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00:01Always believing in your, oh
00:06You got the power to know
00:09You're in the sky now
00:11Always believing
00:14Cause you are going
00:16Always believing in your, oh
00:21Always believing in your, oh
00:24Always believing in your, oh
00:25Always believing in your, oh
00:29john palmer was one of britain's most notorious criminals
00:33john palmer first came to prominence after admitting to melting gold from the 26 million
00:39pound brinks matt bullion raid
00:59um notorious elusive and now deceased paramedics were called to the 64-year-old's home
01:14where he was pronounced dead reportedly after suffering heart problems
01:18i was called in to examine john palmer about five days after he died
01:32are you nothing about him at all i turned up thinking it was going to be what i would call a
01:38routine post-mortem the paperwork said he had an operation the week before effectively keyhole
01:47surgery and that he died following complications related to that
01:54john palmer was on the mortuary trolley and when you looked at him you know you could see there
02:00were holes in the front which didn't correspond to an operation and i mean there were classical gun
02:05shot rules and then there was like a bulge on his left flank it was a bullet i mean you could feel
02:12it under the skin surface it was clear this was not a routine case he'd been murdered
02:24one of britain's most notorious gangsters shot at close range but who ordered john palmer's murder and why
02:34you can't run on for a long time run on for a long time
02:40run on for a long time
02:42i'm not only gotta cut you down
02:51I was the chief crime correspondent at the Daily Mirror, and part of my job I knew all
03:19the serious criminals, and they knew me. And one day, completely out of the blue, I got
03:24a phone call in my office, and it was John Palmer. John Palmer was a huge underworld figure.
03:33He wasn't like other criminals. He was more dangerous. He was much richer, and most important
03:40of all, he was much smarter, which made him, in the minds of many people, really almost
03:45untouchable. Palmer asked me if I would be interested in writing
03:52his life story, and to be absolutely frank, his life story was absolutely astonishing.
04:01Paul! John Palmer had come from a very humble background. He had nothing when he started,
04:10and all of a sudden, he found himself thrust into the centre of Britain's greatest crime
04:16escapade, the Brink's mat gold bullion robbery. It was, and still is, Britain's biggest gold
04:22heist, £26 million worth of gold. There was so much of it that any gold jewellery made since
04:30the robbery probably contains a bit of Brink's mat gold. Paul! Palmer made a pile of cash from the money
04:39he laundered from the Brink's mat robbery, and he built up a vast criminal empire. He had everything
04:46you would associate with a super criminal. He had a huge estate in Essex. He had a chateau in the south
04:53of France. If he flew anywhere, he flew by Learjet. He had a private helicopter, vintage sports cars,
05:01glamorous women. He had as much money as the Queen. He was criminal royalty.
05:09Paul!
05:13For years and years, Palmer got away with it. The press tried to expose him.
05:18Mr. Palmer, I'd like to talk to you about money laundering.
05:20About what?
05:21Money laundering.
05:22The cops couldn't get him. His enemies couldn't get near him. But eventually, somebody dead.
05:32Shot dead in his own back garden.
05:37Nobody knows who's done it.
05:50John Palmer's case is one of the biggest unsolved gangster murders. It's a mystery. But there's all
06:16sorts of issues and problems around it. And it's one of those cases I think there's an opportunity to solve it.
06:25TMI is a team of former, very experienced detectives, ex-flying squad, regional crime squad detectives.
06:33And what we do now is we investigate crime. It's policing still, but not in the police service.
06:40So we've been working on a number of high-profile murder cases. You know, the most recent one is the
06:47Essex Boys murders.
06:49And the two men that were involved, we don't believe they did it.
06:54And we're at a stage now where we've got it back for a review. So I'm hoping that in the same
07:00way as we had success with the Essex Boys murders, that we can see the same success with the murder of
07:06John Palmer, all these years later, to progress it and potentially solve it.
07:21So this is the footpath. And that, the fence there, is John Palmer's fence. That's the garden where he
07:36was murdered. So this is where the murderer had to have come. You've got a good view over the top
07:42of the fence from here because you've got high ground. You can see into the whole garden area from here.
