$22 million worth of gold and other valuables were stolen from a vault at Toronto's Pearson International Airport in a heist that took place in the early morning hours of June 30th, 1995. It was the largest diamond heist in history, and it happened in the midst of one of the busiest airports in the world.
00:03:01.420But people who are experts, the smartest people in this field spent, you know, they spent over two years figuring out how to get away with this.
00:03:49.580And that's the big question for the Pearson robbery that kind of sparked our interest in this and brought me to speaking with you today is airports are very secure.
00:04:02.880We've all been through airports in the last couple decades, since 9-11.
00:04:08.020The level of security that you go through as a passenger.
00:04:11.000Now we're talking about getting a, it's been described as a standard airport cargo container by the police.
00:04:21.240And when the police officer who said that was asked, well, what does that look like?
00:04:28.540They said, well, it's about five feet by five feet square.
00:04:33.060That's a pretty big box to just smuggle out.
00:04:36.200So, you know, what we know in general is that it's gold and banknotes, perhaps other valuables as well, that it was brought into the country by Air Canada.
00:04:49.860Brinks was supposed to handle the ground transportation once it landed.
00:06:43.480I think it's very dangerous to make assumptions at this level, at this juncture in time.
00:06:51.300And I think it's important to kind of look at different possibilities.
00:06:54.900It could be a hybrid, where there's some insider gave a little bit of information, like happened in the Lufthansa heist, the famous Goodfellas heist, where there was an insider who had a gambling debt, who informed organized crime.
00:07:34.080If it turns out that it's insiders, I won't be surprised.
00:07:37.520If it turns out that it's outsiders who just did a very good job at surveilling the place and thinking about the place, I won't be surprised either.
00:07:46.760The police used the odd phrasing that this high-value cargo was, and I quote, removed by illegal means.
00:08:00.000Now, when you and I are talking about these sorts of things, we say something's stolen.
00:08:04.820And in my experience, police are very careful and precise with their language.
00:08:09.460Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I'm wondering, did the Brinks truck that was supposed to take this perhaps show up, load a bunch of containers of valuables into the truck, leave, and then one of them disappeared?
00:08:27.900That's possibly what happened, isn't it?
00:08:31.320There's a lot of possibilities we need to entertain, and that's certainly one of them.
00:08:35.360In terms of the language, a few things come to mind.
00:08:38.440One, police generally use the passive tense, and that may be part of it.
00:08:44.240I'm a lawyer in America, but obviously our legal system is quite different than the Canadian ones, so that may reflect elements of the crime that they need to ascertain.
00:08:54.840There may be different ways that a crime is understood if it's somebody that had control of it but misappropriated it.
00:09:05.380The point is that this juncture, there's not that information known to us that the public have distributed, sorry, that the police have distributed.
00:09:14.580So I can see we're sort of trying to, maybe it's grasping at straws to try to see something.
00:09:21.260Maybe that's a real key to understanding this.
00:09:26.200It's really hard to tell at this point.
00:09:31.020It's been just over a month since the heist happened, about a month since we found out that it happened.
00:09:39.340And I'm quite sure that if it hadn't been broken by myself or somebody else in the media, if I didn't do it, somebody else would have eventually heard.
00:09:46.060But if it hadn't broken in the media, I think that the police would have stayed very quiet about this.
00:09:53.820And I'm sure that the companies involved didn't want the embarrassment of it.
00:09:59.400I'm not sure we can quantify this, but do you get a sense that these things happen more frequently than we know?
00:10:06.560And we just don't hear about it because the people involved don't want word getting out?
00:10:11.040I think you might be onto something there.
00:10:16.720So, for instance, when writing about these stories, it's clear that you have great sources locally and the police and otherwise to be able to break this story.
00:10:27.140But to really get the details, a lot of times it takes actual litigation, right?
00:10:33.160So I think for these things, if it's at a certain level, if it's big enough, I think that it's hard to hide because there could be litigation over insurance coverage.
00:10:45.000Generally, insurance companies don't want to pay out or there's arguments about how much they should pay.
00:10:52.720Also liability for, say, Brinks, maybe the airport security.
00:10:56.100And then if anybody gets caught, all of a sudden these criminal procedures in countries like Canada and the U.S., these things are public.
00:11:04.780I mean, generally, you know, the only exceptions being national security type stuff.
00:11:32.140That's an important part of their job, right?
00:11:33.820But they also need all the people, all the businesses.
00:11:36.840As much money as this is, it's a very small fraction of how much by-value passes through the cargo area of your local airport, right?
00:11:45.220So they need to make sure that everybody feels safe.
00:11:50.420And, you know, that's the business Brinks is in.
