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Death Warrant: Kenneth Noye, the Brink's-Mat Robbery and the Gold
On a cold, grey morning in 1983, a gang of masked and armed men stole £26 million in gold bullion from the Brink's-Mat high-security warehouse. The biggest robbery in British history, it unleashed a trail of murder, betrayal and revenge; forced a young woman into hiding for the rest of her life; and kick-started golbal money laundering. In on the heist from the very first, Kenneth Noye helped turn the gold into cash - and stabbed to death the undercover policeman sent to catch him.
Will Pearson's searing, no-punches-pulled page-turner brilliantly recreates one of the omst extraordinary stories in the history of crime. It is a tale of criminal cunning and stupidity; of brilliant detective work marred by Keystone Cops-style failure; greed, ostentation, high-rolling gangsters, their wives and mistresses ...
Will Pearson's searing, no-punches-pulled page-turner brilliantly recreates one of the omst extraordinary stories in the history of crime. It is a tale of criminal cunning and stupidity; of brilliant detective work marred by Keystone Cops-style failure; greed, ostentation, high-rolling gangsters, their wives and mistresses ...
275 pages, Paperback
First published June 14, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 11, 2017
I admit my rating for this book is perhaps lower than it should be because this book isn't what I thought and hoped it would be. I went into this book hoping for an action-packed true crime story full of cops and robbers, shootouts, car chases, and the like; what I got was an exhaustively researched and meticulously catalogued record of thorough police work, detailed legal proceedings, and a complex web of money laundering. There are brief bursts of action, appropriately placed at the beginning and middle and end, but most of the book is devoted to dry numbers and unpicking the Gordian knot of the criminals' financial scheme.
All that is not meant to say this book is bad. If you were writing an article or scholarly paper on the Brinks-Mat gold heist and how the criminals were brought to justice you could cite this book as a reference, because every part of it is so thoroughly researched and clearly laid out. For that reason alone the book's existence is justified; however, do not mistake this for exciting summer reading. Guy Ritchie this is not, and as long as you know that going in, that's okay.
All that is not meant to say this book is bad. If you were writing an article or scholarly paper on the Brinks-Mat gold heist and how the criminals were brought to justice you could cite this book as a reference, because every part of it is so thoroughly researched and clearly laid out. For that reason alone the book's existence is justified; however, do not mistake this for exciting summer reading. Guy Ritchie this is not, and as long as you know that going in, that's okay.
May 26, 2025
In the mid-1980s, a property developer named Gordon Parry and a solicitor named Michael Relton met with a minicab firm owner named Brian Perry to discuss investing in the derelict London Docklands. Perry was supposed to be looking after gold from the Brinks-Mat robbery on behalf of one of the thieves, Micky McAvoy, but with McAvoy at the time serving 25 years in prison Perry decided to make use of the loot himself – and having arranged for some of the gold to be smelted and sold off, he now needed to launder the money:
Pearson’s account starts with a dramatic reconstruction of the 1983 robbery at the Heathrow International Trading Estate: elaborate security measures and protocols proved useless protection against a corrupt security guard. The guard in question, one Anthony Black, comes across as hapless rather than cunning, and his flakiness proved to be a double-edged sword: it didn’t take much work for the police to discover that Black was living with the sister of a career criminal named Brian Robinson, and he cracked under questioning. Black named Robinson and McAvoy in return for a reduced sentence, and wisely hasn’t been heard from since. The gang expected a smaller a haul of money – they were as surprised as anyone to have pulled off "the robbery of the century", comprising £26 million worth of bullion. In doing so, it turned out they had bitten off more than they could chew.
McAvoy got to hear of Perry’s use of the gold when bars were found by police at the rural Kent home of Kenneth Noye, brought in to undertake the alchemical process of turning gold into paper. Not long after the robbery, a man named Michael Lawson had been indiscreet enough to purchase a heavy-duty smelter, and although he used a false name the suspicious seller went to police and identified him from mugshots. Noye then came onto the police radar due to his proximity to Lawson in Kent and their mutual membership of a Masonic lodge in Hammersmith attended by several bullion dealers (and police officers). More of the gold meanwhile had made its way to the West Country, where it was also being smelted into an untraceable form by Noye’s associate John Palmer (biography reviewed here).
However, the proof of Noye’s involvement following a long surveillance operation had been achieved at a terrible human cost: infamously, Noye’s dogs had alerted him to the presence of someone lurking in his garden after dark, and Noye had stabbed to death the intruder – an undercover detective constable named John Fordham. Noye and his house-guest Brian Reader (later better-known as ringleader of the Hatton Garden Job) both stood trial for murder, but were acquitted after Noye testified that he thought he had been under attack; the trial, presided over by Mr Justice Caulfield (Pearson includes an aside about Caulfield's notorious summing-up in the Jeffrey Archer libel trial two years later), included taking the jury to Noye's garden in the dark, during which someone jumped out at them unexpectedly as a reconstruction.