07:46So looking around, it's isolated, but it's on a footpath. As a prime example, we're standing here
07:57and you've got dog walkers. So there would have been people around.
08:02You've got John in the garden on his lawn tractor. Last picked up at 5.18pm over by the house.
08:20There's no CCTV in this area. His son James is at home with his girlfriend. And someone was here.
08:32It's about 5.30pm. James' girlfriend comes down. She finds John collapsed, calls James. James comes out,
08:44starts CPR, calls the ambulance and he dies. John dies in his son's arms in the garden, just over there.
08:52It's intriguing. The fact is that Palmer Goldfinger plays a major part in probably every career
09:05detective's life. The money from Brinks Matt funded the drugs trade, the cocaine trade in the UK.
09:12So I think the fact is this investigation isn't just about John Palmer's murder.
09:20It's about organised crime in the UK and wider than that. This could take us anywhere.
09:28This investigation could take us anywhere.
09:30Let's start first of all down in the South West. What does Sir Clive Sinclair think of Steve Jobs and
09:36the company he's created? Mrs. Thatcher smiling broadly, a personal as well as a political trial.
09:48The armed men were waiting for the van when it drew up. The security express hall was a massive one.
09:53Police are now looking for the rest of the gang, described as ruthless and professional criminals.
09:58In the eighties, London was a paradise for armed robbers. There was cash everywhere,
10:05gold everywhere, and it was open to us to nick it. Two security guards were delivering money to the bank.
10:11Two masked men forced them at gunpoint to lie on the pavement. You weren't missing about in them days,
10:17because cash was king. There was money, there was gold, there were diamonds, and it was floating about.
10:22In little trucks. That's my wages. Thank you very much. Lay on the floor. You're taking it.
10:34This is how you do armed robberies. You go in there, you're aggressive. Lay on the floor or blow your brains out.
10:40You lay down. Bang! You bring your shutters down on humanity. You're there, a predator, to take what you want.
10:48We was happy. If we nicked 100 grand, in them days, 100 grand was a lot of dough. But the biggest score,
10:54I mean, in the eighties, was the Brim Smack. That was the jewel in the crown.
10:59And I wish I'd have been on that.
11:12The Brim Smack robbery, it was the only least for a crime. It was perfection.
11:17In arm robbery, everything is about timing, doing it, right? The mechanics of it. I mean,
11:28they was blessed. They had an inside man. So they knew the layout, they knew the time frames.
11:34Now, this is a serious bit of work. The biggest massive 6,000 bars of gold. They nicked a lot.
11:47Now, just to put that Heathrow crime into perspective, just the reward offered,
12:00at two million pounds, is greater than the entire sum stolen in the Great Train robbery.
12:05The problem the robbers had was they had a king's ransom in gold, but they needed to turn that gold into cash,
12:14into hard currency. And that's where John Palmer came in.
12:18Brim Smack changed our lives dramatically. Before, we were happy. Life was good.
12:37Everything, you know, was just falling in place. And we were enjoying life and living,
12:43and being together as a family, and everything was good. After it, our whole lives just became totally different.
12:56John Palmer was a small-time wheeler dealer. He was a ducker and diver. He had a business in the
13:03Bristol area called Scadlin that bought in gold, scrap gold, with very few questions asked.
13:09John loved gold. But he also loved silver. And he also loved platinum. And he also loved money.
13:21He was advertising for people's old jewellery and the silver and the gold, the teeth and the watches
13:29and everything. I mean, his eyes used to light up. We used to have it at the house and sort everything out.
13:35He got the smelter. He put it down in an outhouse. And he was melting in there,
13:43sometimes twice a week and making it into bars.
13:47So he was ideally placed to be a man who could convert some of this Brim Smack gold into untraceable profits.
13:55What Palmer did, once he melted down the gold, he was using copper coins or other metals, reducing the purity of the gold.
14:12Once the gold has been through this process, its origins are all but untraceable.
