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The Essex Murders - Who Killed Goldfinger
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Short filmTranscript
00:00My name is Giovanni Di Stefano. I'm an international lawyer. I defended John Goldfinger-Palmer,
00:13but I've also defended a number of other high-profile cases worldwide, including the Iraqi regime,
00:19Milosevic, Gaddafi, Mugabe, Ian Brady. My latest client is President Bashar Assad,
00:27and it all kicked off, thanks to John Goldfinger-Palmer's case.
00:33John Palmer was and remained to the last day, in my view, a legitimate business entrepreneur.
00:41He was dyslexic, he had a problematic childhood, and he still made a success of his life.
00:48He was richer than the Queen, he sailed close to the wind, sometimes he went over the edge,
00:53and he paid a terrible price for it. But, you know, he was no gangster.
00:59I've never come across a more evil person than John Palmer. So we decided that we would show him up for what he was.
01:07Roger Cook, I'd like to talk to you about money laundering.
01:10About what?
01:11Money laundering.
01:11He was the biggest criminal in Britain at the time. You know, he seriously enjoyed hurting people, or having them hurt.
01:19We've got it all on film. You're going to look amazingly stupid.
01:23He had my address, he knew my movements, and he took out a contract on my life.
01:31John Palmer was not dangerous at all. He wasn't a gangster. That's what I do to Roger Cook.
01:36One of Britain's most notorious gangsters, shot at close range.
01:44But who ordered John Palmer's murder, and why?
01:47You can run on for a long time. Run on for a long time. Run on for a long time.
01:57Soon or later, gotta cut you down. Soon or later, gotta cut you down.
02:06You can run on for a long time.
02:08You can run on for a long time.
02:09You can run on for a long time.
02:10You can run on for a long time.
02:12You can run on for a long time.
02:13You can run on for a long time.
02:14One of the things you have seen is that you're gonna run on for a long time.
02:17At the beginning of my career in the 1980s and into the 1990s, I knew John Palmer.
02:22I'd written a lot about John Palmer.
02:26He was a big fish in the criminal underworld.
02:28John Palmer was internationally famous as Goldberg.
02:36finger. He made a fortune out of fencing the Brink's Matt Gold. I'm completely innocent of
02:45this so-called Matt Brink bullion ride. I know nothing of it. As the jury foreman spoke the
02:54words, not guilty, John Palmer looked at the jury, nodded, and then blew them a kiss as he left the
03:00dock. Dodging jail left Palmer, a free man with millions in the bank. He headed straight back to
03:09Tenerife where he spotted a golden opportunity to put his fortune to work. And this propelled him
03:15into the stratosphere of criminality. Oh, I've got him there. But big money leads to big enemies.
03:25In Tenerife, John Palmer was swimming in very dangerous waters. And for him, there was going
03:35to be no escape.
03:55Right, John Palmer. What I want us to do today is review the facts around the day that he was
04:04murdered, the day he died.
04:13My own personal experience of Mickey McAvoy is that he's an extremely dangerous individual.
04:25my own personal experience of Mickey McAvoy, who actually killed him. And the
04:30reason why it came to be the most economical zone is that he was murdered. He was
04:32murdered, and he was murdered. And he's been able to find his way to be a
04:35itude in such a way. And he was a애 to, you know, for the fact that he was murdered, he was
04:37under the program's level in such a very, pretty bad news. He was completely
04:40in my cellar and he was murdered, so he was under the fear of losing his death and he was
04:42under the reverse of Matso feet. And he was murdered. And he was murdered. And he was
04:43under the first imagining of the law. He was murdered and the husband on his life. And he was
04:47under the number of those. He was murdered and he was murdered by his death. He is
04:49When John Palmer first arrived on the island,
05:00it was nothing like it is today.
05:02People dreamed of owning property in the sun.
05:05The land here was cheap, so it was massive investment.
05:08And Palmer saw an opportunity and took advantage.
05:12He invested heavily in timeshare.
05:14So I want to go down to the centre of the main town.
05:20I want to go down and have a look,
05:21get a feel and understanding of what was going on at that time.
