Close to a parcel of Essex countryside known as Gallow’s Corner, John “Goldfinger” Palmer – the Midas touch mobster – burned documents in his secluded garden, unaware his executioner was watching and waiting.
The underworld Mr Big, who once ran a jewelry business from Bedminster, was ripe for the taking. The playboy lifestyle had been replaced by paranoia, ill health had flattened the fizz of his lavish existence.
Heart problems had slowed Palmer, whose tabloid press pictures featured a gallery of glamour models. He felt the discomfort of a recent gallbladder operation, he was haunted by an impending fraud trial in Spain.
The 64-year-old who potted around the grounds of his South Weald, Brentwood, cottage was no longer swathed by the security blanket of rottweilers and bodyguards.
Slow and ailing, Goldfinger no longer glistened. He was a changed man, insisted partner Christina Ketley. “He had made mistakes, but he had paid for those mistakes,” she said. “I was incredibly proud of the way he had re-adjusted to a very, very normal life.”
On June 24, 2015, Palmer was ripe for the taking. Palmer, who ran his empire with a meticulous eye for detail, had dropped his guard.
And his killer struck with silence, speed and stealth in a hit so near perfect it touched the upper echelons of professionalism.
So perfect, it took detectives six days to realise Palmer had not died of natural causes. They initially believed the wounds on his body were incisions made during gallbladder surgery.
It is of little surprise the gunman – a master of his dark art and rumoured to have been paid £1m – has never been caught. That is despite a £100,000 reward being offered by the dead man’s family.
He had “cased” the cottage, monitoring Palmer’s movements through a hole in the garden fencing, then leapt the boundary when a narrow window of opportunity opened.
He pointed a gun, believed to be fitted with a silencer, at his startled target’s chest, and fired six shots, each bullet, it was later claimed, laced with wires to lacerate internal organs.
The career villain, who had spent decades climbing the giddy heights of organised crime, had been erased in the blink of an eye.
“Whoever was responsible was clearly watching John,” Ms Ketley said, “stalking him like an animal before brutally and callously ending his life.”
And detectives knew that, for Palmer’s killer, the death was a job, it was strictly business.
Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Jennings told the press: “Due to John’s significant criminal history there are people or groups of people who may have wished to do him harm.
“Therefore, our search is not just for the gunman but for a person or group of people who may have commissioned the killing.
“There are two significant main lines of enquiry at the moment, the first that John was due to stand trial in mainland Spain relating to real-estate fraud that followed an eight year investigation.
“The second is a combination of factors across 2015 which included a number of significant crimes in the UK, significant law enforcement intervention into organised crime in the UK and significant arrests of people in organised crime groups.”
On the grubby underbelly of organised crime, Palmer certainly enjoyed a prime place. He cast a very long shadow.
So long and dark, the BBC revealed he had been under surveillance by a covert police unit from 1999 until the murder.
His rise from humble beginnings in Solihull, near Birmingham, to jet set, fun-loving gangster is the stuff of paperback fiction.
In his 1980s pomp, Palmer, who cut his teeth selling knocked-off paraffin from the back of lorries, owned a Learjet, two helicopters and a yacht. His personal minders were said to be ex KGB.
He dressed in Armani suits and drenched himself in Chanel Pour Monsieur cologne.
A scan of Palmer’s criminal CV only hardens the belief of John Plimmer, former West Midlands CID chief, that Goldfinger tested the waters of serious crime in his patch, during his time.
Palmer was “The Phantom”, a lone-wolf, untouchable gunman who targeted Post Office and wages vans. Following an informant’s tip-off in the early ‘80s, Mr Plimmer became convinced of the fact.
“We never put the finger on that lad’s identity,” said the top detective. “Right up to the end, no one got an ID, but I always suspected Palmer, I was sure of it.
“We were looking for a ‘smarty’. He only did one a year, then disappeared like a phantom. That was all he needed. In one job he got away with about £70,000 – an awful lot of money in those days.
“Each one was planned to the last detail. There was no shooting, no violence. He’d slam the double-barrel in someone’s face, get them to take the wages out, take the keys to the van from them and drive off to a waiting vehicle.”
Palmer earned the Goldfinger moniker partly because of his legitimate dealings in the precious metal, mostly because of his links to the 1983 Brink’s-Mat, £26m Heathrow Airport bullion heist.
Palmer was cleared of melting down the booty at his luxurious home in Bath, Somerset, and blew kisses to the Old Bailey jury on his acquittal.
The dapper don, who had an eye for the ladies, knew how to charm.
Palmer’s name has also surfaced in connection with the Hatton Garden robbery, which took place two months before the hit.
An international player, his tentacles were said to stretch to both the Russian and Romanian mafia. He opened Russia’s first timeshare company and in 1999 newspaper Kommersant reported Palmer’s private plane made trips to the country “practically every week from either Tenerife or Bristol”.
