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The latest installment of crime drama The Gold airs on BBC One this weekend. The fifth episode of the six-part series will air at 9 p.m. on Sunday (March 12).

Based on the actual Brink’s-Mat robbery of November 1983, The Gold depicts the events surrounding the heist, in which £26 million in cash, diamonds and gold bars were stolen from a Heathrow warehouse, and the massive investigation Police who followed the robbery.

Dubbed “the crime of the century” at the time, the Brink’s-Mat heist, one of the biggest in British history, has continued to receive media attention, even nearly 40 years after it occurred. But what happened to the proceeds from the robbery that inspired the BBC series?

READ MORE: BBC The Gold – What happened to the real-life gangsters in the Brink’s-Mat robbery?

What happened to the gold stolen from Brink’s-Mat?

The Brink’s-Mat robbery of November 1983 saw a gang of six robbers escape with £26 million in cash, gold bullion and diamonds. The thieves expected to steal around £1 million in cash, only to discover that the actual contents of the Brink’s-Mat vault were much more valuable than anticipated.

This posed a puzzle to the thieves: what to do with the gold they had stolen. Partners in crime, including Kenneth Noye, played by Jack Lowden on BBC’s The Gold, were called in to help dispose of the bullion.

Noye is said to have melted down the gold, mixing it with copper coins to disguise the source. This gold was then sold to jewellers, and the money raised from the sale was deposited in banks in Bristol; one of these banks tipped off the police.

John Palmer, a Solihull bullion dealer and jeweler with links to organized crime, has been arrested after it was discovered he was operating a foundry out of a garden shed in Bath. Palmer denied any knowledge of the origins of the gold and successfully beat the charges against him in connection with the Brink’s-Mat robbery.

Around £16 million of Brink’s-Mat profits were laundered. The money was deposited abroad in places including Jersey, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, well known for their lax financial regulations, as revealed by the Panama Papers in 2016.

Proceeds from the Brink’s-Mat robbery were also laundered through a series of real estate deals. Some of the money from the heist is believed to have helped fuel London’s 1980s property boom, with lawyer Michael Renton accused of recovering £7.5m from Switzerland and Liechtenstein to invest in the high-profile Docklands development.

However, most of the gold stolen from Brink’s-Mat, amounting to about three tons, was never recovered. The Independent reported in 1996 that half the gold had been melted down and sold to legitimate jewellers, while the rest was thought to have been secretly buried.

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