EVIL LET LOOSE
He’s a double killer who laundered £26m from the infamous Brink’s-Mat gold bullion heist. Yet now career criminal Kenneth Noye’s won parole — even though the man who collared him fears he’ll NEVER change his ways
SOME time in the next few weeks gangster Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Noye will walk free from Standford Hill open prison on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.
He’ll taste freedom for the first time in nearly two decades after the Parole Board yesterday decided to release him, praising his new-found ‘maturity’ and ability to control a ‘tendency to use violence’.
When he walks through the prison gates, Noye will have served less than 20 years of a life sentence for the 1996 ‘M25 road rage’ knife murder of motorist Stephen Cameron, 21, who died in the arms of his teenage fiancee.
For the past 18 months, Noye has been at the open prison just 30 miles from the home of his victim’s father.
He has been eligible for release since April 2015, but two previous parole reviews concluded he still posed a danger due to his ‘unhelpful attitudes concerning the use of violence’ and inability to ‘control extreme emotions’. Yesterday, however, the Parole Board said he had since undertaken training courses that addressed ‘decision-making’ and ‘focused on improved victim awareness’.
The panel concluded the risk he posed was reduced due to his ‘current proven ability to control his emotions, his clear life goals, his relationships, and his proven ability to work with professionals and accept advice when it is needed’.
Yesterday Stephen’s furious father Ken, 72, said: ‘This is a joke. It’s nonsense.
‘Noye has always been a nasty and violent man all his life and some courses and programmes in prison are not going to change that. He says what they want to hear and he does what they want to see.
‘He would have made out he is a good boy to them. But he will walk out of that prison and pick up from where he left off.
‘He’s pulled the wool over their eyes and now he is being released. He’s never going to change. He’s an evil man.’
Mr Cameron added: ‘I’m totally devastated. I can’t believe they have made this decision. Life should mean life.’
And it’s certainly true that we can all sleep a little less easily as a result of Noye’s release.
He has spent more than three decades in prison or as a fugitive from justice.
In 1985, he stood trial for the murder of an unarmed undercover police officer, whom like Stephen Cameron he stabbed to death.
‘God bless you,’ Noye told Old Bailey jury when, to the fury and despair of the dead man’s colleagues, it accepted Noye’s claim he had acted in self-defence.
A few months later, Noye would scream at another Old Bailey jury, ‘I hope you all die of cancer’ when they convicted him of his role in the Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery, still Britain’s biggest ever.
The mask had slipped. For in reality, he was an underworld kingpin with a savage temper who — whether through active participation, association with the perpetrators or victims, or police suspicion — has been linked to many of the most high-profile crimes committed in the UK over the past four decades. Noye was named as a potential suspect in the hunt for the murderer of Crimewatch presenter Jill Dando in 1999. He was also an ‘ associate’ of South London gangster Clifford Norris, whose son David was one of the racist thugs who murdered black teenager Stephen Lawrence.
Noye’s net of corruption extended into law enforcement.
While cultivating police favours as an informant, he bribed detectives for information about operations into his own activities and gave gifts to staff at prisons where he was being held. Despite being a consummate villain, he attended Crown Prosecution Service Christmas parties and even joined the Freemasons to make better contacts on the ‘other side’.
Now he emerges a free man ready to celebrate his 72nd birthday, which falls tomorrow. But what awaits Kenny Noye on the outside? Will he settle down into a quiet retirement, or do further criminal exploits await?
That a mystery blonde driving a Mercedes SUV visited him in prison last year suggests that the gangster has kept at least one loyal moll and some of his assets.
But a potentially fatal shadow, which some have labelled the ‘Curse of Brink’s-Mat’, hangs over Noye on his release. OVER
the years, with less than half of the Brink’s-Mat gold recovered, an extraordinary number of Noye’s criminal associates have been murdered or disappeared.
In 1990, for example, Noye’s old school friend and fellow Brink’s-Mat suspect Nick Whiting was found shot and stabbed to death.
And on hearing news of the latest of Noye’s circle to be gunned down by an unknown assassin, John ‘ Goldfinger’ Palmer in 2015, one former detective on the Brink’s-Mat squad, wryly described the victim as having died ‘of natural causes’.
The son of a post office engineer, by 15, Noye found himself inside Borstal, a youth detention centre in Kent, after he was caught selling stolen car parts. Freed after a year, he set himself up as a haulage contractor, shifting stolen merchandise.
In 1972, a 25-year-old Noye married legal secretary Brenda Tremain, whom he had met while waiting for advice from a barrister on an assault charge.
They moved into a bungalow set in 20 acres in Kent, with the £50,000 price tag paid for by Noye in cash.
Yet after he was refused planning permission to extend the property, the bungalow mysteriously burned down. And with the insurance payout, Noye built a mock-Tudor mansion called Hollywood Cottage on the site, complete with an indoor swimming pool and Jacuzzi.
The scene had been set for the tragedy to come.
For when, in November 1983, six robbers were let into the Brink’s-Mat warehouse at Heathrow airport by a corrupt security guard, they stumbled across three tonnes of gold bullion, worth £ 26 million. They found themselves with a problem: how to dispose of so much loot.
enter Noye, who by then had moved into the precious metals business; smelting smuggled gold for resale as legitimate bullion. His task was to mastermind the laundering of the Brink’s-Mat haul.
