City bonds robbery

The idea for the robbery was generated by media reports in January 1990 that a courier had accidentally dropped £4M (equivalent to £M in ) worth of bearer bonds on their way to the Bank of England. A 23-year-old surveyor had picked up the four certificates of deposit on Throgmorton Street outside the Stock Exchange, after they had fallen out of the briefcase of a courier working for Rowe & Pitman, a subsidiary of S. G. Warburg & Co. When he gave them back, he was rewarded with a magnum of Laurent-Perrier champagne. Upon hearing this story, an organised crime syndicate realised that if a courier was mugged, they could reap a massive haul, since bearer bonds entitle whoever is carrying them to the money denoted on them. Care was taken to make the theft appear to be an opportunistic mugging, since the bonds would be cancelled if it was suspected to have been a heist ordered by an organised crime group. The syndicate planned to launder the bonds as quickly as possible in Zürich. == Robbery ==

On the morning of 2 May 1990, 58-year-old John Goddard, an employee of financial brokers Sheppards (a subsidiary of Cater Allen) was walking along Nicholas Lane, an alleyway in the City of London. He was carrying 301 certificates worth £291.9M (equivalent to £M in ) in bearer bonds in a briefcase, of which £121.9M were certificates of deposit and £170M were HM Treasury bills. the Bank of England was supplying false information to the media on purpose; whilst it had informed financial institutions worldwide of the serial numbers, the bonds could still be cashed. The Swiss connection which was supposed to launder the money did not work out, therefore the syndicate was forced to seek other options in the criminal underworld. The New York mafia became interested, since they were already involved in a scheme to launder US bonds in London. Back in 1975, he had been charged with extorting £287,000 and remanded for a week, after arriving at court in a silver chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce; he later received a six-year sentence for conspiracy to defraud the Beneficial Finance and Loan Society with 318 fictitious loan applications. Told about the heist, Cheeseman went to work, liaising with associates such as Raymond Ketteridge. He sent some of the stolen bonds to Mark Osborne in the US, who then met up with mafioso Tony Dipiono in a New York bar and delivered ten bonds, each worth £1M. However, Dipiono was an FBI agent and Osborne was arrested, subsequently deciding to betray his associates. The FBI allegedly recorded the conversations between Osborne and Cheeseman until Osborne disappeared in August 1990 and was later found murdered. == Recovery ==

The syndicate in London came to realise that it was also infiltrated by an informer, since the City of London police swiftly began to recover the bonds. In fact the men had been under surveillance, since one of them was Thomas Coyle, a known fence. Coyle had quickly acquired 80 of the stolen bonds and realising their enormous value had recruited John Gilligan and Jim "Danger" Beirne to help sell them. Not being able to shift them in Ireland, they devised a plan to sell them to mafia connections in the US via John Francis Conlon, who had connections to various security agencies and arms dealers such as Monzer al-Kassar and Oliver North. A link to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) was revealed in September 1990, when a man left a package at the Aeroperú offices in Miami to be delivered to Lima in Peru. A search by US Customs revealed that the package contained £71M in stolen bonds, which the IRA was attempting to trade with Colombian drug barons in exchange for money and narcotics. Raymond Ketteridge was arrested with another man and charged with handling £70M in stolen bonds, only to see his prosecution dropped in London in July 1991. He later won his battle against extradition from Cyprus to the US in 1994. He had been facing charges of money laundering based on the heist. The police also foiled a mortgage scam which aimed to use stolen bonds as collateral, arresting John Traynor in 1990. == Death of Patrick Thomas ==

Thomas lived on the Turnham Road council estate in Brockley, south London, with his step-sister and her family. He presented himself as merely being an ordinary person on the estate, whilst being involved in criminal enterprises such as drug-dealing and robbery. When he and David Summerville were caught red-handed cutting up a kilo (2 lb) of cocaine in March 1991, they were remanded to Belmarsh Prison, then he managed to convince the jury that his co-defendant was responsible for the £30,000 haul of cocaine and thus was acquitted, whilst Summerville received a seven-year sentence. In the early morning of 29 December, after hearing a scuffle and a bang at the front door, Thomas' step-sister found him lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to the head. He died from his injuries as she called for an ambulance. At first, police believed that Thomas had been killed by friends of Summerville, but it soon became clear that Thomas was involved in other crimes since he had assorted building society accounts with over £150,000 in them and he was eventually connected to the bonds robbery as the suspected mugger. == Arrest of Keith Cheeseman ==

Keith Cheeseman was arrested in the UK after an investigation by City of London police and the FBI. He was sentenced to six and a half year term but had managed to flee the country whilst on bail. After his arrest in Spain, Cheeseman was extradited to the US, where he faced charges related to a conspiracy to launder £392M in stolen bonds, including the £292M obtained in London. Cheeseman claimed he had skipped bail in fear for his life and pled guilty, admitting he had processed £16M in bonds. ==Arrest of John Traynor==

John Traynor escaped a dispute with criminal associate Martin Cahill in Ireland by moving to England in the late 1980s. He then reacquainted himself with old friend James "Danger" Beirne who was involved in various fraudulent schemes. The two men joined with John Francis Conlon to set up a new venture in which they would attempt to use some of the stolen bonds as collateral investment for a mortgage from a Swiss bank. Conlon had connections to Miami and presented plans for a fictitious £100M holiday resort on a Caribbean island. Using bonds with altered numbers, they managed to gain a £200,000 advance in Geneva, although the bank sent warnings to City of London police and the Serious Fraud Office. When the courier returned to pick up the rest of the mortgage, the bank told him to wait so he called Traynor, who was sitting on a street near Bayswater Road in London. As they spoke, police swooped in both England and Switzerland, and they were both arrested. Traynor was charged with handling stolen goods and received a seven-year sentence. == Legacy ==

The City bonds robbery is seen as one of the largest heists in history in terms of the amount taken, dwarfing other UK crimes such as the Brink's-Mat robbery, the Great Train Robbery, the Knightsbridge Security Deposit robbery, the Northern Bank robbery and the Securitas depot robbery. Globally, it is eclipsed by the 2003 robbery of almost £M (equivalent to £ billion in ) from the Central Bank of Iraq by Qusay Hussein, son of Saddam Hussein. The police ultimately recovered all but two of the 301 certificates that were stolen in the City bonds robbery. == See also ==