Police had more success when Noye and Reader were subsequently prosecuted for conspiracy to handle stolen goods. Two years following his release in 1994, Noye became even more notorious for stabbing a young man named Stephen Cameron in a "road rage" incident at the Swanley interchange of the M25, after which with Palmer's help he fled the country for an obscure corner of Spain. Police didn't want Noye to be aware that he had been identified as the suspect, but "someone in the know sold the information that Noye was wanted for the murder of Stephen Cameron to a tabloid newspaper. Although it was obvious that doing so would jeopardize the chances of catching him, the newspaper went ahead and named Noye." This hints at another strand of corruption in British public life during this period - links between police officers and tabloid journalists that came to light during the "phone-hacking" saga.
Eventually tracked down with the help of GCHQ, Noye was formally identified by Cameron's young fiancée Danielle Cable, who gave evidence at the trial. Her involvement meant that she then had to enter a witness protection scheme, which Pearson evokes hauntingly:
The twists and turns of the financial narrative are dense in places, but Pearson’s account is vivid, with flashes of dry humour. Orion can be a bit slapdash (there's a glaring typo on the very first page), but the book does have a very detailed index that helps with following some of the narrative threads.
Gordon Parry was arrested after fleeing to Spain and convicted in 1992; Michael Relton, like Anthony Black, crumbled under police pressure and made a confession. Brian Perry also went to prison, where he apparently convinced McAvoy that he hadn’t purloined “his” money after all, but after his release he was shot to death in an unsolved crime in 2001.
Standing on the empty quay of Odessa Wharf, letting his imagination freewheel while Parry conjured offices and apartment blocks, conference centres and marinas from the cold London clay beneath their feet, Perry felt an old familiar stirring deep in his soul. It was greed. Why not buy into the Docklands Dream, then going dirt-cheap at £35 a square foot? Why not make a huge profit; accumulate shedloads of cash; double or even quadruple the money he was meant to be holding in trust for his friends in jail?... A phoenix London Docklands was rising, and a fat chunk of it was stretching skyward on the proceeds of the stolen Brink’s-Mat gold. In Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no such thing as society’ Britain, this was and remains beyond irony.If this sordid and sanguinary saga has any broader historical significance beyond being a cautionary tale of human greed, corruption and folly, then this is it. In Pearson's judgement, "if you’ve bought gold jewellery since 1983, you’re probably wearing part of the melted-down Brink’s-Mat hoard".
Pearson’s account starts with a dramatic reconstruction of the 1983 robbery at the Heathrow International Trading Estate: elaborate security measures and protocols proved useless protection against a corrupt security guard. The guard in question, one Anthony Black, comes across as hapless rather than cunning, and his flakiness proved to be a double-edged sword: it didn’t take much work for the police to discover that Black was living with the sister of a career criminal named Brian Robinson, and he cracked under questioning. Black named Robinson and McAvoy in return for a reduced sentence, and wisely hasn’t been heard from since. The gang expected a smaller a haul of money – they were as surprised as anyone to have pulled off "the robbery of the century", comprising £26 million worth of bullion. In doing so, it turned out they had bitten off more than they could chew.
McAvoy got to hear of Perry’s use of the gold when bars were found by police at the rural Kent home of Kenneth Noye, brought in to undertake the alchemical process of turning gold into paper. Not long after the robbery, a man named Michael Lawson had been indiscreet enough to purchase a heavy-duty smelter, and although he used a false name the suspicious seller went to police and identified him from mugshots. Noye then came onto the police radar due to his proximity to Lawson in Kent and their mutual membership of a Masonic lodge in Hammersmith attended by several bullion dealers (and police officers). More of the gold meanwhile had made its way to the West Country, where it was also being smelted into an untraceable form by Noye’s associate John Palmer (biography reviewed here).
However, the proof of Noye’s involvement following a long surveillance operation had been achieved at a terrible human cost: infamously, Noye’s dogs had alerted him to the presence of someone lurking in his garden after dark, and Noye had stabbed to death the intruder – an undercover detective constable named John Fordham. Noye and his house-guest Brian Reader (later better-known as ringleader of the Hatton Garden Job) both stood trial for murder, but were acquitted after Noye testified that he thought he had been under attack; the trial, presided over by Mr Justice Caulfield (Pearson includes an aside about Caulfield's notorious summing-up in the Jeffrey Archer libel trial two years later), included taking the jury to Noye's garden in the dark, during which someone jumped out at them unexpectedly as a reconstruction.
Police had more success when Noye and Reader were subsequently prosecuted for conspiracy to handle stolen goods. Two years following his release in 1994, Noye became even more notorious for stabbing a young man named Stephen Cameron in a "road rage" incident at the Swanley interchange of the M25, after which with Palmer's help he fled the country for an obscure corner of Spain. Police didn't want Noye to be aware that he had been identified as the suspect, but "someone in the know sold the information that Noye was wanted for the murder of Stephen Cameron to a tabloid newspaper. Although it was obvious that doing so would jeopardize the chances of catching him, the newspaper went ahead and named Noye." This hints at another strand of corruption in British public life during this period - links between police officers and tabloid journalists that came to light during the "phone-hacking" saga.
