Noye was – and still is – one of the most powerful and richest criminals in Britain. A genius of the underworld, handling the proceeds of huge drug deals and legendary robberies have helped make him tens of millions of pounds. He had a string of women scattered around the globe and he enjoyed a five-star lifestyle. He is also another member of that exclusive gentlemen gangsters’ club, the Brinks Mat team. It is a legendary job that links so many of the criminals who have settled on the Costa del Sol. Noye’s emergence as a major player is an integral part of recent criminal history – but how did he end up in Spain?
Noye married his teenage sweetheart Brenda and soon had two sons, Brett and Kevin. They moved to the peace and quiet of a village called West Kingsdown; situated in the Kent countryside, it was still within shotgun range of his old south-east London haunts. That’s when Noye began fronting the cash for some daring robberies. One former associate explained, ‘Noye was soon handling half a dozen jobs at a time. The money was rolling in.’ The beauty of Noye’s criminal career was that he rarely got his own hands dirty. He’d simply put up the finance for a job and then leave it up to his team.
Using the alias of Kenneth James, he also kept a luxury flat in Broomfield Road, Bexleyheath, where neighbours spotted him in the company of numerous men and women. Police soon linked Noye to more than a dozen companies, and his list of ‘associates’ read like a who’s who of the south-east London and Kent underworld. Besides his Rolls Royce, Noye drove a Jeep and various Fords, which he had bought directly from Fords in Dagenham through a contact. Noye sold them on later for a fat profit.
But it was the Brinks Mat robbery that really put Kenny Noye on the map and gave him respect throughout the London underworld. He handled much of the £27 million worth of gold bullion stolen from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport in November 1983. Later, Noye stabbed to death an undercover policeman carrying out a surveillance operation in Noye’s garden. Noye was acquitted of murdering the officer but got 14 years for VAT fraud in connection with the stolen gold.
In May 1996 Noye, released from prison just 18 months earlier, made the biggest mistake of his life when he knifed to death motorist Stephen Cameron in a road-rage attack on the M25, just a few miles from his Kent home. Within hours of fleeing the scene, Noye was in a chopper rising above the countryside just outside Bristol to begin a two-and-a-half-year spell on the run from the police. Back on the ground, Noye’s brand-new Land Rover Discovery containing the knife he’d used to kill Stephen Cameron was being driven in a bizarre three-car convoy to Dartford, Kent, where it was scrapped by being crushed into a compressed box of jagged steel.
But Noye’s life on the run in the Costa del Sol didn’t stop him from earning tens of millions of pounds in drug deals from his Spanish hideaway. He even boasted that he was still paying off crooked cops back in the UK. Noye was so heavily involved in cannabis smuggling that he visited Yardies in Jamaica while he was on the run. He was monitored by British police in Gibraltar with a local drug baron, but no one recognised him. Noye travelled in and out of Gibraltar on a false UK passport without even having to show his photo ID and was photographed by the Spanish police with a local girlfriend called Mina because she was under surveillance. But again, no one recognised him.
In mid-June 1998, police back in Kent had a lucky break when they got a call from a long-time informant who gave them the mobile phone number of another villain who was in regular contact with Noye. When the grass demanded a £100,000 tip-off fee if it led detectives to Noye, the police started to take him very seriously.
Back in England, the London underworld was buzzing with rumours about who’d grassed up Kenny Noye. Stories were circulating that the informant had qualified for £100,000 reward money; but would he live long enough to enjoy it? As one criminal source at the time said, ‘I can tell you there will be an even bigger price on that bastard’s head for turning in Kenny Noye.’
Noye still currently owns a share in a hotel in Spain, a timeshare holiday complex in Northern Cyprus and two penthouse apartments in a nearby town in Cyprus. His wife lives in a detached bungalow in Looe, Cornwall. His parents live in a recently built detached five-bedroom house on his old manor of West Kingsdown, Kent. Then there is the semi in Bexleyheath, which he has in the past used to ‘entertain’ his women friends.
Noye, the master manipulator, remains locked up in top-security HMP Whitemoor plotting his next move. Underworld sources initially believed Noye would name some top faces to the police in exchange for a reduced sentence. But then the key witness against Noye during the Cameron murder trial was gunned down by a hitman outside a shopping centre in Kent in the late summer of 2000. The murdered witness’s wife told a newspaper that she did not believe her husband had told the truth during Noye’s Old Bailey trial. Shortly afterwards, Noye’s legal team announced that they were putting together a serious appeal against his murder conviction. His lawyers were eventually granted a full appeal against his conviction and he is currently pursuing the case through the European Court of Human Rights. His lawyers have already had his minimum sentence reduced to 16 years, and the building work at his home in Spain has been completed at a cost of many tens of thousands of pounds because Noye believes he will one day be released. He plans to spend his remaining years on his beloved Costa del Crime.