The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 8

VifZJ THE GUARDIAN Friday July. 8 1988; Yhm gjDBfflioir "aiftgitt lb(Sm 8 BRINK'S-MAT ROBBERY I- i i i 1. 1 1 I II A trail off decent Where the money went fxwwja Blood money fear opened up Swiss bank accounts 26m. in gold bullion 0.5m. goes to London, telexed to Zurich 3m.

goes into accounts in Dublin, Channel Islands made millions ffoir false friends IHPtes seized at Heathrow laS5S2B8a warehouse and US iriXMaMHvrasaEua i i robbery, was appointed as I Back lonChaIelg iH 'sland Jr0 siZim- 3) Total moves on to Property in 3 fapSI Propertylnir 1 Cheltenham! mSmI Ken DCS Brian Boyce: top security base for investigation pending criminal proceedings required by previous legislation. He also had no reservations about cajoling the Swiss banks into abandoning, what were previously sacrosanct principles of secrecy; He persuaded them to open up numbered bank accounts held by suspects by showing the Zurich authorities photographs of the body of Detective Constable John Fordham after he had been stabbed to death by Kenneth Noye. Boyce gambled, and won, on the hunch that the Swiss banks did not want to be seen as the repositories of blood money. Despite the creation of the task force, half of the 26 million of stolen gold has never been traced, let alone recovered, by the police after an investigation lasting more than four years. The police believe they have indentified how 13 million of the bullion was converted into cash, but they do not know the wherabouts or the fate of the remaining half.

It couM still be hidden soinejwherein its original form or laundered in an operation like that they have cracked. But for the loss adjusters nN January, 1986, Micky McAvoy, who planned and led the Brink's-Mat I I gold bullion robbery, smuggled a desperate let ter out of Leicester pnson where he was serving a 25-year sentence. The letter, to a close associate, communicated a growing suspicion that he was being betrayed. For more than a year. McAvoy had remained silent about the whereabouts of the gold, not a bar of which had been recovered.

Without pa role, McAvoy, then aged 33, would be 58 before he was released; nonetheless, he had consistently declined to help the police inquiry into Britain biggest robbery. The raid, which took place at the security company depot near Heathrow Airport on November 26, 1983, was described at McAvoy's trial as "audacious, highly organized and ruthless." Nevertheless, the three tons of bullion netted was far more than the raiders antic ipated and the haul presented them with considerable logistical problems in turning it into cash. McAvoy was one of the first suspects arrested by police after the Brink's-Mat employee the robbers had recruited at the depot as their "inside man' turned informer. The robbers had succeeded in corrupting the security guard, Tony Black, but they had failed to tutor him in the counter-interrogation skills necessary to cope with the hard men from the Flying Squad. Despite his arrest, however, McAvoy had no doubts about what he regarded as his obliga tions to those still at large.

But in January, 1985, an incident indicated to McAvoy that his consideration was not being reciprocated. The killing that month of Detective Constable John Fordham by Kenneth Noye, the Kent builder later convicted with others of handling large amounts of the stolen bullion, dramatically altered his perception. DC Fordham, a member of Scotland Yard's surveillance unit, had been collecting evidence of Noye's suspected handling of the Brink's-Mat gold. Hiding in the grounds of Noye secluded mansion at West Kingsdown, Kent, he had been attacked and mauled by Rottweiler guard dogs, then stabbed to death by Noye. Fordham's killing, and the chain of arrests which it prompted, alerted McAvoy to the conversion into cash of the bullion he thought was being kept in hiding on his behalf.

As he read press reports linking the detective's death to the search for the missing gold, he became alarmed that he was losing control of his 7 million share, and might have nothing at the end of his sentence. Now, McAvoy reasoned, it might be wiser to trade in his share of the gold for a reduction in sentence. Although determined never to expose his fellow robbers, he made overtures to Scotland Yard about the possibility of doing a deal By September, 1985, negotiations were on a formal basis: McAvoy and another man gaoled for the robbery would return their share of the haul in return for a speedy appearance at the Court of Appeal, where they could hope to have their sentences reduced. Tony White, who had been acquitted of taking part in the 7m. goes to Moyet Foundation Vaduz, Jchtenstein of his Kent mansion tration of the Mercedes.

During the three-month trial at the Old Bailey the prosecu tion alleged that John Elcombe knew the origin of the 50 bank notes. But yesterday the jury disagreed and acquitted Mr Elcombe. In Britain the police had begun rounding up suspects in volved in the Noye-Scaddlyn gold trail. At nearly all the ad dresses raided 50 notes with the A24 prefix were discovered, After that, no more money was taken abroad. The route had been shut off.

