In November 1983, a gang of thieves broke into the Brink’s-Mat warehouse in a trading estate near Heathrow airport. There, they stumbled upon three tonnes of gold bullion, headed for Hong Kong. What they stole that day – £26m worth of the stuff – made it the most lucrative robbery in British criminal history and sparked a massive manhunt. That search, and the recovery of part of the laundered loot, constituted the first series of BBC One’s The Gold. The second series, out this week, asks a different question: what happened to the other – lost – half of the Brink’s-Mat haul?
Jewellery dealer John Palmer (Tom Cullen) might have been dubbed “Goldfinger” by the British press for his role in melting down the Brink’s-Mat takings, but he’s now living the high life, selling timeshares in Tenerife and appearing in the Sunday Times rich list. “Before you ask, I don’t know where the other half of the Brink’s-Mat gold is,” he tells punters searching for their Spanish holiday idyll. “But if you do find it, you’ll let me know, eh?” While Palmer’s lifestyle is catching the eye of the British police, one of the original gang, Charlie Miller (Sam Spruell), has left prison and started moving the missing bars. And here we enter the realm of writer Neil Forsyth’s imagination, as the corrupting tendrils of the gold spread out around the world. “Respect what the gold and the money does to people,” DCS Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville) warns his colleagues, as they prepare a last assault on the case.
