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cover of episode The Brink's-Mat Heist | How I Defended Brian Perry | 4

The Brink's-Mat Heist | How I Defended Brian Perry | 4

2024/12/11
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British Scandal

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Alice Levine
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Jonathan Goldberg KC
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Matt Ford
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Matt Ford:本系列节目展现了犯罪、掩盖、惩罚和法律的漫长影响。布莱恩·佩里在抢劫案发生后很长时间才被定罪,这说明法律的执行存在滞后性。 Alice Levine:布莱恩·佩里案受到了媒体的高度关注,这增加了辩护律师的压力。 Jonathan Goldberg KC:优秀的律师需要具备心理学素养和敏捷的思维能力。律师接案如同演员接戏,总是渴望新的挑战。布莱恩·佩里的第一次审判因陪审员被收买而中止。在第二次审判前,他伪装患有精神疾病以逃避审判。布莱恩·佩里是一个专业的罪犯,但律师本人对他有好感。他是一个专业的罪犯,从不向律师隐瞒任何事情。虽然表面上经营着一家出租车公司,但他实际上是一个百万富翁。律师很难预测案件的结果,只能尽力而为。陪审团的判决难以预测。律师与Michael Relton相识,并认为他是一个非常成功且穿着考究的律师。Michael Relton越过了律师职业道德的界限,参与了犯罪活动。Michael Relton为洗钱提供了精明的建议,并进行了成功的投资。犯罪分子将抢劫所得用于房地产投资,并获得了巨额回报。Brinksmat抢劫案促使英国有组织犯罪变得更加复杂和高端化。Brinksmat抢劫案后,英国的犯罪活动变得更加复杂和高端化,毒品犯罪也日益猖獗。律师不能选择客户,必须为所有委托人辩护。即使律师个人对委托人有负面评价,也必须尽职尽责地为其辩护。律师辩护的目的是确保每个人都能得到公平的审判,而不是判断其有罪与否。律师的工作是寻找案件中的漏洞,而不是判断委托人是否有罪。律师的职责是尽力为委托人辩护,即使他们认为委托人有罪。律师不会因为长期为特定类型的罪犯辩护而产生负面自我认知。律师会为自己的成功辩护案例感到自豪,也会为那些最终再次犯罪的委托人感到遗憾。为了避免错判,宁可让十个罪犯逍遥法外,也不愿让一个无辜者蒙冤受屈。律师很少知道委托人是否真的有罪,因为委托人通常不会承认自己的罪行。律师的职责是尽力为委托人辩护,即使委托人有罪,也必须在不违反职业道德的前提下进行辩护。律师不是案件的最终判决者,他们的职责是提出最佳的辩护理由。律师在法庭上的表现力很重要,这与律师的个人天赋和技巧有关。律师在法庭上有效的沟通技巧至关重要。高调的案件更难辩护,但同时也有其挑战性。律师会被有争议的案件所吸引。伦敦老贝利法庭是一个特殊且重要的场所。律师需要适应时代的变化,并调整自己的辩护策略。近年来,英国的司法系统由于资金不足而恶化。如果Brinksmat抢劫案发生在今天,由于科技进步,结果可能会不同。现代银行的合作可能会使洗钱活动更容易被发现。

Deep Dive

Key Insights

Why did the trial of Brian Perry abort after six months?

The trial was aborted due to a well-founded suspicion that one of the jurors had been tampered with by criminals, either through bribery or threats.

What was the sentence given to Brian Perry after his retrial?

Brian Perry was sentenced to nine years in prison after his retrial.

How did Brian Perry attempt to avoid his retrial?

Perry pretended to have a nervous breakdown and severe depression, claiming he was unfit to stand trial due to mental illness and medication.

What was the significance of the plaque found above Brian Perry's desk?

The plaque, which read 'He who has the gold makes the rules,' was used as evidence against Perry, suggesting his involvement in the Brink's-Mat gold heist.

What was Michael Relton's role in the Brink's-Mat heist?

Relton, a criminal solicitor, crossed the line from defending criminals to advising them on laundering the gold from the heist, helping them invest and dispose of the proceeds.

What impact did the Brink's-Mat heist have on organized crime in the UK?

The heist marked a shift towards more sophisticated and white-collar crime, with a significant rise in drug-related activities and more complex financial machinations.

What is the 'cab rank rule' in the legal profession?

The cab rank rule requires barristers to accept any case that comes their way, regardless of their personal opinion about the client or the case, ensuring everyone has access to legal representation.