Parry and Relton now took steps to distance themselves further from the cash they had deposited abroad. They set up the Moyet Foundation in Vaduz a Liechtenstein trust company which was under no obligation to disclose its beneficiaries. Both were in Vaduz in April 1985 when the foundation Gordon Parry (top) and Michael Relton: fateful meeting from the City who covered the insurance claims for the theft of the bullion, evidence of involvement in the rob- bery or its aftermath are less important considerations. Lowrv: Micky McAvoy. mastermind who.

suspected betrayal: 'HE investigation into the Brink's-Mat robbery took Scotland Yard offi cers halfway around the world in pursuit of the stolen gold and the men who were laundering it. It also led to a fundamental reappraisal by the police of organised crime in Britain, it became clear to them that criminals from the top echelon of London's underworld had established an impres sive international network through which they could move vast sums of money. The realisation led the Yard to set up the Specialist Operations Task Force under the leadership of Detective Chief Superintendent Brian Boyce. The 45-strong team was created by officers already on the Brink's-Mat inquiry and with others seconded from SOU, the Yard's surveillance unit, and the fraud sauad. Up until then the Brink's- Mat launderers had remained months ahead of the police who were pursuing them.

As the Yard's in quiries progressed they were thwarted at each turn by the launderers' ability to transfer the cash to yet another hiding place. Even more threatening to them was a growing fear among the hand-picked group of detectives that the associates of the Brink's-Mat robbers had so much money at their disposal that they could corrupt fellow police officers or other people in a position to interfere with the inquiry. They discovered that the telephone in the house which had been bought for the principal robber's then lover had been illegally tapped. The discovery, together. with their overall fears of infiltration by the robbers! associates, led Boyce to shift the operational base for his investigation out of New Scotland Yard in Victoria to a top security wing at Totten ham Court Road police station.

But the task force began to catch up with the launderers by a combination of exploit ing new legislation at home and exerting pressure on the authorities abroad. Boyce realised that schedule 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act gave his officers powers to get into suspects'. bank accounts without the I was set up with 3.167 million transferred from the Zurich accounts which were then closed. From now on, when the launderers needed to bring, money back to the UK for their property purchases, Relton would instruct the Liechtenstein agents to issue a credit transfer to Credit Suisse in Zurich. A banker's draft would be issued for either the Jersey, or Panama-based companies which would then acquire the properties.

For anyone attempting to trace back the money, the trail would end at Credit Suisse where no account was held by either Parry or Relton. As the prosecution was to observe during the trial: "Why did they go to all this trouble? What a performance." In June, 198S, Parry and the Elcombes were arrested on the basis of the information gleaned by the Belgians' border check. Scotland Yard officers had discovered that the Elcombes' Mercedes was owned by Parry. The three were released after questioning: at this stage the police knew nothing of the overseas bank accounts. But their brief detention had alerted Parry and and Relton to the connection made between them and the Noye-Scaddlyn gold route.

The laundering team, however, was not easily going to be put off. With considerable enterprise, they went ahead with their property purchases. in the process converting the original 7.5 million into 18 Ulion. A substantial part of the profits came from three slices of London's Docklands. New Caledonia Wharf, boudht for 750.000 in Febru ary, 1985, was sold a year later for 1,750,000.

Cyclops Wharf, bought at about the same time for 2.7 million and sold in ad vance of completion, went for 4.5 million. McAvoy's associates also bought lavish properties for themselves. Parry bought a 400,000 neo-Tudor mansion at Westerham, down the road from Sir Winston Churchill's country residence at Chartwell, in Kent Gold-plated taps were installed in the bathrooms, and he spent 60,000 on curtains. The robber's then lover, the defendant Kathleen Meacock (now his wife) was provided with a 250,000 house a few miles away. McAvoy's intermediary.

He was to liaise between the police and the person who was looking after the robber's gold. But what neither the police nor McAvoy knew was that all of his share of the gold had already been moved, resmelted and sold. The cash obtained had been moved out of the country through a network of num bered bank accounts and off shore companies. The laundering had started even before McAvoy's trial began. While he was On remand in custody, hundreds oi uiou-sands of pounds from his share of the proceeds had been deposited in accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

By the time he appeared at the Central Criminal Court in October, 1984 to answer charges of having taken part the robbery, more than 2.5 million of his cut had been channelled out of the country. The two men principally in volved were unlikely partners: Gordon Parry, a property developer from Kent; and Michael Relton, a public school-educated solicitor practising in south London. Parry, who was to be described during the trial as the "figurehead" in the laundering operation, and Relton, who was called the "Chancellor of the Exchequer" to the robbers, had known each other socially since 1972 when the solicitor defended him on a charge of im porting cannabis. Three months after the robbery Parryflew to Jersey where they met a banker to discuss setting up a company. Parry had already conferred with Relton who told him it was possible to form a company in the Channel Islands with nominee directors drawn from local people but whose beneficiaries would remain anonymous.