14:16Then he could sell it on as scrap gold for his legitimate businesses. Brilliant.
14:27John Parber worked with two men principally. One was his business partner in Scadlin, Garth Chapel.
14:33And together they also did a lot of work with an entrepreneurial businessman from the West Country called Terry Patch.
14:41Terence Patch was a courier. His job was to go up to London and meet other people who had bags of gold
14:50in the boots of their cars. And he just carried it down to the Scadlin offices and has always maintained
14:56that he had no idea that the vast quantities of gold that suddenly started arriving at Scadlin
15:02were anything to do with the Brim Smack robbery.
15:05Here, look. There's the scales there, look. That's what we used to weigh the gold on in Scadlins.
15:12Oh, this is what you weighed the gold out on?
15:14Yeah.
15:20Garth asked me to do him a favour to pick the gold out one day. So we went to London and it was right the
15:27other end of Vegware Road. He picked some gold out. We went up into a flat. And we're driving back to
15:34Bristol. And he said, I wonder if this brings back gold. And he then said, if it was, he said,
15:42I don't want to do it. I don't want to touch it. That was the only time I really was mentioned.
15:51Were you shocked when you heard that John Palmer had been murdered?
15:54I wasn't surprised. But he must have upset somebody, didn't he?
16:08The police were under a lot of pressure.
16:10Very quickly, they were able to arrest two of the robbers, Brian Robinson and Mickey McAvoy. But they
16:19did not have any of the stolen gold back. It took Scotland Yard about 14 months before they kind of
16:27got a handle on what they thought was going on in terms of distributing and cashing in on the gold.
16:34Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for coming to Scotland Yard.
16:41It's all very well thinking you know what's happening. But taking what you think you know
16:46to the old bailey doesn't work. You need evidence. You need people with dirty hands holding a bar of gold.
16:55We found out that Palm was enrolled in the disposal of the gold bullion purely by surveillance.
17:01He was a new face to us. We have never known where the gold was stored, ever. What we did know was
17:10is that it was being transported in small but heavy amounts from somewhere in Kent. We followed the first
17:20gold shipment that we were aware of into North London, where I saw the gold being transferred from a
17:27Green Cavalier to a Mercedes. We then followed it down to a company dealing in gold bullion in the
17:35West Country. The man who was clearly behind it was John Palmer.
17:44The hunt for gold was on in earnest today as Scotland Yard detectives
17:48descended on a house in Lansdowne near Bath, where goldsmith John Palmer lives.
17:53As far as the police were concerned, the big prize was Palmer. And when they went to his house,
17:58they found his smelter, still warm to the touch, because it had obviously been in recent use,
18:03and they found some suspicious parcels of gold in the house as well. But they didn't find him,
18:09because he wasn't there.
18:28The intensive police raid on John Palmer's home near Bristol happened while he was on holiday in Tenerife.
18:34The whole thing was such a shock. For me, I was frightened. For John, his character
18:49was strength. And he just got on with everything.
18:56I'm completely innocent of anything to do with this so-called Matt Brink bullion ride. I know
19:05nothing of it. He hadn't done anything wrong. For as I was concerned, and as far as he was concerned,
19:13that I know of. The jeweller and bullion dealer police want to question in connection with a 26
19:19million pound robbery failed to return to Britain today. At that particular time, we had no extradition
19:25treaty with Spain. So we couldn't get him. We couldn't get him. We couldn't extradite him.
19:29And he knew that. Today, he was giving his reasons for not going home to face the music.
19:35The first two weeks were ruined by the press. And we just plan to take another couple of weeks now.
19:42As the interviews progressed, we certainly felt he was sticking two fingers up to the yard.
19:48After three months, I said to him that I just couldn't stay anymore. I just needed to get home.
19:56I couldn't take it anymore.
20:06At Heathrow Airport, a sizeable welcoming party awaited the runaway jeweller,
20:10wanted for questioning about Britain's biggest robbery.
20:13He was collected from the plane. When he was in the van, he was reasonable, charming.
