How partying Millwall fan robbed Bank of England with help from US mafia & Pablo Escobar in Britain’s biggest-ever heist
HUNTED down by the FBI for robbing the Bank of England, Keith Cheeseman ponders whether a life of crime really does pay.
Labelled an “old-fashioned villain” by London gangland associates, he did time alongside the US Mafia’s most feared godfathers for his part in Britain’s biggest-ever heist.
Peter JordanKeith Cheeseman was part of Britain’s biggest-ever heist[/caption]
Icon BooksCheeseman, centre, with TV legends Ernie Wise and Eric Morecambe[/caption]
Today Keith, 82, insists in an exclusive interview with The Sun: “In a way, crime does pay.
“I was having a hell of a life, driving a Lamborghini, the chairman of a football club. I was a bit of a celebrity.
“I could stay at the best hotels, have the best suits. I could have whatever I wanted.”
For five-times married Millwall fan Keith, that meant vats of champagne and constantly chomping Montecristo cigars.
Between wives, he dated glamour model Fiona Richmond.
The international conman and fraudster was recruited to help launder £292million of bonds stolen from the Bank of England in 1990.
Such was the enormity of the crime, it drew in the world’s most ruthless crime groups, including the Mafia, the IRA and Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Yet the robbery seemed to have been compromised by a “grass” inside the operation from day one.
Two of the gangland figures embroiled in the heist were “whacked” — both shot twice in the head, execution-style.
The identity of the mastermind behind the robbery remains a mystery to this day.
Now Cheeseman has told his remarkable story for the first time in the book How To Rob The Bank Of England.
‘Hooky accounts’
Laced with Keith’s wideboy humour, it reads like a Guy Ritchie crime caper script.
Unsurprisingly, the film rights have already been snapped up.
Keith was born in Luton during the Blitz in 1942, and his dad ran a chain of TV repair shops.
After serving for six years in khaki with the Royal Artillery, he went into business running a building firm.
When two banks cancelled his overdraft facility — despite the company having £7million of work — it left him with a burning desire to get his own back.
Then Keith bought Dunstable FC and launched a footballing coup by getting Manchester United icon George Best to play for the club.
Best — then 28 — was one of the greatest footballers in history and Dunstable were bottom of the Southern League Division One North.
Keith also recruited former England and West Brom striker Jeff Astle.
It all seemed too good to be true. And it was.
Keith had opened dozens of hooky bank accounts in the names of some of his players, borrowing to the tune of almost £300,000.
Arrested, he served almost four years of a six-year sentence.
He boasted of regular vodka parties in his “lovely cell”, with an armchair and stereo, inside Parkhurst prison.
Soon he had made a name for himself in the criminal underworld as someone who could shift bearer bonds [unregistered paper certificates for debt interest that can be cashed in by the person holding them].
Shortly after 9.30am on May 2, 1990, a messenger carrying a briefcase containing millions in Bank of England bonds was held up at knifepoint.
Keith — 6ft tall with the girth of someone who has lived the good life — takes up the story: “Messengers used to carry fortunes around the City in briefcases.
“Billions of pounds in bearer bonds every day.
“So somebody in the criminal system decided to catch a briefcase.”
Not involved in planning the robbery, Keith says he was asked to help launder the bonds by a disbarred lawyer educated at one of Britain’s top public schools.
Detectives initially believed it was an opportunist mugging.
Later, it emerged that petty criminal Patrick Thomas had been hired to make it look like one.
GettyCheeseman wooed glamour model Fiona Richmond[/caption]
Never charged with the robbery, he would be found dead on his South London doorstep with two gunshot wounds to the head in December 1991.
Police went public to reveal the stolen briefcase contained 292 bearer bonds worth £291.9million.
Except, Keith insists, it didn’t.
When a criminal syndicate — which Keith says included himself, a Swiss-based banker, a London gangster, an Irishman and the debarred lawyer — did a count-up of the bonds, the total came to £427million.
Who, Cheeseman wondered, stood to make on the extra £135million in unrecorded bonds?
Immediately, Keith told the assembled mob he could move £200million through an Indonesian contact for a return of £50million on the face value.
But the gang wanted more.
Instead, he was given just five bonds worth £5million in total to launder.
Soon Keith had struck a deal with an Amsterdam-based fraudster nicknamed Mr Big.
He would take three of Keith’s bonds in return for £1.2million.
Cheeseman and an associate took the Harwich to Hook of Holland ferry in a black BMW to personally deliver the bonds.
As they joined the line of traffic for the ferry, Keith noticed Customs had pulled a black BMW from the queue and began thoroughly searching the vehicle.
