The Brinks-Mat Robbery - The Vedic Astrology of a Crime Scene 1

00:00 Fiona Marques

Hello everyone welcome to The Vedic Astrology Podcast.  My name is Fiona Marques and I am happy to be here with you again today for another episode on the podcast.

You know that I love to cover different areas of astrology: we've talked about;

1.       what is astrology 

2.       how it works

3.       we've looked at some of the techniques of astrology and 

4.       I also enjoy interviewing astrologers

And today we're on topic five, a case study – that I am combining with interviewing an astrologer!

We are looking at a crime scene.  It’s a whole new uh case study that I have for you today.  

And I am blessed to be partnered by one of my colleagues.  A fellow Year 4  (from my Year 4 of Asheville Vedic Astrology Apprenticeship Program).

I’d like to welcome to The Vedic Astrology Podcast, Inkeri!

Inkeri, would you like to say hello to the gang?

00:59 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Hi gang!  I go by the professional name of Venus Rising.  As Fiona said, I’m just graduating from Ryan's Apprenticeship.  I’m particularly interested in crime (even obsessed with crime documentaries) and so I proposed to Fiona to have a look at the crime scene of a bank robbery.

01:28 Fiona Marques

Yes, Inkeri, you're taking us over to the dark side today.  We're getting into quite a seedy world here. 

Would you like to tell us a little bit about the crime scene that we've chosen to look at today?

01:42 Inkeri – Venus Rising

This is this is this is a really juicy one!  This crime scene we're talking about is The Brink’s-Matt Robbery which took place in 1983.  It's the biggest gold bullion heist in the UK’s history and much of the gold has never been recovered.

So, just to set the scene, in November 1983, at 6 40 in the morning, a group of armed robbers burst into the guards’ room at The Brink’s-Matt high security depot.  Now, this is a depot under the flight path at heathrow airport and gold, money, art treasures are held there in highly secured conditions prior to being shipped abroad or entering the UK.  So, the robbers burst in looking for cash and jewellery.  What they found when they got inside was a consignment of gold bullion which in 1983 was worth 26 million pounds.  (Which is in today's money over 1 billion). And so much gold was taken off the market that day that the price of gold worldwide rocketed so even the robbers own haul of gold increased by a million pounds overnight!

03:14 Fiona Marques

To put it in context, it's staggering, isn't it!  I mean the physical weight of this gold would have been staggering in itself, but the value!  It's beyond comprehension for it for a bunch of armed robbers.  They must they must have been just …

03:30 Inkeri – Venus Rising

… but just imagine they went in thinking that they would get like maybe a million.  And they just fall over this gold.  Which wasn't even in the security vault at the time.  It was outside the vault and they decided to take it all.  So one of them went off and got a van and they just loaded it.

Actually, this turned out to be not so good for the robbers because you can’t walk into a supermarket with a gold bar and come out with you know your weekly shopping.  So they then had to find a way to melt this down.  And to do that they had to go outside their normal circle of underworld contacts.  And when you do that, you expose yourself to a lot of risk.  And the result of Brink’s-Mat, which has been a cycle of vendettas and murders which is continuing to this day from 1983 until now.

04:31 Fiona Marques

The scale of this haul, it does so many things … but one of them is, it makes people very greedy.

And, as you said, it's also very complicated to turn that into untraceable cash.  So they've got that whole problem.  And then everybody wants a piece of it!  Because it's an enormous transfer of wealth from inside the system into the crime world isn't it?

And there's another aspect (that we don't necessarily talk too much about in the case study today) where this money's gone on to fuel more crime.

05:07 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Absolutely.  And I think it was responsible for the um rise in ecstasy use in the UK (that the UK drug market was flooded in the 1980s with drugs which were connected with money laundering and Brink’s-Mat money going into the system and being reused.

05:29 Fiona Marques

Yes, yes, fascinating.

So shall we, is there anything more that you want to say about laying the groundworks of the case before we give the listeners a chance to visualize the astrology of the time?

05:43 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well, one fun fact is that many people listening might be wearing gold that's actually been melted down and recycled from Brink’s-Mat!

05:55 Fiona Marques

Ooops.  Oh dear!?

05:57 Inkeri – Venus Rising

So, having said that I think we'll mention other facts as we go through.

So maybe you'd like to give everybody an overview?

06:10 Fiona Marques

Yeah, I’m going to try and lay out the chart.  Because here we are listening and I want you to, as long as you're not driving or cycling, close your eyes and try to visualize the chart.

And of course, in the description of the podcast I’ll put in the relevant data for if you want to bring it up on your own software and listen along with us as you're watching your software.

So, we are talking about the 26th of November 1983 at 6 40 a.m.

