A Gold Heist Like No Other
April 25, 24
At 3.56pm on 17 April 2023, an Air Canada flight from Zurich landed at Toronto's Pearson Airport, with a cargo that included 6,600 gold bars worth US$14.5m and US$1.8m in foreign banknotes.
At 6.32pm a truck driver arrived at an Air Canada warehouse in the airport complex, presented a bogus airway bill (an instruction document produced by the carrier) and promptly drove off with 400kg of gold and the currency.
At 9.30pm the driver of a Brink's armored truck turned up with the genuine airway bill and was more than a little surprised to find the gold and the cash had already been collected. You can imagine how the conversation might have gone.
At 2.43am the following day - more than five hours later - Ontario's Peel regional Police were finally alerted to the theft.
The heist is back in the news because it's now a year since it happened. As is often the case, police are convinced it was an inside job.
Two airline employees, one current, one former, are among nine suspects who have been charged or identified as being involved over the theft.
And as is also often the case, virtually none of the gold has been recovered. It has almost certainly been melted down.
It was the biggest theft of gold in Canada's history (although the nation's biggest ever theft of any kind remains the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist of 2012. 3,000 tonnes were stolen, worth US$18.3m in today's money).
Look at any of the world's biggest gold heists and they are characterized either by the use of brute force (explosives, bulldozers, heavy machinery). Or extreme violence, threatened or actual. Or all of the above.
In the biggest ever gold heist the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) stole 12,000kg of gold - about the weight of a US school bus - from a bank in Beirut, Lebanon in 1976. They blasted their way into the building from a neighboring church.
In the 1983 Brink's-MAT gold heist, six robbers broke into a warehouse near Heathrow airport, London. They doused staff with gasoline, threatened to set fire to them and made off 3,000kg of gold.
In 2019 raiders disguised as police officers held security guards hostage at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil, before fleeing with 748kg of gold.
The gang behind last year's Toronto gold heist handed over a doctored document. That's it.
There was, no doubt, a lot of preparation but the crime itself involved no force or violence, and it was three hours before anyone even realized it had happened.
The airway bill (a copy of which has been made public by police) was for a shipment of seafood from Scotland that had been collected the previous day.
The details of quite how it was used to fraudulently relieve Air Canada of almost half a tonne of gold remain unclear.
But in a world where every diamond of 0.50-cts or more will, as of September, have to be digitally verified, you'd have thought there would be a more sophisticated way of ensuring over $16m of gold and cash isn't inadvertently handed over to the wrong guy.
Brinks is currently taking legal action against Air Canada, alleging it failed to keep its cargo safe.
Have a fabulous weekend.