'The Gold' Recap: Season 1 Episode 2

The Gold airs Sundays at 9:00 pm on WTTW and is available to stream on the PBS app and wttw.com. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Brian Boyce and his team have two of the six robbers who stole three tons of gold, the ringleader Micky McAvoy and henchman Brian Robinson. They have a list of four other suspects and hope that by arresting them all at once, they can get one of them to tell them where the gold is. But the suspects don’t know – the fence Ken Noye has moved the gold – and the lawyer representing them all already has alibis for each of them.

So Boyce sends Nicki and Tony to Customs to try to track down the gold. The head of Customs refuses to help, however – he thinks the detectives are corrupt. An employee, Archie Osborne, guesses that Nicki and Tony are there for help with the Brink’s-Mat heist, and is eager to work on the biggest robbery in history. They reluctantly turn to him for advice, and he recommends going to the merchants around Hatton Garden to see if one sold a portable smelter to someone buying in cash. The Brink’s-Mat gold will need to be melted down to remove its serial numbers, and since the robbers didn’t know they’d be acquiring it, they’ll need a smelter – fast. 

Archie is right; Boyce adds him to his team. Nicki and Tony manage to extract information about the sale of a smelter from a Hatton Gardens merchant. It’s being picked up tomorrow, under a false name. 

Boyce’s request for resources to surveil the pick-up is denied, so he sets Nicki and Tony to watch for the smelter. They tail the car that picks it up, but they’re just in a civilian car instead of a proper pursuit vehicle and lose the trail at a rail crossing in Kent. The car that picked up the smelter had a false license plate. The commander Cath McLean, watching the failure of the operation but realizing the merit of it, tells Boyce to come directly to her next time he needs resources. 

Tony and Nicki are assigned to watch the road in Kent where they lost the car. Boyce warns them not to involve the Kent police, who are notoriously leak-prone. Indeed, Ken is friends with several Kent officers, including one that went to school with Tony and recognizes him when he and Nicki stop for coffee. Nicki quickly lies about their reason for being in the county, but the officer still reports their presence to Ken. 

Tony eventually recognizes Brian Reader, a London criminal, as he drives by on the county road, and wonders what he’s doing in sleepy Kent. Something big is going on down there.

Boyce asks his team if anyone knows a trustworthy officer who used to work in Kent. He then sends Tony and Nicki to speak to the man, warning them not to share their list of four suspected robbers. Nicki does anyway. The man discounts three of them but says that the fourth is probably using Ken as a fence, if he was in fact involved in the robbery. 

Ken isn’t in the police’s system, but Boyce knows him. Boyce suspected Ken was more than just a fence but was never able to pin anything on him – Ken has protection.  

Meanwhile, Ken is busy setting up a system to get rich off the gold. Archie lays out the process for the detectives. Once the gold has been melted down in a smelter to remove the serial numbers, Ken and his crew have to move the gold. They will have legitimately bought some gold and kept the receipt, which they can then keep with a small amount of Brink’s Mat gold as they transport it to make it look legitimate. Archie thinks he has identified the gold that they bought for this purpose.

The gold has to be transported – by Brian Reader – with this receipt to a gold merchant, John Palmer. Palmer has started running TV ads and buying up lots of low quality gold jewelry for his shop, Scadlynn’s, so that he can hide the money from the Brink’s-Mat gold amid a sudden influx of other income. 

But the Brink’s-Mat gold is too pure to fully disguise by melting it down with cheap jewelry, so the criminals need fake paperwork from a gold importer. With that paperwork, they can have the gold certified for sale by an assay, who will hallmark it with a brand. Then Scadlynn’s can sell the hallmarked gold back to a bullion wholesaler, of which there are only four in England – including the one from which the robbers stole the gold in the first place. Once the gold gets there, it will be impossible to trace.

The money also leaves a trace, but banking laws are weak and don’t require reporting by the banks of suspicious earnings and withdrawals. Nevertheless, the bank Scadlynn’s is using has started to take notice of the large cash withdrawals. That cash is then deposited into a foreign bank account by Jeannie Savage, an acquaintance of Ken’s who has come on hard times. 

Edwyn Cooper, the lawyer who flips properties to make extra cash, set up that account in Switzerland for Ken. He makes sure to have his acquaintance Gordon Parry put his name on the account.

From the Swiss account, the money goes into a front company to further disguise it, then into investments, to make it even harder to trace. Edwyn is directing those investments into real estate – he flips properties on the side. He and Gordon are using the money from the gold to buy up wharves in central London, but the process takes time, and Edwyn wants to move the money quickly. So he also buys a new riverside condo that his wife dismissed from the advertisement as new money and “déclassé” – without her knowledge.

Another purchase he makes infuriates her: he buys a wing of the posh school all her family attended, and which she wants their daughter to attend. Her father sits on the school’s board, but it has run into hard times as a new generation of wealth starts to displace the old money families. 

When Edwyn’s wife finds out he is behind the purchase, they fight and he leaves to spend the night at his new riverside condo. The broker who showed him the unit is also a social climber, who asked him to dinner even though he was married. He refused then, but now calls her to the condo and asks her to go into business with him, finding more properties to flip. He tells her he’s in the midst of a divorce.

Edwyn has bought other properties with the money from the gold against his better judgment. Micky McAvoy, the leader of the robbers, who is now in prison, has promised both his girlfriend and long-suffering wife country houses as apologies for his prison time. Ken reluctantly agrees, so Edwyn and Gordon show each woman separately a house they have bought for them, and tell them to keep quiet about it. Edwyn thinks it’s a bad – and risky – idea. 

Ken, Edwyn, and John are all worried about drawing attention to themselves with unusual purchases. So when John arrives home to find that his wife Marnie has picked up a flashy new car that they’ve been waiting on for months, he immediately returns it. He promises they can buy it soon.

Marnie snoops in John’s backyard smelting shed and spots some of the Brink’s-Mat gold. John shows her the smelting process. She wants him to stop working so hard – and doing illegal jobs – now that they have made it into a comfortable upper middle class. He explains that he’s haunted by the taunts of other kids as they passed his dad, who lived on the street, on the way to school. John has been trying to outrun the possibility that such a thing could happen to him his whole life; when he finishes the Brink’s-Mat job, he’ll finally feel comfortable enough to stop. Just a few more months, he promises Marnie.

Everyone – criminals and detectives both – know that it’s now a race. The fencing and laundering system took a while to set up, but now the gold will turn into money and disappear quickly. It’s just up to whether Boyce and his team can catch Ken and his associates before they get rid of all the gold – and Ken has a history with Boyce, telling John once he finds out from a cop that Boyce is leading the Brink’s-Mat team that Boyce came closer to catching him than anyone else has, and that Boyce is incorruptible. Neither he nor Boyce will stop until the job is done.