Latest news with #KennethNoye
Daily Mail
05-07-2025
- Daily Mail
Retired detective gave talk at charity lunch over how he caught Brink's-Mat villain Kenneth Noye - only to discover he was in the audience
A retired detective has revealed he once gave a talk at a charity lunch about how he caught Brink's-Mat villain Kenneth Noye - only to discover he was in the audience. Ian Brown, 86, played a key role in solving the infamous £26million heist in 1983 - which has been dramatised for BBC show The Gold over the last two years - in the months after it took place. The officer was tasked with tracking the 6,800 gold bars after they were transported to the US and Caribbean. Mr Brown did not personally arrest Noye but he established him as a suspect following his investigation into one of the UK's most expensive robberies. But years later, the former Detective Superintendent came face to face with his adversary once again while giving a seemingly innocuous lecture at a Kent golf club. Officials at the venue took him off stage after learning of Noye's appearance in the crowd. Mr Brown told Sky News: 'I go outside and they say "he's here" and I say "who's here" and they say "that table over there in the corner, that's Kenny Noye with a baseball cap pulled down over his head".' He added that there were deep discussion about how to respond to the presence of gangster, who stabbed an undercover policeman to death during the Brink's-Mat probe before using a knife to murder motorist Stephen Cameron 11 years later. 'I said "are you serving food? Well, just use plastic knives",' the ex-cop joked. Eventually, Mr Brown went over to Noye and asked why he had shown up to a discussion about how he had killed undercover officer DC John Fordham in 1985 after finding him hiding in the grounds of his 20-acre estate in West Kingsdown, Kent. The villain was acquitted of murder in this instance but was jailed for handling the gold stolen in the Brink's-Mat robbery, before later being jailed for the stabbing of Mr Cameron. The former policeman added: 'And he said "I want to make sure you don't say I've been dealing drugs" and I said 'I've never said that Kenny".' Mr Brown insisted he would not be adjusting his presentation just because Noye was in the crowd. The gangster said he completely understood, and even offered to make an appearance on the stage with the ex-cop. It wasn't the first time the pair had come face to face, with Noye famously conducting an ill-fated TV interview with Mr Brown years before. The officer was left frustrated following the discussion as the villain repeatedly insisted he was not involved in the Brink's-Mat heist. The segment was never broadcast as prison authorities said Noye had breached his parole, even threatening to send him back to jail. The Gold has recently returned to screens for a second season but Mr Brown added that he had been left less than impressed by the show. He argued that the already enthralling story had been unnecessarily dramatised and that some characters had been completely made up. Mr Brown was also frustrated that he could not work out who was supposed to be playing him in the series. Noye was convicted in 1986 of handling stolen gold after 11 bullion bars were recovered from his home. He was jailed for 14 years and fined £500,000 and ordered to pay £200,000 costs, and served eight years behind bars. After being released, Noye then stabbed 21-year-old Mr Cameron to death on an M25 slip road in 1996 and was sentenced to life with a minimum of 16 years behind bars, before being released in 2019. The former gangster is separated from his wife Brenda Tremain, with whom he has two adult sons, Kevin and Brett. Noye was arrested after Stephen's girlfriend Danielle Cable, who witnessed the killing, was secretly taken by British police to Spain and identified Noye from a distance in a restaurant. He was extradited back to Britain in May 1999 and Miss Cable bravely gave evidence against Noye at the Old Bailey the following year. He was found guilty of murder and jailed for life.
