City bonds robbery
The carefully planned operation made it seem at first as if a courier had been mugged on 2 May, yet the City of London Police soon realised that it was a sophisticated global venture which ended up involving participants such as the New York mafia, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and Colombian drug barons.
The robbery took advantage of the existence of couriers who moved vast sums of money around the City of London in order to ensure liquidity in the UK financial system.
[1][2] A 23-year-old surveyor had picked up the four certificates of deposit on Throgmorton Street outside the Stock Exchange, after they had fallen out of the briefcase of a courier working for Rowe & Pitman, a subsidiary of S. G. Warburg & Co.
[3] Upon hearing this story, an organised crime syndicate realised that if a courier was mugged, they could reap a massive haul, since bearer bonds entitle whoever is carrying them to the money denoted on them.
[1] On the morning of 2 May 1990, 58-year-old John Goddard, an employee of financial brokers Sheppards (a subsidiary of Cater Allen) was walking along Nicholas Lane, an alleyway in the City of London.
[1] The contact man in the UK was Keith Cheeseman, who had previously made false loan applications to support a lavish lifestyle which included becoming chairperson of Dunstable Town FC.
[1] The police had initially hoped the mugging was no more than an accident and the certificates would be found discarded, yet the evidence built up that it was a sophisticated plan and thus Operation Starling was set up.
[1][12] A link to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) was revealed in September 1990, when a man left a package at the Aeroperú offices in Miami to be delivered to Lima in Peru.
A search by US Customs revealed that the package contained £71 million in stolen bonds, which the IRA was attempting to trade with Colombian drug barons in exchange for money and narcotics.
[1] Career criminal Jimmy Tippett Junior writes in his autobiography Born Gangster that Patrick Thomas showed him the bonds in a toilet cubicle soon after robbing Goddard.
[17] In the early morning of 29 December 1991, after hearing a scuffle and a bang at the front door, Thomas' step-sister found him lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to the head.
[18][1] The Today newspaper ran a story 26 October 1991 entitled "£290m clue to headless corpse" which stated Cheeseman had been found decapitated in Bolney, Sussex.
The body was laid to rest in 1994, then dug up again in 2009 for extended forensic testing, which suggested the man was from Bavaria in Germany and had spent about a year in the UK before his murder.
The two men joined with John Francis Conlon to set up a new venture in which they would attempt to use some of the stolen bonds as collateral investment for a mortgage from a Swiss bank.
[16] Using bonds with altered numbers, they managed to gain a £200,000 advance in Geneva, although the bank sent warnings to City of London police and the Serious Fraud Office.
When the courier returned to pick up the rest of the mortgage, the bank told him to wait so he called Traynor, who was sitting on a street near Bayswater Road in London.
He then requested a temporary home leave to see his family and when that was granted in November 1992, he immediately took a flight to Dublin and escaped, secure in the knowledge that his offence would not lead to extradition from Ireland.
[4] The Bank of England continues to use the bonds system to protect financial liquidity, but the last paper bills were produced in September 2003, when the entire process became electronic.
