'How I brought down one of the UK's most powerful crime lords'

John “Goldfinger” Palmer was in the elegant lounge of London’s Ritz hotel when the beginning of the end arrived.

He was sitting at a tea table with two Burmese opium producers in June 1994, celebrating finalising a £65million-a-year money laundering deal, when a large figure loomed over him and announced: “Roger Cook, Central Television. We’ve come to talk to you.”

It was a voice familiar to the 10 million viewers who regularly tuned in to watch television’s biggest investigator uncover, confront and pursue criminals and wrongdoers.

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And it marked the start of Palmer’s descent from a man with a royal-level fortune and a life of yachts, fast cars, Rolexes and helicopters to prison – and, ultimately, his death in a suburban back garden.

Palmer, a former gold dealer, had risen to fame and fortune smelting gold bars stolen in the Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery 11 years earlier.

On trial at the Old Bailey in 1987, charged with conspiracy to handle the stolen gold, he admitted melting down large amounts at his mansion in Bath, but claimed not to know it was stolen. When the jury acquitted him he blew them a kiss.

He went on to set up a huge timeshare fraud operation, cajoling or intimidating thousands of folk out of their hard-earned savings and ruling the holiday island of Tenerife with his posse of violent, steroid-fuelled musclemen.

This ruthless “business model” was essential for Palmer’s real activities of laundering ever-increasing amounts of dirty money for his underworld criminal cronies, thieving Russian oligarchs, and other corrupt government officials and politicians who plundered their own countries.

The latest series of the BBC drama The Gold fictionalises this period in Palmer’s life. Played by Tom Cullen, he boasts to one of his heavies as he steps off a private jet: “A ghost, that’s what I am in England – no passport control, no nosy b****** spotting me in an airport and calling the press or the Old Bill.

“Because I beat them, you see. The English police – I beat the best they have.”

This is where I came in. After becoming the first female crime reporter on Fleet Street when working for the Mirror, I moved to the Cook Report in the early 1990s.

During painstaking research for a programme on Palmer, I assembled a mountain of evidence about his hugely lucrative money laundering activities and estimated he had more than £400m sloshing around in different banks in secretive financial centres, including Russia.

The vast Communist state was crumbling as greedy government agents, businessmen and the Russian mafia began to plunder the country’s most valuable assets.

I traced at least 100 companies, dozens of offshore accounts and business interests in the UK, Europe and around the world, and as far away as South America, South Africa and the Caribbean. Palmer used these companies to move around millions of pounds from timeshare, property, leisure and finance organisations.

He mixed this money up with large deposits of ill-gotten cash that swirled around and came out of the Palmer “washing machine” looking untainted and ready to hand back to his criminal associates – minus his 25% commission, of course.

I informed Scotland Yard about our impending Palmer sting – we called the show “Laundry Man”. Brink’s-Mat detectives whose bid to convict him had failed in 1987 literally fell off their chairs laughing. “He will never fall for it,” they claimed.

Gathering legally watertight evidence needed a very special plan, a sophisticated sting so close to the real thing that not even the streetwise Palmer would suspect he was being lured into a TV trap.

I recruited Buddy Burns, a retired US undercover drug enforcement detective, to talk his way into Palmer’s tight-knit organisation.

A tough, grizzled Native American who had worked more drug stings than I’d had hot dinners, Buddy was a perfect choice. He posed as the “representative” of notorious Burmese warlord Khun Sa, then the world’s biggest opium producer and top of the
FBI’s most-wanted list.

He was, Buddy explained in an initial phone call to Palmer’s Spanish solicitor, looking for a discreet “businessman” willing and big enough to handle £30m twice a year from poppy crops.

The prospect of the biggest deal of his life was an offer Goldfinger couldn’t resist. He took the bait within days. The next vital phase of our elaborate sting involved Khun Sa himself.

Actors, however good, would never be able to convince the wily Palmer. So I sent ex-soldier Patrick King into the jungle of war-torn Burma to enlist the help of Khun Sa – who Roger had interviewed two years earlier.

America’s most wanted man agreed to help us and dispatched two of his closest aides. I posed as a shady local fixer hired by Buddy to look after the Burmese men. At a smart mews house in Marylebone, Central London, we secretly recorded meetings between Palmer and Khun Sa’s henchmen.

I handed out drinks and takeaway Thai food to Palmer as he sat cross-legged on the floor with the Burmese men. My real job, however, was to make sure no one stood in front of the secret cameras and to troubleshoot and rescue the situation if anything went wrong. Palmer’s bodyguards were never far away so we had to be ready for anything at a moment’s notice.

By this time Palmer was so convinced he was finalising the biggest dirty deal of his career that he explained exactly how his money laundering operation worked, which we caught on camera.

He was so comfortable that he even revealed he had several “wives” and girlfriends. “Just a secret between us,” he added – little realising his real wife, Marnie, and 10 million viewers would soon be let in on his “secret”.

Once we had a wealth of self-confessed evidence from Palmer, we brought in Roger for the final denouement. It was hot and stuffy that summer’s day as I sat in a black cab with the two Burmese men and knee-to-knee opposite Palmer, heading for the Ritz. I had a tape recorder tucked into my stocking top and secured to my suspender belt – the only place our blushing sound man could think of hiding it where it would not show through my light summer clothes.

Then, once we were seated at the Ritz at a table laden with gleaming silverware, dainty crustless sandwiches and fresh cream fancies, Roger appeared, followed by a cameraman and several of our colleagues.

Our timing was perfect. Shocked, but trying to hold himself together, the previously untouchable underworld Mr Big staggered to his feet as Roger told him we had filmed every contact he had had with Khun Sa’s men.

Palmer denied everything as he quickly walked to the hotel exit swiftly followed by Roger and the film crew. But he was no longer the smiling, confident wheeler dealer who had entered the Ritz a few minutes earlier.

He looked pale and anxious as he jumped into a taxi. The cab got stuck at a red light and Roger opened the door and continued his devastating onslaught, egged on by workmen on scaffolding in a side street who had recognised him shouting: “Go on, Roger! Give it to him, Roger!”

When the taxi finally pulled away, Palmer sat stony faced inside, the perfect image of a man who has realised he had just been totally suckered.

By this time, detectives were raiding all of his premises and addresses in the UK. Every time Palmer rang his offices, the phone was answered by the police.

The taxi driver later told us he had thrown his phone out of the window in anger.

Scotland Yard was staggered by the speed and success of our sting. They used our information as the basis for search warrants and gathered a mountain of documentary evidence that eventually led Palmer to another trial, again at the Old Bailey.

In 2001 I gave evidence against him. He was defending himself and wore a bulletproof vest as he cross-examined me. Palmer tried to convince the jury the sting was a police suggestion to set him up because they could not get to him. But he failed, and this time there were no kisses for the jury. He was found guilty of defrauding thousands of timeshare victims out of millions of pounds and sentenced to eight years. He served four before release.

In his later years he lived a much quieter life with his partner Christina Ketley and their son in Brentwood, Essex, where he socialised with a close circle of old friends.

Then, 10 years ago, he was gunned down in the garden as he burned old papers on a bonfire, blasted six times with a shotgun. He was 65. No one has been jailed over his death.

At the end of the 1990s, Palmer had been worth over £300m, and the Sunday Times Rich List rated him on a level with the Queen. By 2005, after four years behind bars, he was declared bankrupt, with debts of £3.5m.

Goldfinger, it seemed, had finally lost his Midas touch.