05:44Coming up now to Harley's and the Flamingo Beach Bar,
05:52which was one of John Palmer's original restaurants, clubs.
05:58And this is where he operated from.
06:00This was the centre of John Palmer's power back in the day.
06:05Classic cars outside on the front.
06:08Then going down to Flamingo's Beach Bar.
06:10And this was the investment.
06:11This was the power base.
06:13This is where the wealth was open.
06:16And you could see it.
06:26After his acquittal,
06:29his plan was to go straight back to Tenerife
06:31and make something of himself.
06:34Being in Tenerife at the right time enabled him to build his empire.
06:44John has always been seeing opportunities and going for them,
06:49making the most of everything he possibly could
06:52to get as much money as he can,
06:56because that's what turns him on.
07:00I'm going to meet someone who was investigating John Palmer
07:10at the time that John was building his criminal empire on the island.
07:14For the third place,
07:36we may have reached the first complex
07:38that he bought Palmer here,
07:40the Island Village.
07:42When the Palmer arrived in the Tenerife, this is not...
07:57This is clear.
07:58Clear.
07:59Clear.
08:00All clear.
08:01Wow.
08:02It's huge.
08:04So why is this important to John Palmer's story?
08:07It's important to John Palmer because it's the first complex that he bought or acquired once he arrived to the island of Tenerife.
08:14And with this complex of apartment, he discovered that it was a business that left a lot of money
08:22and he bought another series of complex to dedicate them to time-sharing.
08:28He came with money and he realized that in the island there was no mafia, no delinquency organized.
08:40His business was mainly dedicated to his companions, to the Britannians.
08:46He brought people outside of Tenerife, brought many British buyers.
08:53Well, in 1991, I had hair. I was a lot slimmer and a lot fitter. Loved having fun and loved earning money.
09:15I was 17 years old. I'd never been away from home before. It was my first job. I was so naive.
09:24It's living in the fast lane, Tenerife. You know, bars opened all night, nightclubs opened all night.
09:30There was a lot of drugs. There was a lot of alcohol. The strip, Veronica's, was a very, very popular place to go.
09:37You know, you had the best DJs. It was just wild and it was like a whole new way of life.
09:43When I first got to Tenerife, I realized that it was dominated by John Palmer and his timeshare industry.
09:51It was totally dominated by him out there.
09:54Well, his timeshare business, he built basically shallets. He built rooms, hotel rooms, luxurious ones.
10:01And people would be able to choose the weeks that they would go and stay on holiday.
10:06And that was their home and their property for that period of time there.
10:10Now, in theory, timeshare isn't a bad idea. What happens is that for a lump sum, you buy the right to use an apartment or villa for particular weeks of the year.
10:20On top of that, you have to pay maintenance, but you do get the chance to swap your weeks for time in another apartment somewhere else in the world.
10:27Fine if that's what you want.
10:29If I was a person who wanted to buy a timeshare, I would have a look around a resort, choose a timeshare that I would like, and then I'd buy one or two weeks out of the year for that apartment for the rest of your life, just by paying one fixed fee.
10:43Started for a studio at three and a half grand. For one bed, it was about five or six grand. Two bed, ten to twelve grand. By 52 weeks of the year, times 200 apartments on each resort. It's a lot of money.
10:55Big money. It's massive money. In essence, what you're doing is you're selling the same damn thing 52 times. There's always going to be some trouble in there.
11:05John Palmer's employees were schooled to use absolutely maximum high pressure sales techniques. It was a bit like double glazing on speed, badgering tourists all day long on the seafronts at the various resorts in Tenerife.
11:25So an OPC is an outside personal contact, but the locals would call us overpaid cunts.
11:33We were the people on the streets who would give scratch cards to tourists. Basically, I would approach a couple on the street. You give the winning ticket to the woman and you give the losing ticket to the man. That's what I used to do.
11:49We could make up whatever we wanted. They could either go to the airport and collect their prize.
11:54We're about to the airport. You'll see, as you walk in, there's a big sign. It says scratch your mouth. It's a huge, great, aluminum sign. You can't miss it.
