Goldfinger and Me by Marnie Palmer

Author:Marnie Palmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

10

THE DOWNFALL

Power, pressure, ego and drugs: they were the ingredients of a deadly cocktail. Having stood by my man for decades, he had lost my trust, and I hated his lifestyle. By the mid-1990s, John had started to see himself as a God. He was untouchable.

John was always confident, but now he was arrogant. His business associates were all yes men. The money was rolling in, the timeshare sales were going through the roof, but somehow it wasn’t enough for John. He was taking silly risks. Initially I blamed the drugs; Tenerife was awash with cocaine by the mid 90s, and my husband was taking it morning, noon and night.

He was irrational and seemed to be losing control of his sales staff. Complaints of heavy-handedness were piling up. Sales teams chasing commission were resorting to extreme pressure tactics, hassling holidaymakers as they sunbathed on the beaches. Meanwhile, investors were questioning why it was taking so long for developments to finish.

I hadn’t set foot on Tenerife since the Brink’s-Mat trial but I would always try to sneak an ear on John’s phone calls to make sense of it all.

I remember him shouting on his mobile phone as he looked out to sea on the Brave Goose one summer. He yelled at one of his managers: ‘You can’t do this. Some of these developments haven’t even been agreed, and yet we’re selling them. We’ll have the law all over us.’

Sometimes I think he would say things for effect because he knew I was listening. But I did get the impression he didn’t approve of some of the tactics used to generate sales. He couldn’t complain too much though; he was happy to take the money.

He also had no excuse for not being across it. He was the boss. He was the main man who had set up his staff on commission to ensure they would walk across hot coals to get deals done. But as the business took off, so too did his appetite for cocaine. He was also too busy with his other lovers to care.

I have no doubt the drugs were clouding his judgement. There were reports coming out of Russia that he had done big property deals with Moscow mafia. John was flying out on his private jet, and selling large-scale timeshare schemes by the block to any businessmen that would listen, it was claimed. He would fly out with a translator and Russian language brochures for the holiday lets.

If the reports were to be believed, gangsters, killers and politicians were investing in the hope that John’s businesses could launder their ill-gotten gains. John kept me very much at arm’s length from any of this, but it wouldn’t be the first time he had been foolish with the company he kept.

On cocaine, John felt invincible. I didn’t share his optimism. The newspapers were filled with allegations that his timeshare schemes were bent. One of the first newspaper headlines in 1993 read: ‘Victims of a sunshine fraudster: Britons are being bullied and deceived by a timeshare firm in Tenerife’.

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