The Hunt for the Brink’s-Mat Gold is a compelling podcast about Britain’s biggest ever armed robbery
Presented by Martin Brunt, the series tells the story of a crime that captured the imagination of the nation
On November 26 1983, six armed men entered the Brink’s-Mat security depot near London’s Heathrow airport and, with the help of an inside man leaving a door on the latch, made away with gold bullion worth £26m (£100m in today’s money). It remains Britain’s biggest ever armed robbery.
The Hunt for the Brink’s-Mat Gold, which tells of the robbery and the lengthy police investigation that followed, forms the inaugural two-parter from Story Cast, a new podcast series from Sky News with perhaps the least exciting name in the medium’s history. It nonetheless delivers a hugely compelling yarn taking in larger-than-life gangsters, international drugs cartels, coppers in disguise and superglued suitcases of cash dropped from aeroplanes for laundering.
The series is presented by Martin Brunt, who has worked as a crime correspondent for 30 years and has long been fascinated with the Brink’s-Mat investigation that is far from wrapped up (around a third of the gold is still missing). Crucial here is the testimony of Ian Brown, the detective superintendent originally charged with the task of unearthing the missing gold, and who has never before spoken publicly about the case. Brunt and co can’t resist a bit of bad-boy romanticisation — one of the robbery’s masterminds is known as “The Colonel”, while the man whose job it was to melt down the gold is called “Goldfinger”. As Brown notes: “Not only did [the robbery] capture the imagination of the police, it captured the imagination of the nation.”
Less effective is the production, which is wildly overcooked. Along with some odd background music including the Dallas theme tune, the series is overrun with ringing telephones, barking dogs, police sirens, crashing waves (to signal offshore bank accounts) and the sound of duct tape being unspooled as Brown recalls how security guards were tied up, doused with petrol and threatened with a lighter. Such effects sit uncomfortably in a medium that has moved on from the clunky broadcasting tics of yore. Nevertheless, the story itself is deftly told and so outlandish that you have to remind yourself that what you are hearing is true.
If artfully executed heists are your thing, then you’ll enjoy a 2014 episode of 99% Invisible, the Roman Mars-hosted series about design and architecture. Entitled Breaking the Bank, it looks at the part that building design has to play in bank robberies and tells tales of assorted heists, some imagined or fictionalised and others real, and the complicated lengths to which their masterminds go to avoid being caught.
I also love the seriesLast Seen, about a bold art heist in which Rembrandt’s painting “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” was taken from a Boston museum in 1990, along with 12 other artworks including a Vermeer, a Manet and five by Degas. They are yet to be recovered.