How the cops cracked the $24M Pearson gold heist

Jordan: Everybody loves a good heist story. Preferably in the story, nobody gets hurt. The amount stolen is way up in the millions, and it’s comprised of gold or jewels or other fancy things, and the victim is some big faceless corporation. Hey, I don’t make the rules. Hollywood does. And just about one year ago at Toronto’s Pearson Airport, we had a future blockbuster in real time.

CLIP: Insp. Stephen Duivesteyn: Once this cargo was offloaded at a holding facility, subsequent to its arrival, this high-value container was removed by illegal means from the holding facility.

Jordan: In the weeks and months that followed that day, we learned almost nothing. They got away! Scot-free! Where was the gold? What were the police doing? How did they pull it off? And then, out of nowhere, this week, the hammer came down.

Shauna Hunt: Arrests have now been made in the single largest gold heist in Canadian history. It all happened here at Pearson Airport. I can tell you the

Jordan: So what happened in the Great Pearson Gold Heist? How did police crack the case? Who as they say, done it? And who does Brad Pitt play in the adaptation? I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Andy Takagi is a general assignment reporter at The Toronto Star who seems to join us every time. There’s a really interesting and fun story. Andy, hello.

Andy Takagi: Hi, how are you?

Jordan: I’m doing well. Is it weird if I start off by asking you if you’ve ever seen Goodfellas, the scene where Henry Hill is screaming in the shower after he learns about the heist?

Andy Takagi: No, it feels very appropriate for this.

Jordan: Why do we all love a good heist movie?

Andy Takagi: I’m not sure. I think it reminds us of a time that you think has gone by of gangsters, and I mean like a gold heist is something completely different that I feel like you don’t hear about at all anymore.

Jordan: Yeah. So take us back then, and we’ll cover this week’s news in a few minutes, but just take us back a year ago broadly, what happened at Pearson Airport?

Andy Takagi: Sure. So a year ago on April 17th, 2023, at around six o’clock in the evening, there’s an Air Canada plane that is parked in a warehouse at Pearson International. It’s come from Zurich. It has 6,600 gold bars, about 400 kilograms worth valued at about 20 million, and also the equivalent of around 4 million in foreign cash. And that’s set to be picked up by Brinks. But someone shows up, they present a waybill to Air Canada employees, and they load the gold bars and the cash into the truck and they drive away. Brinks employees show up a few hours later looking for their shipment, and it turns out they gave the gold away to the wrong person. And that’s all we really knew up until yesterday.

Jordan: In the immediate aftermath when we didn’t know anything. What did Air Canada and Brinks say in terms of who was to blame and how this happened?

Andy Takagi: Yeah, so Peel Police didn’t really say too much. They said that they were looking into it. It was an ongoing investigation, but they were very tight-lipped about what was happening. We only got more details about what had actually happened and how the theft occurred when Brinks decided to sue Air Canada for what it said was a lapse in security, basically that this person with the phony waybill was able to bypass Air Canada’s security measures and Brinks lost their shipment of gold and of cash because of it.

Jordan: Do we know who that gold and cash actually belonged to?

Andy Takagi: They were hired by Valcambi SA, a Swiss precious metal refinery and Raiffeisen Schweiz, a Swiss retail bank. I’m so sorry if I butchered that. And that’s who had hired Brinks to transport the gold and the cash from Zurich to Toronto.

Jordan: And when the heist itself occurred, they just presented the waybill and they just drove off, right? Nobody got smacked around, nobody got hurt?

Andy Takagi: No, no. It was completely kind of like we’re comparing it to all these heists because it’s like an Ocean Elevens heist, right? They show up and they drive off with 24 million estimated value of golden cash.

Jordan: So we heard nothing for weeks or months, but what do police now say was the first thing that sort of broke the investigation open?

Andy Takagi: So there’s a big break in the case when a driver from Brampton who was identified by Peel Police as the man driving the original truck in the heist, he’s pulled over at a traffic stop in Pennsylvania in September of 2023, and he decides to run because he knows, and police later find out that he has 65 illegal firearms in the truck that he’s driving in Pennsylvania, including automatic weapons. Police arrest him, they realize that he’s wanted by Peel Police, they contact each other and then they start connecting the dots that this gold and cash heist has now expanded into arms trafficking.