20:26When we got back to the police station, his true face was shown to me. That's when he threatened me,
20:36my family, my kids, my house. And he came across as a vitriolic, nasty human being.
20:44John Palmer walked out of the Old Bailey this afternoon, cleared of being the middleman in
20:50Britain's biggest robbery. The jury agreed he had simply been doing what he thought was a
20:54legitimate job for Scadlins and acquitted him.
20:56There was a cry of delight from John Palmer's wife, Marnie, who was sitting in the public gallery.
21:02Wonderful.
21:02Wonderful.
21:03Were you expecting it?
21:04Yes, of course.
21:05John Palmer looked at the jury, nodded, said thank you, and then blew them a kiss as he left the dock.
21:13He put his fingers up to the police as he walked past them, which is a silly thing to do, really.
21:20But he was, you know, because he could be quite cocky.
21:25It was extremely upsetting. How could this man be walking away from this?
21:31Juries are fallible. Of course, it's completely unbelievable that he didn't know that it was
21:36brink-smacked gold that he was smutting. For a start, it was an avalanche of gold that
21:41was coming through his business. But perhaps on the day he just got lucky.
21:45There's no doubt about it. I was melting gold, but innocently.
21:48I don't accept all of it was brink-smacked gold, but I don't know. I'm still not sure.
21:54There's a possibility. I just don't know.
21:57You can't behave the way that he did without there being consequences.
22:03He thought he was untouchable, but no one is.
22:11So this is what we think happened. When John Palmer was killed,
22:37he was living a quiet life with his partner and son in a secluded house in Essex.
22:47This is the last image of John alive at 5.18pm in his tractor, about to go down
22:55to the bottom of the garden, where he was burning documents.
22:59John's son was inside with his girlfriend. The dogs were also inside.
23:08What John Palmer didn't know is that he was being watched behind this fence.
23:15And according to the police, the killer has a silenced handgun.
23:22The killer went over the fence into the garden area and confronted John.
23:27And he shot John six times.
23:36And these are the bullets that were used to kill John Palmer.
23:44The killer then comes back over the fence and escapes.
23:48There's no CCTV and there's no witnesses.
23:53John Palmer staggered about 15 metres before he collapsed.
23:57And that's where he died.
24:05Police initially said there were no suspicious circumstances.
24:09Then they said it was murder.
24:11I think a lot of people would find it hard to understand how gunshot wounds wouldn't have been
24:14noticed straight away.
24:17Absolutely. I think it's a reasonable question. It's a question that John's family are entitled to
24:20ask and the wider public are entitled to ask.
24:23The big question for us is how did John Palmer's murder go unnoticed for six days?
24:34Right, John Palmer, who some people will know. You've worked on him, surveillance on him.
24:40You know him. So what I want us to do today is review the facts around the day that he was
24:46murdered, the day he died. And what did Essex police miss around the murder?
24:51The problem with this is this is still a live investigation. 2015 is murdered. It's not solved.
24:57And when you start looking at the detail that's been put out, there's very little information.
25:01The one thing we have got is the review of the paramedics' attendance at the scene.
25:08So basically, East of England Ambulance Service received an emergency call. Call was reported as
25:14a 60-year-old male in a collapsed state and not breathing. On arrival at the incident, the paramedic
25:21found the patient to be on the ground and there was a man performing CPR. The man thought to be the
25:27son of the patient stated the patient had been admitted to the Queen's Hospital the week before for
25:31surgery and informed the paramedic that the patient's operation was to remove his gallbladder via keyhole
25:38surgery. Having already noted the blood on the patient's clothing, the paramedic states that he
25:46examined the patient's chest and found some small wounds in various stages of coagulation. The
25:53paramedic asked the son if they were from surgery and the son was unsure. Due to the fact that the
26:01death of the patient was unexpected, the police were called once efforts had been ceased and they
26:07attended the scene. On arrival, the police inspected the body and found another similar wound on the
26:14patient's back. In his statement, one of the paramedics claims that he did not feel that the wounds were
26:22consistent with keyhole surgery to the gallbladder due to the location and the fact that they were
26:28not covered or stitched. He states that he raised the matter with the other clinicians on the scene
26:34and the police officers but they were not concerned.
