The Gold

A true crime story worth its weight in gold

Shortly before 7am on Saturday 26 November 1983, an armed gang burst into the Brink's-Mat security warehouse near London's Heathrow Airport. They expected to find a million pounds in foreign currency. To their surprise, they found gold bullion worth £26 million. Making off with the gold, the gang committed what was at the time the largest robbery in the world, and unwittingly set off an extraordinary, decades-long chain of events.

The Brink's-Mat robbery led to the birth of international large-scale money laundering, provided the dirty money that fuelled the London Docklands property boom, changed British policing, and sparked a series of violent murders that continued until 2015.

As such, the Brink's-Mat job was the most significant robbery of all time, yet its full, epic story has never been told in its entirety.