Jordan: How does that happen? How do guns come into this story?

Andy Takagi: Peel Police didn’t exactly make the direct connection, but they said that the Brampton man who was pulled over in Pennsylvania, that he was given a large amount of money to go down into the states, buy these firearms, and then bring them back into Canada. So the presuming theory is that some of that money was probably from the Golden Cash heist that he was given this money. He’s the truck driver in the original heist as well, so it seems like a runner type in the heist movies. And so he goes down, runs to get these guns, and then is supposed to bring them back into Canada.

Jordan: The police continue putting everything together behind the scenes, obviously, and then this week we get a huge announcement. Describe it for us. Where was it? What happened?

Andy Takagi: It’s all of these police officers, including representatives from the US ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives). Brampton Mayor, Patrick Brown, is also there, and they’re all standing in front of this massive white truck, the truck that was used in the robbery, and it’s on the anniversary of the one year anniversary of the gold heist, and they announced that they’ve arrested six people, including the Brampton man who’s in custody in the US. They’ve three Canada wide arrest warrants out for other people involved in the heist, and that two people involved of the nine who are either facing charges or have been charged were Air Canada employees.

Jordan: So this was an inside job?

Andy Takagi: Essentially, yes. One was a former manager who quit his post before he was arrested, and then another one was actually still employed by Air Canada, both worked in the airlines cargo division and the man who was working for Air Canada has now been suspended.

Jordan: Do we know what their roles were or any more about exactly what happened on that day?

Andy Takagi: No, not specifically about what their roles are. We know one man who was arrested owns a jewelry store in Toronto. We also know that some of the gold that was recovered was fashioned into gold bracelets and that the police also recovered molds and smelting material. So it sounds like they melted down a lot of this gold and transported it or sold it off.

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Jordan: How much of the gold recovered and how much of it is still out there somewhere?

Andy Takagi: So only about $90,000 worth of the gold was recovered.

Jordan: Oh, wow.

Andy Takagi: Police also said that they recovered $430,000 in Canadian currency, which they think some of which is profit from the gold that they were able to sell. So if we’re assuming that all of that money that they recovered and the gold bracelets that’s just over $500,000, we’re still short like 19 and a half million dollars worth of gold.

Jordan: And based on the equipment that would suggest that there’s 19 and a half million dollars worth of gold bracelets that have been floated around and presumably sold off. Right?

Andy Takagi: Something like that. It’s like gold bracelets, gold statues. Maybe someone’s nice gold earrings happen to be from the Pearson Gold Heist.

Jordan: Will we ever find out where that stuff went? What do police say about what they’re still trying to figure out and what they know, but I guess won’t tell us until the trial comes about?

Andy Takagi: Yeah, so police say that it’s still an ongoing investigation, so they couldn’t give too many details about what was happening. They actually showed what they said were too debt lists, which show how the money was distributed and when the gold was sold. But they redacted all of that information, obviously because it’s still an ongoing investigation. The police do believe that a lot of the gold has either been sold off or converted in some other way to money. So they’re focusing on that aspect of the investigation. Whether or not we’ll actually find the gold bars themselves I think becomes less and less likely every day.

Jordan: What happens now to the lawsuit against Air Canada? What’s the status of that? Brinks is, I guess, seeking all the money for the gold that wasn’t recovered from Air Canada?

Andy Takagi: Yeah, so part of the lawsuit is on top of the money that Brinks wanted to recoup from Air Canada for the gold bars and the cash, they were also seeking damages. But Air Canada also filed a statement of defence, which said that they denied all the allegations made by Brinks and that the company had not told Air Canada the value of what they were transporting, and they hadn’t taken out insurance on the cargo. So they said that at most they would only owe something around $17,000 to Brinks if the lawsuit actually went through and they were owing damages.

Jordan: This is me just speculating from my armchair here, but if two Air Canada employees are among the people arrested for this, it sounds like at least somebody at Air Canada knew the value of that cargo.

Andy Takagi: You would think so. Or at least they knew that this big shipment of something was coming in from Zurich and you think, oh, Zurich Gold.