12:00I used to say that there's a festival on the beachfront. You can get some free car hire. You can get a meal for four in Harley's restaurant. It was all a story. It was a story to get them stopped, to think that they would get a free prize, a free bottle of wine, a free drink.
12:15Oh, look! You've done it!
12:17No, I can't!
12:19The priority was to get the couple in a taxi, no matter what, and when you get them to the resort, if they agreed to look around the resort for 90 minutes, I would get £50.
12:32Then the south person would take them around the resort. And then they got the hard sell.
12:37A lot of the south people would say to them that, you know, don't worry if you change your mind, you can cancel when you get home in England, but you couldn't.
12:45The money is gone?
12:46The money's gone, yeah.
12:47Is it Palmer's pocket?
12:48That's right.
12:52Stories were emerging in Britain of people investing in the John Palmer type share scheme, finding they were seriously ripped off.
13:00It's on arrival at the complex that holidaymakers say they're confronting the trouble.
13:05Many of them have found that, unless they pay management costs in cash up front, which they've already paid to a firm in London, then they're not given their keys to their apartments.
13:17I got to realise that, in fact, this is a scam. So that's when I started to go back and say that we wanted out of the arrangement.
13:24They grabbed him, they hustled him out of the building, and they then sort of kicked him and got him down on the ground and they bounced his head on the pavement and on the road.
13:33The story that was emerging was that this was a business run by thugs and gangsters, that money was being almost extorted from ordinary working people.
13:47And that was saying to us that Palmer must have a lot of influence there, because he didn't seem to be in fear of justice, in fear of law enforcement.
13:56I was in the apartment when I turned around and a man came through the door, took three paces towards me and commenced hitting me around the head with a baseball bat.
14:11Palmer moved in Tenerife from being a fraudster to becoming a real organised crime character.
14:26A real mafia don, if you like, in the Canary Islands.
14:30He surrounded himself with people who would go out and commit acts of violence without any questions asked on his behalf.
14:39The first time I realised that John Palmer had a lot of power was when he had a party one night.
14:46Lots of people showed up, lots of his friends were there.
14:49One of his friends got attacked by somebody drunk and John Palmer got the ump about that and he put out a contract on him.
14:56The fella left the island that night and then paid 50 grand to come back.
15:01And then when he came back, he disappeared.
15:04A year later, his car was still parked outside the party venue and it was covered in dust and dirt and everything.
15:09You heard about that?
15:11I heard about that numerous times, yeah.
15:13I did hear about people being murdered and but I just turned a blind eye to it all because it wasn't something that I was wanting to know about to be honest.
15:32So yeah, not gonna speak anymore about that I'm afraid.
15:39Even now?
15:40No.
15:41Palmer was seen as the mafia number one by two things.
15:54He had money, he had a lot of people in his service.
15:57And two.
15:58He was a man who didn't shake his hand to order a fire of a car, a pill, to give an exclamation to that person who didn't comply with what he believed he had to do.
16:14That makes people scared.
16:18He came to control the island.
16:21He was the real love of the south of Tenerife.
16:25I know I'd go from rags to riches.
16:41As his empire expanded, John Palmer's wealth went through the roof.
16:45He was earning so much, virtually a million pounds a week, that he couldn't invest it quick enough.
16:50Back into hotels, into port facilities, marinas, into villas.
16:55This was a top gangster at the top of his form.
16:58My clothes may still be torn and tattered.
17:07Him and I never actually talked about what money he had or what money he didn't have.
17:12Just we didn't do it.
17:15I wasn't living over there.
17:18So Tenerife was totally separate from me.
17:22We had holidays on Concord and we were doing everything that we wanted to do and we had the boat.
17:30He had the private jets because he was coming backwards and forwards to home anyway.
17:37Apart from everything, his business side of it, I mean, and it was least, I mean, loads of people do that.
17:44From our perspective, John Palmer's lifestyle on Tenerife was that of a rock star.
17:50You know, he looked to be unstoppable.
17:53But when he appeared in the Sunday Times rich list, up there with the same amount of money as the Queen,
17:59it started to make the yard think that there had to be something in this that was criminal.
