. He is most infamous for melting petty cash down gold bars that had been a part of the £26million Brink’s-Mat burglary in 1983. Palmer’s estranged wife, Marnie lives in the West Country.

He was formally arrested as he stepped off the plane at Heathrow, not far from the scene of the heist seven years earlier. Centre Services were no longer of use as company administrators. These new administrators would not be as easily spooked by the attentions of UK police. Mossack Fonseca, meanwhile, took the role of legal advisers. Through one Jersey company he bought Kathleen Meacock, girlfriend of robbery ringleader McAvoy, a Kent farmhouse, where she settled with her two rottweilers, Brinks and Mat. Then, a short drive from Meacock’s home, Parry used Feberion to buy a £400,000 home for himself and his family. This laundering chain rapidly generated millions in cash.

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The so-called «Curse of Brink’s-Mat» or «Curse of the Brink’s-Mat millions» refers to the early deaths of many of those allegedly involved. These deaths were theorised by members of the London criminal underworld of being related to laundering of the gold. Much of the three tonnes of stolen gold has never been recovered and the other four robbers were never convicted. In 1996 about half of the gold, the portion which had been melted and recast, was thought to have found its way back into the legitimate gold market, including the reserves of the true owners, Johnson Matthey. According to the BBC, some have claimed that anyone wearing gold jewellery bought in the UK after 1983 is probably wearing Brink’s-Mat. Tried at the Old Bailey in December 1984, McAvoy was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for armed robbery.

A scramble of double-cross and murder played out over the years. Insiders were knocked off while the criminal establishment of South London melted down and sold the gold. Palmer had managed to stay away from being arrested at the time after he fled to Tenerife with his family only days before his company had been raided and it’s two directors were arrested. His family had gone back to England while he was busy setting up a timeshare business at the Island Village close to Playa de las Americas after selling the remaining assets. Palmer used to run a gold and jewelry dealing company called Scadlynn Ltd with his business partners Garth Chappell and Terence Patch in Bedminster, Bristol.

• In 1990, after more than three years on the run, Parry was found by police outside Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol and brought back to Britain.
• On 4 November 2003, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary on the events of the raid.
• They were convicted of handling stolen bullion after 11 bars of gold were found.
• Rowley didn’t hang around for the drama that followed the robbery.
• In court, Palmer said he was unaware the gold was linked to the robbery and he was cleared of all charges.

She had to hand over a pounds 250,000 farmhouse in Kent. He was also the money man for the notorious Adams crime family. Police do not believe his murder was linked to Brink’s-Mat and are now investigating a prime suspect. Their only hope of avoiding spending the best years of their lives behind steel bars was to hand over the gold bars. If passing police had looked closer early that Saturday morning on November 26, 1983, they would have noticed the van was weighted down below its wheel arches — with three tons of gold.

Episode 94: John Mcavoy

McAvoy refused to speak on the programme, but gave the TV company a home video of his 1986 prison wedding to second wife Kathy. This week marks the 20th anniversary of the robbery, and a two-part Channel 4 documentary called Brinks-Mat — The Greatest Heist will tell the full story. It is unclear whether that debt was connected to Brink’s-Mat.

I’m writing a book about the aftermath of the Brinks-Mat robbery and I wondered if you could drop me a line. The next The Mick heard of Rowley was that he was in a Bogota jail cell. A security manager for one of the hotels he defrauded recognized him drinking a beeer at a tienda and called the police. Within a week Rowley had money for booze and coke and was having sex with the institute manager’s wife.

Robinson claimed he was visiting his mum in Kent on the morning of the robbery. And to this day friends insist the mastermind of the robbery was not on the job itself. The story of the stolen loot may have ended almost as soon as it began, as the gang’s blue Ford Transit van broke down on London’s Earl’s Court Road shortly after the raid. In 1992, a made-for-television film called Fool’s Gold based on the robbery was released with McAvoy portrayed by Sean Bean.

Micky Mcavoy Brinks Mat Robbery

What happened to John was that he got himself addicted to the pipe and whores. I saw him with my own two eyes, I saw him with 5 whores in the same bed which I had to pay for. He had one of the greatest criminal minds I`ve ever known `n` that`s saying something. I`d like to know where his father `n` his stepbrother were killed because he never mentioned anything about his family to me. He mentioned the Kray Twins, he mentioned the other fellas from London but I know one thing he robbed me `n` I forgave him but he shouldn`t`ve done that `n` he knew it. Is new to me but then again John Rowley was new to me too. According to what I know John Rowley was murdered in La 10 with 10 in the centre of Bogota and the guy who murdered him was a friend of mine whom after this event was also murdered.

A fax to Jersey regretted to say one of the preferred names, “Midas Inc” – seemingly a joke – was not available. The next day, the more discreet Feberion Inc was chosen.

Meanwhile, at least half a dozen killings – including the 1985 stabbing of an undercover police officer – have been connected to the band of criminals who battled among themselves for decades for control of the bullion. Faxes, memos and company filings from deep in the firm’s archives show how, in the late 1980s, Jürgen Mossack played a vital role in advising – unwittingly at first – fugitive money launderer Gordon Parry. Ex-convict John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer’s life of crime came to an end in 2015 when he was killed in his own garden by an unidentified assassin who has never been located since. John was risking a 16 year sentence by going to trial, but just two days before he was due for his day in court, the prosecution realized the case was flimsy at best, and instead offered him a plea bargain. John accepted the plea bargain, a five year sentence. “The prison officers respected me, the prisoners respected me, and I was proud of what I’d achieved. It feeds into itself,” he says of his time behind bars.

After being sent to prison in Bogota for trafficking cocaine, The Mick heard of a John Rowley locked up in Medellin. They became pen pals around 1986 and briefly met in 1990 after The Mick was released. He visited Rowley where he was finishing his sentence in Ibague. In 1990, after more than three years on the run, Parry was found by police outside Fuengirola on the Costa del Sol and brought back to Britain.

“Before my mom met my father she grew up in south-east London in a place called Peckham. She got married when she was 18 to a man called Billy. He’d been a normal guy up until then, but that sent him totally went off the rails. He eventually became Britain’s most prolific armed robber and a multimillionaire at 21,” John says. In part one of this special two part episode of Xero Gravity, Alice Brine finds out about the years cycling in and out of prison that led McAvoy to the crossroads that would ultimately change his life forever. By clicking OK, you are confirming that this image is only to be used for the rights in the existing license. Hamza, who is now serving a life term in the United States, left a Koran on McAvoy’s bed in his cell when both were incarcerated in Belmarsh high-security prison.

Author: Justin D Smith