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

Jonathan Goldberg KC has acted for alleged murderers, rapists and fraudsters during his five decades as a leading barrister. Among his high-profile clients: Brink’s Mat launderer, Brian Perry. He takes Alice and Matt inside the uncompromising world of criminal justice, and reveals the long lasting impact of Brink’s Mat Heist. Plus, what’s it like to defend someone you suspect to be guilty? Listen to British Scandal on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting https://wondery.com/links/british-scandal/ now. Do you have a suggestion for a scandal you would like us to cover? Or perhaps you have a question you would like to ask our hosts? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alice Levine?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

• 0:15Matt Forde?

  From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford.

• 0:17Alice Levine?

  And I'm Alice Levine.

• 0:18Matt Forde?

  And this is British Scandal.

• 0:32Matt Forde?

  Alice, in this series, we've seen the crime, the cover-up, the punishment, and the very, very long arm of the law.

• 0:38Alice Levine?

  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.

• 0:43Matt Forde?

  It was nearly 10 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?

• 0:58Alice Levine?

  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 bought up 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.

• 1:24Matt Forde?

  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.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Candace DeLong, former FBI profiler and host of the podcast Killer Psyche. In our latest episode, we go inside the case of Krista Pike, the woman Tennessee tried to execute and failed. Listen to Killer Psyche on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Sachi Cole, co-host of Scamfluencers from Audible Originals. Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes let a film crew see everything before she went to prison, or at least that's what she wanted them to think. In our latest episode, we dig into the documentary that has everyone asking, who's really running the con? Listen to Scamfluencers on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:42Matt Forde?

  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?

• 2:53Speaker 04

  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, you know? 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.

• 3:32Alice Levine?

  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?

• 3:41Speaker 04

  Well, of course, you've got to realize that any barrister is a bit like an actor, because the courtroom is a theater, 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 Rinksmar series of trials," I was only too thrilled and delighted. I defended Perry, and...

• 4:20Speaker 04

  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 novelled. In other words, that criminals had got, I believe it was a woman, and 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 that led the judge to abandon

• 5:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  And the police had filmed Perry, unknown to him, and he'd been 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 retrial eventually took place. And that went for at least eight months, from memory. Again, it was a marvelously dramatic trial, but Perry was eventually convicted and was sentenced, from memory, to nine years imprisonment.

• 6:22Alice Levine?

  Can you paint a bit of a picture for us of Brian Perry, the man?

• 6:27Speaker 04

  I have to say, I liked Brian Perry very much. He was a professional criminal to his fingertips. And these fellows are 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 a serious armed robbery 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.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  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. He who 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 Cussey said to the jury.

• 7:48Matt Forde?

  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?

• 7:58Speaker 04

  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 that 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?

• 8:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 8:57Alice Levine?

  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?

• 9:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  Gangsters loved him, he had that sort of a practice. He defended very many of them, of the biggest London gangsters. What happened in Brinksmatt was obviously that he crossed that all important 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, Relton crossed it. And obviously they made him an offer at some stage that he couldn't refuse. And he became the advisor to the robbers and handlers

• 10:35Speaker 04

  who were disposing of the Brinksmatt gold.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  How do you get rid of £28 million 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, or which Wilson 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 and nobody knows where it went. But certainly half of it went into property development in this country. And they made brilliant investments, as I say, Docklars was just one of them.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  An annex wing at Cheltenham Ladies College was another. They bought land from Cheltenham Ladies College and made a great big residential development. But he advised them well and they invested very well. And the money soon became worth far, far more than it had originally been.

• 11:41Matt Forde?

  What impact did the Brinksmatt heist have on organised crime in the UK?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  Of course, inevitably, that's speculative. But I cannot say to you that whereas robberies, 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, entirely transformed

• 12:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:53Speaker 05

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• 13:23Speaker 06

  A trucker merges onto the I-10 in New Orleans. He checks his mirrors. The lane is clear. And then, boom, impact. A pickup truck, seemingly out of nowhere, scrapes down the side of his 18-wheeler, multiple passengers inside. One man flees the scene. And the driver of the pickup, he doesn't seem all that upset. It didn't feel like a regular accident, because it wasn't. Across the city, truckers are getting sideswiped, all on the same stretch of the same freeway. And behind many of the cases is one person, a Hollywood stunt woman turned personal injury lawyer named Vanessa Moda. This podcast is a story about fake accidents that lead to real consequences and a scheme that ends in betrayal and murder.

• 14:08Speaker 06

  Listen to Over My Dead Body: Operation Sideswipe wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

• 14:29Alice Levine?

  Jonathan Brink's matters, 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?

• 14:41Speaker 04

  So barristers don't choose their cases. Cases choose their barristers. That's the first thing to realize. 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 cabrake, we'll as we call it, just as a taxi can't decide not

• 15:24Speaker 04

  to take you to an inconvenient destination far from its 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 cabrake rule, an unpopular cause

• 16:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  So that's the more theoretical answer, but I respect it and I really think the cabrake rule is a very good thing and I'm glad it exists. And also, you must realise, 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...

• 17:04Speaker 04

  Clown, let's say a murderer, as God knows I've defended in over a hundred murder cases. I don't say to myself, oh, he must be guilty. Look at the evidence. He, 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 he's 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.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  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.

• 17:55Matt Forde?

  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, you think, actually, these guys are always coming to me? What does that say about me?

• 18:17Speaker 04

  Ah, 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. 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.

• 19:02Speaker 04

  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. Let's 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,

• 19:44Speaker 04

  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 perfect justification, I'm only doing what my professional duty demanded of me.

• 20:21Matt Forde?