‘It was the stench’
The queue inched along and then Customs pulled over another black BMW.
Keith pulled the bonds from his jacket pocket.
He carefully ripped off the serial numbers and hid them inside his tie to prove he hadn’t pulled a fast one.
Then he tore the £3million of bonds into little pieces.
The dad-of-two remembered: “I put it in a Styrofoam cup so it wouldn’t blow away, got out the car and just dropped it in a bin
“£3million gone. I was crying at the time.”
The close shave seemed to underline Keith’s suspicions that a grass was at work.
Meanwhile, other bonds from the heist had been turning up.
Three Irishmen with links to the IRA were stopped at Heathrow with £77million of the bonds.
And in 1991, two phone books were intercepted in Miami by US customs with £71million in Bank of England bonds stuffed inside.
They were destined for cocaine king Pablo Escobar.
Fairley & SimmonsKeith welcomes football legend George to Dunstable Town with manager Barry Fry, centre, in 1974[/caption]
Keith told one of the robbery gang he had a contact in Texas — Mark Lee Osborne — who could launder bonds.
Osborne, a crooked former bond broker, arranged to sell ten bonds to a New York Mafia don called Tony Dipino.
The pair met at a Manhattan bar and a deal was struck.
Back in Texas, Osborne called Keith to tell him the good news. He’d sold the ten bonds for $2million.
What Keith didn’t know was that Mafia hood Dipino was a high-ranking FBI operative who did a decent Marlon Brando impression.
The FBI then convinced Osborne to turn snitch in return for a lighter sentence.
He made calls to Keith and the London gangster, which the FBI tapped.
“Mark called and said he had the money,” Keith remembered.
“It was silly of me to take the call. I said, ‘Great, where is it?’.
“And he said, ‘I’ve got it in sacks in the boot of my car’.
AlamyKeith in the seventies[/caption]
“And I joked, ‘Well, get it out of the way then’. Or words to that effect.
“And that’s on tape and the FBI gave that information to the London Old Bill.”
Two weeks later, Keith received a call from Osborne’s girlfriend: “She said Mark had been shot.
“They didn’t find his body for days. He was stuffed in the boot of his car.
“And Texas is hot. I suppose it was the stench people noticed.”
Osborne had been executed with a double-tap — two bullets — to the back of the head.
The personalised number plate on his Cadillac read “Adios”.
At 6am on November 27, 1990, Keith woke to his front door splintering as London detectives and US Feds barged into his flat.
An FBI officer pointed a Smith & Wesson at his cheek.
“It was like something out of Starsky And Hutch,” Keith recalled.
Law enforcement made a thorough search of the flat — but missed the two bonds from the batch Keith had received that were stashed in a book.
The Brits had no evidence to charge him, but the Americans wanted to extradite him after the wiretap of his conversation with Osborne.
Keith was bailed — then did a runner.
Travelling on a fake passport, he fled to Paris and then Tenerife, where a friend had a flat.
On January 19, 1992, the law finally caught up with him and he was eventually extradited to stand trial in the US the following March.
Devilish grin
He was held at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center on the high-security tenth floor, where Mafia godfathers were caged.
Jon Gotti — boss of the Gambino crime family — was locked up two cells from Keith.
Meeting in the exercise yard, Gotti asked the Brit: “So, you’re the Big Cheese? You know who I am?”
Keith joked: “You’re the even Bigger Cheese. Parmigiano Reggiano?”
Gotti liked the cut of Keith’s jib and the pair would dine together with other Mafia dons.
In return for serving his six and a half year sentence in Britain, Keith later pleaded guilty to laundering the bonds.
“They made me out to be the genius,” he said of the heist.
“I wasn’t the head honcho. I just had peripheral involvement.”
So who was the real Mr Big?
The London gangster from the crime syndicate appeared at the Old Bailey on charges of laundering bonds in 1991.
The prosecution offered no evidence because “it was not in the public interest to do so”. No other explanation was given.
Today Keith — living the good life in a villa in Turkey with fifth wife Sarah Hancock — believes the ex-public schoolboy lawyer planned the heist with other figures from the British Establishment.
And what happened to the two remaining bonds — worth £2million — that Keith had from the batch he was given?
With a devilish grin, he told me: “I can’t remember.”
How To Rob The Bank Of England: Keith Cheeseman Reveals The True Story Of Britain’s Biggest Ever Robbery, by Clifford Thurlow, is out now.
SuppliedHow To Rob The Bank Of England: Keith Cheeseman Reveals The True Story Of Britain’s Biggest Ever Robbery, by Clifford Thurlow, is out now[/caption]
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