The City Bonds mugging, 1990

I’ve never really considered it before but carrying out a mugging is a bit like buying a ticket in a tombola – you are never quite sure what you are going to get, assuming you manage to evade the long arm of the law. Bearer Bonds are curious financial instrument in that they are unregistered and one of the attractions is that the absence of ownership records makes them useful for investors who wish to hide under a cloak of anonymity. The downside is that whoever has their mitts on the physical bond is assumed to be the owner – hence the name bearer – and if they fall into the wrong hands, recovery is near on impossible.

Another curious feature of the City of London in the days before electronic trading and the speedy transmission of digitised documents was that important papers used to be walked around the City from trading house to trading house. The messengers, as they were called, in my experience, were mainly ex-military personnel who as well as having the perfect job to maintain their physical condition also had time on their hands to pop into a local in order to wet their whistles. After all, the streets are dusty and hot.

58-year-old John Goddard was employed as a messenger for the money broking firm of Sheppards and stepped out of the office on May 2^nd 1990 with a briefcase containing 301 bearer bonds to the tune of £292 million, which he was to walk round to a number of banks and building societies. Around 9.30 am in one of the quiet alleys in the City, he was set upon by a mugger brandishing a knife. Sensibly, Goddard didn’t put up a fight and the assailant, believed to be Patrick Thomas, a petty crook from South London, made off with the loot. It remains to this day the second largest hauls in British criminal history and, astonishingly, relied solely on a knife and a petty thief.

Thomas, if indeed it was he, didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of his audacious mugging. He was found dead in December 1991 from a gunshot wound to the head in December 1991. At least he died without having his collar felt for the crime.

But Thomas was not a lone operator who just got lucky and then unlucky. The police realised that there were bigger brains behind the theft and in conjunction with the FBI launched an operation to bring the felons to justice. A Texan businessman by the name of Mark Lee Osborne came to the attention of the FBI and he was arrested when he tried to sell some of the stolen London bonds to officers posing as members of the Mafia. Osborne sang like a canary and was used to trap another big cheese, Keith Cheeseman, who was arrested in the Barbican.

Cheeseman, out on bail, fled to Tenerife where he was arrested again and deported to the States. He claimed that the reason he scarpered was that he feared that there was a Mafia contract on him. Perhaps there was some truth in the story as his associate, Osborne, was found dead in the boot of a car in Houston with two gun shots to the back of his head. Cheeseman finally stood trial in England in 1993 where he was sentenced to six and a half year in chokey. The police recovered all but two of the bonds. It could only have happened in England.

Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: bearer bonds, Britain's biggest robberies, City bonds mugging 1990, City messengers, Keith Cheeseman, Mark Lee Osborne, Patrick Thomas, Sheppards money brokers, what are bearer bonds