IT was an offer I could refuse. John “Goldfinger” Palmer, Britain’s richest criminal, sat surrounded by court papers at a desk in front of me and he wanted my help.
This confident geezer was the petty crook who went on to be worth £300million — as wealthy as the Queen.
John Palmer with wife Marnie in Tenerife where he ran a controversial timeshare empire
John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer claimed to be a ‘good businessman not a gangster’
He flew everywhere in his Learjet or a helicopter, owned a chateau in France, a huge property empire, a yacht and a fleet of supercars.
Yet on this cold day in early 2001 we were in a pokey little office near St Paul’s Cathedral just around the corner from the Old Bailey where he would soon be on trial for the largest timeshare scam ever.
Goldfinger was wearing a pin-striped Savile Row suit, deliberately-tailored a size too big because he always wore a bullet-proof vest under his hand-made shirt.
He’d summoned me for the meeting because at the time I had ducked out of journalism and was carving a new vocation in PR and word had reached him.
I was curious to see him up close so agreed.
He looked up at me and fixed me with an earnest look: “I want you to become my public relations man.
“I want you to tell the world that I am just a good businessman. I’m not a gangster.”
Not a gangster? It was all I could do to not burst out laughing.
For a quarter of a century, Palmer used proceeds from the £26million Brink’s-Mat robbery to bankroll an international crime organisation to rival the Mafia.
So many corrupt police, judges and politicians at home and abroad were on his payroll that the Met set up a top-secret investigation team at an RAF base 300 miles from London to avoid crooked cops being able to tip him off.
Attacked and terrorised
He even swindled 16,000 people — many of them Sun readers — out of their life savings, making a staggering £30million.
I never figured out exactly why Goldfinger asked me to be his mouthpiece because, as a journalist, I had followed his villainy for years.
Thirty years ago, dozens of Sun readers began telling us how they had been ripped off in a timeshare scam run by Palmer in Tenerife.
And when they complained Palmer’s hired thugs, dubbed the Clumpers, attacked and terrorised them to keep quiet.
Palmer’s despicable rise from petty criminal to Godfather has been thrust back into the spotlight in two new BBC shows — six-part TV series The Gold, which starts on Sunday and a new Gangster podcast, charting his rise and eventual lethal fall.
The Gold stars Tom Cullen as Palmer, while Hugh Bonneville plays Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce, who led the police investigation into the Brink’s-Mat raid.
Bonneville said: “Boycie ran a very tight unit.”
The drama tells the incredible story of how in 1983 a gang of vicious London villains expected to steal millions in foreign currency from the Brink’s- Mat high-security depot at Heathrow in London.
But they came away with 8,600 high-grade gold ingots worth an astonishing £26MILLION — £100million at today’s prices.
BBC podcast Gangster: The Story Of John Palmer chronicles how the small-time crook melted two tons of ingots from the Brink’s-Mat heist in a furnace at his home near Bath.
The plan was to disguise the gold, which ended up in much of the jewellery sold in Britain for the past 30 years, earning Palmer millions which he pocketed and used to build a criminal empire.
Commander Roy Ramm, former head of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad, tells the podcast: “John Palmer was not on the robbery.
“His job was to launder the Brink’s-Mat gold and give the proceeds back.
“He did not do that. I believe that he held on to what was not his.”
When the police closed in, Palmer, who owned two rottweilers named Brinks and Mat, went on the run.
A police raid on his sprawling West Country home uncovered his smelter in a garden shed and gold bars.
He fled on holiday with wife Marnie and their two daughters to the Canary island of Tenerife, where BBC reporter Kate Adie caught up with him.
The gang hauled in £26 million worth of gold bullion during a raid at the Brink’s-Mat high-security depot
She tells the Gangster podcast that when she asked about having a gold smelter in his garden, Palmer replied: “Doesn’t everybody?”
His “holiday”, beyond the reach of British cops, went on for a year and in that time he set up a timeshare operation before he tried to flee to Brazil where authorities refused to let him settle.
He returned to the UK and stood trial at the Old Bailey where he admitted smelting large amounts of gold but claimed he did not know it had come from the Brink’s-Mat heist.
Remarkably, the jury believed his story and acquitted him, and so the Goldfinger legend was born.
Ex-Commander Ramm says: “His acquittal for Brink’s-Mat gave him a sense of confidence, arrogance.
“He saw himself as the big man, the king.”