And we're speaking about the location of Heathrow in London so if you want to put in those details to your software

And for those who are listening only let's outline the major features of the chart:

·         we have a Scorpio ascendant, first house in Scorpio

·         in that house the first house we have Saturn at 10º19 of Scorpio 

·         right next door in Sagittarius, we have four planets

o   the Sun is at 3º25 of Sagittarius

o   Ketu is at 15º54 of Sagittarius

o   Jupiter 17º50 minutes and 

o   Mercury 18º04

·         so four planets in Sagittarius, the Sun, Ketu, Jupiter and Mercury

·         that was our second house

·         moving through Capricorn the third house - no planets 

·         Aquarius the fourth house – no planets 

·         Pisces, fifth house also no planets

·         Aries sixth house -  no planets 

·         Taurus, seventh house - no planets until we get to 

·         Gemini, the eighth house of this chart and we have Rahu (equally opposing Ketu) at 15º54 of Gemini, then 

·         Cancer there are no planets.  It's the 9th house, and in 

·         Leo the 10th house we have the Moon at 17º56 minutes of Leo

·         the 11th house of this chart is Virgo and 

·         the 12th house is Libra, with our final two planets we have 

o   Mars 4º35 and

o   Venus at 18º10

So, that is the lay of the sky (not the lay of the land) it's the lay of the sky.  Scorpio rising chart.

Just to recap some of those combinations, in case you're taking notes and you want to just check that you've got everything where it where it's set out.  We have 

·         Saturn the ruler of the 3rd and 4th house in the 1st house

·         in the second house we have the 2nd, 5th,, 8th and 11th lords in 2nd house

·         9th lord in the 10th house and

·         finally, we have the 1st, 6th, 7th and 12th in the 12th house

And, I'll just say two more things giving you an overlay of the chart ... we have

·         The Sun, Moon and Saturn in Neutral dignity

·         Mars and Mercury in Enemy dignity, and

·         Jupiter is in its own home in Sagittarius, and 

·         Venus is in its own home in Libra

And then, the only thing I’ll just briefly point out is the house cusps.  That it's not a cusp in every house.  So, we have

·         1st cusp in the 1st house obviously 

·         2nd house no cusps

·         3rd house has the 2nd cusp 

·         4th house has the 3rd cusp

·          5th house has the 4th cusp

·         6th house of Aries we've got the 5th and 6th cusps, then 

·         Taurus has the 7th cusp 

·         no cusps in Gemini, the 8th house 

·         8th cusp is in Cancer, the 9th house 

·         9th cusp is in the 10th house of Leo, and 

·         Virgo, we have the 10th cusp, leaving us with

·         11th and 12th cusps in the 12th house

I’m hoping that some of that has settled into your visualization of the chart.  And not to worry if it hasn't because Inkeri and I are diving right now into this extremely exciting, fascinating chart!

And I’m wondering if we should start in the first house?  What do you think the first house represents in a crime scene?

11:15 Inkeri – Venus Rising

From what I can see the first house would be the place where the crime is committed.  And then the first lord which we'll go and talk about after would be the actual victim. So, the first house will be the setting for the crime.  And in this chart we've got Scorpio.

According to the Yavana Jataka, Scorpio represents pits and holes.  It also represents the natural eighth sign of the zodiac, which is concerned with finances, loans and essentially other people's money.  And it's also the house of sudden breaks and changes.  So we've got, Scorpio is a pit or a hole and the vault was under the ground.  Under the path of the Heathrow airport, but actually physically and an underground vault with five alarms and 11 locks.  So I think Scorpio is a very good representation of the actual scene of the crime - something secret something secure.

12:29 Fiona Marques

Absolutely, I agree with you.  Scorpio is a great description of this crime scene because we've got, as you say, from the Yavana Jataka, the pits and the holes, but another statement that is in that quote about the eighth natural sign in the Yavana Jataka is prisons also um in Scorpio.  And that's what it brings up for me as well, the locks, the keys, the guards, everything you know, vaulted away locked up.  It's really got that kind of energy so yeah our crime scene being in Scorpio seems to make sense.

13:07 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Another interesting fact that we can see here is that there aren't any Rasi aspects to the 1st house.  So there's absolutely nothing to stop this robbery from taking place.  And there are two points of annihilation to this house as well.  Which means that there were weaknesses.  That’s how I interpret it, is there are weaknesses in the security system that the robbers were able to exploit.

Now we've got Saturn, the 3rd lord, in the in the 1st house.  So we have this idea of somebody coming in, going underground, taking something out.  So, the robbers were able to enter the control room and enter the premises because at the time the perimeter alarm was disabled because there was a changeover in staff.  So, this, is, I think, the weakness coming from these points of annihilation.  And then we've got a planet, and a malefic planet at that, coming into the first house. 

14:18 Fiona Marques

Definitely!  I’m really fascinated as well by what you say but there's no Rasi aspects - this is just happening purely the way the robbers wanted it to go, there's no messing around.

14:30 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Yeah, absolutely.  And before we actually consider who the victim is (because in this type of case where there's a robbery very often goods are held in secure premises which are not those of the owners - something is being transported it may be in a holding depot - so the first house and the first lord but not necessarily identical so we'll deal with the first lord in a minute but) we've got Saturn, the ruler of the 3rd and 4th houses, in the first house.  So one thing that springs to my mind is that the third house in itself is a house of egoism and personal desire.  But it also represents peers, colleagues and teammates.  So, this could indicate gang membership, for example.  But it could also indicate that there's somebody who's a member of the security team that shouldn't be there.

But Saturn is a powerful malefic and it represents theft and extracting things from under the earth like gold from an underground vault.  And Saturn in Scorpio will be a ruthless, an unstoppable force. 

And this was definitely the case of the gang that carried out the robbery because they were professional South London armed robbers.  And the actual robbers themselves were very, very hard men.