How does Jonathan Goldberg QC view the ethics of defending someone he suspects is guilty?

Goldberg believes it is his duty to defend his client to the best of his ability, focusing on finding weaknesses in the prosecution's case rather than determining the client's guilt or innocence.

What is the significance of the Old Bailey in the UK legal system?

The Old Bailey is considered one of the most prestigious criminal courts in the world, known for handling high-profile cases and maintaining a high standard of advocacy and justice.

How has the legal profession changed since Jonathan Goldberg QC started his career?

Goldberg notes a decline in the quality of judges and advocates, attributed to economic factors such as reduced legal aid funding, which has led to lower pay and less experienced professionals.

Chapters
The episode delves into the Brink's-Mat heist, focusing on the challenges of defending Brian Perry, one of the main figures involved. The impact of the heist on the defendant and the legal system is discussed, along with the media's intense coverage of the case.
  • The long arm of the law in the Brink's-Mat case
  • Brian Perry's success in evading the spotlight for nearly a decade
  • The media frenzy surrounding the heist

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge entire seasons of British Scandal early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford. And I'm Alice Levine. And this is British Scandal. MUSIC

Alice, in this series we've seen the crime, the cover-up, the punishment and the very, very long arm of the law. I mean, say what you like about Brian Perry, but he managed to keep out of the spotlight for a very impressive amount of time. It was nearly ten years between the heist and him being found guilty and during that time he was laundering his money and Mickey's, who'd been the mastermind of the heist.

It's an amazing story, but it does make you think, what's it like to defend someone like Brian Perry in court? Yes, it was all over the news. Everybody knew about it and was talking about it. The tabloids had a field day. The media just would not abate.

I suppose you also, as an individual, not considering this as a huge event in the country, are thinking, what if I don't get this guy off? He's part of a huge robbery. He's got people everywhere. What does this mean for me? Never mind my career. What about my life? I can't even imagine what that would have been like. Well, imagine no longer, Alice, because today I have for you a man that spent a lot of time in court, in a professional capacity, of course.

Jonathan Goldberg KC has a career spanning over half a century. He's acted for some of the most notorious alleged murderers, rapists and fraudsters in criminal courts. But we're talking to him today because he was the defending barrister of Brian Perry. This message is sponsored by Greenlight.

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Audible. There's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com slash wonderypod and discover all the year's best waiting for you. Jonathan, you've had 50 years at the coalface of many high-profile British scandals, and you've represented a good number of people in very sticky legal situations. What makes you so good at your job? I wish it were only 50. It's now approaching 55.

What makes me good at my job? Well, my Russian mother used to say that I had a big mouth, and that obviously helps. You have to be an excellent psychologist. I think that above all. And you have to be very quick on your feet. Cross-examination, for example, is not about asking the questions so much as listening to the answers.

And in an answer, you can hear the germ of what may be a lie. We need to listen very carefully in order to pose your next question. One of the calls that you received in those 55 years was one asking you to defend Brian Perry. How did you feel when you picked up the phone? Well, of course, you've got to realise that any barrister is a bit like an actor because the courtroom is a theatre, believe me.

But a barrister, like an actor, is always worried, where is their next play coming from? So we worry, where is our next case coming from? So be assured that when the phone call did come saying, we'd like you to appear to defend one of the main defendants in one of the main drinks mass series of trials, I was only too thrilled and delighted. I defended Perry and

His trial aborted after, I think, something like six months. And we were never told the true reason by the judge. It was all very hush-hush and very strange. He simply discharged the jury from further consideration one day.

But then we learned that the real reason was that there was a well-founded suspicion that one of the jurors had been nobbled. In other words, that criminals had got her. I believe it was a woman, had got to this woman and somehow suborned her, whether it was for money or for threats, who on earth knows. But that was the well-founded allegation by the priest that led the judge to

abandoned the trial. But can you believe it? So what happened was that there was then a further retrial, which was a year or two later. And meantime, Brian Perry, very desperate to avoid his trial, if he possibly could, because there was an awful lot of evidence against him,

And Brian Perry, I have to say, pretended because that was the finding of the judge. He pretended to have had a nervous breakdown and to be so severely depressed and on medication and this, that and the other that he wasn't fit enough to stand trial. We had endless psychiatric reports on both sides giving opposite opinions.

And the police had filmed Perry, unknown to him. And he'd be sort of, you know, doing the gardening and doing the washing up and just having a normal life, although pretending to be so incredibly ill that he couldn't leave the house. So anyway, the retail eventually took place.