Yahoo
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Gold shows downside to life on-the-run for Brink's-Mat robbers
The Gold showed that life in hiding abroad may not have been quite so glamorous for the Brink's-Mat robbers. Jack Lowden's portrayal of criminal Kenneth Noye showed him as paranoid and anxious in the latest episode of the BBC true-crime drama, which aired on Monday, 16 June. Things began to unravel for the gold robbers living in hiding in luxurious foreign locations. Noye found the Canary Islands was not the most comfortable place to be after he was recognised in a bar by a fellow British ex-pat. Noye chose to go on the run yet again, while money launderer John Palmer stayed put. But later in the episode things began to fall apart for both Palmer and fellow money launderer Logan Campbell, as the police closed in on them. The Gold examines one of the most infamous crimes in British history, the Brink's-Mat robbery, which led to £26m worth of gold, jewellery and cash being stolen — the equivalent of £111m today. A number of people were involved in the robbery from the raid itself to helping melt down the gold, launder the money, and recirculate it back into legitimate channels. The first series featured the robbery and the immediate aftermath, while the current series follows the police investigation to hunt down and catch the criminals after they fled abroad. The hunt is led by detective Brian Boyce, played by Hugh Bonneville. In episode four of series two Noye has been released from prison after serving eight years of his sentence for being found guilty of conspiracy to handle the gold stolen in the Brink's-Mat robbery in 1983. He arrives in Tenerife to visit Palmer, played by Tom Cullen, who has set up a timeshare business on the island to launder the money from the robbery. Looking around Palmer's luxurious home Noye tells him: "This is nice, John. Your house, your plane, your life. Could have been a lot worse though, couldn't it? For you anyway. I did my time." Later, Noye is out drinking in a bar when he is recognised by an old friend of a friend who he played golf with. He asks him: "You on holiday then? Fair enough, hey, you deserve one, don't you, after a stretch like that." Noye threatens the man not to tell anyone where he is, saying: "You won't tell no-one nothing. Because if I find out that you told Barry or your missus, or your f***ing dog, you saw me here, and that ain't gonna work out well for you, Dave. That ain't gonna work out well at all." Noye then returns to see Palmer and asks for his help to disappear. Noye tells him: "Don't matter what I'm running from, what matters is staying ahead of it. And that ain't happening there. Too many English on this island, I may as well be in bloody Kent. I need to go somewhere quiet. And I need enough dough to stay there. "You don't want me coming back here, do you? Every time I need a little bit more of what you got from the gold." As he leaves he tells Palmer: "You know the difference between us, John. We're both on the run. But only I know it." Read more: Jack Lowden Saoirse Ronan and Jack Lowden Are Expecting Their First Child (ELLE, 5 min read) Jack Lowden recalls moment he fell in love with Saoirse Ronan (Cover Media, 1 min read) Jack Lowden Already Knows 1 Trait That Will Set His Mr Darcy Apart (HuffPost, 2 min read) Meanwhile, in the British Virgin Island of Tortola things were also looking bleak for Logan Campbell. Campbell is a fictional character, who has been created for the purposes of the series and he actually is based on multiple real-life people. In the episode fellow money launderer Douglas Baxter turned and became a police informant he agreed to wear a wire and talk to Campbell about his involvement in the Brink's-Mat robbery. Campbell, played by Tom Hughes, guesses something is up and invites Baxter into the swimming pool with him to check if he is wearing a wire. He then confesses everything to his girlfriend Kadene and invites her to go on the run with him to South America or Switzerland. Campbells says: "There's a lot I can tell you, and I will. For now What you need to know is that I've Laundered large amounts of drugs money, and the DEA and the British police are here to arrest me." In a tense climax to the episode Kadene turns Campbell in to the police, telling him: "I chose Tortola." And back in Spain, Palmer agrees to take on a new money laundering client, only to realise he has been set up by an under cover officer and everything he has said is on camera. The Gold series 2 continues on BBC One next on Sunday, 22 June at 9pm, all episodes are available on BBC iPlayer.
Daily Mail
21-06-2025
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: Kenneth Noye's new life. He brutally stabbed two men and stole £26m. Now as he swans around Kent with a much younger lover and plays doting grandfather, friends expose the dark truth
Life, of late, has been undeservedly kind to Kenneth Noye. Despite having a couple of killings under his belt, not to mention a ruthless hand in one of the most lucrative heists in British history, the gangster is a familiar sight on the streets of Sevenoaks, Kent. He is often seen pottering around his local supermarket, clutching an eco-friendly bag for life, nipping into the gym opposite his top-floor flat or simply whizzing around in his Mercedes 4x4. Noye, 78, has been spotted, too, playing the part of doting grandfather alongside other families during sports day at a nearby £30,000-a-year private school.