16:12 Fiona Marques

Yes, it would have been a terrifying experience because, as you say, Saturn is not a soft planet.  It's not gentle and in fact, it's very cruel.  Well very cool, very hard, very dry and very well organized it's the planet of discipline it is and patience, right, things take time. 

16:35 Inkeri – Venus Rising

And yeah, and petrol was poured over two of the guards, especially the team leader, to try and get him to give the combinations for the vault.  He was in fear for his life.  This was very brutal and the staff the other staff were traumatized for a long time after.

16:55 Fiona Marques

Yes, I mean it was torture really, wasn't it?  I mean it's like flash torture - it was very fast (this whole crime lasts about an hour or an hour and a half) so they weren't tortured over a long period of time but the way they were treated - they were bound, handcuffed, hooded, petrol was poured on them - I mean they would have been in complete fear.  Which is Saturn right?!  Saturn, so much fear.  Yeah definitely.  And it's happening in Mars’ sign, you know, so we've got those two malefics – Mars’ sign of Scorpio so Saturn and Mars combination there.

17:29 Inkeri – Venus Rising

And Saturn itself has got very low dig bala.  It's going to show the very worst signs of Saturn that bring out the most ruthless, the cruellest aspects.

Saturn is aspected by the Moon to create fear and insecurity.  Which is amplified by being starved in the sign ruled by Mars.

17:55 Fiona Marques

I really like what you're bringing in that the 3rd lord is the 1st house.  It’s kind of our band of brothers.  Which, as you say, is a gang.  But we may actually have here an inside job - someone from that band brothers is now in the first house.

18:12 Inkeri – Venus Rising

And what the police actually found, because this was a very well organized robbery - the robbers knew exactly what they were doing and how to get in, so the police very quickly concluded that this was an inside job.

When the police identified one of the robbers as part of the staff at Brink's-Mat, this person immediately gave himself up to the police.  He betrayed the other robbers to have a lighter sentence.  However, he's got to live in fear for the rest of his life because these aren't people to be trifled with.  Retaliation will go his way.  He will he will suffer from retaliation at one point or another.  And I think he given a false identity.

19:07 Fiona Marques

It’s not a position that I would like to be in, that's for sure!

And I think that some of Saturn’s qualities are also coming through.  You know how we speak about Saturn as being dumb, in that it's not the brightest, most intelligent planet in the pack.  It's sort of um … it goes about … Saturn's role is to go about all of those messy jobs in our life that need to be done … there's no point in questioning whether we should do them or not, they're just the tasks that need to be done.  Because Saturn has that role in the kingdom of planets.  That's what Saturn does.  So we can sometimes call it dumb.  And it strikes me a little that, there was a lot of planning obviously to this robbery.  And, like you say, they got in so smoothly and they got through all of these, as you outlined, some enormous number of hurdles to get to the vaults (there's like there's gates, there's keys, there's combinations, there's half a combination to one person, half a combination to another person) there's a lot going on here.  And obviously, there's a lot of planning.  But on the other side of it, perhaps there was not a lot of planning about what would happen after the situation.

20:16 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well, I think there was no planning because they were just not expecting to find that amount of stash.  And then, as I said one of them, went out and just got a van and started packing in these gold bullion bars.

20:32 Fiona Marques

That’s right.  But regardless even if they'd only taken a hundred thousand or a million of cash (which is what you know maybe they wanted a million of cash or three million lovely they'd be wonderful) I think the police would have been on to the inside job if you'd stolen a dollar from the place.  The policemen and kind of say ‘hang on?’.  And that's what I mean but the planning on the front side was great but what did they think this guard was going to do?

20:54 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well he came over very badly in police investigations because the police wanted to know how a van could possibly get in.  And when they interviewed the suspect gang member, he gave a very, very unconvincing explanation.  He said ‘oh I didn't see the white van entering because I was staring at the corner’.

21:22 Fiona Marques

Which is such a classic Saturn thing, right?! Saturn's vision looks down.  You're trying to convince the police that, under all of this amazing robbery that's taking place (that he's supposed to be as shocked and as innocent as anybody) he's looking into the corner not looking at what's going on around him!  It was a great Saturn moment! 

21:40 Inkeri – Venus Rising

But Saturn's all about survival as well.  I mean you know if you think about Saturn in the first house as the sort of bad apple in the barrel and let the others in.  He would just do what he needs to survive and that includes betraying his other gang members whatever the consequences 

22:00 Fiona Marques

Fascinating.  All right, so we've talked about the location of the crime scene being related to Scorpio.  And we've talked about having the 3rd lord in the 1st house as an indicator for the inside job.  Is there anything else that you want to say about Scorpio and Saturn before we move on?

22:18 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Okay so, Saturn is also the 4th lord.  And there are two aspects to that.  I'd like to discuss here first of all, the 4th house in Vedic Astrology.  And then, the 4th house according to the techniques developed by other people who are interested in criminal astrology.

So going to Vedic Astrology first, the 4th house is associated with one's ability to acquire wealth and luxury.  So, again, we've got the 4th lord going and extracting wealth from this vault.  

So the 4th lord in the 1st house is a dharma yoga of power and purpose.  So in this case, very much to obtain wealth.  Saturn's yoga judgment score is very negative it's minus 18.6.  This to me indicates that the robbery would have harmful consequences and would not actually bring wealth to the gang members themselves.  And that's actually borne out by the fact because the inside man got nothing and the other gang members who were directly involved in the robbery didn't get anything either.  And they were even ripped off by other people who were involved in the handling.