18:04We need to look even more closely at this man. How did he get to be this rich?
18:11My fate is up to you
18:17Driving a buggy through the grounds of his Essex home, one of Britain's most notorious gangsters,
18:32John Goldfinger Palmer, and watching him in the garden, a contract killer who would later shoot him dead.
18:38I heard John Palmer was dead in a news bullet and very shortly afterwards, people who knew I had an interest rung me to tell me that he had been assassinated.
18:51I did not feel sorry at all for his departure. I thought the world was rid of a really nasty piece of work.
18:59Well, I've had an interest in John Palmer for a very long time. The man was evil, pure evil, I think.
19:05So we decided that we would show him up for what he was.
19:14The Cook Report was a very, very popular investigative programme.
19:21It tackled all sorts of subjects.
19:24We're in Red Square and on our way to a secret meeting to buy plutonium to make a nuclear bomb.
19:30We had a very wide variety of subjects, like buying weapons-grade plutonium from the Russian Mafia.
19:37That was the hairiest one we ever did.
19:40Once we had the evidence, we would then organise to confront the malefactor.
19:45Hello, my name's Roger Cook from Central Television.
19:48And some of them, of course, turned violent.
19:50Leave him alone.
19:51Leave him alone!
19:52Leave him alone!
19:53During the course of it, I used to think it was like lion taming.
19:56If you showed fear, you'd had it.
20:00Hey!
20:01Oh!
20:05On Tenerife, John Palmer was a very powerful man, some people thought the most powerful.
20:11He used to boast he had the judiciary and the police force in his pocket, and he could do anything he liked.
20:17If he didn't get his way by fair means, which he very rarely did, he'd do it by foul.
20:22Well, we had an editorial meeting in the Cook Report offices in Birmingham, and one of the subject letters we wanted to investigate was money laundering.
20:30We spoke to a lot of people, lots of senior police officers, and the one name that kept coming up was John Palmer.
20:39Palmer very quickly got into money laundering because timeshare is an ideal way of doing it.
20:44He had a legitimate business, and he manipulated it so that he was able to have millions of pounds going through the companies that he set up.
20:55He began to launder money for the Colombian cartels because he had a big cocaine habit himself, and it made him lots and lots of money.
21:03Actually, in the end, it made him more than timeshares.
21:05Our research showed that huge amounts of money, as much as 400 million, were being sifted through his many accounts.
21:18He was able to conceal the true origins of this money by laundering it through a vast web of international companies in a number of different offshore tax havens, almost impossible, in fact impossible to trace.
21:31We did a deal with the Metropolitan Police to investigate his money laundering activities while they concentrated on timeshare.
21:43It is unusual for the police to work in that way with a journalist, but, you know, you have to remember that Roger Cook at the time had a tremendous reputation.
21:53He had like 12 million viewers. His journalism was regarded as, you know, really being integrity-based.
21:59And we were very happy that what he was going to do was a legitimate operation.
22:04We wanted to find a way of showing John Palmer as the unprincipled man he was.
22:08And we thought the best way to do that would be to get him to offer to launder money from drugs.
22:14The only way we could do that was find some realistic people to do the deal with him.
22:18General Coonsar cuts open raw opium, which will be refined into heroin.
22:26Coonsar was a warlord in Burma, who was the biggest heroin producer in the world at that time.
22:31As he produces 80% of the world's heroin, the potential profits for a money launderer would be staggering.
22:39So as a result of a program we had made earlier, when we wanted to get a couple of drug barons, we sent a message to him on a cleft stick.
22:47And he said, of course you can. And set out two of his men who were the real article.
22:51And John Palmer couldn't fault them because they were the real article.
22:56So we thought he'd go for something that big.
23:00First, the Burmese wanted happy snaps to take home.
23:05This is with a special hook.
23:07We've finished all the other.
23:09Astonishingly, Palmer came himself, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the Burmese, eating a Thai meal.
23:15That was when we knew we had him hooked completely.
23:21He told Soren Porn that he kept at least one bank account, especially for the purpose of money laundering.
23:28Balanced 10 million dollars. It's difficult for him to check me.
