Post by alf on Mar 23, 2023 10:31:50 GMT
Did anyone else see the BBC documentary on this a few days ago? I grew up near Sevenoaks in Kent, quite close to the road of massive houses which my dad always said were "all gangsters" - including Kenneth Noye's. I was only 10 at the time but remember it all over the news, I had never dug into it much since but had assumed the perpetrators went to jail and most of the money was recovered. I had also known Noye had killed a policeman in his garden and got away with it (he later went on to kill someone in a road rage incident aqgain very near where I lived at that time) but did not realise that surveilance was related to Brinks Mat:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brink%27s-Mat_robbery
I found the program somewhat astounding on many levels. The level of Police incompetence was astonishing - they got a lead about someone buying a smelter immediately after the robbery, followed a car with it in, and somehow lost it in a rural area. They never traced it. It was a Gold Rolls Royce FFS! IT somehow lost "flying squad" officers and was never traced.
Then - again days after the robbery - a couple near Bath see a white hot smelter working overtime (presumably in John Palmers's shed) and call the Police. They arrive and speak to the couple but say its "outside their jurisdiction" and they'll pass the info on. They don't.
Then it discussed the observation of Noye's house, and the fact a certain car was regularly leaving it visibly laden, and connecting with a Jaguar taking the load to a small second hand gold dealer near Bristol - owened by John Palmer. The timeline had somehow skipped on over a year from the robbery to the stabbing of the police officer in the garden of Noye's house, the impression was that it was observed for a long time. Why wait? It's not espionage, there is no advantage in waiting all that time hoping for new leads, get effing well in there and find the Gold! Pre-smelting, it would be somewhat incriminating...
John Palmer was aquitted even though he admitted smelting bars from the robbery "not knowing they were stolen". His tiny gold business sold so much gold that the Bank of England had to create a new serial number range and increase production of £50 notes - £13m or so apparantly passed through the company and a small local Barclays branch, nothing was done about that - apparently the confidentiality of the client trumped any sort of money laundering regulations in those days.
Most of the money/gold was never recovered - it seems that what happened to about half of the gold was not known, and while something approaching the value of the original theft was recovered in total from criminals, that was over decades and not taking into account inflation - or the massive costs of the multinational investigation.
The rules - or lack of them - around money laundering amazed me, we almost live in a police state by comparison now, and while clever people will always get around rules, it has to be a good thing that you need to account for where money came from! The Police incompetence is more baffling in many ways. I can only conclude - as has been suggested - that the fact Noye and others were Freemasons in the same Lodge as many Scotland Yard senior members, meant that they were being allowed to get away with it. Not by all of the police involved, but by enough to effectively torpedo the investigations. I thought Freemasons were not supposed to take people with criminal records...........
All in all it was a baffling and depressing story of British incompetence and corruption that seeemed more worthy of 1884 not 1984, but at least we have moved on in some ways - solving major crimes being one, where the UK uses far more forensic evidence, and that from CCTV and digital sources, than many countries even in Western Europe. We have a much better murder solving rate than France for example (remember the British family and French cyclist gunned down in France not that long ago?). But with the report out this week, you have to wonder how far the rank and file Met Police has really come. And whether membership of Freemasons can ever be acceptable for people involved in law, government, national security, and more...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brink%27s-Mat_robbery
I found the program somewhat astounding on many levels. The level of Police incompetence was astonishing - they got a lead about someone buying a smelter immediately after the robbery, followed a car with it in, and somehow lost it in a rural area. They never traced it. It was a Gold Rolls Royce FFS! IT somehow lost "flying squad" officers and was never traced.
Then - again days after the robbery - a couple near Bath see a white hot smelter working overtime (presumably in John Palmers's shed) and call the Police. They arrive and speak to the couple but say its "outside their jurisdiction" and they'll pass the info on. They don't.
Then it discussed the observation of Noye's house, and the fact a certain car was regularly leaving it visibly laden, and connecting with a Jaguar taking the load to a small second hand gold dealer near Bristol - owened by John Palmer. The timeline had somehow skipped on over a year from the robbery to the stabbing of the police officer in the garden of Noye's house, the impression was that it was observed for a long time. Why wait? It's not espionage, there is no advantage in waiting all that time hoping for new leads, get effing well in there and find the Gold! Pre-smelting, it would be somewhat incriminating...
John Palmer was aquitted even though he admitted smelting bars from the robbery "not knowing they were stolen". His tiny gold business sold so much gold that the Bank of England had to create a new serial number range and increase production of £50 notes - £13m or so apparantly passed through the company and a small local Barclays branch, nothing was done about that - apparently the confidentiality of the client trumped any sort of money laundering regulations in those days.
Most of the money/gold was never recovered - it seems that what happened to about half of the gold was not known, and while something approaching the value of the original theft was recovered in total from criminals, that was over decades and not taking into account inflation - or the massive costs of the multinational investigation.
The rules - or lack of them - around money laundering amazed me, we almost live in a police state by comparison now, and while clever people will always get around rules, it has to be a good thing that you need to account for where money came from! The Police incompetence is more baffling in many ways. I can only conclude - as has been suggested - that the fact Noye and others were Freemasons in the same Lodge as many Scotland Yard senior members, meant that they were being allowed to get away with it. Not by all of the police involved, but by enough to effectively torpedo the investigations. I thought Freemasons were not supposed to take people with criminal records...........
All in all it was a baffling and depressing story of British incompetence and corruption that seeemed more worthy of 1884 not 1984, but at least we have moved on in some ways - solving major crimes being one, where the UK uses far more forensic evidence, and that from CCTV and digital sources, than many countries even in Western Europe. We have a much better murder solving rate than France for example (remember the British family and French cyclist gunned down in France not that long ago?). But with the report out this week, you have to wonder how far the rank and file Met Police has really come. And whether membership of Freemasons can ever be acceptable for people involved in law, government, national security, and more...