And that went for at least eight months from memory. Again, it was a marvellously dramatic trial. But Perry was eventually convicted and was sentenced from memory to nine years imprisonment. Can you paint a bit of a picture for us of Brian Perry, the man? I have to say, I liked Brian Perry very much. He was a professional criminal to his fingertips. And these fellows...

And in some ways, a pleasure to defend because they never tell you anything you don't want to hear. So he was very, very professional. I mean, I knew and he knew that I knew that he'd probably been staging serious armed robberies since he was 16 years of age. But he always...

kept up the mask that he was a successful, reformed character, that he'd been a tearaway in his younger days, but he now ran a taxi business in Peckham called Blue Cars that was a substantial business, and I've no doubt it made good money. Of course, you may remember that when they finally arrested him, he was a bit stupid in this one respect.

they found a plaque above the boss's desk which read, Remember the golden rule. Hero has the gold, makes the rules. And of course, that was used as a little

vignette of evidence against him. It could mean anything, Jonathan. Well, that's exactly what Mr. Goldberg QC said to the jury. In Brian's case, the evidence didn't look great. He was a taxi driver, as you'd said, with millions of pounds in the bank. What did you think his chances were when you went into court with him pleading not guilty? Well...

Believe it or not, the worst person to ask on what chances of acquittal a criminal defendant has is his own barrister. I never know. I win the cases I think I will lose, and I lose the cases I think I will win. So it doesn't matter. You do your very best. You slog your hardest. And you sort of don't look to left or to right in pursuit of them.

wonderful verdict of not guilty, the nicest two words in the world, I think. So did I think he had a chance? Well, on the evidence, not a very big one, because there was a very strong case on paper against him. But the other thing that jury trials always teach you is that there's no area of life that is less predictable than a jury verdict.

We've, of course, heard about Michael Relton's part in the story, the solicitor that helped Perry launder the gold and spent time living a life of luxury in New Malden Police Station. Did you ever meet him? I knew Relton fairly well. So imagine the scene. I was an ambitious younger barrister, and this was for me a wonderful series of trials to be briefed in. So this was for me a career-defining moment, if you like.

Now, Relton was a very well-known and very successful London criminal solicitor. And barristers get their cases largely from solicitors. So Relton was always to be seen at the Old Bailey. Beautifully dressed man, very suave, very debonair, had always magnificent cars. He was a real show-off, very flash.

Gangsters loved him. He had that sort of a practice. He defended very many of them, of the biggest London gangsters. What happened in Briggs, Matt, was obviously that he crossed that all-important line.

line between being a lawyer who defends these people according to the ethics of the profession and becoming a criminal yourself. And it's a line with many temptations and you have to be very careful throughout your career. Well, Relfen crossed it. And obviously they made him an offer at some stage that he couldn't refuse. And he became the advisor to

to the robbers and handlers who were disposing of the Brinksmat gold. How do you get rid of 28 million pounds worth, as it was in those days, of gold? Well, of course, that led to the very complicated machinations as to how to get rid of this gold or what to do with the proceeds, on which Welton advised them rather brilliantly. And I say brilliantly because the

properties that they developed and bought with only a part of this gold because a part of it has disappeared nobody knows where it went but certainly harvard went into property development in this country

And they made brilliant investments. As I say, Docklands was just wonderful. An annex wing at Cheltenham Ladies' College was another. They bought land from Cheltenham Ladies' College and made a great big residential development there. But he advised them well and they invested very well. And the money soon became worth far, far more than it had originally been. What impact did the Brinksmat heist have on organised crime in the UK?

Of course, inevitably, that's speculative. But I can at least say to you that whereas armed robberies of cash vehicles and of premises where cash was to be found, banks and so forth, the typical and fashionable common crime of those years, and I defended any number of them,

But after Brinksmatt, it took perhaps time for this to happen, but things got a lot more sophisticated. Also, drugs came in in a big way, which, of course, I can tell you, transformed the criminal and gang scene to something like it is today. But I think after Brinksmatt, somehow crime became much more

white collar and much more sophisticated than it had been before.