26:40So that's a very short report but I mean what's everybody's views on that one? Did any of the family
26:46hear the gunshots been fired at the time? No. From what they're saying, they're suggesting
26:52that it was a silencer. There was a silencer used. So you haven't got the family screen when
26:56they've been shot. They're talking about surgery which would have been it was keyhole and we'd have
27:02a stitch. Where's your gallbladder? But where's the gallbladder? It's down here, isn't it?
27:05Your gallbladder's down here. Yeah. Yet the bullet wounds are up here and at the back.
27:09Because I still can't understand how they haven't found these bullet wounds. If he's wearing that white t-shirt
27:15shot six times, you're going to have blood. Yep. So that should have been obvious really.
27:20We were discussing this earlier from the perspective of how did they miss the gunshot wounds and
27:26the blood and everything else. They didn't. It's in the report. But the police officers on the scene
27:33have accepted it. Why? Why would you do that?
27:36The role of a coroner's pathologist is to identify the cause of death. Simple as that. Over the course
27:49of my career, about some 35 years, I've done somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 autopsies on
27:54homicide cases. John Palmer must count as the most unusual in terms of a missed murder.
28:01John Palmer had been shot right elbow, right chest, right abdomen. Threw him through wounds to the left
28:11arm. He had a wound to the back of the left kidney and then there was a wound to the back of the chest.
28:20Gunshot wounds are not like the Hollywood version of events. They're much neater. You know,
28:25there's often not the sort of huge amounts of blood and spraying everywhere that you see.
28:32Yeah, they can be missed. I think in John Palmer's case, there's a sort of group mentality has gone
28:39on. It started off with saying he's had an operation the week before and then they've just carried on
28:45on that same route. It was just human nature.
28:52It's a complete and utter mess. I'll use the expression, it's a cock up. They haven't done the job
28:59properly. It's a cock up on a scale that you've never seen. I don't think I've ever seen a balls
29:03up like it. Have you? It was a bad day at the office for that PC. So I suppose 10 years on,
29:09what do you think could be done now? When you look at it, there ain't a lot there, is there? No.
29:15So forensically, you've got nothing. There's nothing at the crime scene. So to find out how a man died,
29:21you've got to find out how he lived. So who had the motive to kill them?
29:33Unfortunately, the material from the police investigation is very sparse. So the only way
29:40to progress this now is to go and meet the people who knew John best and to establish from them
29:48what John's background was all about and who John was meeting, seeing,
29:54and what was going on at the time of his death.
30:12Even though it's been 10 years, it's on my mind every single day. It's like a massive
30:21part of my life has been taken away. I feel like nothing's really happened in these 10 years
30:29to go in any way more forward to finding out who did murder my dad.
30:36So I'm hoping that something might come to light
30:44when we finally get some answers.
30:46I'd actually been to visit dad because it was father's day a couple of days before he was murdered.
30:57He'd had a keyhole surgery. I mean, he was laughing with me saying, look at my scar, Ella. And it was
31:04like a tiny, tiny little scar. It was like, he was, he was fine. And I stayed for about three days.
31:11Um, and then came back home. That day, I'd actually speak to him a couple of hours before.
31:25He'd called me and I said, oh, I'm sorry, dad. I'm at my friends at the moment.
31:30And he's like, no problem, love. That's fine. He said, I'll give you a call back later.
31:34And then he, he didn't.
31:42I was told that he had passed away due to the operation.
31:47So it was one thing trying to process that he's dead. And then another trying to process that he'd
31:55actually, it's somebody had done this to him.
31:57Hello, Ella. Hello, David. Hello. Nice to meet you. Hello.
32:05From our perspective, the big thing for us is it all starts on the day at the scene. What were you
32:12told by the police of what happened to dad? As far as I'm aware, they were saying that it was due to
32:19the operation. Yeah. Then I was told that he had been murdered. How did they miss it? Yeah.
