Full Comment - Cracking the $20-million Pearson Airport gold heist

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00:00:30.000 $22 million worth of gold, banknotes, other valuables just vanishing.

00:00:41.760 It's an astonishing story that happened at Toronto's Pearson International Airport.

00:00:46.580 One that I've kind of had as close as you can get to a front row seat for it.

00:00:51.060 Hi, my name's Brian Lilly, host of Full Comment Podcast.

00:00:55.180 And today we're going to be talking about heists. 0.97

00:00:58.120 Because there's something that just, something about a heist that just fascinates us all.

00:01:03.400 Maybe it's taking us back to our youth when we read about Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

00:01:09.580 Maybe it's just fascination with how organized crime works.

00:01:13.540 But we're drawn to these stories.

00:01:15.660 And that's something that our next guest knows an awful lot about.

00:01:18.660 But before I get to him, I do want to remind you that you can subscribe to this podcast on whatever app or device you're listening to.

00:01:25.760 And please do hit subscribe, leave a comment, hit a like, make sure that you let people know about it.

00:01:32.500 Spreading the word helps us get these stories out to a wider audience.

00:01:36.460 Our next guest is Scott Andrew Selby, and he is someone who has studied heists, written about them.

00:01:43.580 He is co-author of the book Flawless, Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History.

00:01:49.220 And he joins us today from Southern California.

00:01:51.580 Scott, thanks for the time.

00:01:53.260 Thank you, Brian.

00:01:53.760 So you wrote about a diamond heist that took place about 20 years ago.

00:02:00.360 What was it that drew you to that story?

00:02:02.100 I want to talk about Pearson and what you know about that and different gold heists in a minute.

00:02:06.280 But what drew you to this diamond heist in, was it Holland?

00:02:12.060 It was in Antwerp, Belgium.

00:02:14.380 Okay.

00:02:15.180 And what drew me is just the scale of it, both in terms of the security that had to be subverted and the amount of loot itself.

00:02:23.180 So the first thing that hits you is sort of the headline.

00:02:26.320 It's hundreds of millions of dollars worth of primarily diamonds that were stolen.

00:02:31.140 And the thing that really fascinated me, though, was all the layers of security.

00:02:36.300 You mentioned the big question is, why do we like heists?

00:02:39.880 It's sort of the meta question of the hour.

00:02:42.980 And at least for me, I found it to be a sort of maybe even four-dimensional chess, if you take in time as an element.

00:02:50.900 Where on the one hand, you see something and it looks impenetrable.

00:02:55.740 You're there as a tourist in a secure diamond area, and it's unimaginable.

00:02:59.700 It's the equivalent of Fort Knox.

00:03:01.420 But 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.

00:03:12.860 Two years to plan a heist.

00:03:14.160 Did they get away with it in the end?

00:03:17.580 Yes and no.

00:03:19.640 In the immediate aftermath, the Monday morning, the security guard comes down and the vault's been ransacked.

00:03:25.880 There's enough, like, diamonds and jewels on the floor, like Alibaba's cave for, you know, it's millions of dollars.

00:03:34.360 It's enough take that any robber would be happy with, and that was left behind.

00:03:38.080 So in that moment, they got away with it, and the loot's still gone.

00:03:43.640 But some of them did get caught.

00:03:46.280 Some, but not all.

00:03:49.580 And 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.

00:04:02.880 We've all been through airports in the last couple decades, since 9-11.

00:04:08.020 The level of security that you go through as a passenger.

00:04:11.000 Now we're talking about getting a, it's been described as a standard airport cargo container by the police.

00:04:21.240 And when the police officer who said that was asked, well, what does that look like?

00:04:25.260 I don't deal in airport containers.

00:04:28.540 They said, well, it's about five feet by five feet square.

00:04:33.060 That's a pretty big box to just smuggle out.

00:04:36.200 So, 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.

00:04:49.860 Brinks was supposed to handle the ground transportation once it landed.