But one thing that robbers did, or some of the people who did benefit from the stolen gold was that money was put into property.  Various people bought very large, ostentatious houses in cash with some of the proceeds.  I think one of them had two Rottweilers, one called Brinks and the other one called Matt.  So that was very, very subtle!

24:14 Fiona Marques

Classy, classy that. I say classy Inkeri, very classy.

But, as you say, they also invested heavily in a development in London didn't they?

24:25 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Yeah.  But in the way criminal astrologers see the 4th house is it would represent the location of the stolen property.  So, you've actually got the idea being the 4th house that the proceeds would go to property in general.

But in this case, we can look at it in a different way as well.  Because if we think about, not just property in general, but a precise location where some of the bullion may be stashed, the fourth house in this chart is Aquarius.  And although Aquarius is an air sign, it's a water carrier.  And it represents man-made structures for holding water - including swimming pools (this is according to a book on criminal astrology that I i was looking at for clues for murder victims where they might be found).  And interestingly, in the documentary that I saw the, BBC documentary, on the Brink’s-Mat robbery, a family member of some of the gang responsible for Brink’s-Mat said that, in his opinion, in his very well informed opinion, a lot of the bullion is buried under a swimming pool somewhere in south England.  So we've actually we haven't just got the fact that the robbers or the handlers bought property, which is fourth house but we've got the idea of a physical location which is very precise.

26:12 Fiona Marques

I know!  It's incredible isn't it!? And I watched the same documentary that you did (and I’ll share the link in the description for everybody to go have a look if you would like to) and another match for me to the Aquarius scenario was that if you think about the man holding the pot (that's what Aquarius the archetype is) and the police did manage to recover 11 gold bars.  They found them in the property of the man that they were investigating (which I’m sure we'll speak about soon) but in a paint can - it was literally in a pot, you know, in this guy's backyard and I just thought that that was very Aquarius as well - that you would stash the current 11 bars that you're smelting in an Aquarius pot.

So, yes, so we can find out something about the location of the the gold by looking at Aquarius and could be buried under a swimming pool, could still be quite some sum of gold bars because how many gold bars did they take?

27:25 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Wasn't it 600 or something like?

27:28 Fiona Marques

No, 6 000!  6 000 so this is an enormous amount.

And then I think the other thing we could say about location is that 4th lord going back into the 1st house.  Is that, the poor old bank or the gold bank that had you know traded this gold and were holding it in order to send it to the customers who bought it – so, they ended up buying back some of their gold you know once it had been smelted and cleared.

So we've kind of got ‘where did the money go?’ well let's have a look where the 4th lord of the location of the money went and right back into the first house the people that that had been robbed in the first place.  So it's quite fascinating isn't it Saturn's role here as the fourth lord?!  He's getting around!

28:10 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Moving on.  In criminal astrology the seventh house, the seventh lord represents the perpetrators of the crime.  Venus rules both the seventh and the twelfth so we've got loss, a planet causing loss that is a perpetrator.  And Venus is in Libra in its own sign.

28:35 Fiona Marques

Yeah, I know, and you feel for these robbers, as much as you can feel for anybody with a shorn-off shotgun and a can of petrol pouring it over you (so, you know, the compassion only goes so far) but you feel it don't you.  Because here they are, the seventh lord, the robbers but they're linked by astrology to the 12th house of loss.  So and we know that many of the physical people involved in the robbery, of which there were six, they have not benefited from this wealth.  

And then, isn't it interesting that it would be Libra the sign of the scales, you know, with that thing I mean, these poor guys have got all this gold they have to turn it, because it's 100 pure gold, it's the best gold you can buy, and of course, not only can you not take it into Tesco’s to buy your weekly shopping, but you can't even sell it to a jeweller or whatever, it's just too pure.  Everyone would know straight away where that gold is coming from.  So you've got to do your balance, you've got to smelt it, and get it reassessed, re-weighed, re-stamped re um you know assessed by the Libra scale.  So, yes, the poor robbers have definitely involved themselves here in a lot of transactions a lot of the weighing of the scales. 

29:51 Inkeri – Venus Rising

But what was interesting as well, because I mean Venus is in good dignity, and you know we said that.  Which is very curious when the robbers themselves are in general especially, Mad Micky McAvoy, who was one of the main protagonists in this, got nothing and even was cheated himself of his share.  But I think it's in good dignity because two of the robbers were jailed but others were acquitted and walked free.  Also, the robbery itself was successful.  So that objective was achieved.  And even though the robbers were in jail, these are hard professional criminals who being sent to prison is just an occupational hazard and they probably weren't that bothered thinking that they were going to get millions when they came out on their release, so they would probably just for the first few years, relaxing on their beds imagining that, you know dreaming about their share.  And it was only later that they got uh they got ripped off.

31:00 Fiona Marques

Yeah.  And, I don't think, I mean, they would have been well respected in prison too.  

31:10 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Absolutely.  They would be king of the pack. People would be shining their shoes and bringing them tea.

31:17 Fiona Marques

Yeah.  And we should say that the 12th house as well as being losses is also prisons and imprisonment institutions and being taken off the streets so, that some of the robbers were, and there were really were some convictions especially when you consider that it's been very difficult to recover the stolen goods themselves, but there were quite some convictions four or five, a handful of convictions, so, that some of the robbers ended up in prison is indicated by the chart.

