The Goldfinger files
When John Palmer’s bullet-ridden body was found two years ago, the question was: which of his many underworld enemies was to blame? Now a top investigative writer has pieced together the rise and bloody fall of a criminal kingpin
TO THE two young police officers called to John Palmer’s £2million Essex home on June 24, 2015, it seemed like a cut-and-dried case: a tragic accident. The 64-year-old’s bloodied body was discovered sprawled on decking and police immediately noticed evidence of heart surgery he had undergone just a month earlier.
They assumed that he had fallen from the quad bike he had been using to tow a trailer containing garden waste and ripped open his operation scar.
Paramedics attending with the police were unable to save him. He’d died, they all swiftly concluded, of a preexisting heart condition.
There was one major problem with their theory, however. For this wasn’t a harmless man who had died while pottering about his back garden on a summer’s afternoon. The body they unwittingly shipped off to the morgue was none other than ‘Goldfinger’ – one of Britain’s most notorious gangsters.
Amid the bruises caused by the paramedics’ violent CPR and the blood from the gaping wound, they missed the real cause of death. It wasn’t until five days later that Palmer’s corpse finally gave up its secrets. A post-mortem examination found he had been shot six times in the back, chest and arms with bullets designed to fragment on impact.
Essex Police chiefs were immediately hauled to Scotland Yard to explain themselves. Palmer’s name was so synonymous with police corruption that there were unfounded suspi- cions the killer may have been allowed to escape deliberately. When it became clear the force had simply been inept, an investigation was launched into a murder they now said ‘bore all the hallmarks of a professional hit’. It was too little, too late.
BACK in 2001 I was approached by an intermediary to ghost-write Palmer’s autobiography. I had been fascinated by him since the 1980s, when I became aware of his criminal activities. But I realised it would be a mistake to get involved with so dangerous a man, so I politely declined.
In the summer of 2016, I was approached this time by Essex police and asked if I could help with the murder inquiry. Again, I politely declined because it would have ruined my contacts with sources in the UK underworld. But since his murder, I have spent two years speaking to his closest associates to piece together the remarkable story of Goldfinger’s meteoric rise from slum kid to multi-millionaire – and of his bloody demise.
In the wake of Palmer’s death, London was awash with lurid theories, so it was no surprise that police quickly established a long list of suspects. They included a London underworld family, the Russian mafia and even a deranged former Hezbollah terrorist who had once worked as a henchman for Palmer when he ‘ran’ Tenerife.
There were also the many thousands of victims of his £500million timeshare empire, which had helped turn him into the crime king of the Spanish sunshine island.
Once police discovered he had been assassinated, they went to see the infamous killer Kenneth Noye in prison, where he is serving a life sentence for the roadrage murder of a motorist. The two men had been responsible for smelting down much of the gold from the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery near Heathrow Airport, then the world’s biggest-ever bullion heist – a feat that earned Palmer his Goldfinger nickname. An associate later told me: ‘Noye implied he’d co-operate if his sentence was “looked at”. The police refused and the discussion went no further.’
But there was another crucial lead. Essex police combed through 70 pages of transcripts of conversations recorded by police monitoring a gang suspected of carrying out the notorious Hatton Garden safety deposit raid in April 2015. They found clear evidence that Palmer had links with the raid, as well as being an associate of elderly ringleader Brian Reader.
But I can now reveal that it was the Hatton Garden job – and the role played by the mysterious ‘Basil’, the only member of the gang never to be caught – that cleared Palmer’s arch enemies, the London crime family, from any involvement in his death. One of Palmer’s associates explained: ‘John had tape recordings of the family talking about two murders they’d committed and had used them to keep them off his back. They were kept in a security box at the Hatton Garden deposit.’
Safecracker ‘Basil’ was a late addition to the Hatton Garden gang. He had one task – to recover Palmer’s incriminating tapes. In the days after the raid, Goldfinger was summoned to a meeting, where the family told him they now had the tapes – and demanded he pay them £1 million in cash every month to guarantee his safety.
‘He had no choice but to agree,’ the associate added. ‘Despite the rumours, the family are probably the least likely to have killed him. His death cost them millions.’ JOHN PALMER’S life had always been steeped in crime. He grew up poverty-stricken and illiterate in the post-war slums of Birmingham, where his absent father had once been a member of the city’s feared Peaky Blinders gang – so-called because members stitched razor blades into the peaks of their caps.
Sleeping three-to-a-bed with his brothers, Palmer often went hungry and wore hand-me-down clothes. He was still in short trousers when he turned to petty theft and street robbery. He even acted as a pint-sized runner for a gang supplying illegal guns. But despite his lack of education, Palmer was bright, resourceful and ruthless. Contemporaries say he was obsessed with money – the only thing that could wipe away the stigma of being born dirt-poor.
In his teens, Palmer realised the ‘fences’ to whom he sold his stolen goods made much greater profits and with little risk, so he opened a small jeweller’s shop in the centre of Birmingham – its takings boosted by ‘hot’ jewellery.
When a gang of older criminals muscled into the operation, he took his business model to Bristol, where he opened another jewellery store handling stolen goods.
Palmer was in his mid-20s and a prosperous, if shady, local businessman when his friendship with notorious Kent criminal Noye marked an escalation in his criminal career. When Noye originally approached Palmer with a scheme to ‘launder’ gold in the early 1980s, Palmer hired a helicopter and flew low over Noye’s five-acre home in Kent. When Palmer saw a figure run from the house and train a gun on the aircraft, he realised, he told friends later, that Noye was a man he could do business with.