Palmer returned to Tenerife and built his Island Village timeshare empire, which ran 13 developments near Las Palmas.
His “Dream Team” of touts targeted 8,000 Brits by claiming Palmer would sell their existing timeshares if they bought another timeshare holiday in one of his apartments.
I remember attending a meeting at a hotel near Gatwick airport where dozens of his victims told harrowing stories of how Palmer’s mob never resold a single timeshare and they were left deep in debt, forking out huge instalments.
Those who begged to get out of the deal were threatened or beaten up — such as engineer Brian Nolan, of Harlow, Essex, who was left with a fractured skull after Palmer’s thug beat him senseless with a baseball bat after he began asking too many questions.
The following year, 1994, I was in close contact with researchers from TV investigator Roger Cook’s programme, who were tracking Palmer as he jetted across the world, laundering money for organised crime bosses.
On flights back from Russia, he would hide bundles of 100 dollar notes behind the panels of his Learjet, while locals in Normandy believed he stashed gold and money in the walls of his turreted chateau near Caen.
Tom Cullen in TV’s The Gold as Palmer, who was found to have a smelter stashed in his garden shed
Jack Lowden plays villain Kenneth Noye in the new BBC drama
‘World’s worst slimebags’
The Cook Report hired veteran Texan private eye Buddy Burns to pose as the representative of a drug cartel that was looking for someone to launder 160million dollars a year.
Grey-haired Buddy, then 58, lured Palmer to the Ritz hotel in London, where Goldfinger agreed straight away to launder £75million.
On video, Palmer offered to sell the Texan Soviet-made guns, tanks, helicopters and rocket launchers on behalf of the Russian mafia and bragged: “I’m not cheap but I’m good.”
Buddy later told me: “I’ve dealt with many of the world’s worst slimebags but I never got as much satisfaction as I got nailing this man.”
What I did not know at the time, which Roy Ramm reveals in the Gangster podcast, was that Scotland Yard were involved in Cook’s TV sting which forced Palmer to flee Britain.
Goldfinger was so incensed that he offered a £20,000 bounty to anyone who would take out Cook.
Cook, now 79, says: “On Tenerife where he was the biggest landowner by far, John Palmer boasted that he had the police and judiciary in his pocket.
“He was a dangerous and violent man. He took pleasure in doing people down and got pleasure from hurting them.
“He usually got away with it. He was an arrogant little s**t.”
While on the run again, Palmer helped out his buddy in crime, professional villain Kenneth Noye.
Remarkably in 1985, while under investigation for his part in the Brink’s-Mat case, Noye killed undercover cop PC John Fordham with a knife.
He told the jury he was acting in self-defence and was acquitted.
But he was caught by DCS Boyce and jailed in 1986 for his part in handling Brink’s-Mat gold.
DCS Boyce had used a Masonic handshake to trick Noye into believing he was “on the square” and they could talk in confidence.
Noye offered the cop a £1million bribe, which Boyce reported to top brass.
Out on parole Noye killed again, this time stabbing 21-year-old Stephen Cameron in a road rage incident in Kent in 1996.
Palmer used his resources to fly Noye out of the country to France and from there he fled to Spain.
By the time I got a call to meet “an international businessman who needed help with his public relations” Palmer was back in Britain and about to go on trial.
When I came face-to-face with Goldfinger I had no hesitation in telling him “I was too busy” and happily walked away.
Palmer was shot dead in 2015 at an address where he was living in Essex
Palmer’s decision to stop wearing a bullet proof vest ended up costing him his life
Palmer went on trial weeks later, fired his lawyers, defended himself and was jailed for eight years, spending four in prison from where he continued to run his crooked empire.
By the summer of 2015, age 64, he was living in Essex and no longer wearing his bullet-proof vest, a lifestyle change that would cost him his life when a hitman put six .32-calibre bullets into him.
The man who claimed he was “just a good businessman and not a gangster” had made so many enemies there are literally thousands of suspects who would have wished Goldfinger dead.
- The Gold starts tomorrow on BBC1 at 9pm. Podcast Gangster: The Story Of John Palmer is on BBC Sounds now.
DCS Brian Boyce took charge of the Brinks-Mat case against the gang
He is played by Hugh Bonneville in The Gold, which is also running as a separate podcast
Sun man Mike Ridley was wanted by John Palmer to be his PR man
The gold was melted down and ended up in jewellery sold across the UK
Palmer was associated with M25 road rage kiiller Kenneth Noye
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