On a sunny May morning in 1990, Keith Cheeseman was staring out at the splendid view from the window of his penthouse at the Barbican. He wasn’t surprised when the phone rang and Henry Nunn invited him to a meeting at his Mayfair house that evening.
As the phone call was taking place, so was a robbery.
The bank courier John Goddard, a sturdy man of 58, had just buckled 301 bearer bonds worth £291.9m into a leather satchel. He went briskly down the steps of the Bank of England into Threadneedle Street and turned into Nicholas Lane.
What then happened was so quick, Goddard was in a state of shock but unharmed. A man in a hood held a knife to his throat, snatched the satchel from his shoulder and ran off through the maze of back streets.
The satchel was standing on an oak side table in Henry Nunn’s living room when Keith arrived at 7pm. Already present were the Swiss banker John Bowman, a big Irishman named Houlihan in a donkey jacket, and the gangster Ray Ketteridge, ostensibly the boss of the operation, although Henry seemed to be calling the shots.
Henry Nunn was an effete debarred lawyer, educated at Gordonstoun, with a Goya in the kitchen and connections from the Cabinet to royalty and from the IRA to the underworld. He had helped fill the Barbican penthouse with antiques of dubious provenance and, Keith recalled, once having on the wall a Monet “worth a lot of monet.”
Keith counted what was just under a ream of embossed A4 paper and was surprised that there wasn’t £292m, as Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Dickinson had said on the BBC news. There were 450 bonds worth £427m, £135m more than the bank had reported.
Crime made his heart beat faster. It gave him that same sense of breezy freedom he had every time he flew on Concorde
To put it into context, the sum stolen in the City Bonds Robbery made the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion haul of £26m seem like child’s play and the Great Train Robbery of £1.6m a paltry bagatelle.
In crime circles, bonds are worth between 25 and 40 per cent of their face value. They are used in drugs deals, arms deals, property speculation and, in the case of Pablo Escobar, the Medellín coke king, to guarantee funds when acquiring rare animals for his private menagerie.
The sum of £427m – almost three billion in buying power in 2024 – wasn’t so much a bonus as a burden, an ocean of slippery money that could drown them all. Keith’s first instinct was to withdraw from his role fencing the bonds, but crime made his heart beat faster. It gave him that same sense of breezy freedom he had every time he flew on Concorde or checked into the best suite at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
Cheeseman was a big man with a big personality and charisma to burn. Two inches over six feet, he’d served six years in the Royal Artillery, could have gone pro playing soccer, and counted as friends everyone from Dean Martin to the mafia godfather John Gotti. When he had lunch at his regular table at Simpson’s on the Strand, the Queen Mother would give him a little wave.
Keith had never set out to be a bank robber. He had a building firm with several million pounds of orders on the books and was the co-owner of Dunstable Football Club with Angus Montagu, later the 12th Duke of Manchester. The club was climbing the league after Keith at the bar of the Phene Arms in Chelsea persuaded soccer legend George Best to come out of retirement, aged 27, to play for Dunstable.
To keep everything afloat, Keith took out loans in players’ names but couldn’t resist the temptations of the good life. As Private Eye raged in its Knacker of the Yard column, “How come the owner of Dunstable Town FC drives a Lamborghini?” The answer came when Keith was standing in the dock at the Old Bailey alongside Angus Montagu, charged with taking out false loans to the value of £400,000. Keith pleaded guilty. Montagu’s lawyer said his client, from Gordonstoun and the Royal Marines, was far too stupid to be involved in fraud. He walked free.
Keith served four years behind bars. He read the Economist, honed his maths skills in the library, charmed the wardens and met everyone from disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse to Frankie Fraser, the torturer and hitman. One time they played chess.
“I suppose you’re going to kill me if I win?” Keith said.
“Bet your life I will.”
“Thank Gawd for that, I can’t stand the food in here.”
Frankie Fraser was a man who never laughed. He laughed.
Not that Keith ate prison food. JAK – Raymond Jackson – in the Evening Standard did a cartoon showing six waiters with steaming tureens lining up outside Keith’s cell. He had a regular hamper from Fortnum & Mason and a Harrods pud at Christmas.
The night the gangsters gathered to count the spoils, Ketteridge gave Keith five bonds to “test the water”.
Within days, an Irishman turned up at a Scottish bank with a million-pound bond, asking for cash. He was arrested and released the same day. Three Irishmen with IRA links were stopped in a “random” search at Heathrow with £77m in bonds in their luggage. Customs in Miami intercepted two telephone books with £71m in bonds between the pages, posted to animal lover Pablo Escobar at an address in Peru.
Superintendent Dickinson had formed a task force of 40 agents working with the FBI and they seemed to know where the bonds were moving before Ray Ketteridge knew himself. Keith set out with a friend to meet a contact in Amsterdam in a black BMW. Two black BMWs ahead in the line at the Harwich ferry were pulled out and searched. Keith “broke his heart” ripping the three bonds he carried into confetti.
Keith arranged to send ten bonds to Mark Lee Osborne, a struck-off bond dealer he knew in Texas. Osborne through his network found his way to New York mafia boss Tony Dipino. They met in the Irish bar Ray McFadden on 42nd Street where, after two shots of Bushmills, Mark couldn’t stop talking.
Meeting the mafia in an Irish bar should have been a red flag but Osborne had gambling debts and was easily duped. Dipino wasn’t mafia. He was an FBI agent by the name of David Maniquis, famous for his Marlon Brando impersonations. He had the names of Ray Ketteridge and Keith Cheeseman on tape and Mark Osborne in his pocket. He sent him home to put his house in order and promised a light sentence in a country club jail for good ol’ boys.
A week later, Osborne was found in the trunk of his Cadillac, with the registration plate ADIOS. He had been shot dead, a double tap to the skull, assassination style.
The next to fall was Patrick Thomas, a Jamaican chosen by the crime syndicate that had set up the robbery so that police profiling would point to a random mugging. Thomas was killed on his South London doorstep, like Osborne, with two head shots.
Ray Ketteridge was arrested with nine bonds but walked out of court after the prosecutor announced that it was not in the public interest to proceed with the trial. Keith was not so lucky.
His door smashed open one morning at daybreak and Scotland Yard charged in with gun-toting men in black from the FBI. They searched the premises, missed the two bonds hidden in a John le Carré novel and dragged him off to face an extradition charge. He was suspected by the FBI of passing JC Penney bonds in the United States and they needed someone to take the fall for the biggest bond haul in history.
Keith jumped bail and while the police searched for a racing-green 2.4l Jaguar, he swapped the car for a mate’s yellow Rolls Royce, drove blithely through the roadblocks and escaped with a false passport to Tenerife.
Six months later, the law tracked him down to an apartment in Puerto de la Cruz and surrounded the building with snipers and machine guns. Dickinson’s detectives, the Feds, US Marshals, Interpol and the Guardia Civil all burst in at the same time. “I’m surprised you didn’t bring the Bengal Lancers.” Keith shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve got enough glasses for all of you.”
He was charged in a New York federal court with stealing the entire £292m in bonds and was greeted by the Teflon Don John Gotti as “the big cheese” when he walked out into the exercise yard on the roof of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
After four years behind bars in various tough jail blocks, Keith as a free man returned to London as ebullient as ever. He packed up his belongings and moved to Turkey with his new wife Sarah.
In May 2023 a limo picked me up at the airport and I sat with Keith by the poolside at his villa in the hills with a pile of newspaper clippings and a list of questions in a notebook. Who was behind the robbery? What happened to the £135m never recorded by the Bank of England? Why were you, after 80 people were arrested, the only person who went to jail? What happened to the £2m in bonds hidden in the John le Carré novel?
He smiled, took a long draw on his Montecristo cigar and poured two glasses of raki.
Clifford Thurlow is the author of “How to Rob the Bank of England: Keith Cheeseman Reveals the True Story of Britain’s Biggest Ever Robbery” (Icon Books)
