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If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. J R R Tolkien
We were expecting to find a gas when we slammed gold nuclei into each other. The shock was it wasn’t a gas at all – it was a liquid ... like a soup. Professor Michio Kaku
The essential evil of gold in its relation to war is the fact that it can be controlled. Break the control and you stop war. Henry Ford
Restoration of the gold standard was not something which could be done by a mere act of government. It was admitted even by the most ardent advocates of the gold standard that certain financial relationships would require adjustment before the gold standard could be restored. There were three chief relationships involved. There were (I) the problem of inflation, or the relationship between money and goods; (II) the problem of public debts, or the relationship between governmental income and expenditure; and (III) the problem of price parities, or the relationship between price levels of different countries. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time ch7
All the gold ever mined comes from outer space ... All the gold ever mined would fill just three Olympic swimming pools. Mankind: The Story of All of Us IV, History Channel 2012
Montezuma’s treasuries are filled with gold. Mankind: The Story of All of Us VII: New World
Gold is the universal prize in all countries, in all cultures, and in all ages. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 4/13: The Hidden Structure, BBC 1973
Ancient cities lost for centuries. Treasures hidden deep under water. And secret chambers buried under the great Egyptian Sphinx. For millennia humans have been enchanged by legends of hidden gold. Ancient Aliens s3e4: Aliens and Temples of Gold
‘A number of researchers have suggested that aliens have come to Earth primarily to mine gold.’ ibid. Chidress
Lake Guatavita in Colombia is said to be the site of an ancient meteor crater. The circular-shaped mountain lake is at the heart of one of man’s most enduring searches: the search for El Dorado, the lost city of gold. ibid.
Ancient Egypt: The land where gold was linked to the gods. ibid.
There are two distant concepts on the issue of gold: the Spanish were looking for metal because in their economy these precious metals were important. The Inca knew about the gold but the gold didn’t have the same value of money or wealth. Professor Jorge Flores-Ochoa, anthropologist
Gold: its colour this glorious radiant yellowness ... Our timely obsession with all things golden. Dr James Fox, A History of Art in Three Colours: Gold I, BBC 2012
Klimt: one painter attempted to restore the colour of gold. ibid.
More remarkably of all, a sun chariot from 1,500 B.C. Now the star exhibit at the National Museum of Denmark. ibid.
Egypt: hundreds of deposits ... Very good at extracting that gold ... All four goldsmiths are dwarfs. ibid.
Howard Carter was a maverick who had come to Egypt in search of gold ... On 26th November 1922 Carter broke into the tomb of Tutankhamun ... 110 kilograms of solid gold. ibid.
Gold had magical powers ... Never tarnishes, never corrodes, never rusts, it shines for an eternity. ibid.
Gustav Klimt produced a series of glittering paintings. But one of them shines brighter than all the rest: The Kiss. Known as the last word on love. ibid.
The Sutton Hoo treasure – this is the finest hoard of Anglo Saxon gold ever dug up in Britain. Waldemar Januszczak, The Dark Ages: An Age of Light IV: The Men of the North, BBC 2012
One man masterminds the largest gold nugget scam in history. He outwitted scientists, analysts and the world’s leading investors. He turned a penny stock into a billion dollar scam and made himself millions. Masterminds e17: Fool’s Gold, History 2003
Back in Indonesia the prospector kept uncovering more and more gold. ibid.
There was no gold. Not one ounce. ibid.
He declares that Bre-X has the largest gold deposit in the world. Having built Bre-X into a company worth $6,000,000,000 and with its stock price at nearly $300 a share it’s time for De Guzman to start cashing in. ibid.
What he doesn’t know is the Indonesian government is about to make a move to reveal his scam. ibid.
Not one investor has ever been compensated. ibid.
The problem was how to get 6,000 pounds of gold out of the warehouse. Masterminds: Brink’s-Mat Robbery
$50,000,000 in gold bullion gone without a trace. The impact would be felt worldwide. ibid.
In a daring and perfectly orchestrated robbery a gang stole $50,000,000 in gold bars from London’s Brink's-Mat warehouse. Police didn’t have a single clue who pulled off this staggering heist. But they suspected an inside job. ibid.
Black [inside man] was the brother of Robinson’s [perpetrator] girlfriend. The guard and the gangsta got to know each other well. Black was neither clever nor disciplined. But he did have something Robinson desperately needed: inside information. ibid.
McAvoy – an armed robber who applied his trade in the shadow of legendary villains like Freddie Foreman. Now he was ready to write his own story in the chapter of London’s underworld. November 26th 1983 McAvoy and a gang of six robbers head for a lucrative target, Brink’s-Mat – a storage facility for money and precious metals near Heathrow Airport ... No combination. No cash. Then the gang made an amazing discovery ... It was an incredible stroke of good luck. The gold had been packed for shipment to a customer. The gang had stumbled across 7,000 gold bars – over three tons ready for delivery. The haul is worth a staggering £100,000,000 in today’s money. It was the biggest gold bullion robbery in British history. McAvoy had pulled off the crime of the century. But the gold was about to give his gang more trouble than it was worth ... Some of the proceeds of the gold were invested in property, including the rebuilding of the docklands, part of the original heartland of organised crime in London. But as the money from the robbery spread out, police began to close in. Detectives discovered Brink's-Mat guard Anthony Black had a sister who lived with a well-known bank robber, Brian Robinson. The Krays by Fred Dinenage, 2010
This was an enormous amount of gold. Almost Conquistador proportions. Tony Brightwell, ex Scotland Yard Flying Squad
Very quickly we made a connection with a man called Black, who was one of the guards on duty that day. His sister was living with and was the common-law wife of a man called Robinson who was very high up in the criminal underworld of south London, was a suspected armed robber, was an organised criminal of high standing. Tony Brightwell
On the day of the robbery Black had overslept. And panicked that he couldn’t get to the warehouse on time. So he was late arriving for work. And in fact he had met the robbers as they waited to get into the premises. Tony Brightwell
Ruthless in its conception, fearless in its operation, the Brink’s-Mat heist is still the largest bullion robbery in British criminal history. In just fifteen minutes a highly organised south-London gang of armed robbers made off with three tons of gold from the Fort-Knox style warehouse near Heathrow. Britain’s Biggest Heists: The Brink's-Mat Robbery, Sky 2010
Brink’s-Mat was no ordinary warehouse. It was one of the most secure buildings in Britain, containing three of the world’s toughest safes. To get to them once inside the warehouse it was necessary to pass through locked and alarmed vault doors, using two sets of keys and combinations numbers, then through a gate. One inside the vault the safes could only be opened by a set of keys and combination numbers. ibid.
Whilst Robinson, McAvoy and White were arrested and questioned by the police, the pressure was on detectives to find the missing gold. Seven months after the robbery the police got another breakthrough when a man called Kenneth James Noye was brought to their attention. They were back on the gold trail. ibid.