32:27Does that impact a lot? Is there a lot of things that could have been missed from them?
32:32The reality is that, you know, we call it the golden hour. That golden hour is when you get your
32:37best forensic opportunities. DNA, fingerprints, firearms residue. There may be footprints,
32:44tool marks, all sorts of things. So that's the stuff that's been missed. Yeah.
32:49So this gut feeling of everybody is that this crime scene was incompetence. The reality is,
32:56this failure has potentially resulted in this murder being unsolved.
33:04It's really hard to hear. Yeah.
33:07Okay. Well, you've got my assurance that we will do our very best to find out what's going on.
33:24Ella only knows John as her dad. He kept his criminality hidden from her.
33:30To understand his murder, we have to confront his past head on. It really all started with the Brinks
33:40Matt robbery. So that's where I need to start.
33:44So this is the Brinks Matt chart, effectively. The robbers of six robbers, two convicted,
34:03Mickey McAvoy being the primary one here. And my own personal experience of McAvoy is that he's an
34:10extremely dangerous individual. And then you've got all of the people involved in laundering the gold,
34:17including John Palmer. So when you've got this number of people involved, the more chance there
34:24is of cheating, betrayal, you get people ripping each other off. George Francis was shot four times
34:31in the head and chest as he sat in his car. His murder bears the hallmarks of a contract killing.
34:37Charles Wilson died after an assassin called at his villa in Marbella. Police investigating the
34:42murder suspect it was a professional killing. John Palmer, or Goldfinger as he was known,
34:48is the eighth person with links to the 1983 gold bullion raid at Heathrow Airport to have been shot dead.
34:55So who would want John Palmer dead? Well, it might be linked to what they call the curse of the Brinks Matt
35:01robbery. So there are eight unsolved murders, one of which is the murder of John Palmer. And of these
35:08unsolved murders, the one that I had most involvement in is the murder of Nick Whiting,
35:14whose body I found on Rain and Marshes.
35:17These desolate marshlands were probably the last thing Nick Whiting saw.
35:28He disappeared on June the 7th after a break-in at his garage in Rutham Heath.
35:33It was here on Monday that his body was found by conservationists making a survey.
35:38Back then, I was a trainee detective. I was just about to go on my detective's training course at Hendon.
35:46I was here with a much more experienced detective. We found horrific sight. He'd been stabbed nine
35:53times. He'd been shot twice. His hands were tied with ratchets behind his back. He'd clearly been
35:59tortured. Absolutely appalling way to die. Having investigated it, Nick Whiting was alleged to have
36:07laundered money on behalf of some of those involved in Brinks Matt, and that potentially was the motive
36:13for his murder. John Palmer's murder, like Nick Whiting's murder, was pre-planned and it's got all the
36:22hallmarks of a gangland execution. So the thing we've got to establish now is, is there anyone in Brinks Matt
36:34who is capable of that level of violence used in Palmer's death? There's only one.
36:40Michael McEvoy was known to the yard as Mad Mickey McEvoy. He led the gang into the warehouse at Heathrow.
36:55He led the threats against the guards. He led them taking out 6,000 gold bars.
37:03The bullion thieves forced their way into the top security depot armed with revolvers and automatic
37:08pistols. His reputation went before Mickey McEvoy. He was a professional arm robber. Very good at his
37:16job. Not a man to be messed about with. I mean, he could look after himself, but he wasn't a mug.
37:29Why was he called Mad Mickey McEvoy? Because he was prepared to use extreme violence.
37:34I mean, tipping petrol over people ain't exactly going out for a drink, is it? But I'm not going
37:40to put him down because we, every one of us, have terrorised people. Like the petrol thing,
37:46they thought, well, no one had done that other than Buddhist monks. So they thought to themselves,
37:50well, hold up a minute, that's a bit strong, but it worked well. And 10 out of 10 for it for that.
37:55McEvoy was caught because basically an inside man who'd helped the gang
38:02grassed him up. He was convicted and given a very long sentence, indeed, 25 years in prison.
