Why should the BBC portray Brink’s mat sociopathic gangsters as nothing more than rogues?

The chief reporter for the Western Daily Press, my colleague Mervyn Hancock, was a big guy in every way: highly experienced, loud, 6-foot-3, and good-humored.

But an encounter with John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, now a main character in the BBC1 crime drama The Gold, left this imposing man white-faced and shaken.

In the early 1990s, when I was working at the Bristol morning paper, we heard that Palmer was running a timeshare scam, ripping off thousands of tourists.

Merv went to investigate. He signed up for a presentation at a hotel in the city, where he watched a video promoting Palmer’s apartments in Playa de las Américas, Tenerife.

After being showered with promises of free vacations for life and annual earnings, by the end of the sales movie, everyone in the conference room, most of them retired couples, discovered the trap.

The gates were locked and no one would be allowed out until they had signed in.

Merv declared that he was leaving. That’s when the scare tactics started. Customers couldn’t leave, use the restrooms or even attend medical appointments as they were pressured for six hours by Palmer’s slick sales team. They threw pens into their hands and forced them to sign.

This was just the ugly start of a massive fraud that scammed customers out of thousands of pounds. Many never even got to spend their vacations in their time-share apartments.

When Mervyn finally returned to the office, he was shocked, but seething with anger at what the thugs were doing to innocent people.

That was the truth about John Palmer, the ruthless and illiterate gangster, who is now portrayed by the BBC as a doe-eyed, cuddly big man in the new series about the aftermath of the biggest armed robbery in British history: Brink’s. -Theft of Mat gold bars in November 1983.

Tom Cullen is a good physical match for ‘Goldfinger’, so named because his scrap gold business Scadlynn, based in Bristol’s Bedminster district, bought jewelery by the pound.

Melted down, these pieces of precious metal helped him disguise much of the three tons of extraordinarily pure gold, valued at £26 million in 1983, from the robbery.

But Cullen’s Palmer is a Somerset softy, a wide boy just out of his reach in the big leagues. In love with his needy wife Marnie (Stefanie Martini), he pushes his luck and continues to melt down stolen gold. No one is more surprised than him when she gets away with it.

In a tearful scene, Palmer tells Marnie how, as a child, he was bitterly ashamed of his alcoholic and homeless father. Any crime is better than living as a beggar on the streets, he says.

What sentimental nonsense. His assassin associate Kenneth Noye (played by Jack Lowden in the drama) made it clear in a book published last month that even he was terrified of John Palmer.

After Noye stabbed Stephen Cameron to death in a road rage on the M25 in May 1996, Palmer helped him flee to Tenerife, traveling part of the way in a private plane owned by a mafia oligarch. Russian.

In the Canaries, Noye saw some of the methods Palmer used to deter challenges to his power.

He ensured a reign of terror by encouraging his entourage of thugs to do cocaine and whiskey on weekends, before descending on bars to pick fights with locals and tourists.

On another occasion, one of his lovers, a teenager, was invited to throw a party for her family and friends, where she would be given the keys to her own glamorous vehicle. With great ceremony, she was blindfolded by her and everyone gathered around her, before one of Palmer’s henchmen rode a dirty, broken-down motorcycle. . . purely to humiliate her.

Figuring it was only a matter of time before he himself became a victim of Palmer’s malevolent grudge, Noye took off for Africa and spent the next two years on the run. Eventually, he was tracked down by the dogged police work of Detective Superintendent Nick Biddiss of the Kent force, who criticized Noye’s generous portrayal in The Gold.

“The BBC portrait of Noye is out of order,” says Biddiss. He was a cunning, cold-blooded killer, but that doesn’t get across. The drama shows that he was a kind of latter-day Robin Hood, a ladies’ man who wouldn’t hurt anyone, not the vicious, violent criminal that he really was.”

The claim that these wicked men were merely working-class rogues is only one part of the large-scale reimagining of events in The Gold.

One scene early on, for example, shows a wise old superintendent advising Flying Squad detectives DS Tony Brightwell and DC Nicki Jennings (played by Emun Elliott and Charlotte Spencer). He suggests Noye as a likely suspect for the first time.

The reality was much more colorful than that, according to a Sky News podcast published last year by veteran police reporter Martin Brunt. In the police canteen, Brunt said, as officers expressed their frustration over the case, a sergeant on duty pricked up his ears. He recognized some of those names, and was able to guess who else was involved. But his information came at a price: a dinner of curry washed down with gallons of beer at an Indian restaurant.

It wasn’t until the bhajis and bhuna and all the poppadoms had been eaten that the sergeant began to speak: the Flying Squad needed to speak to Kenneth Noye.

Why that scene isn’t on the show is a mystery. But like many of his former colleagues, Roy Ramm, a former commander of Special Operations at New Scotland Yard, sees the entire series as a disappointment, a succession of missed opportunities.

Ramm says: ‘The production feels cheap. Not Happy Valley quality, that’s for sure. The Gold claims to be “inspired” by true events, but the introduction of totally made-up characters is silly and at times offensive. The female officer, Nicki Jennings, is a fictional, baseless, and unnecessary invention.

‘Using real characters and real events as part of the narrative,’ he adds, ‘makes it impossible for the viewer to distinguish between what was ‘inspired’ and what actually ‘occurred.’

Among the errors he identifies is the scene in which armed robber Micky McAvoy, in remand, is left unsupervised to have a covert phone conversation about bullion with an offshore criminal. “He must have left viewers wondering about the competence of the officials who allowed it,” says Ramm.

And Daily Mail senior journalist Neil Darbyshire, who covered the Brink’s-Mat case as a young crime reporter, takes issue with the interpretation of Hugh Bonneville of DCI Brian Boyce, who led the investigation. He says that Boyce was a much more complex man than the show makes it out to be. In particular, he was a talented jazz pianist, known for relaxing by playing boogie-woogie piano in Soho clubs. Again, why such vibrant material was omitted is a mystery.

But the central complaint of all the veterans is the same: Palmer and Noye were sociopathic freaks, not a couple of likely guys. They left a trail of devastated lives and showed no remorse.

Palmer was killed in a gang execution in 2015, but Noye was released from prison after serving 20 years for the M25 murder.

“Noye should still be inside,” says Biddiss. I’m a wooden box man. If he is convicted of murder and he is a professional criminal, he should never be released. It’s hard enough for the police to catch these killers and gather the crucial evidence.

“When that happens and they’re convicted, they should never come out, except in a wooden box.”