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Jonathan Brinksma is, of course, only one chapter in over half a century of doing this job. What have been your most notable cases in your career and how have they come about? So barristers don't choose their cases. Cases choose their barristers. That's the first thing to realise. But you also need to understand that barristers have a professional ethic whereby they cannot choose their clients. They must take a case whether they...

approve of the client or of his cause or not. The theory being that otherwise a very unpopular cause could never find a lawyer, which would be wrong. Everyone is entitled to the best possible trial and to present his case to its best advantage.

and to have a mouthpiece who's doing his best. And for that reason, the cab rank rulers would call it, just as a taxi can't decide not to take you to an inconvenient destination far from his own that night, so too a barrister cannot say he won't take the case. Let me give another example. Even the most feminist lawyer has to agree to defend a rapist if she's asked to do so.

So we don't choose our cases. So to this day, I'm always being asked at dinner parties, how can you defend a man you know to be guilty? To which I have two stock answers. One of them is cheeky. The cheeky one, I simply say, well, does a prostitute have to love her client? But the more serious one is to say, well, without the cabaret rule, an unpopular cause or client could never find a lawyer.

And that would be quite wrong because every person, however evil, is entitled to have his or her case presented by an impartial lawyer who's acting to the best of his ability to be a mouthpiece for that client, putting all the arguments that the client would put for himself if he were trained in the law and eloquent.

So that's the more theoretical answer, but I respect it and I really think the Cabaret Rule is a very good thing and I'm glad it exists. And also, you must realize we don't know our client is guilty because we put on a sort of pair of spectacles that allow us to see only black and white. If I'm defending even the very worst

Clown, let's say a murderer, as God knows I've defended in over 100 murder cases. I don't say to myself, oh, he must be guilty. Look at the evidence. I say to myself, well, where are the loopholes? Where are the weaknesses in the prosecution case? Where are the points that I can make which may persuade a jury that in fact he's been wrongly accused and is not guilty?

And we don't ask ourselves, is this man guilty or not guilty? We simply say he denies he's guilty. And it's our job to make every possible point that you fairly can, which tends in that direction. And I always say there's no such thing as a hopeless case. There are only hopeless lawyers. And I've always tried in my career not to be one of them.

Is there another ethical consideration, though, that if you are seen to be defending particular types of people, then you attract more of those types of people? And do you end up in a situation where, however noble the intention of ensuring that the crown meets a threshold to convict someone, do you think, actually, these guys are always coming to me? What does that say about me? Well, I certainly have never allowed myself to think in that way.

And if you defend in crime, invariably, you will get all kinds of crimes. You don't get stereotyped in just murders, for example. You'll get, you know, rapes, burglaries, grievous bodily harms, child abuse, whatever it might be. The whole range and gamut of criminal offence. And let's add to that fraud and white-collar crime and money laundering and all the other things that

So it's a very wide and diverse field, and it's very unlikely that you'll get known for one particular type of crime. So there's always a variety in one's practice.

And what does it say for me? Well, if I want to be pompous about it, it says for me that I'm very noble because I've won many cases where the whole world believed the man was guilty. And in fact, he wasn't. And in fact, I got him off. And sometimes I've been very, very proud of it. Take as an example, Marine A.,

the Marine who shot the dying Taliban in Afghanistan. And absurdly, in my view, he was convicted of murder. And I succeeded with my team in getting him acquitted on appeal and released from prison. Well, I'm very proud of that, and I feel good about that. Now, at the other end of the spectrum, I have to say I have secured acquittals of which I've been much less proud.

I can think of one particular murder case, a horrific, sadistic murder by a man who I think was a complete psychopath, I think, privately, and who went on to do it again. I didn't defend him, and happily, he was convicted next time. But obviously, that leaves, shall we say, a bad taste in the mouth. And yet, I can say to myself with confidence,

perfect justification. I'm only doing what my professional duty demanded of me. Those of us who aren't barristers often wonder about the ethics of the industry, and we totally understand that everyone has the right to a trial and the thresholds that we've discussed, but there must be times where you might worry that your day's work has led to a dangerous person being let free. I like to remind myself of the famous quotation of a very great judge called Viscount Caldicott,

in the House of Lords in a case in, I think, the late 1940s, where he said, it is often better that 10 guilty men should go free than that one innocent man should be the victim of a miscarriage of justice. And it's on that that our whole legal system of criminal law is predicated.

May I also add this point? Very rarely does the barrister ever know that his client is guilty because the client knows that if he tells his own barrister that he is in fact guilty, that barrister can no longer continue to defend him on a not guilty basis. The ethic of the bar is that suppose a client says to me, Mr. Goldberg, I'm accused of robbing a bank in Birmingham.

My fingerprints are on the broken glass in the bank. My footprints are on the floor. My blood and DNA were left at the scene.

