There's a gaping hole in your Sunday nights now that Happy Valley has finished for good, but another gripping BBC drama is set to take its place.
The Gold is a dramatisation of a real-life gold heist in the ‘80s, starring Hugh Bonneville, Jack Lowden and Dominic Cooper as just some of the characters who get involved the aftermath of the heist, as the burglars – and the police – watch as the stolen treasure makes its way around the country.
It’s an incredible story, but how true is the six-part series to the real event? Like Bonneville’s character, let’s investigate…
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The heist
In an interview with Esquire, Lowden explained: “It’s not a documentary, it’s inspired by real events. It was heavily, heavily researched by Neil [Forsyth] and his team. It’s so far reaching, they had to whittle it down to this so there’ll inevitably be things that have been left out and Neil has also got to make it entertaining”.
So let's start at the beginning, with the undisputed facts. At 6.40am on 26 November, 1983, six men, including Micky MacAvoy and Brian Robinson, broke into the Brink’s-Mat warehouse, specifically Unit 7 of the Heathrow International Trading Estate. The men had thought they were robbing a sum of foreign money, but instead found three tonnes of gold bullion (6,800 ingots), with a value of £26 million back then, around £100 million today.
The gang of men had infiltrated the building through the security guard, Anthony Black, who was in on the operation. The men tied up two other security guards, and threatened to douse them in petrol unless they used their codes to open up the vault.
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The aftermath
The burglars had no idea what to do with the gold, so they called in some criminal acquaintances to help turn it into cash. One of these was Kenneth Noye (Lowden) who was brought in by MacAvoy’s associates, Brian Perry and George Francis, to help with his stash. It's said that Noye melted down the bullions and mixed them with copper coins to dilute the purity of the gold, but also to make it less traceable, as the police were desperately trying to locate the gold, and the people making a fortune from it. Noye then sold the gold through jewellers, depositing the large amounts of money in banks around Bristol. One bank tipped off the police.
While he was under police surveillance, Noye killed a police officer in what he claimed was self defence (he was later found not guilty by a jury). However, 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.
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Meanwhile, another jeweller and bullion dealer, John Palmer, was arrested. He had a smelter in his garden shed near Bath. However, when he was arrested, he denied any knowledge that the gold was stolen and he was cleared of all charges.
Antony Black eventually cracked and told police of his involvement, and of his brother-in-law, Brian Robinson. Black was sentenced to six years, but Robinson got 25 years for armed robbery, as did his cohort, MacAvoy, who also was revealed to have had two rottweilers called Brinks and Mat. The other four robbers have never been found.
In 1992, four people who helped launder the gold – an estimated £14 million – were jailed for five to ten years, including Gordon Parry, Brian Perry, Patrick Clark and Jean Savage. Parry (a similar character called Edwyn Cooper is played by Dominic Cooper in the series) had been most prolific in moving the money into foreign off-shore accounts in places such as Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Jersey, as was later revealed by The Guardian’s Panama Papers investigation. The money in these was then ploughed back into UK building developments including London’s Docklands, and, as per The Independent: “A portion was used to buy a former section of Cheltenham Ladies' College, which was then converted into flats for sale.”
According to The Independent, the judge said at the time: “You must have known you were playing for very high stakes indeed. There can hardly have been a more serious case of handling than this.”
Brian Reader, Michael Relton and Kathleen MacAvoy also were convicted of laundering proceeds or handling stolen goods. However, these are likely to only be the tip of the iceberg, as to how far reaching the gold – and the money made from it – went throughout the world in the ‘80s.
What happened to the gold?
Most of the stolen gold was never recovered. The Independent reports that “half of it was smelted and sold back to legitimate dealers, including Johnson Matthey, to whom it belonged”, while another half was simply buried and remains undiscovered. The BBC also reported that: “It is claimed in some quarters that anyone wearing gold jewellery bought in the UK after 1983, is probably wearing Brink’s Mat.”
The Gold starts on BBC One on Sunday 12 February, at 9pm.
Laura Martin is a freelance journalist specializing in pop culture.
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