31:49 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well, I think, well, the main two, Mad Micky McAvoy and, I can't remember the name of the other one, they were jailed but others did walk free - but if we look at the yoga indications the seventh lord in the 12th house because Venus has got minus 15.6 negative yoga score so even though it's in its own house you've got this success but bringing a lot of problems.  And if you look at the Bhava yogas indications in The Art and Science of Vedic Astrology Volume II, for example,  you have things coming up like - loss is in business, and partners causing loss - so you've got a lot of ideas of gang infighting.  Twelfth lord in the twelfth - the negative factors would be - prone to thievery and financial impropriety

32:40 Fiona Marques

Yeah it's a perfect description of this!

32:45 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Suffers loss of resources, may be jailed and angry and prefers solitude.

32:50 Fiona Marques

Well let's hope that was the case!

32:52 Inkeri – Venus Rising

We've also got um the 11th and 12th cusps in the 12th house.  So we've got this whole idea of loss and and gain going together.

What's really interesting in this chart though is that the first lord, Mars, is actually in the 12th house with Venus.

33:14 Fiona Marques

That's right yes.  Tell us a little bit about the first lord of this chart being in the 12th house with those criminals.  Tell us some interpretations we can take from that.

33:26 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well, the first lord, Mars is in enemy dignity in the 12th house in Libra.  And it's with the planet representing the robbers.  Now Venus is in the robbers representing the robbers is in good dignity and is in the higher degree than Mars.  So Mars is overpowered by the robbers.  And there are no helpful planetary aspects.  But what's really fascinating in this case is that the owners of the gold bullion was the Johnson Matthey bank.  Who were originally gold bullion dealers and then they became a financial institution who made very, very high risk loans.  So Mars is the first and the sixth lord of this chart.  So Mars represents debts and obstacles.  Anyway, going back to what I was saying about Johnson Matthey, is that Johnson Matthey Bank made very high risk loans to a small group of investors.  Now, they were reimbursed by Lloyds of London for the loss of the bullion.  And we can see the chart that Mars has a positive yoga score in the chart, but the year after the heist, Johnson Matthey Bank collapsed because of its reckless loans.  And it caused a massive scandal in the banking world.  And the owners of Johnson Matthey actually were imprisoned.

So, looking at this chart, as I said we've got Mars ruling the first and the sixth house, so you've got debts and obstacles.  It's in the sign of Aries, making it reckless and impulsive.  And it's got the fifth and sixth cusps in Aries, showing that there's an intermingling deriving debts from speculative investment such as trading on the bullion market - loss and enemies. They've certainly got enemies if you're being attacked by a group of South London robbers

35:34 Fiona Marques

Yep, that that is up there on the enemy list absolutely. Yeah I know, and then they end up in the 12th house, as you mentioned, together yeah together.  So we've got being jailed and also enormous losses and we've got that high high-risk behaviour.  Because, being here in the 12th house, it's full of secrets really isn't it, the 12th house?  And this bank, I mean it's probably, it's the company you keep, the kind of people who are trading gold, perhaps are also um involved in other businesses, and you end up making loans to those people who give you the idea that they're one thing but uh it turns out that you're now over - you're completely debt exposed - you've actually lent these people way more assets than they have to pay you back.  So I think the 12th house of secrets here, this poor bank uh has gotten itself yeah like you say, in in over its head.

36:38 Inkeri – Venus Rising

I’m not so sure if we can say ‘poor bank’, I mean if you think about the combination of Mars and Venus together - this is going to make Mars become very greedy and very, very aggressive in its attitude to money making.

36:51 Fiona Marques

You're absolutely right.  It's a very passionate combination isn't it Venus and Mars together? 

36:57 Inkeri – Venus Rising

And if you look at some of the sort of indications for the first lord in the 12th house - suffers from thieves and secret enemies, causes loss to partners, and doesn’t understand how to take proper action in the world.  And I think that's certainly true in this case.  I mean, the whole banking system had to be reviewed after the Johnson Matthey crash because it caused such a scandal.  Yeah because um regulation was so relaxed at the time and there was a lot of gentleman's agreements and I think it was after that that um there were attempts to regulate the financial sector more seriously.

37:36 Fiona Marques

Which I guess we're still battling with because can you tell us a little bit that about the Panama Papers end up coming into this story, much later this is a case from 1983?  The Panama Papers are

in the last, I don't know is it five ten years? I don’t know, you tell me?  More recently.  How are the 

Panama Papers connected to this case and what do they shed light on?

38:01 Inker – Venus Rising

Okay so the Panama Papers leaked a lot of confidential information um in relation to this case.  And what was discovered was that financial institution that's now closed down because of the damage to its reputation called Mosack Fonseca, were involved in helping to launder the money, the proceeds of this bullion robbery.  Once they became, apparently, once they became aware of where this bullion had come from they, nevertheless, continued to assist in keeping this safe, confidential, away from the tax authorities and so on.  Just very interesting that a lot of people and their money were acting, how can I put it?

