A former detective has told how a chance meeting led to Kenneth Noye being brought to justice over the £26million Brink’s-Mat raid.
Ian Brown was secretly tasked with finding the missing gold a year after the robbery of a warehouse near Heathrow.
Ex-Det Supt Brown, now 82, said his only lead was a photo of the six robbers taken months before the November 1983 raid.
But while visiting a police station he met an officer who asked what he was working on.
When Brown named the six alleged “robbers”, the cop said he suspected Noye was involved as he was a friend of one of them, John “Little Legs” Lloyd.
The officer said of Noye: “You won’t find a more slippery, clever, devious b * d. He is probably the best middleman I have ever come across but what a dangerous villain he is.”
The officer said Noye was seeing a CID typist and in a Masonic lodge with a detective.
The tip-off led to surveillance on Noye’s mock Tudor cottage, in West Kingsdown, Kent.
Officers identified the key players in the gold distribution network but by then much of it had already been laundered.
In January 1985, DC John Fordham, 45, was stabbed to death by Noye while watching him in the grounds of his home.
Noye was cleared on grounds of self-defence. In 1996, he killed a motorist in a road rage attack and was jailed for life.
Now 75 and a grandfather, he is played by Jack Lowden in the BBC series The Gold.
When Noye was jailed for 14 years for handling some of the gold, he angrily told the jury he hoped they “die of cancer”.
Brown, who details his career in his book From The Krays To Drugs Busts In The Caribbean, first met Noye after DC Fordham’s death. He spoke out after meeting Noye again last year for a new book by Donal MacIntyre and Karl Howman.
He suspects some gold is still out there after being hidden by robbers Brian “The Colonel” Robinson and Micky McAvoy.
Brown said he first arrested McAvoy as a teenager when he took him to some railway arches. He said: “I often wonder if we’d looked in those arches, whether we’d have found a big pile of gold. We will never know.”