00:11:52.720And I will want to say to defend Brinks, the reason that they come up in these sort of heists, including the 1952 one, is they're the biggest players or one of the biggest players in security.
00:12:04.000So that's no slight on them that their name is being mentioned in all these things.
00:12:08.400Obviously, it varies by each particular event.
00:12:12.420But, yeah, there could be ones we don't know about.
00:12:14.900And a lot of these things, it just takes time to unfold.
00:12:17.720There's been a lot of speculation on whether the people behind this particular heist will ever get caught.
00:12:25.160In the diamond heist that you wrote about in Flawless, you said some of them got caught, some didn't.
00:12:55.200It's the kind of thing that if you don't delve into all the details like I did for this research, you start coming up with conspiracy theories.
00:13:04.160I heard all sorts of stuff, as they say, the devils in the details when you really dig into it.
00:13:09.900And you just have to kind of understand the larger context.
00:13:13.520But the amazing thing is that the heist took place over a weekend, Valentine's Day weekend 2003.
00:13:19.700There was a lot of stuff happening there.
00:13:21.300There was a huge tennis tournament involving superstars.
00:13:27.520And that Monday morning, the heist is discovered, right?
00:13:48.880It's an apartment I've been in, and they sort through what they have.
00:13:53.580They're basically trying to separate the trash from the valuables, right, as they've quickly gone through and gathered this stuff.
00:14:00.560And that's where they made the first mistake, which I'll get back to.
00:14:04.240So that Monday morning, they're already, you know, gone or in the process of leaving.
00:14:09.640There's different people, and there's also a...
00:14:13.640You could track all the different entities, you know, one or more people going through this sort of network of burner phones, of SIM cards, right?
00:14:57.720And the thing that helped make sense of this to me is it's basically the last wooded area if you're traveling from Antwerp to the next major airport, which would be in Brussels, right?
00:15:09.180So as they're going through there, the thieves had turned off and just tossed this trash into the woods.
00:15:16.840And so that's their first mistake, right?
00:18:07.180You've got to be able to melt them down to get rid of the serial numbers, perhaps.
00:18:11.020Or sell them to somebody who doesn't care that they've got stamps and serial numbers on them.
00:18:18.300That's harder to do than just finding someone who, for the right fee, will recut diamonds so that you can't tell they've ever been out there.
00:18:26.360Well, the thing with diamonds is there's a lot of different ones there.
00:18:30.720But the majority, maybe even the vast majority of these stolen diamonds, it just is the first person that brings it back into the legitimate stream of commerce that knows that something's wrong and they're going to take a steep discount, right?
00:18:45.720And diamonds can move very quickly in the diamond district or anywhere in the world, really.
00:18:50.480They could just change hands, you know.
00:18:52.100There are some diamonds that you would have to do work on and you would need a corrupt polisher to polish something off.
00:18:59.480Or there are a few that would be really difficult to move.
00:19:02.040So if you have a very large, fancy, you know, colorful diamond, that's hard.
00:19:09.180There's diamonds, for instance, diamonds from Canada.
00:19:11.920Canada does this amazing job with marketing, right?
00:19:14.320Because there are concerns about the environment, about human rights, about blood diamonds, all these sort of things.
00:19:21.280So if you get a diamond mined in Canada, they could put a little thing on the side of it with maybe a maple leaf, maybe a polar bear, as well as a serial number.
00:19:31.020So that's the sort of thing that you might have to remove.
00:19:34.080Like, the vast majority of it, the kind of stuff you're just going to see in your local strip mall jewelry store or, you know, an upper middle class or middle class engagement ring, that's easy to move.
00:19:44.720But, yeah, gold is going to be really difficult because it is going to have these serial numbers on it.
00:19:51.720Like, there was a huge gold heist in England, very famous, the Brinks Mat heist, where they were easily able to just sort of go and transform this gold into new bars.
00:20:00.900But obviously now there would be a million questions.
00:20:02.900So I think unless you had a corrupt entity willing to do that for you in Canada, I would think the smart move by far would be to move it out of the country to somewhere where people don't care or they have that capability to transform it.
00:20:20.700Or if you don't know how to do that, to just, you know, hide it until you do.
00:20:26.220And the good thing about stealing gold is gold basically keeps up with inflation.
00:20:31.780So it's not like a bank job where you bury the bank notes for 20 years and, you know, inflation's eaten away at that.
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00:22:01.160But what do you do with the gold after that?
00:22:04.200That has to be one of the big questions after this $22 million worth of gold and banknotes and other valuables was taken from Pearson Airport.
00:22:14.660Scott, I've talked to people who said if there's banknotes and they're euros, it should be fairly easy for the thieves to dispose of that over time.