39:01 Fiona Marques

Well, acting under the veil of the 12th house I think.  The chart really gives us the answer there.  And I think at the time when this took place, we're looking at a chart of a moment in time in 1983, there was a lot of secrecy, what we would now consider secrecy, in banking and financial transactions.  But, at the time, that was considered to be privacy that a person's money is their private affair and how they store it and transacted is private, and should be private.  This is, I’m talking about 1983 and that those institutions, 12th house of institutions, are not allowed to reveal the transactions of their private customers.  Because that's the business that they deal in, is private transactions.  So even, I can't speak about the Panama Papers, but even clerks in the bank who are giving money out of these bank accounts, maybe suspecting things, but they are not empowered to call the police and say a private person came into the bank and took money out of their private bank account because that's a completely legal at the time thing to do.  So the 12th house here is providing the perfect veil for all of these transactions to come out.  And I think, when Lloyd’s of London try to recover the gold, in inverted commas, you know, they're looking for some actual material, physical, heavy, golden substance - it was years later when the Panama Papers came out that they realized how much of the money had been converted into Swiss bank accounts and in quite a complex way and then re-routed back into the real estate investment so those Panama Papers are the only time that the veil of the 12th house lifted and we saw what a network had really developed around this enormous sum of money.  We're talking millions and millions and millions of pounds.

41:05 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Yeah.  What's really interesting, and because I think we'll probably come back when we talk about the second house um in a minute, but the first lord being in the 12th house - you've got this idea of imprisonment and actually the owners of Johnson Matthey were actually imprisoned for lying um about assets um in relation to the collapse of the bank.  And one of the, as I said Mars also rules the sixth house and the indications for the sixth lord in the twelfth include - overwhelming debt and being stolen from in foreign lands.  And in fact, loans were made to a group of Asian businessmen which were never paid back.

41:59 Fiona Marques

That's really, very, very interesting – very relevant to this placement first lord sixth lord in the 12th house.  It really speaks to that doesn't it?

42:08 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Yeah.  So, I mean, what's amazing about this chart is it's so vivid and it's really reading like a like a book!

42:17 Fiona Marques

Oh, exactly.  All right.  So we we've had a look now at 

·         the first house the crime scene location Scorpio 

·         we talked about the pits and the prisons and then 

·         we noticed that we've got the third lord in the first house 

·         we've talked about the band of brothers,

·         the inside job, 

·         the brutal torture approach to the robbery, 

·         and how smoothly it went because of no Rasi aspects they just were able to implement their plan 

·         but perhaps uh with Saturn being not the brightest card in the pack they perhaps didn't think through their their exit strategy and 

·         now we've also had a look at what's been going on in the 12th house because 

·         we have the first lord in the 12th house and 

·         we have also the people committing the crime, the seventh lord is also in the 12th house 

·         so, that's already provided so much information because 

·         we also talked about the location of the gold, from the fourth lord

However, that is not the whole story from this incredible chart, because, right next door to this first house of Scorpio, in the second house in Sagittarius, we have some great players.  We've got the Sun, we've got Ketu, we've got Jupiter and we've got Mercury.  All located together in the space of Sagittarius.  What can you tell us about the second house?

43:37 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well, first off, the second house represents wealth and resources.  And we've got in the second house, the second lord, Jupiter (who also rules the fifth house in this chart - the fifth house, as we know represents gains from speculative investment).  And I think Jupiter, as the second lord and the fifth lord is actually the bullion itself!  

So we've got Jupiter and Sagittarius.  What's around it?  We've got Ketu, which is a fiery, separating planet.  

Ketu will indicate criminal intent.  It's less than two degrees from Jupiter.  And it's a fiery planet.  So the gold was actually melted down.  Jupiter is also a very heavy planet.  And it makes everything bigger.  And it's in its own home dignity here, aspected by the Moon.

So we've got this idea of something absolutely huge and weighty - just like the bullion itself.

As I said, we've got Ketu right on top of Jupiter (just two degrees away) with the powerful aspect of rahu from the eighth house.  (The dragon's head, the head without a body representing greed and amplifying this personal ambition for wealth exponentially).

Well, Ketu's fiery nature, in a sign of Sagittarius which gives you the idea of a furnace um is really important because, remember that the robbers poured petrol on some of the guards and threatened to burn them alive to get their hands on the the codes um to access the safe.

Now next to Jupiter is also the planet Mercury in very, very close conjunction.  And, Mercury's got a very important part to play here as the eighth lord and the eleventh lord.  So we've even got the eighth lord in the second house and - as I said, stealing the gold was the easy part for the robbers (because they had expected to find cash) once they had the gold they didn't know what to do with it and they didn't have the skills so they had to go outside their circle of criminal associates to find people who were capable of processing this gold so it could be turned into ready cash.

And this is Mercury.  In the United Kingdom, Mercury here, as the eighth and eleventh lord (representing gains and other people's money) is what would be called a ‘fence’ - so somebody who's a handler of stolen goods.

So, the eighth houses we know is sudden breaks and changes, hidden resources and the eleventh lord is personal ambition, wealth and networking - so gang connections.  

And so the robbers had to call in professional ‘fences’.  And that was the big mistake.  Mercury here is in enemy dignity with high Shad bala.  And some of the fences did very, very well out of handling the gold bullion because they stole an awful lot of it!  And some of them got murdered.  And this was the source of some of the violent feuds that have continued.

But if we look at some of the Bhava yoga combinations here for eighth lord in the second house - prone to lying about finances and losing finances through battles, does not get the expected money from other people, too many surprising changes in finances.