00:04:54.580 It did land.

00:04:55.620 It went to a cargo facility.

00:04:57.520 And somewhere between going into that cargo facility and arriving at TD Bank, it just disappeared.

00:05:05.040 How much does that grab you?

00:05:07.500 As someone that has studied this, and you've studied the 1952 gold heist at Pearson, we'll talk about in a minute.

00:05:14.240 How much does that mystery just strike you as soon?

00:05:18.220 Okay.

00:05:19.020 There's something interesting here.

00:05:21.300 I mean, you know this as a journalist.

00:05:23.040 It's an amazing story.

00:05:25.180 I mean, this is straight out of something you'd see on Netflix.

00:05:28.080 There's a wonderful and fascinating aspect of it, which is this story of how did this happen?

00:05:36.820 It's a magic trick writ large.

00:05:39.300 There's gold.

00:05:41.040 It's in this secure area, an area intended for cargo.

00:05:45.440 So that security would look a little different than what you go through as a passenger post 9-11.

00:05:50.240 And it's disappeared.

00:05:51.060 So clearly, these thieves, just like any thieves at this level of expertise, they saw something a little different than the rest of us.

00:05:59.760 They saw some weaknesses to exploit, and they managed to pull a magic trick.

00:06:04.400 And the strangest thing about this trick, really, in my opinion, is how basically the same thing happened in 1952.

00:06:10.840 And that was never solved.

00:06:12.300 And it was the same thing where Brinks came in with a bunch of gold, and the gold disappeared.

00:06:17.460 You and I spoke a little while ago for one of my pieces that ran in print in the Toronto Sun.

00:06:26.660 And I had been hearing from everyone, well, it's obviously got to be an inside job.

00:06:32.340 This is an inside job.

00:06:33.480 Somebody was on the inside.

00:06:35.320 You said, no, don't be so sure.

00:06:38.400 You're not ruling it out.

00:06:39.940 But you told me not to be so sure.

00:06:43.000 Why?

00:06:43.480 I think it's very dangerous to make assumptions at this level, at this juncture in time.

00:06:51.300 And I think it's important to kind of look at different possibilities.

00:06:54.900 It 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.

00:07:07.460 But it's just hard to say.

00:07:10.540 In my case, for the Antwerp Heist, I wrote about it, they were outsiders. 0.97

00:07:14.600 I mean, they became sort of semi-insiders by renting an office in their target building.

00:07:20.340 But ultimately, I would consider them to be outsiders. 0.95

00:07:23.800 And here it's possible.

00:07:24.820 People could take the time to analyze the security and see what they could see and figure this out.

00:07:31.600 So I'll put it this way.

00:07:34.080 If it turns out that it's insiders, I won't be surprised.

00:07:37.520 If 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.

00:07:46.760 The police used the odd phrasing that this high-value cargo was, and I quote, removed by illegal means.

00:08:00.000 Now, when you and I are talking about these sorts of things, we say something's stolen.

00:08:04.820 And in my experience, police are very careful and precise with their language.

00:08:09.460 Maybe 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?

00:08:27.900 That's possibly what happened, isn't it?

00:08:31.320 There's a lot of possibilities we need to entertain, and that's certainly one of them.

00:08:35.360 In terms of the language, a few things come to mind.

00:08:38.440 One, police generally use the passive tense, and that may be part of it.

00:08:44.240 I'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.

00:08:54.840 There may be different ways that a crime is understood if it's somebody that had control of it but misappropriated it.

00:09:03.340 It could be nothing.

00:09:04.480 I don't know.

00:09:05.380 The point is that this juncture, there's not that information known to us that the public have distributed, sorry, that the police have distributed.

00:09:14.580 So I can see we're sort of trying to, maybe it's grasping at straws to try to see something.

00:09:21.260 Maybe that's a real key to understanding this.

00:09:26.200 It's really hard to tell at this point.

00:09:31.020 It's been just over a month since the heist happened, about a month since we found out that it happened.