I made a full confession to the police afterwards, but I'm not guilty. And you have to understand that the glass must be of a different type that got in my shoes on a different occasion altogether. The blood was because I was in the bank the day before and innocently cut myself, but I wasn't in on the day of the robbery. The confession to the police was because they beat it out of me and so forth. You get the point.

That client I can and indeed must defend. But if the same client were to say to me, Mr. Goldberg, yes, there's all this evidence and between ourselves I did do it, but I want to say that I have an alibi and was never in Birmingham that day at all. That client, I have to say to him, I'm sorry, Mr. Smith, I can no longer defend you.

you because you've admitted to me that you are in fact guilty of the offence. And all I can do is plead in mitigation of sentence for you. But you have to now plead guilty. And if he says to me, well, I'm not going to, I insist on trying to fight it out and bluff my way through that. I say, sorry, you're going to have to get a new lawyer. I cannot do it.

So that's the ethic. And for that reason, that invariably the clads know, they learn it in prison, they learn it with their mother's milk, if you like, that they never tell their own lawyers they are guilty. They always say, however strong the evidence, they give some kind of an explanation for it. And then I'm duty bound to do my very best to pick holes in the prosecution case and try to find that loophole and try to find some way of securing an acquittal within the rules and

So you never really know because they never admit it to you. And there have been cases in my own career and experience where I have privately thought the man is guilty and then something has happened in the trial. Some totally unforeseen aspect has emerged as it so often does.

at trial, in the drama, in the evidence that has made me realise he's not guilty, as I had thought, and he's been acquitted. So we are the worst judges of whether our clients are guilty or not. And thank God, it's not our job to decide. It's the judge and jury. We simply present the best arguments we can. And your job is, of course, as you've already said, to

partly that of an actor. And I'd love to talk about the performance element of your job in court. People describe you as delivering emotive closing speeches with quite some swagger. Where does that persuasive, performative flair come from? To be honest with you, my father was a great orator. He was a minister of religion and

And people used to come to hear his sermons from miles around. And, you know, to this day, I ask myself whether I am as good an orator as my late father was.

So you're either, I think, born being a public speaker or you're not. But that said, there are rules of advocacy and you have to master them because without mastering them, you'll never be any good. The most basic rules of advocacy, which I have always tried to teach my pupils over the years, I sometimes say, write this on a piece of paper and have it in front of you in court at all times. Slow down, speak up,

Speak clearly. In court, because of the drama, you're always gabbling much faster than you realize. So you have to tell yourself, slow down, slow down all the time. And studies have shown that if a jury can hear either a witness or a defendant, let alone a barrister, without straining to hear, the chances of a quittle go up something like 20%. Nodicrous, but it's that simple.

And does a case being high profile make it easier or harder to defend? The answer is it makes it much harder. But in my own case, I've always loved the challenge. I've always unashamedly adored high profile cases and cases where the press is watching and reporting because, you know, it sharpens your game. Perhaps as a tennis player, would you rather play at Wimbledon or in the local park?

Although you don't get to select the cases, are you drawn to controversy? Do you like the kind of grey area? Personally, yes. I'm sorry to say I am drawn to controversy, sometimes to my cost. Yes, I speak my mind. I speak my mind both inside and outside court.

And I'm a great believer in free speech. So am I a bit controversial? I suppose at this stage, I have to look back and say, yes, I have been. Do I regret it? No, I don't.

♪♪♪

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Brian Perry was tried at the Old Bailey and lots of our British Scandal characters end up there. It's almost like the Old Bailey is our second home. We've never been there ourselves. So describe it for us as a crucible. And does it hold a special place in your heart? The Old Bailey holds a very special place in my heart. And I think you will find the same being said

By any of the well-known advocates who've appeared there, I would almost go so far as to say over the centuries, never mind over the decades. It's probably the foremost criminal court in the whole world, even today. Everybody knows the golden statue on top of the goddess holding the scales of justice in her hands and balancing them equally.