So, we've got all this chaos going on pretty quickly.  Once the criminal underworld knows that this particular gang have got 6 000 gold bars because - it very, very quickly became known in the underworld who these people were, so it wasn't just a question of the robbers looking for help to melt down the gold but there were other criminal gangs trying to get at them and to take their their ill-gotten gains.

So other indications here if you have the 11th lord in the second house it says - easily converts assets to cash.

48:16 Fiona Marques

That's what they needed!

48:18 Inkeri- Venus Rising

Except that Mercury is in enemy dignity.  And they did have some problems smelting it down, I believe.  But we've also got the Sun.

48:31 Fiona Marques

Yes, tell us about the Sun?

48:35 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Now, the Sun in this chart is the tenth lord.  To me, this represents the police.  And we can actually look at it the Sun in the second house - it's only at three degrees of Sagittarius.  The others are around 18 degrees.  So the Sun is way behind Mercury and Jupiter

48:54 Fiona Marques

So, you really have this literal image which comes to mind of the police pursuing the robbers with the gold that's out of reach.  That although they're on the trail, they just can't catch up with them.  We’re watching it in front of us.  These poor police, you know, running after running after the gold.  And, what I like about that is that there's Ketu in between.  If we take it literally, we've got the Sun at around three degrees, Ketu at just over well, somewhere in the 15s and Jupiter at the end of the 17s.  So for the police, the Sun, to get to Jupiter, they have to go through Ketu.  And Ketu is like the smoke screen isn't it?  Every time you see a node, you know that it's creating illusion and delusion things are just not clear, you can't, that nothing makes sense, you know, you can't penetrate because it's this this smoke screen.  So I really feel like it's perfect for the gold to be occulted, to be hidden, is to have Ketu as the shield between the Sun and, that is, between the police and the gold.  ‘Let's put a node in there’ it's just what you need.

50:06 Inkeri – Venus Rising

But Ketu is also a separative influence.  And separative, in this case, also in a tragic sense.  Because during the investigation, when the police were tracking one of the handlers of the gold, a policeman was actually murdered.. And even worse than that, the perpetrator actually managed to persuade the jury that he acted in self-defense and was acquitted.  And this is, so you've got this idea with Ketu of a separation - that the handlers have gotten away from the police, separated themselves from pursuit by literally causing death.  And the second house is a maraka house has as well.

50:57 Fiona Marques

Yeah, there's an awful lot going on there.  It's great point Inkeri.  And then, haven't we we've also got a Lajjitaadi Avastha here?  We've got the shaming avastha.  Because, when you have a node with a malefic planet, we get that shaming of avastha.  And, I think there's a lot of shaming to go around!  There's plenty because we can talk about gold.  If we think of the gold as being Jupiter it's normally gold, you know pure.  We even call it ‘pure’ gold.  And this was the purest gold, it was the highest quality gold.  And here it is being used in a very shameful way.  This commodity that is – the reason why gold is precious or has value is because of its rarity and purity – and yet, in this case, that's exactly what's causing the whole inauspiciousness or ignominy whatever you want to call what's happening to the gold.  It's not being used in a pure way.  And if we think about whether it went on to fuel that increase in ecstasy that flooded London and theUK in the 80s, here's this pure substance being completely tarnished, used for very, very sad life outcomes for those people who become addicted and all of those networks that are going on there. 

But of course, we also have Mercury receiving some of that shaming.  And I know that Lajjitaadi Avasthas do not technically work this way, but I often find that even the Sun here in this case is also receiving some of that damage.

We could just say that there's an awful lot going on in the second house.  And you can see how the police, if you watch these documentaries or you have a little bit of look on Wikipedia, or you read some of thethe stuff that's around, the police just missed opportunities didn't they?

52:51 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Yeah, absolutely.  One thing that was really quite incredible was apparently two days after the robbery, a couple called the police in Bath, which is a town in South West England, to say that they had seen someone attempting to smelt down metal.  And the police didn't react at all.  They said it was nothing to do with them.  And it was only 14 months later that there was an investigation and they found the tools that we're trying that they were they were using.

53:30 Fiona Marques

Yeah, yeah, exactly.  And in the other documentary, there was a similar instance where some of the money was physically being driven through Europe to try to get it into the Swiss bank account and in Austria, I believe, a car was stopped and it had, the back and the boot of the car was full of cash, under the back seat, when you lifted up the cushions, was full of cash, there was briefcases of cash – and, bless them, the authorities you know, telexed (that's what we had at the time telexed) over Interpol to the UK ‘look, we picked up this UK passport driver, you know, with consecutive banknotes, you know, we think it's a little bit sus, here are the banknote ranges’ and it didn't it didn't get filtered to the right people at the right time and there was no warning flags on that money and they let the driver go.  

I’m sure every police investigation has these missed moments.  So you know we don't want to make too much of them, because at the same time we do actually have convictions in this case, so, you know, there's mixed, there's both, you know success, um and missed opportunities.

But I think, when you look at that second house, you can see why.  There's just so much going on and you’ve got this node there.

54:00 Inkeri – Venus Rising

You've also got this conjunction in between.  You've got the trinal aspect of the Moon and all these planets together.  So the Moon's sort of really helping in some way or pushing this along.

Interestingly, Mercury Jupiter and Ketu are in Jyeshtha Nakshatra.  Whereas the Sun is in Anuradha.  Anuradha means to come after.  So you've got this idea of a pursuit but it doesn't come to fruition.

