How Canadian gun smugglers pulled off the biggest gold heist in years
livemint.comTORONTO—One of the biggest gold heists in years was remarkably simple. A shipment of 6,600 gold bars and millions of dollars in foreign cash landed last April at Toronto’s airport, where it was sent to a warehouse. Soon after, a man drove up in a white truck and presented fake documents.
In a few minutes, the gold and cash were in the truck, and the man drove away with $14.5 million in stolen gold and almost $2 million in cash. The theft was discovered three hours later, setting off a yearlong search by Canadian police, who uncovered what is alleged to be an inside job involving employees at Air Canada and an international arms-trafficking operation that was foiled by Pennsylvania State Police in September. “It’s almost out of an Ocean’s 11 movie," said Patrick Brown, the mayor of Brampton, a Canadian city near Toronto Pearson International Airport.
He was standing, along with an array of police officers and other elected officials, in front of the 5-ton white truck used in the heist. The Toronto heist is one in a line of thefts from airports in recent years. Eight armed men stole roughly $30 million of gold and other precious metals from São Paulo’s airport in 2019, the same year that armed robbers in Albania rushed onto the tarmac at Tirana International Airport and stole millions of euros worth of gold and cash.
In 2013, masked robbers stole more than $50 million worth of diamonds from a plane at Brussels Airport. Airports around the world are struggling with an increase in cargo thefts, many of which are organized by criminal gangs, said Andy Blackwell, senior risk adviser and security adviser with the London-based security firm ISARR. The Toronto heist, with its connection to arms smuggling, was likely a
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