Jordan: Oh, Zurich and it’s from a bank that works with a mining company. Hm.

Andy Takagi: Exactly. But Air Canada has said that they can’t comment any further as the cases before the courts. Brinks actually in their comment to us called the heist the Air Canada heist, which is I thought pretty funny because I think most in the media have been calling it the Pearson Gold Heist. Then that’s how kind of we refer to it colloquially, so they’re clearly a little tilted in how they’re viewing this.

Jordan: When might we learn more of the details of exactly how this worked? Would it be when, or if I guess, those people wanted on warrants are tracked down and charged, or is this going to wait for trial and how long could that take?

Andy Takagi: It could take a long time. We don’t really have a timeline that, like I said, there are three people who are still out on the lamb. There could be more charges coming if investigators managed to track down a wider network of people involved in the heist and who the gold might’ve been sold to if there were other connections to arms trafficking that haven’t been identified. So there’s a lot of loose threads here, but I think Peel Police and US authorities maybe wanted to get this information out there on the one year anniversary of the heist. I

Jordan: Love that you use the phrase on the lamb. It’s perfect for this conversation.

Andy Takagi: It seems appropriate. It’s a funny story actu ally. Yeah. I was working from the office covering this, but my colleague Peter Edwards, who covers a lot of crime and is a great reporter, he was at the press conference and there was kind of like a breakdown in email yesterday. A lot of people were having trouble sending and receiving mail, and he was trying to send me his copy for me to update the story, and he couldn’t, and so we had to get on the phone and he had to dictate his story to me, which felt very of a certain time of gold heists and robberies and things like that.

Jordan: I used to have to do that as a reporter. So you’ve just now made me feel terrifically old.

Andy Takagi: I’m so sorry.

Jordan: Last question, because we’ve been having fun with this and we’ve been saying this is going to be a heist movie or et cetera, et cetera, but I was reading a lot of the coverage out of the press conference yesterday, and the police are saying this too. It’s not just us making fun. People are talking about, oh yeah, this will be on Netflix.

Andy Takagi: Yeah. They were joking that this could be a Netflix show. They made references to Oceans 11 and CSI. I’m sure at some point this will be made into a Law and Order Toronto episode.

Jordan: Oh, yeah.

Andy Takagi: It’s the largest gold heist in Canada. No one was harmed. It’s just this guy pulled up his truck and bluffed his way into tricking employees to load up 24 million worth of golden cash into his truck and drove away. It’s a crazy, crazy story.

Jordan: And drove away and melted it down into bracelets and sold it on the black market until somebody was caught guns in their truck.

Andy Takagi: It’s insane, and it just sounded like officers in Pennsylvania were just kind of lucky to have come across this truck. Apparently he made some sort of traffic violation, and that’s what led to his traffic stop. It wasn’t that they were trying to find his truck or that they were on the lookout for him as a driver in Pennsylvania. They just happened to stop the right guy.

Jordan: Oh man. We’ll find out the rest of it, I’m sure before it’s all said and done and talk again. But in the meantime, Andy, this is a perfect conversation for a Friday after a week that’s been all about budgets and the housing crisis and everything. Thanks again for doing this.

Andy Takagi: Thank you so much for having me.

Jordan: Andy Takagi, general assignment reporter with the Toronto Star. That was The Big Story, and like I said, after a week of talking about budgets and the housing crisis, gosh, that was a relief. I’m going to go spend my weekend rewatching Goodfellas and Oceans 11 and all that. I hope you do too. If you have a suggestion or a comment about this show or any other episode of The Big Story, you can send it to us in email. The address is hello at The Big Story podcast.ca, or you can tell it to us over the phone by calling 416-935-5935 and leaving a voicemail. Joe Fish is the lead producer of The Big Story. Robyn Simon is also a producer on this show. Chloe Kim is our editorial assistant. Stefanie Phillips is our show runner. Diana Keay is our manager of business development. Mary Jubran is our digital editor. Sound design this week was handled by Robyn Edgar, Ryan Clarke, and Christian Prohom. I am your host and your executive producer, Jordan Heath-Rawlings, telling you to have a great weekend and just wait. On Monday, we drop the first episode of Paydirt, the inside story of the Green Belt Scandal. We’ll talk then.

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