23:31Our business is in Spain. Our banks are in offshore England.
23:3590% is in the digital money.
23:38I watched the secret recordings, more or less as live, and I just couldn't stop grinning.
23:44He was digging a big, big hole, which is exactly what we wanted him to do.
23:49In the house we'd rented for Kunsa's men, Palmer put a price on his services.
23:54I think you'd probably be selling my 25%.
23:5725%?
23:59Because I have to do it properly.
24:01This is a meeting in the Meuse house that we rented.
24:05I'm not cheap, but I'm good.
24:07He soon began to relax and realise that he was going to do some serious business in Southeast Asia.
24:14If you give me a million dollars, I'll take a million from my bank.
24:19This is clean money.
24:21I need a minimum of six weeks. I can handle 50 million every six months.
24:26He was offering to launder vast quantities of drugs money.
24:30And to top it all, he asked these drugs barons whether they could provide him with unidentifiable soldiers to act as enforcers for him.
24:38So if I want something done, somebody making problems with me, big problems, you can give me some soldier from you, some men?
24:48Yeah, there's no problem. No problem.
24:49No problem. No problem.
24:50The confrontation was meticulously planned. I mean, we thought of every possible variation and we made it very convincing.
24:57So Palmer actually turned up on his own.
24:59Mr. Palmer, Roger Cook, I'd like to talk to you about money laundering.
25:07About what?
25:08Money laundering. We've been listening to every conversation you've had with George...
25:11He was so shocked, you could tell on his face as it dawned on him that he'd been conned by the Cook report.
25:18I don't know what you're talking about.
25:20We've recorded every one of the conversations you've had with the representative de Kunsa.
25:23We've just heard you offering to launder money. We've heard you offering to launder at least three million.
25:29We have. We have the tape of it. Everything you've said has been recorded.
25:34Everything, including, including requests for, including requests for enforcers.
25:40He denied all knowledge of any of these nefarious activities and then got into a taxi which he'd hailed and looking ridiculously smug.
25:49Which you knew it was?
25:50I wish I had it.
25:51You had?
25:53The taxi starts to move away, but as luck would have it, the lights turned red.
25:58Roger went in again and opened the door and started talking to him. Just extraordinary.
26:03So, tell us more about the laundering.
26:06You were laundering money. You were offering to launder 60 million dollars a year from what you knew was drugs money.
26:16The people you've been talking with come from Kunsa.
26:19Never heard of it. I don't know what we're doing.
26:21We've got it all on film. You're going to look amazingly stupid.
26:24As soon as Roger Cook had confronted him, we were raiding all of Palmer's premises looking for evidence to support what we believe was the timeshare fraud against British subjects and therefore something that we could prosecute.
26:40The taxi driver phoned us the next day and said, we'd gone about two streets up the road and he started phoning all his offices around the country only to find that the police had raided them at the very moment that we were doorstepping him at the Ritz Hotel.
26:55So, he got so angry he flung his phone out of the open window. It was just amazing.
27:02What did John say about Roger Cook?
27:04Well, as usual, he said he was tricked into it.
27:12Made him look a bit silly really.
27:19What Roger Cook did and the way that we worked together with him was the key to opening up the timeshare empire and ultimately Palmer's downfall.
27:30Scotland Yard initially investigated John Palmer on suspicion of money laundering, but senior detectives eventually decided they had a better chance of convicting him on the timeshare fraud.
27:54This was what I call payback for being acquitted in Brink's map.
27:59The state were out to get John Palmer.
28:02One way or to the other, by hook or by crook, they were going to get him.
28:10John Palmer turned up at the Old Bailey wearing a bulletproof vest saying that he was a target and he wore it throughout the trial.
28:17The threat against John Palmer was huge.
28:20You know, he was facing a trial which could have earned him 14 years in prison.
28:25And I think a lot of criminals on the outside would have been thinking that he would do anything to mitigate that position.
28:32And I think he was extremely vulnerable at that point.
28:36Palmer was charged with Connick's 16,500 timeshare customers out of £30 million.