Some of the gold has been recovered but the majority of it hasn't.  It's either been laundered, some of it's under this swimming pool.  So you've got this idea of this real gap between the gold, the people responsible and the Sun, pursuing but not actually catching them up.

55:40 Fiona Marques

Yep.  And do you think that Mercury there, it's also telling us something about the curse of Brink’s-Mat, with this ongoing vendettas, the fences, or the people that have been handling this have sort of, one by one, been picked off haven't they?  If they've strayed over their role and they've ended up siphoning off something for themselves, they've come to a nasty end.  I’m just wondering about you know the the eighth house of death, Rahu being there, Rashi aspecting on to those guys - I’m wondering if if that's where this the curse of Brink’s-Matt is taking place?

56:16 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Well, definitely.  Because I mean, all the fences involved did in fact end up robbing each other.  They didn't just steal from the people that actually went into the vault, but there was a lot of infighting between themselves.  And so, many people ended up being involved.  There were five or six deaths.  In fact, one of the deaths, which happened pretty early on, was someone involved in the great train robbery.  And I think the latest death was in 2015 that we know about.

56:50 Fiona Marques

Actually, I’m glad you mentioned that because I wanted to say, when we were talking about the 12th house, that some of the people involved are not in prison and institutions they are exiled in other countries aren't they?  Like Spain comes up, but other sunny climes.  So, some of these murders have taken place of people in exile.  So another indication of our seventh lord being in the twelfth house.

Is there anything you want to say about the dasha timing?

57:21 Inkeri – Venus Rising

It is the Ketu/Venus cycle as we would expect.

57:24 – Fiona Marques

So we've got Ketu here in the second house being such a main player, separating the police from the gold.  And then what did you say? It was Venus as well? - The robbers?

57:33 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Ketu Venus cycle so I think that's pretty hilarious!

What about the Moon, Fiona?

57:39 Fiona Marques

Yes, the Moon, the Moon, the mystery Moon.

Well, I have my theories which I’ll share.  But I do like what you brought up so far that it really feels like the Moon is having an amplifying effect.  And, if we notice that the Moon is in the 10th house, we know that means it was high in the sky.  It's the strongest angular house isn't it?  Because it's right up there, very clear.  If you looked up, there would be the Moon, right at the top of the heavens.  And the Moon, in this chart, is the ninth lord.  So for me, the ninth lord in the tenth house that's a raj yoga.  This is a beautiful trinal energy in an action house, the biggest action house there is.  So I think for me, the Moon speaks to how this captured the imagination of the public.  You know, the Moon as the general population.  And if you think back to the UK in the early 1980s, it was grim.  If I’m right, you know, we're talking about Thatcher, we're talking about Falkland’s war, we're talking about unemployment.

58:43 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Do you remember that song ‘Bank Robber’ by The Clash?  I think it was probably inspired by this robbery.

58:51 Fiona Marques

When you have such a grey, grim, heavy, real kind of period - I mean imagine walking out of somewhere with 6,800 gold bars?!  It’s like it's like a fairy tale you know you can't even conceptualize.

59:04 Inkeri – Venus Rising

I think, despite the fact that it was a very brutal crime, I mean these guys got a lot of respect.  I mean a lot of people were just who were maybe without a job or had a lot of financial pressures were like wishing they could find one of these gold bars somewhere you know?

59:21 Fiona Marques

Yeah, it's a bit like Willy Wonka and the gold in in the chocolate.

And in a way, they didn't kill anyone, and the insurance - it was fully covered you know - I’m not saying there were no losers from this, but, you know, in another way it's one of those crimes that, Lloyd’s paid out to every loss, but even the victim Johnson Matthey was involved in various fraudulent transactions which is why it collapsed.

59:49 Inkeri – Venus Rising

But for me, what's interesting is, although, the Moon is the ninth lord, the eighth cusp is in the ninth house.  So you've got this intermingling of this idea of money and the ninth house being morality.  I think that the Moon may well represent Mossak Fonseca - the sort of institution, a very respectable institution from the outside, who have clients like the former prime minister's father, so on um actually acting in a very underhanded way.

60:25 Fiona Marques

Wow!  Right, so we have taken a tour of this chart.  And I’m wondering is there another way to look at the chart?

60:37 Inkeri – Venus Rising

You can look at it from the perspective of the seventh house - from the robber’s point of view. So you could you read the chart starting with Taurus rising, which would be the accumulation of wealth.  And Rahu in the second house.

60:51 Fiona Marques

Yes, that's right.  And then we have first lord and the sixth lord.  You know you've got your you're your own worst enemy so you find out that the criminals in this case, when you look at it from their perspective, it's not the police that become their problem, it's their own they're their own worst enemy in this in this case.

Gosh Inkeri, this has been dramatic!  Betrayal.  It's just stunning and shocking!

Can I tempt you back to talk about another crime scene?  Would you come back to The Vedic Astrology Podcast and share another crime scene with us someday?

61:24 Inkeri – Venus Rising

Absolutely.  Absolutely.  I’m really looking forward to it.

61:27 Fiona Marques

Okay, until next time.  It was great to have your company.  Tell us what you think.  And I look forward to discussing the next crime scene with you some other day.

Okay, bye everyone!