00:22:26.880Small amounts, small amounts, trading it in because we can't trace foreign banknotes.
00:22:32.340We just, the police don't have the capability to do that.
00:22:35.280But getting gold out of the country, it's not like you can just turn around and put it on another airplane all that easily.
00:22:42.800Unless you're smuggling it out in small amounts, getting that big cargo thing on there, there's going to be paperwork.
00:22:49.980You're going to have to explain what it is.
00:22:54.180So all of these things would be a record.
00:22:56.620But driving it to a port, like say Montreal and greasing the local organized crime group that runs the port, that should be fairly easy, shouldn't it?
00:23:07.920That depends on who our thieves are, right?
00:23:11.280So if these are people with deep connections to organized crime, then 100%, right?
00:23:17.000They're just going to tap into existing networks that would be used in Canada for illegal drugs primarily, right?
00:23:24.240Those are similar sizes, similar high values, right?
00:23:29.020And there are other parts of the world where there are smuggling things, smuggling methods already in place for gold, right?
00:23:37.100Because, for instance, somewhere like India, if I remember correctly, is like 18%.
00:23:43.920So it's the sort of thing where people smuggle for those reasons.
00:23:47.480But again, this depends on who our thieves are, right?
00:23:50.380If these just are people, if it's a crime of opportunity where people saw this and just moved in on it, they may not know what to do with it.
00:23:58.440They may have been so focused on getting the gold, they may not know.
00:24:02.120There also could be small-time thieves that are in over their heads.
00:24:05.440You know, maybe this is more than they expected.
00:24:08.940And then they would probably just go to whoever the local fence is.
00:24:12.220But it's very different bringing in $22 million in gold to the guy that you normally sell stolen TVs to, right?
00:24:18.580So there could be all sorts of issues.
00:24:21.700And if it were me, if I didn't have very strong ties with local organized crime, honestly, I would just stay away from them.
00:24:28.940Because I would be much more afraid of them than the police, right?
00:24:32.000Because these are the sort of people who might just, you know, take care of you and just keep the $22 million for themselves, which has an added benefit, not just of not giving you a cut, but also that cuts the connection, right?
00:24:46.600So even if you figure out who did the robbery, you're not going to connect it to whoever, you know, moves it on.
00:24:52.460So, again, I just, I'm not really sure.
00:24:58.400And if it were me, where's a crime of opportunity, as I said, I would bury it in my backyard, Tony Soprano style, and just wait until I had a plan.
00:25:06.860Oh, man, I can't imagine, I mean, I can imagine that there is the possibility that this is a crime of opportunity where somebody stumbled upon it, took advantage of the situation.
00:25:22.540But I can't imagine being that person and then sitting there not knowing what to do with that much gold.
00:25:31.000I mean, I would be afraid, and, you know, there'd be people I'd be much more afraid of than the Canadian police.
00:25:41.060We've, you know, whether it's movies, Thomas Crown Affair, Great Train Robbery, Goodfellas, things of this nature have been portrayed.
00:25:56.740I believe it was a 1970s Montreal art gallery robbed of art by people who rappelled in from the roof and then walked out the front door, never to be seen again.
00:26:10.520How often do people get away with these big heists?
00:26:39.260Honestly, a lot of them, it doesn't take a lot of ability.
00:26:42.500But a $22 million gold heist, that takes a lot of ability, right?
00:26:46.400Or hundreds of millions of dollars in diamonds.
00:26:48.900But there's also a risk element, right?
00:26:50.500So even if you and I were to sit down and game plan out how to pull off one of these heists and we're OK with the morals of it all, maybe rationalize it, but they have insurance coverage or something like that, which isn't always the case.
00:27:06.360There's a risk, you know, and personally, I'm not willing to take the risk of spending, I don't know, five, 10 years in prison.
00:27:13.760But for a lot of people, that would be worth it.
00:27:16.460You know, it would very much be worth it.
00:27:17.860And, you know, they would try to do this.
00:27:21.980I did hear the case of one person who went to jail just to be able to get out and take their loot that they'd hidden because they couldn't be, for what I forget the entire backstory, they couldn't be charged with the actual robbery.
00:27:39.260And they thought, man, two years, I can sweat that.
00:27:41.580And then I know where the millions are at the end.
00:27:43.940So I would have trouble with the morals of it above and beyond the jail time.
00:27:49.600I mean, I'm the same, but there's a lot of people that wouldn't.
00:27:53.200I mean, look at how many people are willing to, you know, smash somebody's window and steal their, you know, stereo or their papers or whatever.
00:28:00.020I mean, there's people that would do it.
00:28:01.660The legal concept that you're referring to is known as double jeopardy, right?