28:43The difference with John Palmer's trial was he decided to defend himself.
28:49I'd been a police officer for 27 years.
28:52I'd never been cross-examined by a defendant acting on their own behalf.
28:58He thought he knew best, as John Palmer always did.
29:02John Palmer asked me, you know, why were we following him?
29:06Why were we spending all this money on him, as it were?
29:09And I told him that it was because we believed he was a serious and organised criminal.
29:14Which outraged Palmer, who kept turning to the jury and saying, I'm not a gangster, I'm not a gangster.
29:20Well, I spoke to Palmer and asked him how he got on in court there and he actually did tell me that he regretted that he didn't have counsel.
29:27Jesus, he could easily have afforded. He was one of the richest people in the UK. A massive mistake.
29:34During a long trial, he told the jury there had been a fraud, but that was done by others who were running the company for him.
29:41Palmer claimed that he was let down by people he worked with. That's complete rubbish. He controlled the whole thing.
29:46Nothing happened in his organisation without his direct involvement. He orchestrated absolutely everything.
29:54And if you didn't do it his way, you got seriously hurt.
29:57A wealthy businessman has been found guilty of swindling £30 million from holidaymakers in a timeshare fraud.
30:0551-year-old John Palmer has been convicted of defrauding 17,000 tourists on the island of Tenerife.
30:12He still had a chauffeur and minders too, but the transport had changed rather as Britain's wealthiest villain was driven off to prison.
30:27I think the reality of John Palmer's life following the conviction was very different.
30:33He was going to prison for quite a long time. He was not in financial control of his businesses in Tenerife.
30:41He was in a very difficult and vulnerable position.
30:44When he was in prison, he clearly lost a lot of his cachet, a lot of his reputation.
30:50People didn't want to be associated with a man who was so publicly humiliated and was such a public target.
30:58If you've had the kind of life that John Palmer has had, he's got to look over his shoulder because things were falling apart for him.
31:07How come you and John never got divorced?
31:12I did try, but he would just not sign the papers.
31:21And, of course, he was in prison quite a bit.
31:28So, when John died, we were still husband and wife.
31:35As John said to me a long time after, when I said to him, what's happened to us?
31:41And he said, it was all the Brinks map.
31:44Because it changed everything about us.
31:47About how we were.
31:49Do you miss those days?
31:52Yes, I do.
31:56He was a special person to me.
32:03So, yes, I do.
32:24So, Tony, what happened to Palmer's empire when he was in prison?
32:27Well, well, the empire of John Palmer, without John Palmer being present in Tenerife, no works well.
32:34He leaves a cargo of his companies, his men of Pajas, his testaferros,
32:40who don't know how to manage the business as he was.
32:44And the business, evidently, he was not the same.
32:46Aparte, there was more competition.
32:48There was a man who was his right hand, who also wanted a part of this, Mohamed Erbaev.
32:55And there was a lot of Russians with money.
32:58You have to take into account that John Palmer left a lot of enemy behind.
33:02A lot of enemy and very powerful.
33:18So, I'm going to meet a really important man here in Tenerife.
33:27John Palmer's enforcer, Mohamed Erba.
33:30At one stage, he was Palmer's right hand man.
33:33Then they became bitter enemies in a power struggle on the island.
33:37He seems to have taken over here when Palmer was jailed.
33:41This is a man alleged to have been involved with intimidation, violence,
33:46never been prosecuted and convicted.
33:50So, we're on our way now to meet him at his business premises.
33:53And I want to see whether or not he knows or has got any ideas
33:57as to who really killed John Palmer and what the motive was.
34:01Hello, Mr Durban, David.
34:12How are you?
34:13You okay?
34:14Good to see you.
34:15Come here.
34:16Thank you so much for meeting with me.
34:19Any help you need, I mean.
34:20That's brilliant.
34:21Because you're not doing the wrong thing, you're doing the right things.
34:23Brilliant.
34:24And people, if they understand that, they're supposed to do it to help you.
34:27What I want to do is ask you some questions about John's life.
34:30And potentially, you know, what led to John's death.
34:35Yeah, it's no problem.