In November 1983, Noye was sounded out by the South London perpetrators of Britain’s biggest-ever bullion robbery at a Brink’s-Mat warehouse near Heathrow. Noye and Palmer were offered a 25 per cent cut to ‘recycle’ £26million in gold bars. Within weeks of the heist, Palmer was smelting £1million worth of gold every month, which was secretly transported to his West Country home by Noye and associates including Reader, who would emerge 30 years later as ringleader of the Hatton Garden gang.
For 12 months, Palmer and Noye outsmarted the law. They smuggled the new, untraceable gold bars out of the country in lorry drivers’ lunchboxes and by private plane and reimported them with a ‘legitimate’ paper trail.
They even claimed back 15 per cent VAT on each deal.
The event that would catapult Palmer into an even bigger league was one that risked causing his gilded life to collapse around his ears.
In January 1985, Noye killed an undercover policeman, John Fordham, in the garden of his house. Detectives called to the scene found gold bars from the Brink’s-
Suspects included an ex-Hezbollah terrorist and the mafia
Mat raid and – as the known associate of a cop killer – Palmer suddenly became one of Britain’s most wanted men. He was arrested and later charged.
But somehow at his trial, Palmer managed to convince an Old Bailey jury that he did not know he was smelting Brink’s-Mat ingots.
After his 1985 acquittal, he moved to Spain, which then had no extradition treaty with Britain. Eschewing the so-called ‘Costa del Crime’ and its flashy London criminals, Palmer settled in Tenerife, where he could live in relative obscurity.
It was there, as we shall reveal next week, that he would turn his Brink’s-Mat gold into riches beyond his wildest dreams.
A decade later, while most of the Brink’s-Mat mob languished behind prison bars, the 1996 Sunday Times Rich List featured Palmer alongside the Queen as joint 165th richest person in Britain with an alleged fortune of £300million. One of Palmer’s associates later explained: ‘At first John thought it was a trick by Scotland Yard to try to expose him. But after one of his associates read it out aloud, he held a party to celebrate.’
Halfway through the gathering, Palmer tapped his champagne glass with a fork to ask for quiet. ‘Who’d have believed it?’ said Palmer. ‘As rich as Her Majesty the Queen… Not bad for a kid who can’t read and write… The drinks are on me!’ BUT Palmer had one weakness: women. He was naturally suspicious and introverted with men, but he had an eye for a pretty girl.
Back in his Bristol days, he was introduced to a beautiful 21-yearold local beauty queen called Marnie Ryan. She was attractive, stylish and down-to-earth.
A few days after their first date, he leaned towards her and whispered in her ear: ‘You gonna marry me one day?’ Marnie laughed and tried not to say yes, but she knew it was destined. Within six months, she was pregnant, which was the perfect excuse for Palmer to press ahead with the marriage.
Few guests at their 1975 wedding knew what the ‘businessman’ groom did for a living. Marnie was discreet enough never to ask. The couple moved into a small house on the outskirts of Bath and soon Palmer was living two separate lives. By day he ran at least three criminal enterprises. Then he’d go home and play the role of loving, generous husband to his beautiful young wife and newly born daughter.
As his fortunes grew, Palmer spotted a detached five-bed Georgian coach house called Battlefield, seven miles outside Bath. The secluded building with a vast courtyard and numerous outbuildings was ideal in every way for Palmer and his family.
He bought Marnie three horses and stabled them there. He used another outbuilding to smelt stolen gold. Marnie later said she felt like the luckiest person in the
He was being blackmailed by the gang for £1million every month
world when Palmer carried her through the front door. He encouraged her to furnish their new home with fine antiques and began dressing like a country squire in tweed jackets and flat caps. Marnie, meanwhile, toned down her look with twinsets and pearls, jodhpurs and neat jackets.
When Palmer was forced to flee the country for Tenerife, he told Marnie to stay at Battlefield and look after their two daughters.
It was on the holiday island that Palmer hired Essexborn accountant Christine Ketley as his business adviser. Before long, he had moved her into his apartment as his ‘Tenerife wife’.
Marnie knew about – and despised – Christine. But neither of them knew of a third woman: a beautiful German student called Saskia Mundinger, who worked as a sales rep for Palmer’s timeshare operation.
Associates say Palmer was completely smitten by Saskia, particularly after she announced she was pregnant and returned to Germany to have their child. Palmer followed her on his private jet and insisted on attending the birth. But when his lawyer warned him he risked deportation to the UK, he flew back to the safety of Tenerife, leaving Saskia to bring up the child alone on an allowance of £60,000 a year. He saw little of his son.
Back in Tenerife, Christine soon became pregnant. One associate explained: ‘I don’t know if she knew about Saskia, but her pregnancy suggested she did.’
Thus ensued a hectic few years that allowed Palmer to shuttle back and forth between Christine and their son in Tenerife and Marnie and their two daughters in Bath. Perhaps exhausted by their competing attentions, it was Christine who finally won his focus.
After scaling back his activities on the holiday island, they retired together to a mansion in High Weald, Essex – where he planned for a long and happy retirement after a hugely profitable life of crime. These plans were abruptly cut short one June day as he pottered around the garden and six bullets from an assassin’s silenced pistol found their target.
Killing Goldfinger, by Wensley Clarkson, is published by Quercus on June 1, priced £16.99. Offer price £12.74 (25 per cent discount) until June 11. Order at www. mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640; p&p is free on orders over £15.