In February, 1984, selective Estates (Jersey) was established. In the same month, Mel-chester Holdings was set up in Panama City, where similar regulations applied for the creation of companies. In both cases the undisclosed beneficiaries were Parry and Relton. As the prosecution was to say during the trial, which ended at the Old Bailey yesterday, these companies were set up for the sole purpose of acquiring properties in the UK in a manner in which the purchase money would be distanced from the proceeds of the Brink's-Mat robbery. The money which would now through these companies' accounts was soon on its way from Britain via a circuitous route.

The trail began in July, 1984, at Noye's home, from where over the next six months some 10.5 million of the stolen gold was transported to Bristol, resmelted to disguise its origin, then sold on the legitimate bullion market in Sheffield. The dealers who bought the gold ironically, Johnson Matthey, the original owners of the stolen bullion, were among the most enthusiastic buyers paid the purchase price into a small branch of Barclays Bank in Bedminster, Bristol. Between September, 1984, and January, 1985, more than 10 million was paid into an account held at the bank by Scaddlyn, a bullion company whose director. Garth Chap-pell, was later gaoled with Noye. The money was almost immediately withdrawn in cash.

So many 50 notes were cessfully defending all but one of them in the courts. Parry was the son of a south London bookmaker. He met Relton in 1973 when the solicitor acted for him on a drugs smuggling charge for which Parry received a three year gaol sentence. After his release Parry, like Relton, began to demonstrate considerable flair for identifying good property deals. With the help of Relton, who loaned him 17,000, he bought an hotel in the Isle of Wight in 1976 for 80.000.

He sold it three years later for 160,000. At around the same time, he spent 200,000 converting a south London grocery store into a recording studio which was used by Manfred Mann and Jeff Beck In 1981 Parry turned the studio into a disco bar where, according to Relton, who later became a partner in the venture, nightly takings could amount to 40,000. They were ''coining it," Relton said during the trial. But there were also problems which should have indicated to Relton that his partner had very different notions of how to run a business. "Parry hadn't paid any tax Cash obsession drove lawyer over borderline They are now poised to take action through the civil courts to seize the properties obtained through the proceeds of Britain's biggest robbery in order to recover the compensation which they have paid out.

The launderers acquired all the properties through the offshore companies they had set up to distance themselves from the true source of the money at their disposal. But they had reckoned without the naivety of the woman in McAvoy's life. When Scotland Yard officers Went to Turpington Farm, in Bickley, Kent, to inquire how Kathleen Meacock had managed to move from a south London council flat to such a prestigious property they discovered a pair of Rottweiler guard dogs. She had registered their names with the Kennel Club as "Brink's" and "Mat." The defendants Michael Osborne and Joseph Medayil, an accountant, who were both acquitted yesterday, were arrested by the Yard officers who discovered that they had been involved in the purchase of the property for McAvoy's woman. By this time the gaoled robber had already written to his associate saying how he had no intention "of being fucked for my money and still do the sentence." McAvoy could not understand why there should be any delay in the return of his share of the gold.

"It seems someone's getting a lot of interest well not from mine he fucking won't," McAvoy wrote in the smuggled letter. He could not have been more wrong. His share of the gold bullion had been squandered and the deal with Scotland Yard was off. What the deal he had struck with the police required was the return ot original gold bul lion, not its equivalent in cash which his associates outside had thought they could settle the account with. When Kathleen, the one per son who had been loyal to McAvoy, discovered the extent of the betrayal she wrote a bit ter letter to him.

"They have all been in this together, greedy bastards, and the8 have earned millions, haven't they? Well I'm going to do everything I can to hurt them. I love you, and they have ruined our lives so I'm going to ruin them." Instead, Kathleen ended up in the dock at the Old Bailey with the very people she had come to despise. Yesterday, she was found guilty of receiving 250,000 in proceeds from the Brink's-Mat robbery the dream house purchased for her in the Kent countryside. Characters from the trial Kenneth Noye, who stabbed to required for the transactions that the Bank of England had to supply the branch with a special series, all beginning with the prefix A24. The prefix was to become crucial evidence in the police investigation into the laundering.

The cash was transported, via Noye, back to Parry who began to take it out of the country and deposit it in a numbered account at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Zurich. The account was coden-amed "Burton" after the actor, Richard Burton, who had recently died in Switzerland. It had been opened by Parry in July, 1984, with a reference from Relton, who was given power of attorney over the account. The bank was given strict instructions to keep all documentation relating to the account in Zurich. By the end of August that' for six to seven years.