34:36It's just, you know, it's whatever I can have about John.
34:39Like, because you know, and everybody know how I am close to John from the beginning
34:43and even before he died.
34:45It's fine.
34:46It's fine.
34:47It's fine.
34:48It's fine.
34:50It's fine.
34:51It's fine.
34:52You can't do those.
34:53It's fine.
34:54I'm not going to do that.
34:56It's fine.
34:57You know, that's not, you know, I'm not going to be done.
34:59It's fine.
35:00You'll have to go.
35:01what was that blimey that was not what i expected i mean i've made notes um but um
35:28mo is without doubt the most powerful man on the island no doubt about it he told me the whole
35:34history of john and him but what was important was that mo and john were best mates at the end
35:45and mo was looking after john john had lost his power on this island and mo was looking after him
35:51and mo is looking after the family as well but it was incredible i mean he spoke about john's wealth
35:59and how john lost that wealth um what happened throughout the period when john was in prison
36:08and how he looked after him in prison but he said that john had got greedy and that's that's what
36:14had happened towards the end john had got greedy when he was buying up properties but he was also
36:20borrowing money and so he was having to pay interest back on that money and he said that john
36:26towards the end of his life his exact words john just wanted peace and he just wanted to get on with
36:32his life he wanted to go fishing he just wanted an easy life he the money had gone and he just wanted
36:37to get on to get on with his life the one thing that was quite clear is he says that if john had
36:44stayed in tenerife he would have been safe he went back for that gallbladder operation and that's what
36:51got him killed if he'd stayed in tenerife he would have had the protection of mo and his people whereas
36:59john went back and that ultimately led to his death so it was a it was a mind-blowing interview and i'm
37:06gonna have to sit down and seriously put all this together um because it was it was it was so much
37:14there was so much there and then i need to follow through on the leads that he's given me
37:19to establish whether or not there's any cooperation for those leads
37:36he's given me to be a part of the lead to the lead to the lead to the lead to the lead to the lead
37:42mo portrayed palmer as charismatic but volatile capable of both generosity and extreme violence
37:48he recalled various violent episodes and criminal entanglements involving numerous people
37:56major crime families and organized crime from across the world including the italian gomorrah and also
38:02links to russians also vast scale money laundering all around the timeshare but they were making eight
38:10to ten million pounds a month making he said that the cash flow issues presented by palmer's arrest
38:19led to palmer's downfall the biggest opportunity that came out of his he he spoke about a man who he
38:26described as a british accountant that clearly mo durba didn't like he called him a grass and so
38:33i need to now track that person down
38:54back in the 90s after serving time in prison for fraud i decided to have a fresh start in tenerife
39:00away from the british police and set up a company uh dealing with high net worth individuals advising
39:07them how to minimize their tax
39:13i had clients from all over europe including john palmer's former right-hand man mohammed durba
39:23and at that time i realized that some of my clients were in fact mafia members or just gangsters
39:30so i became an informant on behalf of the spanish secret services
39:39so i gathered lots of information on all these individuals
39:47so i've got a mountain of evidence
39:49so i've got a mountain of evidence
39:51tape recordings
39:55documents
39:58everything
39:59and because of that information and intel i know who killed john palmer
40:14so
40:29hello paul how are you i'm david pleased to meet you and you good to meet you
40:35paul i've i've come up to see you yes um about the murder of john palmer so what's your involvement
40:43in all this how did you get involved in it all i'm an offshore financial consultant right i was
40:49working in in spain when did what part of john's life was this this was late 2000s so that was when he
40:55was out of prison yes right and i had a client who was worth 25 billion pounds million or billion billion billion billion billion and he was involved in a property deal in moscow called project moscow right
41:11which my client had invested in project moscow was a development of a shopping complex in moscow
41:25and from looking at all the accounting records to do with that i came across a russian oligarch
41:31called boris boris berozowski correct right so where does john palmer fit into all of this
41:38john palmer had some links to boris because he was dealing with boris
41:45do you know what sort of business property in tenerife
41:50so he was he was investing in property in in tenerife he was yes right okay back in the 90s
