Brink’s-Mat robbery 1983: Seven men steal £25m worth of gold in huge heist

At around 6am on November 26, 1983, seven men in a van, armed with guns and disguised with balaclavas, approached the Brink’s-Mat depot about one mile away from Heathrow Airport.

They were on the hunt for million pounds worth of foreign currency.

The group jumped through the back doors of the vehicle and broke into the warehouse, overcoming a number of guards and disabling a huge array of electronic security devices.

But instead of cash, they stumbled upon gold bullion worth £26million, bound for the Far East.

The Brink’s-Mat robbery was the largest robbery in world history at the time.

Several of its key players were born and bred South Londoners: security guard Anthony Black, from Bromley, robbers Micky McAvoy and Brian Robinson from Bromley and Kidbrooke, and notorious criminal Kenneth Noye from Bexleyheath.

In the words of the detectives first assigned to the case, the incident appeared to be “a typical Old Kent Road armed robbery”.

But over the following months, detectives scrambled to track down the robbers and their loot, with little success.

The robbers had handcuffed guards, knocked one out with a pistol and poured petrol over them, before using the warehouse’s own forklift trucks to transport the 76 boxes of gold into a waiting van.

The alarm was raised by one of the guards at around 8.30am. But by then, the gang was long gone.

Reports stated that the 6,800 gold bars, which weighed three tons, would have been contained in packages measuring 6ft by 3ft by 2ft. Each piece was identifiable by refiners’ stamps.

After fleeing the scene, the robbers turned to Mr Noye for help to turn their unexpected treasure stash into cash.

Born on 24 May, 1947, in Bexleyheath, where his father ran a post office and his mother a dog racing track, Noye was known as one of Britain’s most notorious criminals.

He combined some of the gold with copper to disguise it, before selling the pieces and laundering the cash.

Scotland Yard Flying Squad Chief Commander Frank Cater, who led the hunt for the thieves, said he believed they had inside information, and were a “highly professional team”.

The inside information had come from Black, a security guard who had been caught up in the scheme alongside his brother-in-law, Robinson.

Black gave up Robinson to police for his part in the heist.

He was jailed, alongside McAvoy, for 25 years. They are the only two robbers convicted for the heist itself. They both died in the past two years.

Cops later found 11 gold bars, worth £100,000, wrapped in cloth and hidden in a drainage trench at Noye’s former home.

He was imprisoned for helping to launder some of the cash, but before he was sent behind bars he knifed an undercover detective to death after finding him in his back garden.

Noye was cleared of murder after pleading self-defence, but later convicted for murdering a man on a slip road of the M25 in a road rage incident.

Despite a huge police investigation, most of the gold has never been recovered.

So huge was the heist, it is said that if you have bought gold jewellery in the UK since November 1983, the chances are you were wearing some of the bullion stolen during the Brink’s-Mat robbery.

Pictured top: CS Brian Boyce, head of Scotland Yard’s task force, investigating the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery, carries boxes marked ‘Exhibits’  at Lambeth Magistrates’ Court, where eight people were charged with handling Brink’s-Mat gold (Picture: PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo)