Police have begun a search of over 7,000 safety deposit boxes in what is believed to be a massive crackdown on British gangsters.Around 300 officers are involved in what is being described as a hunt for cash, guns, drugs and child pornography. They believe they could find contents worth tens of millions of pounds.Cops said the raids on three London depots, thought to belong to the Safe Deposit Centres Ltd company, would target the “top tier” of Britain’s criminals as part of a two-year investigation into money laundering, dubbed ‘Operation Rize’.
Two people, believed to be connected to Safe Deposit Centres Ltd, have so far been arrested in the blitz.Scotland Yard detectives last week found six suitcases crammed with gold inside a London deposit box. They could help solve a crime so spectacular it panicked the international gold market, reconfigured London's criminal map and left a trail of murders in a gangland feud over the whereabouts of the missing bounty.
The gold 'grains' - carefully wrapped in plastic and wedged inside travel luggage - were hidden inside a deposit box raided by the Metropolitan Police last week as part of a huge two-year investigation into the proceeds of organised crime. Scotland Yard sources, pointing out it was too early to glean the origin of the gold, have confirmed they are examining the 'possibility' that it may have come from the 1983 heist in which bullion worth £26m was stolen from the Brink's-Mat warehouse near Heathrow Airport by six armed robbers.
Commander Allan Gibson of Scotland Yard's specialist crime directorate said his officers had never seen anything like it. The haul is thought to be the single largest discovery of unexplained gold seen in Britain. Provisional estimates suggest the suitcases' contents could be worth £8m, potentially a significant portion of the Brink's-Mat loot never recovered, and eclipsing the £2.6m stolen during another of Britain's most high-profile crimes, the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Alongside the gold, Scotland Yard officers last week found £30m in cash, much of it stuffed into plastic supermarket bags, which officers believe are also the profits of organised crime. For those officers investigating what happened to the unrecovered bullion stolen in the Brink's-Mat raid the find may yield vital clues to a crime that has perplexed some of Scotland's Yard's finest. Although the Metropolitan Police would not reveal the weight of last week's discovery, Gibson said the suitcases were so heavy officers struggled to pick them up. The weight of the stolen Brink's-Mat gold was three-and-a-half tonnes.
'We have identified six suitcases of gold grains which, if real, could be very, very valuable. It's a phenomenal amount. They were wrapped like a large packet of peas and were so heavy officers couldn't pick them up,' said Gibson. Police are stressing that the focus of their inquiries is on the people who rented the boxes.The raids on thousands of deposit boxes in London last week were based on intelligence indicating they contained the proceeds of crime syndicates who for years had viewed the storage space as a safe deposit for assets. Although last Thursday's discovery of gold in Operation Rize, which yesterday still involved more than 200 officers, has still to be fully analysed, sources said the gold appeared to be the genuine article.
Numerous attempts to locate the Brink's-Mat bullion have been made over the years. In 2001 police excavated land owned by a builders' merchant in Kent after receiving a tip-off that gold bars had been buried there, but as in other instances found nothing. Unsubstantiated rumours, meanwhile, claim that proceeds from the gold have been invested in property abroad. Last week's discovery was found in storage vaults belonging to a firm called Safe Deposit Centres Ltd, of which two directors have been arrested on suspicion of money-laundering offences and bailed to return to a central London police station in September. The firm was established in 1986, three years after the Brink's-Mat robbery, raising the possibility the gold was kept in temporary storage before being hidden inside the vault. Investigators will attempt to ascertain whether such a large amount of one of the world's most precious metal - its price reached a record high last March as the global financial crisis increased its investment appeal - can be linked to any modern crime, although it remains more likely the stash relates to a more historical crime. It remains unclear how much of the £26m of Brink's-Mat bullion has been recovered or melted down so far. After escaping from Heathrow with their haul, the robbers turned to one of Britain's most notorious criminals for help in transforming the bullion into cash. An expert in his field, Kenneth Noye even mixed some of the gold with copper to alter its purity and disguise its origins.
Detectives investigating the crime found 11 gold bars worth £100,000 wrapped in cloth in a drainage trench at Noye's former Kent home. The 60-year-old was jailed for helping to launder some of the proceeds, but not before he stabbed to death an undercover detective staking out his house. He was cleared of murder after pleading self-defence, but later jailed for murdering Stephen Cameron on a slip road of the M25 in a road rage incident. The killing is just one brutal episode in a trail of death and wrecked lives among those who have become embroiled in a deadly feud over where the gold from Britain's biggest bullion haul might have been stashed.
Last year two ageing hitmen were jailed for the murder of millionaire businessman George Francis, a former associate of the Kray twins, who had survived a murder attempt in 1985. He was the sixth person linked to the Brink's-Mat heist to have been murdered. Another two have killed themselves. Francis was entrusted with part of the haul belonging to 'Mad' Mickey McAvoy, who was jailed 25 years for his part in the robbery. McAvoy is one of only two men convicted in connection with a crime that involved armed men bribing a security guard to let them into the Brink's-Mat warehouse at 6.30am on 26 November 1983. Once inside, they poured petrol over staff and threatened them with a lit match if they did not reveal the combination numbers of the vault.
Another well known criminal, conman John 'Goldfinger' Palmer, was cleared of smelting and recycling the Brink's-Mat bullion in 1987. Palmer, who allowed Noye to use his jet to flee the UK after he stabbed Cameron, was accused by Spanish police last year of masterminding a crime organisation in Tenerife. The 58-year-old spent four years in prison from 2001 after being imprisoned for timeshare fraud that affected up to 20,000 victims.
So far, officers have investigated a third of the 7,000 storage units. Gibson said: 'It is a difficult job in difficult conditions and officers are working through the night to get the job done. Every box is a story, a potential investigation.'
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