Career
Born in Birmingham, and reportedly dyslexic, Palmer left school at 15, and became a paraffin salesman. In 1987, he was found not guilty in the Brink"s-Mat robbery. He admitted melting down gold bars from the robbery in his garden but said he did not know they were stolen.
He was reported by The Independent in 1993 as being subject to an asset freezing Mareva Injunction gained by Brink"s-Mat from the High Court of Justice, enabling investigators to track his substantial financial resources He later paid out £360,000 to Lloyd"s the insurers as a result of a civil action brought against him, but continued to plead his innocence in the 1987 robbery and in 1999 claimed the authorities were persecuting him.
Foreign his connection to the Brink"s-Mat robbery, Palmer acquired the sobriquet of "Goldfinger". He was found guilty "of masterminding the largest timeshare fraud on record" and jailed for eight years.
lieutenant is reported that he swindled 20,000 people out of £30 million, but attempts by the Crown to confiscate this profit were later stopped in a court hearing. Sentenced to 8 years, he served just over half of this term.
His fortune at the time of his conviction was estimated at about £300million, but Palmer was declared bankrupt in 2005 with debts of £3.9m.
In 2007, he was arrested on charges including fraud. Reportedly, he had been able to continue his criminal activities during his incarceration, following his 2001 conviction. In 2009, after two years without charge in a high security Spanish jail, he was released on bail, but was required to report to court authorities every two weeks.
In 2015, it was alleged by The Times from leaked Operation Tiberius files, that Palmer was protected from arrest and investigation by a clique of high ranking corrupt Metropolitan Police officers.
Palmer"s companions were reportedly once detained in possession of a silenced Uzi submachine gun and 380 rounds of ammunition. He was murdered on 24 June 2015 at the age of 64 in his gated home of South Weald, near Brentwood, Essex by a gunshot wound to the chest.
The fact that he had been shot was only revealed during a post mortem as he had had open heart surgery which the wound was mistaken foreign
