The Gold

The definitive account of the Brink's-Mat Robbery to publish alongside a prime-time BBC 1 series.

A true crime story worth its weight in gold

Shortly before 7am on Saturday 26 November 1983, an armed gang burst into the Brink's-Mat security warehouse near London's Heathrow Airport. They expected to find a million pounds in foreign currency. To their surprise, they found gold bullion worth e26 million. Making off with the gold, the gang committed what was at the time the largest robbery in the world, and unwittingly set off an extraordinary, decades-long chain of events.

The Brink's-Mat robbery led to the birth of international large-scale money laundering, provided the dirty money that fuelled the London Docklands property boom, changed British policing, and sparked a series of violent murders that continued until 2015.

As such, the Brink's-Mat job was the most significant robbery of all time, yet its full, epic story has never been told in its entirety.