Reminiscent of the Liberty Bond thefts after World War I but bigger.
From The Telegraph, November 3:
It was one of the biggest robberies in history. You’ve probably never heard of it
The 1990 City bonds robbery has faded from our collective memory, but it remains a fascinating piece of villainy
The jewel theft at the Louvre last month reminded us of the elements of a classic heist: an audacious plan, a priceless haul, and a clean getaway. In the hours after the men had inveigled their way into the gallery, opened an exhibits’ case with a glass cutter, and made their escape on scooters, people were already reaching for parallels with other famous crimes: the Great Train Robbery, the Brink’s-Mat bullion robbery, the Hatton Garden robbery and the Millennium Dome jewel heist.
Yet no one seemed to remember the biggest of the lot, the big one to end all big ones: the 1990 City bonds robbery.
That crime has faded from our collective memory for reasons that I still struggle to explain. It only stays with me because a year before it happened, I was working as a bicycle courier in the City of London. The routes I cycled took me around the Square Mile, where the robbery took place. And its principal target was a courier too.
Unlike the other big heists on the list, the City bonds robbery began in a deceptively understated way. On a side street in the City of London, around 9am on Wednesday 2 May 1990, a bank messenger called John Goddard was robbed at knife point.
The thief ran off with the briefcase containing the documents that Goddard was supposed to deliver. These were 301 bearer bonds – financial instruments that, in that analogue era, functioned like high-denomination banknotes. Their total value was £292 million. Consider that figure for a second. The Brink’s-Mat robbery netted a paltry £26m. Adjusted for inflation on the Bank of England’s own website, £292m in 1990 would be worth £726m today.
Elements of the case remain very murky, even to this day. The British courts never convicted anyone of involvement, yet the City of London police declared their investigation a success. No one seems to know who masterminded it, and there is even disagreement over the exact size of the vast sum stolen. While researching the story for my TV documentary, Heist: Robbing The Bank of England, I met a criminal involved in laundering the bonds who claimed the actual sum was much higher than the official figure of £292m.
Having interviewed the former detectives who investigated it and criminals who had insight into the case, I still don’t know if there was a single Mr Big who ordered the robbery. Whoever the masterminds were, they had hired a young criminal called Patrick Thomas to steal the bonds on that May morning. Unable to keep his record-breaking haul secret, he went, the same day, to a south London hangout called Charlie’s Bar and showed it to a friend called Jimmy Tippett.
Jimmy was then a 19-year-old troublemaker. Today, he’s a middle-aged but mischievously charming firecracker of a man with a flat cap and improbably white teeth. I met him in the basement of a karaoke bar on Victoria Street. He told me he had no idea what he was looking at when Patrick Thomas opened a green folder in the men’s room of Charlie’s Bar and showed him what was inside. “They looked like swimming certificates,” he told me. “What you would get from a teacher for swimming 100 metres.”
Thomas then left the bar to deliver the bonds to his client. Unfortunately, he is not around today to tell us who this was. Six months later, in January 1991, before police had managed to link him to the crime, he was found in a flat in south London dying of a gunshot wound. The detective who investigated his death told me it was suicide. His friends, Tippett and the reformed armed robber, Marvin Herbert, told me it was no such thing. The coroner recorded an open verdict.
In the intervening months, a panicky City of London force had created Operation Starling to investigate the crime and recover the bonds. A former detective who had been part of the team and spoke to me on condition of anonymity said their biggest worry was that the bonds would be put into a prearranged scheme that allowed the robbers to monetise their haul immediately. The criminal slang for this is “slaughtering the bonds”.
If there had indeed been a scheme – a land-deal in a Far Eastern country, for example, for which the bonds could have been used as collateral – the robbers could have realised close to their face value. But it appears that Plan A, if the robbers had one, didn’t work. “We could see the certificates were being what we call ‘bomb-bursted’”, the detective told me (meaning that the bonds had just been dumped onto the market instead of being monetised strategically through a handful of trustworthy people). “There was no prearranged scheme and they were desperate to get value.”....
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