Brink's-Mat robbery
The bullion was the property of Johnson Matthey Bankers Ltd. Micky McAvoy and Brian Robinson were convicted of armed robbery.
Once inside, they poured petrol over the staff and threatened them with a lit match if they did not reveal the combination numbers of the vault.
[6] The robbers thought that they were going to steal around £1 million worth of Spanish pesetas,[2][7] but they also found three tonnes (3000 kg) of pure gold bullion[8] outside the main vault in 152 bars in 76 cardboard boxes.
[10] Two days after the robbery, a couple saw a white-hot crucible operating in a garden hut at a neighbour's property near Bath, Somerset.
[11] Police soon identified that Black's sister was living with Brian Robinson, who appeared in Flying Squad intelligence files.
[12] Black confessed in December 1983 to aiding and abetting the raiders, providing them with impressions of the key to the main door, and giving them details of security measures and became an informer.
[13] In January 1985, the premises in Bath were raided and the furnace was found but the occupier, John Palmer, a jeweller and bullion dealer, was on holiday in Tenerife.
[17][18] Noye claimed that he had been attacked and killed Fordham in self-defence and at the resulting trial, the jury found him not guilty of murder.
[11][24][15] Another suspect, John Fleming, was held in Miami in 1986 after being deported from Costa Rica where he had arrived following an earlier ejection from Spain.
[26] In 1988, nine people, including Perry, solicitor Michael Relton and McAvoy's wife Kathleen, were arrested and put on trial for conspiracy to handle stolen goods.
[27] Relton was accused of bringing £7.5 million smuggled to Switzerland and Liechtenstein back to the UK to invest in London's property boom in the Docklands.
[34] In 1986, Noye was found guilty of conspiracy to handle the Brink's-Mat gold, fined £500,000, plus £200,000 costs, and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
[37] On 21 December 1983, less than four weeks after the robbery, police in Austria arrested five men, four Italians and an Austrian, at a Vienna hotel.
[54] Gordon Parry laundered large amounts of cash from the robbery after the disposal of the gold according to the Panama Papers, which show an offshore financial intermediary firm in Jersey named Centre Services requested Mossack Fonseca set up a Panamanian company 12 months after the Heathrow raid on behalf of an unnamed client.
Under Parry's direction millions of pounds were put through the resulting Feberion and other front companies via banks in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Jersey and the Isle of Man.
A man identified as depositing £800,000 in cash to the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank is thought to have been notorious armed robber David Moore.
[56] Parry used the offshore firms and recycled the funds, said to have amounted to £10.7 million, through transactions involving land in London Docklands, some buildings that used to form part of Cheltenham Ladies' College, a farmhouse in Kent for McAvoy's girlfriend Kathleen Meacock and a £400,000 home for himself and his family, Crockham House, near Chartwell, Kent.
[56] The Metropolitan Police raided the offices of Centre Services in late 1986 in cooperation with the Jersey authorities, seized papers and the two Feberion bearer shares.
[57] The bank had made very large loans to fraudsters and insolvent businesses over several years, and had serious and unexplained gaps in its records.