38:09You pay an eye price for being armed robber, and he paid the highest.
38:16I saw McEvoy in Leicester prison. He was in the maximum security unit in a section of the prison
38:22reserved for terrorists. He hated being there, and he was prepared to do pretty well anything to get
38:29out. The deal that McEvoy wants to do is to hand back his share of the stolen gold in order for a
38:38significant reduction on his prison time. We were talking about the return of half the gold that was
38:46stolen. McEvoy arranged for us to see a man called Brian Perry. Brian Perry was also a known associate
38:52to us. He came to see us at Scotland Yard. I asked him, what's happened to the gold? Can you deliver it
39:00back? And he said, it's gone. He said, Mickey thinks he's in control of it, but he's not. He ain't in control
39:08of it anymore. Brian Perry was in cahoots with John Palmer, and he'd taken McEvoy's gold, and he'd handed
39:18it to Palmer so that Palmer could melt it down, disguise its origins, and sell it for cash. We realized
39:26that not only had it been laundered, but McEvoy didn't know that, that McEvoy was not part of that
39:33transaction. So McEvoy was being screwed by people on the outside.
39:47McEvoy thought that he still had the say in what happens to that gold, but he didn't understand.
39:55When you go into custody, you become a liability. It doesn't matter if your name is Alphonse Capone,
40:08right? You forfeit control. The gold had been worked from day one. It was, you know, smelted,
40:15converted into cash. That cash was taken out to Switzerland, and then it was invested back into
40:23property in the UK. And that's where you came in? Yes.
40:29Perry invested 7.5 million in a property operation that I was involved with. It turned out to be
40:37based on the proceeds of the Brinks-Mac gold robbery. Without a doubt that included McEvoy's share,
40:44as well as his own share, because Perry was one of the robbers. So Perry had control of all that,
40:51and we were in a position to maximize it. Two veteran Thames tugs lie moored beneath the metal
40:58and the glass of the new Docklands. Just six years ago, all this was a no-go area.
41:04In the 70s, the Docks was a wasteland, corrugated iron, everything locked up. And then the London Dockland
41:14Development Corporation, which was started by Thatcher and Hesseltine, that came in, overrode all local
41:20council planning decisions. Things really started to move. The biggest single development in Europe
41:27will happen here at Canary Wharf. Before you knew it, we owned four wharves. We had more net profit
41:34coming out of one project than was taken in the Brinks-Mac robbery. That's a fact. But McEvoy didn't know that.
41:40We told McEvoy exactly the words that Perry had said to me, that it had been dealt for. The look on
41:49his face was barely controlled anger. He had been betrayed. There's no doubt about that whatsoever.
41:57And he recognized it. McEvoy wrote a letter out to the people concerned. Hello, mate. I don't know
42:07what's going on here. It's my share we're talking about. What I want is for you to make sure that we
42:13are not fucked and the game is played. I won't have anyone else keeping my share for their own needs.
42:20They'll be signing their own death warrant if they go through with it. And if he believes that we are
42:25too long away to worry about it, well, it will be done for me. I have no intention to be
42:32fucked for my money and still do this sentence. Give my love to your family, McEvoy. So that's
42:40obviously to somebody. It doesn't say who, but it refers, I would think, to Perry. That's never
42:47going to end well. You kind of know that there's going to be blood.
43:06I knew Mickey McEvoy. I'd worked in South East London for the majority of my career and he was
43:13held in high esteem. He'd planned and executed the largest robbery in the world.
43:22When Mickey McEvoy was released from prison, within weeks of his release, he turned up unannounced
43:28on a Sunday at Brian Perry's home address. Quite clearly, Brian Perry wasn't expecting him
43:35and they spent about an hour together.
43:36The conversation, by all accounts, was civil. There was no raised voices or threats made,
43:45and Mickey McEvoy left. And it's evident that the only reason McEvoy had visited on that Sunday
43:52morning was to try and get his share of the gold or the value of the gold back.
