John "Goldfinger" Palmer
John Palmer was born in Solihull in 1950 and came from hard poverty. By his late teens he had a jewellery shop, and by 20, our film says, he was making six figures. VAT gold scams made him rich. After the Brink's-Mat robbery of 1983 he was one of the men trusted to smelt the stolen bullion, and that is where the name Goldfinger came from.
In 1984, as police in Britain got ready to arrest him over the gold, he went to Tenerife. Spain had no extradition treaty with Britain, and the island gave him time and distance. He was later acquitted over Brink's-Mat, but by then Tenerife was his.
On the island he took the timeshare idea he had watched boom in Florida and made it far more aggressive. Tourists were pressured into long contracts, often for properties that did not exist or that they would never own. He brought in young men from Wolverhampton, Teesside, Darlington and all over Britain: salesmen, doormen, bodybuilders and petty criminals. Some sold. Others collected. The line between salesman and gangster went quickly.
In 1986 he opened the Holiday Village, his headquarters on the island, with a bodyguard he had met in Libya the year before at his side. The business grew fast. The island picked up a new nickname, the White Island, and it was not for the beaches. Enforcers with names like Psycho Bill and the Sharks kept the money coming in, and Palmer's own heavies were known as the Clompers.
That same year Spain revoked his passport. He fled through Lisbon to Brazil and was arrested there, but by 1987 the charges had collapsed and he was back in Tenerife. By the 1990s his old bodyguard was building a power base of his own, and the cold war between them was fought out by rival security firms in clubs, car parks and villas. In May 1996 Kenneth Noye, once convicted of handling the Brink's-Mat gold, fled Britain after stabbing a young man to death on a Kent slip road. Palmer was his first call, and he flew Noye out on his private jet.
By the late 1990s Palmer's former right-hand man and his brother had timeshare businesses of their own, and the old partnership had become a war. According to court testimony and local reports, Palmer tried more than once to have them killed. Once, two gunmen opened fire on their car. Another time six Clompers armed with baseball bats beat both brothers in their apartment complex until the police arrived.
In 2001 a British court found him guilty of the largest timeshare fraud in British legal history: more than 20,000 victims and £30 million. He got eight years. By 2005 he was officially bankrupt, and his empire never recovered from the investigations. In January 2006 Billy and Florence Robinson, a British couple who had worked with him and then set up on their own, were murdered on the island. Those killings were never solved, and people close to the couple said it was not Palmer's style.
In June 2015 Palmer was found dead in the garden of his Essex home. It was first put down as a natural death. The post-mortem found two bullets in his chest. There have been no arrests, and the killing remains unsolved. These are the films about him.