00:09:39.340 And 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.

00:09:46.060 But if it hadn't broken in the media, I think that the police would have stayed very quiet about this.

00:09:53.820 And I'm sure that the companies involved didn't want the embarrassment of it.

00:09:59.400 I'm not sure we can quantify this, but do you get a sense that these things happen more frequently than we know?

00:10:06.560 And we just don't hear about it because the people involved don't want word getting out?

00:10:11.040 I think you might be onto something there.

00:10:14.220 It also depends how far things get.

00:10:16.720 So, 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.

00:10:27.140 But to really get the details, a lot of times it takes actual litigation, right?

00:10:31.560 So that could be criminal or civil.

00:10:33.160 So 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.

00:10:45.000 Generally, insurance companies don't want to pay out or there's arguments about how much they should pay.

00:10:52.720 Also liability for, say, Brinks, maybe the airport security. 0.96

00:10:56.100 And then if anybody gets caught, all of a sudden these criminal procedures in countries like Canada and the U.S., these things are public.

00:11:04.780 I mean, generally, you know, the only exceptions being national security type stuff.

00:11:08.720 But, yeah, just smaller things.

00:11:11.020 Maybe they make deals and make things go away.

00:11:13.760 It's definitely very embarrassing.

00:11:16.540 But the thing is, is it's beyond embarrassing.

00:11:18.900 The business of these entities is security.

00:11:22.660 That's what they're selling, right?

00:11:23.640 So the airport as a whole, they need people to feel safe.

00:11:27.740 They need passengers to feel safe post 9-11.

00:11:30.640 And that's important.

00:11:32.140 That's an important part of their job, right?

00:11:33.820 But they also need all the people, all the businesses.

00:11:36.840 As 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?

00:11:45.220 So they need to make sure that everybody feels safe.

00:11:50.420 And, you know, that's the business Brinks is in.

00:11:52.720 And 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.

00:12:04.000 So that's no slight on them that their name is being mentioned in all these things.

00:12:08.400 Obviously, it varies by each particular event.

00:12:12.420 But, yeah, there could be ones we don't know about.

00:12:14.900 And a lot of these things, it just takes time to unfold.

00:12:17.720 There's been a lot of speculation on whether the people behind this particular heist will ever get caught.

00:12:25.160 In the diamond heist that you wrote about in Flawless, you said some of them got caught, some didn't.

00:12:34.260 How long did it take?

00:12:35.840 How long were people out on the lam with all this loot?

00:12:40.640 I mean, I'm assuming they sold off some of the diamonds, were able to live a nice lifestyle for a bit at least.

00:12:45.240 Were they on the lam for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, years?

00:12:51.560 What was the story there?

00:12:52.940 I mean, it's a really wild story.

00:12:55.200 It'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.

00:13:04.160 I heard all sorts of stuff, as they say, the devils in the details when you really dig into it.

00:13:09.900 And you just have to kind of understand the larger context.

00:13:13.520 But the amazing thing is that the heist took place over a weekend, Valentine's Day weekend 2003.

00:13:19.700 There was a lot of stuff happening there.

00:13:21.300 There was a huge tennis tournament involving superstars.

00:13:27.520 And that Monday morning, the heist is discovered, right?

00:13:29.920 They come down the vault.

00:13:31.440 At that point, they have absolutely...

00:13:32.600 So not even an alarm going off over the weekend?

00:13:35.920 Nothing.

00:13:36.620 You show up Monday morning, nothing.

00:13:39.720 You know, it happens over Saturday night into Sunday morning.

00:13:42.980 Nobody knows they've been robbed.

00:13:44.220 And that gives the thieves at that point, they quickly kind of sort.

00:13:47.660 They go to their safe house.

00:13:48.880 It's an apartment I've been in, and they sort through what they have.

00:13:53.580 They're basically trying to separate the trash from the valuables, right, as they've quickly gone through and gathered this stuff.