43:58In Brian Perry's minicab office, on a large poster in italic writing, he had,
44:06Remember the golden rule. Whoever has the gold makes the rules.
44:14He had the gold, but the golden rule in that life is to stay alive.
44:19Brian Perry ran a taxi business, but had well-known links to the criminal underworld.
44:27The 63-year-old businessman was gunned down in broad daylight on Friday afternoon. He was shot,
44:34probably with a handgun, three times in the head and body.
44:37Brian Perry was shot dead in the street outside his minicab office. At the time Brian Perry was
44:44murdered, Mickey McEvoy was out of the country. So clearly, Mickey McEvoy didn't pull the trigger.
44:50But if we look back at that letter that Mickey McEvoy wrote, it said,
44:56Someone will do it for me.
45:03As soon as I heard that John Parba had been shot dead, I kind of flipped back my memory to
45:11the conversations that we'd had with McEvoy and the part that Parma had played in laundering that gold.
45:19And the inevitable link is there. There's McEvoy, whose gold it was. There's Perry, who's saying,
45:27You've lost control of it. And there's John Parma, who's helped Perry get rid of it. So to me,
45:34when you're looking for the motive for somebody to kill John Parma, you cannot rule out Michael McEvoy.
45:51In early 2000, McEvoy came out of prison and went straight back to business. And he worked for an
45:57organised criminal group out in Spain. It wasn't until about 2006, when I was working on
46:06one of the biggest crime families in the UK, that McEvoy's name again popped up.
46:11Officers led by Detective Chief Inspector David McKelvey uncover an Aladdin's cave of property,
46:17which they link to one of the UK's biggest organised crime groups. A good result for the police,
46:22but one which had consequences. We received information from four separate sources that
46:26McEvoy had met with an assassin in Spain, where they had planned the murder of three policemen.
46:33One of them was me.
46:36There was a contract killer with a machine gun, sat outside Stratford Police Station,
46:41which is where we operated from. And their intention was to follow off
46:46our team and shoot us dead at a set of traffic lights. From that point on, we were living in fear.
46:54We didn't know if someone was going to come through our door in the middle of the night and kill you,
46:57your family, your kids. It's just overwhelming. And I ended up on the verge of committing suicide.
47:04I ended up with a breakdown over it all, destroyed my career.
47:09A dangerous, dangerous, dangerous man with the capability of organising not just the murder of criminals,
47:19but the murder of police officers.
47:23So, so far, Mickey McEvoy is a prime suspect for the murder of John Palmer.
47:30Unfortunately, he took his life in 2023, so we can't now speak to him.
47:37But we know he was violent and he may have had a motive to kill John Palmer.
47:41So he's a good suspect for the murder. But there's so many more leads around this case.
47:47The fact is that Brink's map was just the beginning of John Palmer's criminal career.
47:54In the years after his acquittal, Palmer became one of the richest men in Britain,
47:59running a vast criminal network out of Tenerife and making dangerous enemies wherever he went.
48:07So who else wanted John Palmer dead?
48:20Palmer made so much money that he was at risk himself.
48:24He was richer than the queen, worth over 300 million.
48:27It's crazy. It's just nuts.
48:29Everyone knew him. Everyone feared him.
48:33He was doing business with the communists, including the Russian mafia.
48:37Now Palmer is at a different level. He's in debt to the tune of a million pounds a week.
48:44Wow.
48:45Wow.
49:14Wow.
49:15Wow.
49:16Wow.
49:17Wow.
49:18Wow.
49:19Wow.
49:20Wow.
49:21Wow.
49:22Wow.
49:23Wow.
49:24Wow.
49:25Wow.
49:26Wow.
49:27Wow.
49:28Wow.
49:29Wow.
49:30Wow.
49:31Wow.
49:32Wow.
49:33Wow.
49:34Wow.
49:35Wow.
49:36Wow.
49:37Wow.
49:38Wow.
49:39Wow.
49:40Wow.
49:41Wow.
49:42Wow.
49:43Wow.
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