Eventually tracked down with the help of GCHQ, Noye was formally identified by Cameron's young fiancée Danielle Cable, who gave evidence at the trial. Her involvement meant that she then had to enter a witness protection scheme, which Pearson evokes hauntingly:
From this moment on, Cable would have to live out her days in the bleak and soulless desert of the witness protection programme... Over the next few days and weeks, Cable changed her identity, her appearance, her habits, the way she dressed, her hobbies, her reading matter, and just about everything else. Allowed very little contact with her immediate family, and none with her former friends, even her authorized telephone calls were kept to the barest minimum.Noye once again attempted a self-defence argument, but this time the jury wasn't having it and at the time of the book's writing he was in a high-security prison, subject to a regime of randomly changing prison guards to thwart the possibility of guards being "turned". Another prosecution witness, Alan Decabral, was shot dead in Ashford a few months after giving evidence, although the case remains unsolved (and it seems he had also had other enemies).
The twists and turns of the financial narrative are dense in places, but Pearson’s account is vivid, with flashes of dry humour. Orion can be a bit slapdash (there's a glaring typo on the very first page), but the book does have a very detailed index that helps with following some of the narrative threads.
Gordon Parry was arrested after fleeing to Spain and convicted in 1992; Michael Relton, like Anthony Black, crumbled under police pressure and made a confession. Brian Perry also went to prison, where he apparently convinced McAvoy that he hadn’t purloined “his” money after all, but after his release he was shot to death in an unsolved crime in 2001.
December 25, 2020
Only 3 stars. The stories told were fascinating, but a proofreader would have helped. For the money laundering, charts or graphs would also have been appreciated.
September 30, 2013
If Will Pearson's 'Death Warrant' was a work of fiction there would be some parts which would strike the reader as unbelievable or impossible ... however, it is true and although those parts still exist, the narrative is an exact record of what went on when the Brink's-Mat warehouse was robbed.
It seemed obvious from the outset that there had been inside information and help and this proved to be the case. The robbers thought they were going to net a million pounds in cash but when the guards were so stunned they could not remember the combinations, it looked as though they might leave empty-handed.
But, they then unexpectedly came across an enormous amount of gold bullion, so much that the leader had to send for another vehicle to move it all. This was done and then began the largest money-laundering exercise I imagine ever undertaken. And the sums involved were massive as people moved money around from bank to bank and country to country. The amazing thing is that no banks initially queried the amounts that were being passed around in a variety of bogus names and companies.
Kenneth Noye was not one of the police's first suspects; he only came into the frame later but once in it he was a major player. Arrests were eventually made but the gold was not discovered.
Noye later killed an undercover police officer who was sent to carry out surveillance before making an arrest and this was the first of any number of deaths that occurred - all people who had some involvement with the robbery or the handling of the money that accrued once the bullion was smelted down.
The story is superbly told and as a consequence the book is one not to be put down even towards the end when Noye, out of jail, commits murder following a road rage incident.
The author's summing up was also excellent, if someewhat ironic. He wrote, 'The Brink's-Mat gang showed great daring, flashes of brilliance and examples of extreme stupidity. The detectives who spent so many years hunting them showed great daring, flashes of brilliance and made some terrible decisions.'
It seemed obvious from the outset that there had been inside information and help and this proved to be the case. The robbers thought they were going to net a million pounds in cash but when the guards were so stunned they could not remember the combinations, it looked as though they might leave empty-handed.
But, they then unexpectedly came across an enormous amount of gold bullion, so much that the leader had to send for another vehicle to move it all. This was done and then began the largest money-laundering exercise I imagine ever undertaken. And the sums involved were massive as people moved money around from bank to bank and country to country. The amazing thing is that no banks initially queried the amounts that were being passed around in a variety of bogus names and companies.
Kenneth Noye was not one of the police's first suspects; he only came into the frame later but once in it he was a major player. Arrests were eventually made but the gold was not discovered.
Noye later killed an undercover police officer who was sent to carry out surveillance before making an arrest and this was the first of any number of deaths that occurred - all people who had some involvement with the robbery or the handling of the money that accrued once the bullion was smelted down.
The story is superbly told and as a consequence the book is one not to be put down even towards the end when Noye, out of jail, commits murder following a road rage incident.
The author's summing up was also excellent, if someewhat ironic. He wrote, 'The Brink's-Mat gang showed great daring, flashes of brilliance and examples of extreme stupidity. The detectives who spent so many years hunting them showed great daring, flashes of brilliance and made some terrible decisions.'
April 24, 2017
Totally compelling. I binge read it over one weekend. Exceptional level of detail and research.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews