'The Gold' Recap: Season 1 Episode 1

The Gold airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the following episode. 
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As the security guards at a Brink’s-Mat warehouse near London’s Heathrow airport have their morning tea, six men in balaclavas break in, brandishing guns. The robbers know the names and home addresses of the two security guards they need to open a locked vault containing a million pounds in foreign currency, as well as the denominations of that currency and some of the codes to get to the vault. But one of the guards can’t remember the code for the vault in his fear. As the robbers wait impatiently, their eyes fall on something else: £26 million in gold bullion. They didn’t know that was there.

The gold was at the facility overnight. There was too much – three tons – to go in the vault. One of the security guards tells the police he’s never seen so much money. Were the robbers just extraordinarily lucky? Either way, they take the gold. 

Tony Brightwell and Nicki Jennings are members of the “flying squad” of police in London. They report to the Brink’s-Mat and immediately guess that the robbers had an inside man. They narrow in on Robert Wright, who was badly hit in the eye – even though he posed no obstacle. His story of the robbery is also suspicious – he should have been able to see the robbers’ van.

But the head of the flying squad is retiring in a couple weeks and wants to go out on a high note. So he’s trying to push the investigation of such a big heist – the largest in history, at the time – onto another department. Tony and Nicki don’t want to lose the case.

Brian Boyce wanted other work. He has helped catch a man who tried to kill the Prime Minister and wants to head counter-terrorism, but he has caused too many international incidents. Instead he’s being sent to the flying squad, against his will – until he finds out he’ll be leading an investigation into Brink’s-Mat independently. 

When Nicki and Tony bring their case files to Boyce, they argue that they should be kept on the case, telling Boyce their suspicions about Robert Wright. He lets them lead the interrogation of Wright. Nicki is from the same rough South London streets as Wright and knows the criminals there well, including Brian Robinson, who took part in the Brink’s-Mat robbery (not that she knows that) and is the brother of Wright’s wife (which she does realize). 

Wright refuses to answer questions, asking for a lawyer. But when Boyce begins listing possible criminals who might have organized the robbery, he picks up on a subtle signal from Wright at the mention of Micky McAvoy. Wright insists he didn’t say anything. Boyce tells him to get his own lawyer, and not to accept the one that McAvoy and his friends will offer.

Boyce accepts Nicki and Tony onto his team.

Meanwhile, Micky has to figure out how to fence and launder £26 million in gold. He stows it in a lock-up in South London and gets connected to Ken Noye, who has climbed his way from the working class to become a builder with a country mansion – but still poaches rabbits from a wealthy neighbor for the fun of it. Brian Robinson is skeptical of Ken, but Micky knows that it will be difficult to sell so much gold without anyone noticing. Micky’s girlfriend also doesn’t trust Ken, urging Micky to move the gold himself so that they can finally escape London and start a new life.

Ken’s associate John Palmer is also wary of taking on the job – they’ll get caught. The gold is too pure to sell without anyone noticing, so they’ll have to melt it down with worse-quality gold to disguise it, and only move a little bit at a time. Ken convinces John, another working class striver, to try with one of the bars. He successfully melts it down and then sells it – at a mark-up, since gold is now at a premium on the market after so much of it went missing.

John tells Ken that they’ll need someone in elite society to help them launder the money, however – it will look suspicious if they suddenly have a huge amount of wealth. 

Ken arranges a meeting with Edwyn Cooper through his acquaintance Gordon Parry. Cooper is a lawyer who represents cops in corruption cases. He has climbed far from his working class roots, even adopting a new accent to hide them. Parry arranges “investment opportunities” for him via flipping properties, and has a big one: purchasing wharfs on a vacant stretch of central London riverfront, re-zoning it, and building there. 

Cooper’s third (and current) wife is from a wealthy family that finds Cooper himself to be a gauche new money arriviste, and Cooper has access to her trust fund. But he needs more than£100,000 for the wharf project, and that would require his condescending father-in-law to co-sign. So he looks elsewhere for the money.

That’s when Parry asks him to meet at a tony club and surprises him by bringing Ken along. Cooper quickly guesses that Ken is asking him to launder the Brink’s-Mat gold. He initially refuses, then bristles when Ken accuses him of being from a different world. He emphasizes that he, too, is from “the streets,” and demands a 25% cut instead of Ken’s proposed 10%. He’ll move the money from the sold gold through a Swiss bank account into dummy companies in the UK. He can launder a million a week.

Boyce and his team execute a warrant on Micky McAvoy’s home, but only his long-suffering wife is there. Boyce learns the address of Micky’s apartment with his girlfriend from some neighborhood reconnaissance. Micky flees out a window before the police enter and is pursued by Tony and Nicki before being caught by another member of Boyce’s team. Boyce tells Tony that his fitness is unacceptable – he’ll start running for exercise with Boyce at lunch every day. 

Micky knows Boyce by reputation, and recognizes Nicki as the daughter of another South London criminal. (Boyce arrested Nicki’s dad once.) He refuses to name his collaborators. But the police get him to share the location of the gold.

Nicki and Boyce both realize that the robbery is a chance to trace money laundering operations past the petty criminals of South London into elite places the law typically doesn’t reach – but only if they don’t recover the gold before it is sold and laundered. 

When they arrive at the lock-up, they find that they will have that chance. The gold is gone. Ken has moved it without Micky knowing.