Telegraph
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Everything the BBC gets wrong about The Gold as the heist thriller returns
When the first season of the Brink's-Mat heist thriller The Gold was broadcast in 2023, it depicted the true(ish) story of Britain's then largest ever heist in 1983, in which £26 million's worth of gold, diamonds and jewellery was stolen from Heathrow. The show ended with its lead villain Kenneth Noye convicted of conspiracy to handle stolen gold, but the realisation on the part of the police that they have only recovered half the treasure. A second series beckoned. As the new season of The Gold begins, there is a new central antagonist, in the form of the jeweller and gold dealer John Palmer (Tom Cullen), who was acquitted of any involvement in the robbery and has now established himself as a respectable businessman, selling timeshares to British holidaymakers. However, it becomes clear that the gold has been smelted down and turned into cash and the police resume their cat-and-mouse hunt for the malefactors, set against an international backdrop. The Gold's creator Neil Forsyth has always been upfront that the show has contained a generous helping of dramatic licence. Nonetheless, he has also suggested that 'the series is very much inspired by real events'. With this in mind – and given that many of the events throughout the second, and final, six-part instalment seem almost to defy belief – we delved into what's accurate historical recreation, and what's Forsyth's own invention. (Warning: comnt Was the remaining Brink's-Mat gold really hidden in tin mines in Cornwall? When it became clear that only half the Brink's-Mat gold had been recovered, excitable rumours began to spread about what had happened to the rest of it. It was suggested that it had been hidden everywhere from a builders' merchant in Hastings (which was excavated in 2001 after a tip-off) to, of all places, Bristol Rovers football ground. The fruitless search for it takes up a good proportion of the first episode of The Gold season two, as Boyce and his lieutenants are thwarted by the machinations of the various criminals, who duly melt down the gold and, with the connivance of crooked Hatton Garden jewellers, turn it into cash. The second stash of gold was never discovered by the police (or anyone else), so whatever happened to it is the inevitable source of speculation. However, the show suggests that the remaining gold bullion was hidden in an abandoned Cornish tin mine. Forsyth comments,'That came from one article the researcher Adam Fenn and I found in the Evening Standard from the 1980s which we decided to explore in the opening of series two. It's very exciting for me knowing that that's never been dramatised before, and it became a key part of our opening episode.' It may or may not be true, but it's certainly original. Is Tony Lundy a real person? There are many new figures who appear on both sides of the law in The Gold, but perhaps the most interesting is police detective Tony Lundy, played by Stephen Campbell Moore. Lundy is portrayed as a brilliant but morally complicated detective chief inspector who refuses to follow the relatively straightforward path that Boyce and the others go down in order to pursue their investigation. While many of the characters in the series are carefully drawn composites, Lundy is in fact a real detective superintendent. Long since retired, he's now resident in Spain: ironically, home to many of the villains that he spent his career attempting to put away. He retired in 1988 on the grounds of stress-induced ill-health, and continued to be a controversial figure for years afterwards. He was sufficiently well-known for the News of the World to publish an interview with him in 1994 entitled 'Bent or Brilliant?' If The Gold suggests that he is the former, there's still enough of the night about him, in Campbell Moore's nuanced performance, to leave doubts in both his colleagues' and the audience's mind. As Campbell Moore says, 'We meet him when he's at the very end of his career, he's hit an absolute brick wall. Then he's given a chance and in a way it's his dream job… I think he felt that it was very unjust that he was being treated like this by the force that he had served for such a long time.' Was the police enquiry really 'the longest and most expensive' in the Met's history? One of the running themes during both series of The Gold is the Met's Assistant Commissioner Gordan Stewart (Peter Davison) complaining vociferously about the cost and man hours of the ongoing Brink's-Mat investigation. In reality, the investigation did indeed drag on for decades. First, the police's search for the missing half of the gold was largely fruitless given that, as the show suggests, it was smelted down and reformed in untraceable fashion. Second, many of the villains involved in the heist absconded to countries that didn't have extradition treaties with Britain, including Spain – where the existing treaty expired in 1978, not to be renewed until 1985 – making attempts to remove or repatriate them nigh-on impossible. And finally, as with Lundy, there was the necessity of recruiting officers who not only had the skills needed but were also above suspicion. After all, there were considerable sums of illicit cash available for bribery purposes. Those recruited were generally ex-flying squad, an elite group of undercover officers hired both for their professionalism and ability to liaise with the criminal underworld without arousing suspicion. In the series, although Stewart's apparent aversion to Boyce's investigation is played up for dramatic purposes, the investigation was a protracted and costly process that lasted until 2001 – and therefore took 18 years from the initial heist – that became about the principle of recovering the gold or money as much as anything else. Who was John Palmer, really? John Palmer, as played by Tom Cullen, was a supporting figure in the first series of the show, and most significant as the robber who got away. Palmer, a West Country jewellery and bullion dealer, was acquitted at the Old Bailey after successfully claiming that he was unaware that the gold he was handling was stolen. When the second season starts, Palmer is