Flash new lives of brazen crooks behind Britain’s greatest cash laundering plot: JANE FRYER reveals how £266m of drug cash handed by rundown Bradford jeweller, why the money has now vanished and the way the lads responsible skipped justice

With its barred windows, murky glass, bristling security cameras and walls topped with barbed wire, 136 Hall Lane, a modest two-storey brick building on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bradford, was never terribly welcoming.

There was a large black sign on the wall that read ‘Fowler Oldfield’, a spiked metal fence, a front yard usually rammed with cars and, between late 2013 and early 2016, an awful lot of deliveries.

Couriers arrived constantly from Merseyside, Glasgow and Manchester carrying suitcases, holdalls, sports bags, supermarket ‘bags for life’, shoe boxes, gift-wrapped toy boxes, takeaway food containers, carrier bags and refuse sacks.

Every one of them was stuffed with used banknotes which were then counted on machines inside and bundled into black bin bags, hessian sacks – whatever was available – and moved on to local banks by legitimate cash delivery companies and the Post Office.

Of course, as we now know, this was exactly what it looked like – the proceeds accumulated by drugs gangs, delivered by criminals to Fowler Oldfield, a ‘cash-for-gold company’ run by Gregory Frankel, 48, a former bodyguard who described himself as a ‘security consultant’.

He and his team ‘laundered’ the dirty cash by using it to buy untraceable gold pellets (or ‘seed’) which were shipped into the global market, mostly via Dubai. Almost £266 million worth, in under three years. At one stage nearly £2 million a day was flooding in.

In the end, after a police surveillance operation and investigation, Frankel, Daniel Rawson, 48, Haroon Rashid, 55, and Arjun Babber, 33, were all arrested along with socialite James Stunt, former son-in-law of Formula 1 tycoon Bernie Ecclestone, who was also implicated for receiving vast sums of dirty cash through their businesses.

It culminated in a series of very long and very expensive trials at Leeds Crown Court between 2022 and 2025 – the first trial ended in a hung jury, so there was a retrial the following year.

It was the biggest money laundering plot ever to have come before the UK courts so, naturally, everyone was terribly excited when, last March, the four men – but not Stunt, who was cleared of any wrongdoing – were convicted and sentenced to a total of 43 years and six months for money laundering.

The judge called the scale of the crime ‘eye-watering’ and the CPS declared an important message had been sent ‘about the wholesale laundering of criminal proceeds’, and that money launderers – who clean an estimated £100 billion in the UK each year, of which £12 billion is cash – should no longer feel ‘beyond the reach of the law’.

So it’s a shame that things haven’t quite worked out like that.

For starters, as we shall see, only one of the four – Rawson – is actually in prison. While he collapsed in court the moment the judge handed down his sentence of ten years and ten months, and Stunt sobbed at being acquitted, a new investigation has revealed the others have since vanished into the ether.

Gregory Frankel, the criminal mastermind (who was sentenced to 11 years and eight months), scarpered in late 2022, just before the end of the first trial as the jury were heading off to deliberate.

During the previous six months, he’d sat in court every day. His defence had been that he was never aware that any of the cash was from criminals.

‘One day he was there. The next he was gone,’ said a court regular. ‘Maybe he could see the writing on the wall and panicked.’

In fact, he has relocated permanently to Israel, where his wife and children had lived for some time and where he is now employed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense as a security coordinator.

Babber, who was given 11 years, tried to skip the country in 2024, before the second trial began.

When that failed, he checked himself into The Priory and it was from there that he was mysteriously ‘spirited away’ by his family when staff refused the police access. He also has now disappeared, and no one close to him is talking.

Rashid, meanwhile, skipped off to Colombia years ago. During both trials, he sent instructions to his legal team in court from South America, where he’d started a new life as a successful jewellery entrepreneur – impressing everyone with photos of his lavish lifestyle and Ferraris – and married a local woman in 2018 (although he subsequently split from her).

All the gold and cash has gone, too. Other than the £2.1 million found in used notes at 136 Hall Lane which, unsurprisingly, no one has come forward to claim. Financial forensic experts say the rest of the money would be so difficult to trace now it might as well have evaporated.

And while the police investigation was a painstaking, eight-year affair involving analysis of invoices, emails and paperwork as well as studying more than 8,000 hours of CCTV footage, there were an awful lot of red flags that, well, with the benefit of hindsight, do make you wonder how on earth Frankel and co got away with it for so long.

It wasn’t as if they were even especially cautious. Or discreet. Particularly when it came to depositing all that dirty cash at more than 50 branches of NatWest.

The banks were drowning in filthy money. At the Walsall branch, staff were forever grumbling about Fowler Oldfield cash being dropped off in black bin liners, so full they would split, and in such quantities they filled the bank’s floor-to-ceiling safes.

At the bank’s central cash centre in Washington, Tyne and Wear, staff struggled to process the enormous volume of Scottish bank notes, which often smelled unpleasantly musty, as if they had been stored underground.

The bank’s cash centre in Maidstone, Kent, received a staggering £43 million in cash in just ten months between 2015 and 2016 without any alarm bells ringing.