00:28:06.220If you've already been tried for a crime, you can't be tried for it again.
00:28:10.120But that can get a bit complicated, right?
00:28:13.840Because, for instance, you can't be tried again.
00:28:16.900Whether you're found not guilty or guilty doesn't matter, right?
00:28:19.500But you can't be tried again for the actual heist.
00:28:22.620But there's going to be other things these days.
00:28:25.280You know, the way you're moving the money, what you're doing with it, there could be things that they could do.
00:28:30.120And there also might be civil things where the government's able to take the loot away from you.
00:28:35.920But, so yeah, personally, I wouldn't just do two years just to get rid of that double jeopardy aspect.
00:28:43.940You mentioned earlier the School of Turin.
00:28:47.220And it fascinates me that there are these groups that, quite frankly, sound like Ocean's Eleven.
00:30:02.000So the School of Turin is more Ocean's Eleven.
00:30:04.940It's a magic trick, whereas the Pink Panthers are more like a Mission Impossible, some sort of Hollywood thing.
00:30:11.040They've literally had things where they've gotten away in speed boats, you know, just crazy stuff.
00:30:15.260But the thing you need to look at with this stuff in the end, right, is if you have something that's incredibly valuable, just incredibly valuable, right, there's going to be people that will want to take it.
00:30:28.800And on each level, it's very much like – do you remember, I think it was Mad Magazine that had spy versus spy for these two sort of characters, right?
00:30:38.240It's sort of like in the Cold War, there's the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
00:30:41.360So at the very high level, you know, if you're protecting hundreds of millions of diamonds, for example, they're not worried about your listeners.
00:30:50.660Maybe one of your listeners would have that skill set.
00:30:54.820Maybe somebody tuned in just for this subject.
00:30:56.860But the idea is they need the best – the best in the world will look at it because if you have that skill set, even if you invest two years, you rent a safe house, you're doing all this stuff, the return on your investment is incredible, right?
00:31:21.820I mean, the groups I mentioned are well-known at this point.
00:31:24.700I mean, we have a thing in the U.S. now where there's a certain group that comes in, does some big sort of house burglary-type jobs, and then leaves the country immediately.
00:31:34.400You know, so that sort of cuts off the connection.
00:31:37.320And it can be, like you theorized in a prior conversation that you and I had, there could be organized crime that doesn't specialize in these sort of high-end heists but maybe sees a local opportunity.
00:31:50.480And they deal with all kinds of different sort of crimes, but they already have the ability and willingness to take risks, to know how to move things, to do things.
00:32:01.700And so, for instance, in Dresden, Germany, just two days ago, people were sentenced for a very big jewelry heist there out of a museum.
00:32:10.960And this was a local criminal group that handled all sorts of stuff.
00:32:15.080It was a crime family that had come to Berlin in the 80s.
00:32:18.960And they knew how to do this kind of stuff, and they were willing to do it.
00:32:25.220There are an increasing number of hotel heists you've told me about.
00:32:30.520Now, you know, just from breathing the air, we would all know about the Kim Kardashian jewel heist in Paris a few years ago.
00:33:05.660I mean, there definitely are going to be, you know, hotels I've heard about where there's some sort of insider, has some sort of master key, and they're robbing tourists of, you know, relatively small takes.
00:33:17.900You know, for the tourists, it could be, you know, losing 1,000 euros could be a real big hit.
00:33:22.480But in terms of people looking to target the bigger scores, I mean, this is definitely a soft target, right?
00:33:32.180When we're talking about an airport cargo area that's equipped to handle millions of dollars worth of gold and brinks, this is a hard target.
00:33:41.380But, for instance, if you look at Cannes in France, where they have this big, you know, film festival that's either happening or just happened, and there's a lot of people going there, and there's representatives of jewelry companies, there's celebrities who are borrowing this jewelry, there's all sorts of money floating around.
00:34:01.720And they're staying at hotels that are set up to protect a tourist, like when you've traveled, just your passport, some spare cash, right?
00:34:11.200And so that could be something worth targeting.
00:34:14.980And a really interesting thing now is also social media, right?
00:34:18.140So you see that there's a certain celebrity.
00:34:46.700And obviously, breaking into a hotel safe is, I mean, there's a lot of people that could do that.
00:34:52.020That's like one step up from being an expert pickpocket.
00:34:55.280I mean, the number of people with that skill set and willingness, you know, dwarfs the number of people that could pull off the sort of heist that we've been talking about so far today.
00:35:08.060I just realized that we didn't really get into the 1952 heist too much.
00:35:14.320That many people don't know that the 1952 heist at what was then called Malton International Airport, now Pearson International, that that even happened, you know, because we there was no movie about it that I know of.