The Cook Report - Laundry Man / John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer S09E05 (1994)
The time share scandal was well-known in the seventies and eighties. Less well known was the man behind the worst of it, John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer. He acquired his nickname after laundering much of the gold from the £26 million Brinks Matt robbery in 1983 and put some of his ill-gotten gains to work in Tenerife, where he became the island’s biggest landowner. He also owned a private jet, a helicopter, a French chateau, a collection of classic cars and a £6 million superyacht. By dint of fraud, violence, arson attacks and the general intimidation of his 17,000 timeshare clients combined with the corruption of officialdom, he amassed a fortune of £300 million, then on a par with the Queen, according to the Sunday Times Rich list. Over the years, he doubled that fortune by laundering money for Columbian drug barons and East European Mafiosi. Two of his former employees who
went into competition with him were tortured to death. No arrests were ever made, but then Palmer used to boast that he had the island’s police and judiciary ‘in his back pocket.’
Working with the Metropolitan Police, the Cook Report exposed the latter in a sophisticated
undercover sting operation, during which Palmer offered to launder the proceeds of two Burmese heroin harvests every year. ‘I’m not the cheapest, but I’m the best’, he boasted and said his cut for organising the deal through his labyrinthine network of off-shore companies would be a cool 25 percent of the proceeds. A subsequent Cook confrontation of Palmer was set up at the Ritz Hotel in London – where the Brinks Matt robbery had apparently been planned. (nice touch!) This event gave investigating officers the opportunity to seize Palmer’s time-share records and have him gaoled for eight years. For that, he blamed Roger Cook and took out a contract on his life.
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