Charming monster with the Midas touch
The murder mystery of John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, the cocaine-fuelled, swaggering conman with 16,000 reasons to die . . .
THeRe’s something very fishy about the death of John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer — the man who was acquitted of conspiracy to handle stolen gold after the Brink’s-mat bullion robbery of 1983. He was later convicted of masterminding a massive scheme of timeshare fraud in Tenerife.
on June 24, 2015, the 64-year- old exconvict, now living with his long-term mistress Christina, went into his garden in Brentwood, essex, to collect branches for the bonfire. His adult son (by Christina), James, spotted his father, then went to the home gym in the basement for 45 minutes. When he went back outside, he found his father bleeding to death on the lawn.
The police arrived, and — astonishingly, considering that scotland Yard had been obsessed with Palmer’s criminal connections for more than 30 years — assumed he’d died of a heart attack after complications from gallbladder surgery.
or, as his wife marnie puts it in this unputdownable memoir: ‘The attitude that day was: “stick him on the mortuary slab and get the kettle on. Accidental death. Case closed. Home for eastenders.” ’
Five days went by before the duty pathologist came along and found Palmer had been shot six times: a small detail the police had somehow failed to spot.
The case is still unsolved. essex Police eventually totted up 16,000 different possible motives for killing him — Palmer had amassed that many enemies.
But why was he alone in the garden without his rottweilers, with whom he went everywhere? Why was he shot in the one patch of his estate that didn’t have CCTV?
Though marnie accepts that he’s dead, there’s a small part of her that still wonders whether this might not all have been a set-up — that perhaps he ‘did a deal with someone very powerful and he’s on a sunlounger somewhere, laughing at us’.
marnie tells the story of Palmer’s life and of their roller coaster of a marriage — and I’m reeling from it. It’s a gripping, true rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags story, and if you read it, you’ll be like marnie: halfloving and half-loathing John Palmer.
From the moment they first slept together in Bristol in 1974, after Palmer was the ‘knight in shining armour’ when she crashed her friend’s Triumph spitfire into the back of a taxi, ‘that was that — he had me,’ she writes.
she was charmed by his swarthy looks and his optimism, and she loved the jetset life he went on to give her: the Rolex watches, the Ferraris, the fur coats, the private jets, helicopter, yacht, acres of property and a stable of beloved horses.
she loved the smell of him in the glory days, in his Armani suit with his Chanel Pour monsieur fragrance — and he loved the smell of cash. He held thick wads of the stuff to his nose and inhaled.
she even didn’t mind when he broke wind to the tune of Baa, Baa, Black sheep, fooling around with his siblings. It was all part of larger-than-life Palmer.
His entrepreneurial, ‘can- do’ attitude drove their existence. Having grown up in such poverty in solihull that ‘the goldfish froze one Christmas’, Palmer’s blood burned to make cash.
He left school at 15, sold petrol off the back of a lorry, then started trading in jewellery. In the early eighties he built a smelter in the shed in his garden near Bath and started melting down any old gold that came his way, converting it into saleable jewellery. And some of that gold was Brink’s-mat gold bullion.
All marnie longed for was a happy, peaceful and preferably wealthy life. she, too, had had a ropey start. When she was seven, her single mother walked out of the house to go off with her lover and left marnie to fend for herself for three days before she was rescued by her ‘Nan’.
It was marnie’s idea to book a holiday in Tenerife in the mid-eighties, on the proceeds of Palmer’s gold-smelting.
When they arrived, they found their hotel besieged journalists who believed
( wrongly) that Palmer was masterminding the Brink’s- Mat money-laundering. Tenerife became ‘like Alcatraz’, Marnie recalls. They were stuck there, safe because there were no extradition laws. Palmer feared he would be arrested if they returned.
As soon as he heard of the concept of the timeshare, which he did through chatting to locals on Tenerife, he was hooked. This was the way to make millions: sell ‘weeks’ or ‘fortnights’ on an island of year-round sunshine to gullible pensioners.
It was on that volcanic island of black sand that his life of crime really got going.
His company employed ruthless salesmen who earned up to £4,000 of commission per day, bullying and cajoling buyers and frog-marching them to banks to pay deposits, sometimes for timeshares of properties that hadn’t even been agreed yet, let alone built. The extradition laws changed and Palmer was arrested in 1986 on Brink’s-Mat charges. He charmed the pants off the jury at the Old Bailey.
At the moment of his acquittal, he put two fingers up to the row of detectives, walked out of the court and began to feel ‘as if he were God’. That two-finger gesture was ‘such a stupid, arrogant thing to do’, Marnie writes. ‘John would be a marked man from that moment on.’
His association with Brink’s-Mat gave him a certain new glamour, and now he did become a kind of ‘Goldfinger’, running his empire in Tenerife, but jetting back and forth to Britain in ‘Air Force John’, his Learjet.
He was soon raking in so much from his timeshare empire that he became richer than the Queen.
Marnie had borne him two daughters, Janie and Sammy. Little did she know that he also had two sons by different mistresses: Saskia in Germany, and Christina, his business partner in Tenerife.
It gets worse. Palmer became addicted to cocaine, which clouded his business judgment and made him violent. One evening, when Marnie forgot the burglar alarm code, he hit her across the face with his bricklike, mahogany-edged carphone. So God-like did he feel that, when he handed himself in to the police in 1997 for timeshare fraud (knowing that the net was tightening around him and he would soon be arrested), he decided to represent himself in court. That was another arrogant mistake. The case dragged on for nearly eight months. He was convicted and sentenced to eight years.
From riches, then, not only to rags but to an orange jumpsuit with ‘H’ for ‘high security’ on it. The biggest confiscation order in history followed: £33 million. He was declared bankrupt. As his powers waned, Palmer became more unpredictable, callous and violent. The couple separated but never divorced.
Not only is his murder still unsolved, Marnie is no longer on speaking terms with her daughters. Palmer set them against each other in the wrangles over the little money he had left.
‘In his dogged pursuit of financial success,’ Marnie writes, ‘he destroyed our family and his own happiness.’
Marnie has since found love again, and enjoys her two Jack russells and a peaceful life of gardening. She won’t be buying a timeshare in her retirement.