Six robbers stormed a Heathrow warehouse expecting to grab a million pounds in cash. Instead they found three tons of pure gold sitting outside the vault. In an instant, a brute-force smash-and-grab turned into something far more dangerous: the problem of making 6,800 serialized gold bars disappear.

This episode maps the 1983 Brink's-Mat robbery and the decades-long saga it unleashed, from melting gold with copper coins to global money laundering, a collapsed bank, bizarre counterfeit bullion, and a trail of violent deaths the tabloids called the curse.

• How an inside man and a can of petrol got robbers into a haul worth 26 million pounds, equivalent to 290 million today
• Kenneth Noye's trick of mixing copper into the melt to erase the gold's chemical fingerprint, and the killing of an undercover detective
• The money ...