In fact, no one at NatWest seemed remotely concerned that, in just four years, Fowler Oldfield went from a struggling company with just £50,000 in assets to the bank’s most lucrative client in the Bradford area, generating more than £500,000 in fees and with cash deposits of £266 million in less than three years. It was even categorised as a ‘low-risk’ client.

Frankel’s neighbours in Leeds did, however, smell something fishy when his home at the end of their quiet cul-de-sac was festooned in alarms, CCTV systems and security gates, and suddenly he was driving a slew of luxury cars, including a Lamborghini. But somehow, for an awfully long time, no one did anything to stop them. And so, led by Frankel, the gang made hay.

It had all started back in 2012, when Fowler & Oldfield, a jewellery shop in Bradford city centre dating back to 1887 – one of the oldest shops in the county – closed for good.

It was run by Frankel’s father, Jeff, now 77, a hugely popular local businessman who’d done all he could to keep it going in the face of rising rates and falling footfall.

But rather than give up completely, son Gregory – who’d apparently had military training and worked as a bodyguard for top footballers, but had no reported experience as a jeweller – had a brainwave.

He’d restart the business (with a similar name, but completely unconnected to his father) from a new headquarters on the industrial estate a mile out of town. It would deal in wholesale jewellery designs, tools for jewellery workshops and offer cash for scrap jewellery, particularly gold.

He took it seriously. There were glossy company brochures and business plans. The 2012 launch document trumpeted how Frankel Jr had made the ‘brave decision to move the business in a new direction’ and suddenly there was a rash of new clients.

If Fowler Oldfield ever was legitimate, it didn’t stay so for long. Within a year, the business model changed and Frankel was roaring around the country in a giant black US army-style Hummer, buying scrap jewellery, but particularly gold, in return for cash.

Then the money started coming into him. In a tidal wave.

Meanwhile, at the nondescript building back on Hall Lane, tucked in behind the railway line, it was all go.

Because as well as professional cash counting machines, an array of melting vats, furnaces and specialist moulds sprung up in the unit next door to convert dirty cash into gold.

It was ridiculously simple. The dirty cash went first into Fowler Oldfield’s bank account and was then used to buy gold bullion bars from legitimate dealers. Dealers that included Stunt & Co, which had built a gold refinery in Sheffield and went into business with Fowler Oldfield.

But, of course, gold bars have serial numbers and are traceable, so the gang smelted them on site, reforming them into smaller pellets, or ‘grain’ which is more easily stored and distributed – and is untraceable.

Soon they were so inundated with dirty cash that it was also pouring into the offices of Stunt & Co on Curzon Street in London’s exclusive Mayfair and another company, Pure Nines, in the capital’s Hatton Garden jewellery quarter, and back out to banks.

Nor was it just NatWest. Barclays also received £46.8 million in electronic transfers into its Fowler Oldfield account, via Stunt & Co, in just over a year between July 2015 and August 2016. It was only in 2016, after endless staff complaints, that alarm bells finally started ringing at NatWest.

At about the same time, West Yorkshire Police’s economic crime unit was alerted by one of the legitimate cash-in-transit companies reporting the huge increase in banknotes being collected from Hall Lane.

Eventually, a surveillance operation was launched from the top floor of an old mill near the site and the police raided it on September 8, 2016. Frankel was arrested a fortnight later and the other three soon after, along with dozens of cash couriers.

The case looked cut and dried. Not least because the surveillance operation produced brilliant CCTV footage, showing how the cash couriers were given a token of some sort (sometimes a £5 note, or a dollar bill) for identification and a password for proof of delivery.

How some of them would wipe their parcels for fingerprints before handing them over and an on-site security expert would check them for tracking devices. And how all communications took place through encrypted chat platforms.

Finally, some of Britain’s biggest money launderers had been caught, and the prosecutions, in both Leeds Crown Court and in London, started brilliantly.

Fourteen of the cash couriers are now in prison.

NatWest was convicted of three offences of failing to comply with money-laundering regulations and fined £264.8million in December 2021 – the first bank to be prosecuted by the City regulator for money-laundering offences.

Barclays was fined £39.3 million for failing to adequately manage money-laundering risks associated with providing banking services to James Stunt’s firm Stunt & Co.

But last March, after two trials and a £1.5 million legal aid bill – because his assets had been frozen – multimillionaire entrepreneur Stunt was acquitted of money laundering.

(He always maintained that, while more than £30 million cash was delivered to his firm’s London office for Fowler Oldfield, he never once suspected it was part of a criminal enterprise. And the jury believed him.)

And what of Frankel, Rashid and Babber?

With the benefit of hindsight, it might have been a good idea to have confiscated their passports. Or at least attached a few conditions to their bail.

But they didn’t have criminal records, were not proven to be flight risks and, no, never showed any remorse.

Last week, West Yorkshire Police confirmed that they had issued arrest warrants against all three and started the process of trying to first find and then extradite them.

Fat chance! They’re all light years from Hall Lane now – rich, free, laughing in the face of the police’s painstaking investigation and the endless regulations the UK has in place to prevent money laundering, with surely no intention of ever coming back to face the music.