  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.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  I like to remind myself of the famous quotation of a very great judge called Viscount Coldacott, in the House of Lords, in a case in, I think, the late 1940s, where he said, "It is often better that ten 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...

• 21:16Speaker 04

  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

• 22:00Speaker 04

  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 because you've admitted to me that you are in fact guilty of the offence and all I can do is plead

• 22:44Speaker 04

  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 clients 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.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:07Alice Levine?

  And your job is of course, as you've already said, 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?

• 24:26Speaker 04

  To be honest with you, my father was a great orator. He was a minister of religion. And people used to come to hear his sermons for 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.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Speak up. Speak clearly. In court, because of the drama, you're always gabbling much faster than you realise. 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 acquittal go up something like 20%. Nerdy, Chris, but it's that simple.

• 25:38Matt Forde?

  And does a case being high profile make it easier or harder to defend?

• 25:43Speaker 04

  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. It's perhaps, as a tennis player, would you rather play at Wimbledon or in the local park?

• 26:08Alice Levine?

  Although you don't get to select the cases, are you drawn to controversy? Do you like the kind of grey area?

• 26:15Speaker 04

  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.

• 26:45Matt Forde?

  Alice, have you ever wondered why the Mini is so small?

• 26:48Alice Levine?

  The skirt or the magnum?

• 26:50Matt Forde?

  Well, I meant the iconic British car, because in 1956, Britain's oil supply was suddenly cut off. Petrol rationing was brought in, and the car industry was scrambling around for a vehicle that hardly used any fuel. Enter the Mini.

• 27:04Alice Levine?

  Interesting, but actually not technically British scandal series material.

• 27:09Matt Forde?

  Well, the reason they had to save petrol is because the Prime Minister started a war and lied about why.

• 27:15Alice Levine?

  Okay, scandal siren going off.

• 27:17Matt Forde?

  I'm Matt Ford.

• 27:18Alice Levine?

  And I'm Alice Levine.

• 27:19Matt Forde?

  And our latest British scandal series involves a secret meeting in a French villa, a Prime Minister running on amphetamines.

• 27:25Alice Levine?

  An Egyptian president that everyone fancied, the end of the British Empire, and at the heart of it, a canal.

• 27:32Matt Forde?

  This is the story of the Suez Plot.

• 27:35Alice Levine?

  Follow British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Audible.

• 27:45Speaker 07

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• 28:28Speaker 07

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• 28:52Matt Forde?

  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?

• 29:09Speaker 04

  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

• 29:54Speaker 04

  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 secret trials. But otherwise, any member of the public can go into the courts of the Old Bailey, there's now at least twenty three of them, at any time. And the old part of the building, which dates back to the early years of the nineteenth century, I believe. And the old part of the building is architecturally magnificent and has wonderful paintings on the walls and ceilings. And

• 30:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 30:59Alice Levine?

  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?

• 31:11Speaker 04

  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, 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

• 31:54Speaker 04

  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 twenty years ago, thirty 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 any chance of success.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  That 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.

• 33:01Speaker 04

  Of course, a lot of criminal defence 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 clients and we can hope that the very small share of the market where people can afford to pay privately, wealthy defence, 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

• 33:44Speaker 04

  now barristers are sometimes paid 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.

• 34:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 34:39Matt Forde?

  If the Brinksmatt heist happened today with better forensics and technology in the modern legal system, do you think the outcome would be different?

• 34:47Speaker 04

  The Brinksmatt heist, well, maybe with the advances in forensic science, 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 Brinksmatt, 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

• 35:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 36:01Matt Forde?

  Jonathan, thank you so much for this, it's been fantastic.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  With pleasure.

• 36:06Matt Forde?

  Thanks so much to Jonathan for speaking to us there. Alice, what do you have for us next week?

• 36:10Alice Levine?

  Next week I will be bringing you a next level con.

• 36:14Matt Forde?

  I love a con.

• 36:15Alice Levine?

  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.

• 36:38Matt Forde?

  Can't believe I've got to wait six sleeps.

• 36:40Alice Levine?

  Well, as is the new norm, if you subscribe to Wondery Plus, you can get the whole series on the day it's released.

• 36:46Matt Forde?

  Oh, wow. So no more agonizing waits to find out what happened?

• 36:49Alice Levine?

  You can sleep soundly, no more waits and completely ad free.

• 36:54Matt Forde?

  From Wondery and Samizdat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Brink's Matt Heist. British Scandal is hosted by me, Matt Ford.

• 37:02Alice Levine?

  And me, Alice Levine.

• 37:03Matt Forde?

  For Samizdat, our producer is Chika Ayers. Our assistant producer is Redsy Bernard. Our senior producer is Joe Sykes. For Wondery, our series producer is Theodora Leludis, and our managing producer is Rachel Sibley. Executive producers for Wondery are Estelle Doyle, Chris Bourne, Morgan Jones, and Marshall Lewin.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the Revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men. So he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress to the

• 38:22Speaker 04

  enemy and doom the Revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 38:38Alice Levine?

  Ghosts aren't real. At least, that's what journalist Tristan Redmond always believed. Sure, odd things happen in his childhood bedroom, but ultimately, he shrugged them off. Until he discovered that he wasn't alone, that everyone who lived thereafter him also had bizarre experiences they couldn't explain. And it gets even weirder. It just so happens that his wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door. Is this ghost somehow connected to her murder? He decides to go where no son-in-law should, digging up a cold case and asking questions that nobody wants answered. Like, could his wife's great-grandfather have gotten away with the perfect crime? This is a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence,

• 39:21Alice Levine?

  and the things that come back to haunt us. For the best bingeable series like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.