The day Goldfinger put a £20,000 bounty on my head
TV investigator Roger Cook on a chilling threat from the fearsome gangster shot dead last month
There were a dozen occasions in my career exposing serious criminals for The Cook report programme when I had credible death threats. One of the most serious came from gangland figure John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, who was blasted to death with a shotgun in his essex garden last month.
I say credible, because such threats weren’t someone saying ‘I’ll get you for this’ during filming or later on the phone; they usually came through police or our own intelligence.
Being the target of multiple threats was very hard to cope with, and my first thoughts were always for my wife and daughter — to whom, I admit, I was occasionally economical with the truth.
You can go too far in briefing your family over possible dangers — do so and you induce fear that can amount to paralysis. So it was always gently done, with reminders to be careful and to keep the gates locked and the CCTV and special police response alarm turned on.
I’ve coped pretty well over the years, and I’ve always been fairly nerveless during filmed confrontations with villains, from war criminals in Bosnia to people-smugglers and serious drug dealers, which perhaps contributed to The Cook report becoming the highest-rated current affairs programme on British television.
But I do sometimes suffer from what I call ‘fear in arrears’, as in: ‘What have I got involved in now?’ I just try to get on with the job. It’s what’s expected of me.
I first learned to take some threats seriously early in my career, having ignored one which was followed by an incendiary device being planted in my car. Fortunately, when it went off, I got out with little more than singed eyebrows, but I could have been — literally — toast.
Bizarrely, some serious threats have had a funny side. After we’d filmed a sting on an armed Ulster Defence Association figure in Northern Ireland, during which he demanded money with menaces, a phone call came through at the office.
Our unflappable secretary appeared at my office door. ‘There’s an Irishman on the phone who’s demanding to speak to you,’ she said. ‘What’s he want?’ I asked. ‘I think he wants to kill you — I’ll put him through.’
The man told me in no uncertain terms that if we transmitted the secret film he now knew we had, I’d be . . . he was interrupted by payphone peeps and then cut off.
A few minutes later, he was back on the line apologising for having to go to the corner shop to get enough change to finish the death threat.
Only in Ireland! he later went to prison for ten years.
So when John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer decided he wanted me to die, it certainly wasn’t the first time someone had threatened my life.
What did I do to offend him? Britain’s wealthiest gangster (equally placed with the Queen in the Sunday Times rich List) offered £20,000 to have me eliminated just a few days after what I think was the best sting operation The Cook report ever pulled off in more than a decade of programmes in the eighties and Nineties.
events had culminated at The ritz hotel with a flustered Palmer scampering away in a taxi with me in hot pursuit. It was timed to coincide exactly with a police raid on his home and, as Palmer later admitted, this helped land him in jail.
Like many people, I had become aware of Palmer because of the £26 million Brink’s-Mat gold robbery at heathrow Airport in 1983.
he was linked to the raid when it was found he had been melting down three tonnes of gold ingots in the back yard of his home.
But when he went to trial, he was found not guilty of knowing that the bullion was stolen. The verdict was something of a surprise, and police sources I spoke to believed he had somehow nobbled the jury. The case gave him a high profile, and he acquired the nickname Goldfinger — a sobriquet that he clearly enjoyed.
We had decided to try to entrap Palmer to prove he was a major money-launderer after receiving information that this was the case. The police knew what we were doing from the outset.
We were initially told our proposed programme was too risky and that Palmer was too clever to get caught. But we weren’t deterred.
We asked two drug barons we had met while filming a Cook report in Burma’s Golden Triangle to pose as opium growers who needed drug money ‘cleaned’.
It worked a treat. We had Palmer on tape offering to launder $160 million of opium profits for them twice a year, even boasting that his rates were the best in the business.
It felt like poetic justice setting up the finale at London’s ritz, where, it is said, the Brink’s-Mat raid was planned. When I confronted Palmer and told him we had recorded him offering to launder drug money, he feigned surprised innocence — then ran for the door.
he jumped into a taxi outside, but it came to a halt at a red light ten yards down the road.
I opened the taxi door and began to quiz him again. It was great TV, and later the taxi driver rang our office to say Palmer was so angry he threw his mobile phone out the window. he’d just taken a call from an associate who apparently told him that as he was being confronted at the ritz, detectives were raiding three of his UK premises, using our investigation as justification.