But the net was closing. And 14 months after the raid, police officers from Operation Bullion were preparing to serve 36 search warrants across the country, including one on Noye’s home.
On the evening of January 26, 1985, two detectives from Scotland Yard’s elite C11 surveillance squad were outside the snow-covered property.
One was Detective Constable John Fordham, a 45-year- old father of three. Both officers, who were camouflaged but unarmed, were ordered by radio to enter the grounds to keep watch on the house before the Flying Squad struck.
Within minutes, three of Noye’s seven rottweilers detected their presence. DC Fordham’s colleague, DC Neil Murphy, retreated to the boundary fence, telling him: ‘Let’s go.’ But Fordham did not leave.
What happened next was the central dispute of the resulting Old Bailey trial. What we know is that Brenda Noye and Brink’s-Mat co-conspirator Brian reader were also at Hollywood Cottage that evening. And later, DC Murphy would say that he heard shouting and saw three figures, one of them pointing a shotgun, standing over someone lying in the snow.
DC Fordham died later in hospital. Post- mortems showed he had suffered ten deep stab wounds from a kitchen knife.
When arrested, Noye told officers he thought he was about to be attacked by the masked figure hiding in his bushes and claimed the dead officer offered no ID to prove he was a policeman.
Murder charges against Mrs Noye were eventually dropped, while Noye and reader were acquitted.
They did, however, remain in custody as police discovered 11 gold bars on the property — as well as the instruction manual for a gold smelting machine. Police believed that up
to £10 million of Brink’s-Mat gold had already been melted down at the scene.
In July 1986, Noye, who described himself as a ‘property developer’, was sentenced to 14 years for conspiring to handle the Brink’s-Mat gold. He had admitted to being involved in illegal smuggling, but claimed to have nothing to do with the bullion robbery.
Prison did little to curb Noye’s empire of crime. He kept in touch with a number of his drug smuggling and fraud operations through a phone in the gym of one jail.
By 1996, Noye was out of prison — but not for long. That May, he suffered a fatal loss of temper that was to ruin a number of lives and secure his downfall.
Driving his Land Rover on a slip road of the M25 near Swanley in Kent, Noye cut up a van driven by 17- year- old waitress Danielle Cable. Her fiance Stephen Cameron indicated his displeasure and Noye stopped his car and approached the van. There was an altercation and Mr Cameron was stabbed in the heart and liver. Covered in blood, he staggered back to his fiancee and told her ‘take his number plate’.
Noye was seen walking away smiling and then sped off. He simply disappeared.
In fact, he had arranged for the Land Rover to be scrapped by a friend and had an identical vehicle placed on the drive of his new £400,000 home in Sevenoaks.
Then he fled to the West Country — police later tracked his movements by his mobile phone calls — from where he was flown by helicopter to France and on to Madrid in a private jet.
He travelled on to the Canaries and the Ivory Coast before going into hiding under an assumed name on the ‘Costa del Crime’ near Cadiz, Spain.
By 1998, he had a Spanish girlfriend and was posing as ‘Mickey the builder’.
Yet it was his first wife that would unwittingly lead police to his hideout. Brenda Noye made three trips to Spain in 1998, with police tracking her movements. Several weeks later, Noye was spotted and Miss Cable was flown to Spain by detectives. She was taken to a restaurant where Noye was eating. ‘ That’s the man who killed Stephen,’ she whispered.
The next day Noye was arrested. And in August 2000, another Old Bailey jury refused to believe his excuse of self-defence and he was sentenced to life, with a minimum of 16 years.
MEANWHILE,his old colleague Brian Reader was busy. In 2015, aged 76, he masterminded the Hatton Garden heist in London’s jewellery district, Britain’s biggest ever burglary. His team ransacked safe deposit boxes to a value of up to £200 million.
Reader was caught and sentenced to six years and three months. He was released earlier this year and will be able to welcome Noye home. Mrs Noye, who had reportedly started a new life in Cornwall with another man, is now back in Kent, where their two
sons live. Meanwhile, Miss Cable is believed to be still living under police protection. She has had to change her identity and start a new life.
Yesterday, police officers who tracked Noye over the years expressed their outrage at his release. Retired Detective Superintendent Nick Biddiss, the Kent officer who nailed Noye for the M25 murder, said: ‘Let us not forget he is a career criminal.
‘He left Stephen Cameron to die in the gutter on the M25 23 years ago this week and then went on the run. He was out in Spain and cynically claimed he had nothing to do with it.’
He added: ‘Kenneth Noye is a career criminal and I have no doubt he will carry on with his criminality when he comes out.
‘I am all for the rehabilitation of offenders but there are some people who don’t deserve to come out because of their lifestyle and previous convictions. Kenneth Noye is one of them.’ Last night a former colleague of DC Fordham, who was on duty on the night of his death, said of Noye’s impending release: ‘He is a horrible, evil man who cheated justice over John’s death. There is no doubt in my mind he will continue in his criminal ways. He is an absolute piece of scum, very nasty and very vicious.
‘To the end of his days, he will be a villain.’
Noye would argue that he has paid his debt to society. But has society just allowed him to open up a new tab?