Episode Details

On a chilly Saturday morning in November 1983, six armed men broke into a Heathrow warehouse expecting one million pounds in Spanish pesetas. Instead they found 6,800 bars of pure gold, three tons of bullion worth 26 million pounds, roughly 290 million today. Stealing it turned out to be the easy part. The Brink's-Mat robbery became a masterclass in be-careful-what-you-wish-for, because the violent, decades-long fallout came entirely from trying to hide the haul.

This episode maps the shockwaves: the inside man who copied the keys, the copper-coin smelting operation that chemically erased the gold's identity, the glowing crucible a couple reported to police who called it beyond their jurisdiction, and the undercover detective killed in a launderer's garden. Then the so-called curse, a trail of underworld assassinations stretching from 1990 to a 2015 garden shooting, more than thirty years after the raid.

• A peseta job that became a gold problem: three tons of loot and a getaway van's suspension
• Melting away the evidence: copper coins, altered assays, and the chemistry of money laundering
• "Beyond our jurisdiction": the white-hot crucible tip-off that 1980s siloed policing ignored
• The curse of Brink's-Mat: Charlie Wilson, the launderers, and a 30-year trail of assassinations
• Who survived and who didn't: why the robbers outlived the financiers who laundered their gold