Three years earlier, he had crashed the Sunday Times rich list at 76 with a published fortune of £200m. His pen portrait read: “John Palmer runs a large and lucrative timeshare operation in Tenerife.”
The description is correct but omits the menace that fuelled the “large and lucrative operation”. His foot soldiers on the Mediterranean were known as “clumpers”, baseball wielding thugs who violently claimed prime positions in the sun drenched resort.
They did what it said on the tin. They clumped rival touts into submission.
Their scam was seaside simple. Sixteen thousand customers paid a combined £30m for apartment contracts that were worthless.
In 2001, Palmer received eight years for “masterminding the largest timeshare fraud on record” – and, allegedly, continued to run his nefarious business activities from behind bars.
On his release, Palmer, declared bankrupt in 2005 despite reportedly possessing a £300m fortune when convicted, found the Mediterranean hotspots that had proved such a fertile cash cow now being milked by East European mobster.
To get back to where he wanted to be, he had to forge dangerous alliances with very dangerous men.
And the Teflon coating that had protected Palmer’s murky world was wearing thin. In 2007, he was arrested on suspicion of, among other things, fraud and held without charge in a high security Spanish prison for two years before being released on bail.
By 2015, Spanish police believed they had enough to bring their suspect to trial. If convicted, Palmer faced 15 years for fraud, money laundering and firearms offences.
That impending prosecution, many within the criminal fraternity believe, sealed Goldfinger’s fate.
Shadowy, powerful figures feared Palmer – frail and dreading a long stretch – was poised to name names in exchange for a lesser sentence.
The potential grass had to be mown down.
One Essex “face” reportedly claimed: “Palmer couldn’t do no more bird. They feared he was going to turn Queen’s evidence, so they got him out of the way.”
It was a hit, of that there is little doubt. Whether the order was issued here or abroad is a matter of conjecture. So is the reason for it.
In his book, “Killing Goldfinger – The Secret Bullet-Riddled Life and Death of Britain’s Gangster Number One”, Wensley Clarkson traced the assassination to Palmer’s alleged Russian partners-in-crime, the feared St Petersburg-based Tambovskaia Gang.
He had sold the gang a 50 per cent slice of his timeshare business and, inevitably, they soon plotted to have it all.
Clarkson wrote: “Palmer told one associate at the time the Russians were the most ruthless, cold-blooded villains he’d ever come across.
“They thought nothing of gunning down an entire family if one member of that family dared to cross them or owned something they wanted.”
Clarkson believed Palmer’s illiteracy – he left school at 15 unable to read or write – may have played a part in his brutal downfall: “From the 1980s, he taped every meeting. He had to, he couldn’t write.
“That made a lot of people very nervous.”
Interestingly, detectives investigating the murder have looked at the deaths of four other individuals involved in the Spanish timeshare industry and with links to Goldfinger.
*Dennis New, aged 58, was found dead in his adopted hometown of Srisoonthorn, Phuket, in 2015, Thai police ruling he succumbed to on-going medical conditions. Among the tributes, one ex-pat posted: “I knew this man who ran Spanish timeshare industry with a rod of iron over 25 years.”
*Billy and Flo Robinson were abducted after dining at a Tenerife restaurant in 2006. Flo, aged 55, was bludgeoned to death, her 58-year-old husband was tortured before the attackers cut his throat. Robbery was not a motive and police believed the crime to be “an act of revenge”.
Millionaire Gary Leigh, 47-year-old king of Spain’s Holiday Clubs, was fatally injured when hit by a car while cycling in Marbella. Leigh had made enemies: eight years before the 2010 accident masked men stormed his office, hurled tear gas cannisters and beat up the boss.
Add to the mystery the fact Palmer’s murder was predicted in a book – “Timeshare: Certificate to the Country of Fools”, published in Russia – nine years before it happened.
The work, written under the pen-name of Aleksander Tochka – is considered by some to be a grim “comply or face the consequences” warning to the crimelord.
In this baffling case, among the litter of theories, one truth shines brighter with each passing year. The killer is unlikely to be caught.
Palmer’s widow Marnie, who remained married to the man despite his string of infidelities, said candidly: “There’s more chance of Lord Lucan showing up than of police finding my John’s assassin.”
Author Wensley Clarkson agrees: “There is a long list of people, a long queue, who wanted him dead.
“I am not going to say who I think is the favourite because I don’t have enough proof and I think the likelihood of catching those responsible is remote.”
Back in 2020, Detective Chief Inspector Jennings hung on to a hope that ties binding the underworld to silence had loosened with time. Someone would talk.
He said: “We know that the key to solving Mr Palmer’s murder lies within the underworld. Loyalties do change and people may now feel able to come forward.”
Despite an investigation that has seen hundreds of statements taken, 700 lines of enquiry followed and 1,400 documents studied, police are still confronted by a wall of silence.
In gangland, that’s the security an alleged £1m contract buys you.