41:57before prison john palmer decided to open an office in moscow selling timeshare and that was
42:05very very successful but to do business in russia at that time was you had to be in with the mafia
42:11otherwise you didn't operate then once he's in business with them he's got access to funds
42:19borrowed funds from them so now he's borrowing monies as well wow and this is a lot of money
42:26money borrowed from a lot of highly dangerous people in russia okay so how do you back up you know
42:36what you've said to us today i have tape recordings right and this is a recording of a colleague of mine
42:43interviewing muhammad over this recording for me demonstrates just why john palmer got killed right
42:51okay someone said that um palmer's jet was often seen at moscow airport
43:02well at that time all the time the jet there went to pick up the money cash
43:09you said that um it was one million pound a week coming in from russia
43:15the russian mafia and the russian people they said okay give money make investment to take the money
43:20out and they keep the apartment in lagomera
43:30and now the problem is lagomera does not exist land has already sold hard faith no building
43:37in the secret filming that we did at the time we had no prior knowledge about john palmer's russian
44:04connections until he started talking about it this is a track a full transcript of one of our meetings
44:11with john palmer a lunch meeting and he was he was very open about his business in russia doing business
44:19with the communists and xkgb agents including the russian mafia we then started tracking his plane from
44:29tenerife via geneva where he had bank accounts before he flew on to russia he told us during our secret
44:36filming that he had opened offices in moscow in st petersburg where at that time vladimir putin was
44:46the deputy mayor of st petersburg and in charge of the external investment committee
44:50there was a story about him inviting gorbachev to tenerife in two weeks time he says here to talk
45:00about timeshare you know it sounds as if he's exaggerated but this actually happened gorbachev did
45:07go to the canary islands it's it's it's extraordinary really john palmer was doing really well in russia
45:21and then he got arrested for the timeshare fraud right he can't touch his assets he can't touch his
45:27money and now palmer is absolutely in debt up to his eyeballs he's out of his league this is not
45:35gangsterism in tenerife you're at a different level do you know how much debt palmer was in he's heavily
45:43in debt to the tune of a million pounds a week interest is that's just interest just interest
45:50a million pounds a week but now if we fast forward john palmer's out of prison he can't pay his debt
45:56that is when you become a liability exactly what happened to people who were involved in project moscow
46:06the russian mafia have killed several people on british soil all associated with project moscow
46:15inside his multi-million pound mansion verezovsky was found dead in his bath by his bodyguard
46:22he was murdered and it was made to look as if it was a suicide
46:27scott young's body was found in montague square on monday
46:29day evening did he fall onto these railings in london from the building above or was he pushed
46:36scott young they killed him also all on the orders of the russian mafia
46:41suddenly you're putting all the pieces of the jigsaw together
46:44you've got the russian mafia you've got project moscow you know a series of deaths in the uk
46:51you've got john palmer vast debts and they're all interconnected everything's connected one way or
46:58another wow tell me what you think happened how john was murdered my trusted client told me the russian
47:10mafia they put out the hit on john palmer and assassins carried out the hit
47:18so do you think that you're putting two and two together
47:21or is that something that you specifically you were told this is what they've been actually been
47:26told right yeah
47:33it's an extraordinary theory but it's very difficult for me to back up if paul is right and john ripped
47:40off the russian mafia in a big way their desire to kill him is plausible but it doesn't prove anything
47:46but it does open up the possibility of a line of inquiry russian ocgs are clearly capable of killing
47:55people on british soil but they don't get their hands dirty they employ professional hitmen to carry
48:02out the murders for them it's happened in other cases and we've seen it hitmen and assassins coming
48:08into the country and then escaping so if i can identify who pulled the trigger i may be able to establish
48:16who ordered the hit on john palmer
48:25they've been described as a murderous drug dealing cartel
48:31what was he burning was that the motive for john palmer's murder
48:36they found all sorts of weird stuff he was here to kill you've got a professional assassin
48:45coming into the uk into essex two weeks before the murder of john palmer as this is dynamite
49:02whoo
49:06whoo
49:13whoo
49:14whoo
49:16whoo
49:18Oh, my God.
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