The building itself is magnificent, particularly the old part consisting of the four original courts. And the public are very welcome to go and look at the halls itself and also inside.

the courtrooms because we operate according to the famous saying that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. So all courts are public with very rare exceptions. Perhaps, for example, official secrets trials. But otherwise, any member of the public can go into the courts of the Old Bailey, there's now at least 23 of them, at any time. And the old part of the

to the early years of the 19th century, I believe. And the old part of the building is architecturally magnificent and has wonderful paintings on the walls and ceilings. And because the cases that go there tend to be very high profile, very well-known cases that have been and will be reported in the press, everyone tries to be on top of their game.

when they're appearing at the Old Bailey. There's a drama to it that you do not find in the lesser crown courts. Jonathan, I imagine in the time that you've been practising law, lots has changed. But has your approach to defending people changed since the start of your career? You have to be...

somewhat attuned to the times, obviously. An advocate is a bit like a salesman. If the salesman is selling you a car, let's imagine, and he's rude or unpleasant or has bad

forgive me, bad breath or dandruff on his collar, you're less likely to buy that car, even though it's the same car, regardless of whether the salesman knows his pitch and is eloquent or is unpleasant in the ways I've described. But you're going to buy the car from one salesman and not the other, aren't you?

Well, putting it at its most basic, that's what being an advocate is as well. You have to make yourself attractive to your tribunal so that they're buying your ideas in this instance. So you have to change with the times. I mean, comments you might have made 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you wouldn't dare make today because there's so many issues where society's changed. So you have to adapt your advocacy if you hope to have change.

any chance of success. The things have changed, yes. And I have to tell you, not for the better. In my personal experience, very much for the worse. With the economy the way it is today, the delays in the courts, the dilapidation of physical court buildings, the lack of cleanliness in the courts, dare I say the quality of the judges, I think, has gone down enormously.

in recent years. The quality of the advocates has gone down greatly in recent years. I attribute it, unfortunately, to economic conditions. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Of course, a lot of criminal defense is inevitably conducted on the legal aid system because most defendants cannot afford people like me defending them privately.

Of course, it's a bit of a catch-22 situation because people like me no longer need to defend legal aid plans. And we can hope that the very small share of the market where people can afford to pay privately wealthy defense will come to us. But of course, 95% of the market is legally aided. So as they've

taken the fees down and heavens they have over the years and notoriously now barristers have sometimes played far less than plumbers doing a much harder job, I would argue. All that kind of thing feeds in. So the root of it is economic, that the government today are paying so much less for the criminal justice system

This may surprise the public, but that's the situation that we have today. And then we have today an even worse situation that there isn't the money to build the prisons, to have enough places to put all the serious criminals that really should be in prison because they're a danger to the public outside of prison. So they're being released early to make more places. All of this, you know, is going on right at the moment.

So it's lack of investment. And I suppose lack of investment comes because the country is relatively going poorer than it was in those early years of my career. If the Brinksmat heist happened today, with better forensics and technology in the modern legal system, do you think the outcome would be different? The Brinksmat heist, well, maybe with the advances in forensic...

There would have been traces left at the scene by the six robbers such that they wouldn't just have caught two. So maybe they would have caught more. Who knows? They were pretty professional robbers, and I think they took good care to leave very few traces at the scene.

The handling side of Brink's Mat, the way the money was laundered and invested, I doubt that that would have been different because the type of detection and police work I don't think would have been any different today. Except perhaps in one respect, that today banks and particularly foreign banks would cooperate.

with investigations. In those days, they didn't want to get involved, particularly the Swiss banks. There was a tremendous veil of secrecy over Swiss banks, which has since been lifted by international pressure. So I suspect that it would all have come to light sooner today, and the defendants that I represented would have had a harder time today, because the banks would have opened their doors in those days. The banks were being very cagey about cooperating.

Jonathan, thank you so much for this. It's been fantastic. With pleasure.

Thanks so much to Jonathan for speaking to us there. Alice, what do you have for us next week? Next week, I will be bringing you a next level con. I love a con. I know you do. It's ridiculous, this one. In fact, it's kind of genius. It's the story of Arthur Orton, who was pretending to be Roger Tichborne. And in order to inherit a fortune and an estate, the most important person he needs to deceive is not the police or a bank,

It's his own mother. Get ready for the case of the missing aristocrat. I can't believe I've got to wait six sleeps. Well, as is the new norm, if you subscribe to Wondery Plus, you can get the whole series on the day it's released. Oh, wow. So no more agonising waits to find out what happened. You can sleep soundly. No more waits and completely ad-free. From Wondery and Samus Dat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Brinks Matt Heist.

British Scandal is hosted by me, Matt Ford. And me, Alice Levine. For Samizdat, our producer is Chika Ayres. Our assistant producer is Redsy Bernard. Our senior producer is Joe Sykes. For Wondery, our series producer is Theodora Leloudis and our managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones and Marshall Lewin.

Follow British Scandal on the Wondery app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

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