Funny enough the figure usually thrown around for Palmer's timeshare fiddle is stg£30M... yet he featured in the rich lists valued at around stg£300M. Seems he was laundering notes for mafias from Russia to Columbia.I went on one of the timeshare junkets back in the early 90s in that area - Playa de las Americas. Not sure if it was Palmer's but they were commonplace by then and well known to be fraudulent. Long story short, the bloke who recruited us from the streets told me what he got paid just for sending us to the depot and he paid our breakfast bill out of his cut. I can't remember the figures but it wasn't small change. We were promised, and to be fair received, free taxis up and back, 200 smokes and a bottle of spirits each and as much sangria and finger food as we could consume while up there. The set up was highly impressive with no expense spared which got me to thinking the catch must be in the service charge 'cos they're making nothing on the sales prices... so I got myself a contract and a sun lounger by the pool and settled down with a bottomless jug of sangria for the afternoon. Before I got to finish the contract one of the salesmen switched course and tried to recruit me to the sales team... told him I'd get back to him, blah, blah, blah, collected me duty free and left firmly of the opinion that the levels of commission alone deemed the whole scheme implausible. Point being, if that's how his outfit was run he didn't didn't hold on to much (if any) of the alleged stg£30M turnover... but worked wonders for Teneriffe's economy!
I guess the series did glamorise the villans to some extent. I see Kenny Noye - the scumbag who was eventually locked up for murdering a young lad during a road rage incident - has put the villa he bought as a hideout for £200,000 on the market for c.€2M since the series aired. The solicitor character was totally changed, one wonders why. However, they did get two things right (insofar as they concur with real world reports). First, only half of the Gold/Money went through the Noye/Palmer/Relton scheme with the whereabouts of the other half still unknown and second, the stg£11-13M was worth c.stg£28M by the time it was washed... not a bad rate of return over a relatively short period of time by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not sure how much was eventually recovered but it may well have exceeded the amount stolen... and that was only half the story!
P.S There's a series on Palmer on BBC sounds called The Gangster.