They took lorry loads of documents away. Partly as a result of that, when a massive timeshare scandal he had been involved with in the Canaries got to court years later and he was convicted, Palmer blamed me.
Our sting at The ritz was a good result because nobody had ever got the better of him before. But my joy was short-lived.
About a week later, I was filming in Scotland when I got a call from a senior police officer in the South West Serious Crime Directorate.
he told me they had picked up a known criminal ‘heavy’ in connection with an armed robbery, and he had offered them information if they went easy on him. he told detectives his next job was a hit on me, ordered by Palmer.
I got the first plane south, and when I returned home there were armed police all over the place. Trying to lighten the mood, the briefing officer told me he thought £20,000 was a bit cheap.
Palmer denied ordering my liquidation, and said he would sue if we aired the allegation on TV. We did, and he didn’t, and when the programme was finally broadcast about The ritz sting, Palmer was not the only one left unhappy. We had him boasting on tape that he had a fulltime mistress called Christine.
As the show was being transmitted, we had somebody watching the family’s manor house near Bath. They reported that within minutes of the programme finishing, Palmer’s wife Marnie stormed out of the house and took off in her range rover, bouncing off the gate pillar on the way out.
Of course, I didn’t take the danger of being killed lightly. We’d always been cautious, but with Palmer we were extra cautious. he had the motivation and the money to carry through his threat.
If I was away from home, my wife Frances changed her routine so she couldn’t be counted on to be in any given place at a particular time. This also applied to the school run for our young daughter. Sometimes, Belinda got the bus all the way there, and at other random times we would drop her off, reversing the procedure for the return journey.
School was pretty sensitive since the daughter of John Palmer’s personal pilot happened to be in the same year.
In fact, Palmer himself then lived less than ten miles away.
We went to a different supermarket every time. Not having a routine became routine, and after a while wasn’t too onerous. We never considered moving house, though we weren’t on the electoral register — and we still aren’t.
Frances had a police hotline number, and I kept my mobile with me and switched on at all times — even in bed. This was back when the phones themselves were fairly substantial items.
I certainly wasn’t the only one Palmer threatened over the years. he consistently bullied people and seemed to enjoy it. he may have been dyslexic, but had cunning in spades and intimidated those who dealt with him through violence and murder.
Now, he’s the one who has been killed, gunned down in his essex garden, just over a week ago — though it took several days for the police to realise he had been murdered.
Because of that staggering incompetence, the crime scene at his secluded retreat is totally polluted in forensic terms. But his murder looks like a classic gangland hit, very professionally done and leaving few clues.
Any number of people would happily have queued up to pull the trigger. Prime suspects must include British crime families with whom he had worked, bankrolled or double-crossed — or who feared he
A telephone death threat was cut off — he’d run out of coins Palmer blamed me when he was convicted
A criminal ‘heavy’ said I was his next hit
might be about to turn supergrass to try to avoid a prison sentence he was facing in Spain over allegations he carried on with the timeshare fraud even when he was behind bars.
Then there were his Russian friends. When we made a programme which involved buying weapons-grade plutonium from Russian mafiosi, I had it from a senior Federal Security Service (FSB) officer, as well as hearing it separately from someone in the Met police, that Palmer was heavily involved in money laundering for Russian criminals. Other Russians were rumoured to be trying to move in on his Tenerife timeshare operation.
As the FSB officer confided to us: ‘You don’t pick a fight with the Russian Mafia: they make the Sicilian mafia look like something out of Enid Blyton.’
Back in 2005, after his release from prison, Palmer was ordered to pay back over £33 million. But somehow the Crown Prosecution Service did not submit the correct paperwork, and Palmer managed to keep the money — along with his Learjet, his brace of helicopters, his £6 million superyacht and his chateau in France. The law was made to look an ass.
It was, once again, another lucky escape rumoured to have been orchestrated by the ever-cunning Palmer.
But now, his past life has finally caught up with him.
The £20,000 bounty he put on my head in 1994 is, I believe, the last death threat against me which is still ‘ live’. Hopefully, after 21 years, it has died with him.