apparently a successful businessman, whose Tenerife timeshare activities mean that he is to be found on the Sunday Times Rich List next to the Queen: a source of grave embarrassment for the Met, who are determined to nail him for his illegal activities. He therefore becomes the principal antagonist of the show. In reality, Palmer spent the 1990s a free man. In 1993, the High Court of Justice successfully applied for an injunction to freeze his assets, meaning that his extraordinary wealth (estimated at around £300 million at one point) could now be delved into more closely, and its origins properly analysed. Palmer, as The Gold suggests, remained a source of great interest for the international police, although his descent into cocaine-fuelled paranoia à la Henry Hill in Goodfellas is good old-fashioned dramatic invention, as are his suspiciously regular confrontations with Boyce. The real-life Palmer was convicted of fraud in 2001. He spent the next decade in and out of jail for various convictions. He was shot to death in 2015; two years later, a man volunteered to be interviewed about the crime. No-one, though, has been convicted of the killing. Is Douglas Baxter a real character? The most entertaining character on screen in the second series of The Gold is Joshua McGuire's self-righteous but corrupt financial advisor Douglas 'Dougie' Baxter, who becomes involved with various money launderers out of a mixture of greed and desperation. McGuire and Forsyth are having almost too much fun with Baxter, who keeps coming out with instantly quotable one-liners – 'I once asked for a Martini in a pub on the Isle of Man and the landlord came at me with a poker' – and if he really existed, he should be flattered (or horrified) by his presentation in the drama. In fact, Baxter is a composite, albeit all-too-believable, character: one link in the chain that is the international laundromat for dodgy cash. The presentation of the Isle of Man as a semi-corrupt tax haven where virtually every financial adviser is crooked may be broad, but the famously low-tax regime has certainly attracted some characters of dubious legality. Can the police really use the money from drug busts? When Stewart is moaning to Boyce about the costs of the investigation, the dogged detective suggests that, should the money be recovered from the criminals, it would then pass straight into the hands of the police force to offset the money spent on investigating them, as long as there might be some drug-related offence involved. Although this sounds like a particularly neat (or contrived) piece of dramatic invention, the Drug Trafficking Offences Act was a real piece of legislation that was introduced in 1986, as a result of Operation Julie: an attempt to recover the profits that were made from a major LSD-smuggling ring in the 1970s. The act was later replaced by the 1994 Drug Trafficking Act, which broadened the scope to suggest that a confiscation order of a defendant's assets might be made if they were found guilty of having received 'payment or any other reward' from drug-related activities. Therefore, while the original Brink's-Mat robbery had nothing to do with narcotics, by the time that the considerable sums of money being involved were being used to finance and facilitate international drug deals, it had inadvertently played right into the Met's hands. Did Kenneth Noye kill someone by accident in a road rage incident – or was it deliberate? The surprise reappearance of Jack Lowden's Kenneth Noye in Tenerife at the end of the show's third episode, asking a reluctant Palmer for help, was revealed in the programme's trailers, as otherwise it might have been a genuinely surprising twist. By the time that he re-enters the second series, Noye has been released on licence after serving eight years of his fourteen-year sentence for conspiracy charges, and promptly goes on the run after murdering a 21-year old motorist, Stephen Cameron, in what was widely reported as a road rage incident. The show implies that Noye had acted with deliberate intent. Noye, who is still alive – unlike many of the villains depicted in the show – was said to have been flattered by the casting of the charismatic Lowden in the first season; it will be interesting to see whether his reappearance leads to similar admiration. Are 'supergrasses' a real phenomenon? When the Comic Strip group released their comedy The Supergrass in 1985, in which a nobody boasts about being a successful drug smuggler and is mistaken for a police informant, the idea of the 'supergrass' was an unfamiliar one; so much so that they might have been believed to invent it. The 'grass' – or informant – has been a well-known feature of the legal system since the late 1930s, when the word was used to describe a police stooge; the expression came from the term 'snake in the grass'. But the term 'supergrass' first emerged in the early 1970s to denote someone whose knowledge might be able to crack open and convict whole criminal networks. But this idea was always more optimistic than anything else, and by around 1985, the term 'supergrass' had fallen into abeyance. The system was discontinued after a series of high-profile trials in Northern Ireland fell apart due to the 'bizarre, incredible and contradictory' statements of one such supergrass, and many of the informants' evidence was regarded as tainted. By the time that the second series of The Gold begins in the early 1990s, supergrasses were largely obsolete (although they would, of course, give their name to the Britpop band). Therefore, the late introduction of an old-school villain (who shall remain nameless here) who is secretly working for the police is a surprising throwback, as is the revelation of which of the central characters has been in charge of them. This epitomises the tense, at times compromised relationship between the police and criminals – and the blurred lines between the two – which becomes such a central feature of The Gold. The first season of the show was one of the most popular dramas on the BBC in the past few years, and there's no reason why the second instalment shouldn't recreate its success. But go in expecting dramatic invention, rather than documentary fact, and you won't be disappointed.
