John Palmer: the Goldfinger years

Market trader, gold dealer, timeshare king — and the fortune Britain's police believed ran to £300 million. His murder in 2015 ended one of the strangest criminal careers of the modern era.

John Edward Palmer began as a market trader and gold dealer, the kind of man who seemed to have built a respectable business empire through hard work. By the time the police added it all up, they believed the empire was worth as much as £300 million — and that most of it had been built on swindles.

Palmer's name first entered the national story through the Brink's-Mat robbery of 1983, when nearly £26 million in gold bullion was taken from a warehouse near Heathrow. Much of that gold was never recovered, and Palmer was among those later questioned over what became of it. He was acquitted of handling the proceeds, but the association never left him.

The fortune itself was a labyrinth. Investigators mapped a network of 122 companies — many registered in the Isle of Man, Madeira and the British Virgin Islands — and at least 60 offshore bank accounts. Money moved between them in ways designed to be untraceable, and the police spent years trying to follow it.

The source of that money, according to prosecutors, was a timeshare fraud run from Tenerife. Holidaymakers who had bought timeshare properties were persuaded to pay thousands of pounds in 'maintenance fees' and 'legal costs' for properties that were often worthless. Palmer's organisation ran one of the largest such operations ever dismantled.

He was arrested in 2001 over the timeshare fraud, and again in 2007, when police estimated he had defrauded tens of thousands of victims across Europe. In 2008 he was jailed for eight years. On his release he insisted he had reformed.

In June 2015, Palmer was shot dead at his home in Great Baddow, Essex. He was 64. The killing was widely linked to underworld rivals; the case remains officially unsolved. The gold from Brink's-Mat, and the larger part of his fortune, was never recovered.