I warned him, but he couldn't care less," Relton said. Nevertheless, when Parry approached Relton early in 1984 and asked him for help in setting up offshore companies and for an introduction to a Swiss bank, the solicitor readily agreed to provide professional assistance. Within six months of that request, Parry had transferred sums of money out of the country far in excess of anything he could have been making from the disco bar. By the August of that year more than 2.5 million in cash had been deposited in the numbered bank account which Relton had aranged for his client. But the solicitor, apparently, never thought to ask Parry where the money was coming from, even though he had power of attorney over the bank account and was now a co-beneficiary of one of the offshore companies with a 26 per cent Interest in its profits.

During the trial, Relton said that he had assumed that the money might have been coming from Parry's mther who owned 86 betting shops. The solicitor said that (from left): the judge, Mr Justice death Detective Constable John year more than 2.5 million in cash had been paid into the Burton account, all but 500,000 of it carried out to Zurich. The remaining 500,000 was deposited at the bank's London branch in Bishopsgate in cash by a man who walked in with a suitcase full of 50 notes. He did not ask for a receipt, nor did he leave his name. When told there would be a 500 fee for counting the notes, he told the dumbfounded staff to take it out of the' deposit He did not wait for the suitcase to be returned.

In July, 1984, the Brink's-Mat launderers made their first substantial property acquisition. They purchased, for development, a number of residential cottages belonging to Cheltenham Ladies' College. The price of 500,000 was paid by Selective Estates which had received a banker's draft for the same amount from the Burton ac if he had suspected for one moment that the cash was part of the proceeds of the Brink's-Mat robbery he would not have gone "within a thousand miles of it" But in Jane 198S, something occurred which should have alarmed the solicitor. In that month Parry was questioned by police investigating the robbery and he immediately contacted Helton's managing clerk for legal advice. As the prosecution observed during the trial, it was inconceivable that a law yer with Helton's experience in criminal matters would not at that point have demanded an explanation from a man who was both his client and business partner about the source of the money with which they were dealing.

Instead, he began assisting Parry in creating an even more circuitous route by which the money they had already sent abroad could be brought back to (he UK to purchase property. By 1888 these activities were taking up so much of Helton's time that he sold bis solicitor's practice and went into full-time partnership with Parry. Fordham (right) in the grounds count in Zurich. Over the coming months other accounts with exactly the same purpose were opened in Switzerland and Liechtenstein by the launderers. One was code-named "Moyet," a misspelling of "Moet," after the champagne.

But in January, 1985, the month in which DC Fordham died, another incident was to have far-reaching consequences for the launderers. On January 30 the defendant John Elcombe and his wife, Anne, were stopped for a random check by Belgian customs officials at the German border post of Aachen. Hidden under the back seat of their Mercedes was 710,000 in cash, 500,000 of it in 50 notes with the tell-tale A24 prefix. The Elcombes were allowed to continue their journey to Zurich, but a random sample of the banknotes was recorded, along with the regis But despite the increasing business involvement of the two men their fundamentally different personalities could not be reconciled. "Parry was a shrewd man.

As a wheeler-dealer, he left me yards behind. All I wanted was an orderly business set-up," Relton told the court When associates of Parry's were arrested in connection with the Brink's-Mat robbery the two men mounted a panic-stricken attempt to distance themselves from what they both knew had been a blatant laundering operation to utilise proceeds from the bullion robery. The plan involved both of them leaving the country immediately, but the strategy was to prove more easy for Parry. Although Relton fled to France he had to return home to deal with documentation winding up the offshore companies and arranging getaway cash for both Parry and himself. It was on October 15, 1986.

while Relton was attending to this business in London, that he was arrested. Parry, meanwhile, is now believed to be In Spain, travelling on a false passport. MICHAEL Relton, one of London's most successful criminal de-'ence lawyers, crossed the line and began taking part in criminal activities himself when the sums of money being handled by one of his clients became far bigger than he could ever charge in fees. Making money had always been an obsession with Relton. In addition to the earnings from his lucrative practice, the solicitor had always dabbled in property deals buying and selling to make substantial and regular profits.

His interest in this sphere was to bring him into close contact with Gordon Parry and lead to what, for Relton, was to become a ruinous partnership. Apart from their mutual interest in property speculation, the two men could hardly have been more different. Relton, the son of a solicitor, was educated at Westminster School before going on to qualify in 1961. By the early 1970s he had his own practice specialising in criminal defence. Over a period of .13 years he represented the Police Federation and acted for 36 officers, suc.