Telegraph
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Gold, series 2, review: bleaker, more desperate, but the show retains its sparkle
The first series of The Gold (BBC One), a drama about the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery, was an accomplished piece with one major flaw: a soft spot for its chief villain. Everyone likes a Robin Hood figure, but Kenneth Noye is a convicted murderer who also stabbed a police officer to death. This isn't loveable rogue territory. The second series wisely avoids doing the same thing again. It differs in two ways. When Noye (Jack Lowden) eventually appears, he is now just a nasty piece of work. And the sequel is more interested in two other characters linked to the heist: John 'Goldfinger' Palmer and Charlie Miller. They're not exactly nice guys either, but they've got more nuance in storytelling terms. Cast your mind back to the ending of series one, and one of the final shots was of Miller (Sam Spruell) sunning himself on the Costa Del Sol. He was revealed to be one of the armed robbers, and that tied in with Scotland Yard's realisation that they had only ever been on the trail of half of the Brink's-Mat gold. Now they're going after the other 50 per cent – all £13 million of it – and the drama explores various theories, which range from stashing it down a Cornish tin mine to laundering the money through a former public schoolboy based in the British Virgin Islands. 'A lot of blokes in South London become villains to be big men in South London. I became a villain to get out of South London. I became a villain so that one day I wouldn't have to be a villain any more,' says Miller, but his unsophisticated ways soon tell and he finds out that acquiring wealth and knowing what to do with it are two separate things. Meanwhile, Palmer (Tom Cullen) is sitting pretty on the Sunday Times Rich List thanks – on paper at least – to his dodgy timeshare business. Unfortunately for him, he's a magnet for trouble. With the chauffeur, private jet and champagne comes cocaine, Russian gangsters, and angry pensioners fleeced out of their life savings. There are so many threads to the story, which freely admits to being based on theories rather than facts, and writer Neil Forsyth handles them with great skill. While it may lack the narrative drive of series one, it will keep you watching through the strength of the writing and the top-notch performances from everyone involved – Bafta nominations for Cullen and Spruell would be well-deserved. If the scenes in Tortola begin to drag, they are pepped up by a great turn from Joshua McGuire as Douglas Baxter, a prissy, disgraced lawyer who brings a welcome note of comedy. There's also a great little cameo from Phil Davis as a crime boss hankering after the good old days. The hunt for the gold is again led by Hugh Bonneville as Brian Boyce, the dogged detective who personifies everything that was good and proper about old-fashioned British policing. At the beginning, he's under pressure to wrap it up – this has been the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Met, and its failure has become an embarrassment. But Boyce presses on, aided by trusty colleagues Brightwell and Jennings (Charlotte Spencer and Emun Elliott) and new addition Tony Lundy (Stephen Campbell Moore). It's no spoiler to say the police never did find the gold. But nobody got clean away. Where series one was full of verve, this series has a bleaker, more desperate tone. Pulling off the heist was all well and good. This follow-up is about the reality of being on the run, and it's not much fun.
