On the morning of Saturday 26th November 1983, the largest gold bullion heist in UK history took place at Heathrow. Six armed robbers, including Brian Robinson and Mickey McAvoy, broke into the Brinks Mat warehouse at London Heathrow Airport at 6.30am with the help of one of the security guards, Anthony Black. Their target is £3 million in cash. Once inside, the robbers immobilized the guards and doused them in gasoline, threatening to burn them if they did not reveal the vault’s combinations.
Opening the vault, the six robbers saw an unexpected sight. Gold bars weighing about ten tons and worth more than 40 million dollars, diamonds worth tens of thousands of dollars and a few million in cash. The operation lasted nearly two hours instead of a few minutes, as the robbers had originally estimated. None of them, however, complained about the extra time it took to load the loot onto their vehicles. By 8.30 the six robbers had already left the airport warehouse.
“The biggest heist in Britain’s history took place near London’s Heathrow Airport yesterday when six masked gunmen entered a gold warehouse in cinematic fashion, overpowered its guards and made off with three tonnes of gold, worth a total of at least £30m (more from 4.35 billion drachmas)”, wrote “Kathimerini” on November 27 about the robbery. According to the report, “Several hours after the robbers left one of the six guards and employees managed to free himself from the handcuffs and give the alarm signal. But by the time the police, fire engines and ambulances arrived at the airport, the robbers and gold bars had taken flight.”
As it turned out later, the masterminds of the operation were Robinson and McAvoy. Security guard Anthony Black, Robinson’s son-in-law, was the one who informed the robbers about all the security measures in place at the warehouse. The three of them were also the only ones who paid the price of their actions. As “Kathimerini” reported on February 18, 1984, “A London court sentenced 31-year-old John Black, a security guard at Heathrow Airport’s high-security warehouses, to six years in prison, where last November he helped carry out the biggest robbery in history of Britain, with booty totaling £26 million.
Black cooperated with police after his arrest and testified against three of the robbers, who are wanted. However, not a pound has been found of the loot and the authorities believe that the jewels and gold bars that were stolen then have now ended up and been absorbed by the illegal market of the species.
Most of the loot from the November 26, 1983 robbery was never recovered.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigoni-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