00:14:00.560 And that's where they made the first mistake, which I'll get back to.

00:14:04.240 So that Monday morning, they're already, you know, gone or in the process of leaving.

00:14:09.640 There's different people, and there's also a...

00:14:13.640 You 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?

00:14:21.440 Because they're calling each other.

00:14:24.520 And so you could see them heading out.

00:14:28.540 And eventually, they were able to trace these SIM cards to the north of Italy.

00:14:32.320 So that gives you, you know, you got a sense of who you might be dealing with generally.

00:14:36.820 But what happened is it's just wild.

00:14:39.860 So this Monday morning, they discover the heist.

00:14:41.920 It hits the news.

00:14:43.540 It's just everything goes crazy.

00:14:46.680 And there's this guy, August Van Camp.

00:14:49.140 He basically patrols this parcel of land that has some trees, some nature.

00:14:54.860 I've walked around it.

00:14:55.980 It's right off the highway.

00:14:57.720 And 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?

00:15:09.180 So as they're going through there, the thieves had turned off and just tossed this trash into the woods.

00:15:16.840 And so that's their first mistake, right?

00:15:19.780 Because they probably—

00:15:22.420 The trash being some of the goods that they'd stolen that they didn't want.

00:15:26.780 Correct.

00:15:27.140 As well as paperwork that would be associated.

00:15:29.220 You're emptying these.

00:15:30.000 It's a safe deposit job.

00:15:31.360 So there's all kinds of things you're grabbing together, right? 0.95

00:15:35.520 And the thing that happens is this guy, August Van Camp, he notices this trash.

00:15:40.880 And he's the kind of guy who just bothers the local police whenever people are dumping, right?

00:15:45.420 And in northern Italy, that's a much bigger issue with people just dumping stuff.

00:15:50.000 In Belgium, not so much.

00:15:51.960 But in Belgium, you can't just go to your local McDonald's and toss it there.

00:15:57.200 They lock down their trash.

00:15:58.340 They have CCTV.

00:15:59.460 So this seems like a good place to just dump stuff.

00:16:01.580 And if it weren't for August Van Camp, they would have gotten away with it.

00:16:05.320 So he goes through this trash and he notices all this stuff from the Diamond District, right? 0.92

00:16:10.840 And calls into the police.

00:16:12.520 The police move really fast. 0.96

00:16:14.760 And here's the next big break, which is that this trash commingles two things. 0.96

00:16:20.120 One, it has trash from the heist. 0.95

00:16:22.720 But two, it has household trash from the safe house.

00:16:27.220 These things are commingled.

00:16:29.120 And that enables the police with a lot of hard work.

00:16:32.600 It's harder work than you might think to piece this stuff together, to take torn receipts,

00:16:36.900 put them together, figure out what's going on.

00:16:38.920 But they're able to put it all in place by Friday.

00:16:41.880 So when the person who'd rented an office in there, Leonardo Norto Bartolo, shows up at the office building,

00:16:48.240 he wants to badge into their electronic system.

00:16:50.640 So he's not shown as the only person who never came back after the heist.

00:16:53.760 When he pops up, he has no idea.

00:16:56.140 But the police are already on to him.

00:16:57.640 And that starts the process of them then being able to arrest and convict for the thieves.

00:17:04.400 But there obviously are more people involved.

00:17:08.120 Who were just never caught.

00:17:11.080 Correct.

00:17:11.460 And I've spent some time with the police in Turin.

00:17:15.920 And they're definitely, they have some ideas and some thoughts.

00:17:18.240 And they definitely know they're part of a loose association of thieves known as the School of Turin.

00:17:23.260 So these are high-end thieves who come together for a particular job.

00:17:27.020 And they definitely would need a fence away to get these diamonds back into the legitimate stream of commerce

00:17:33.180 and other things along those lines.

00:17:34.980 It's fascinating that it was a bag of trash thrown off the side of the road that tipped off the police and got them.

00:17:44.180 And I'm wondering what, if anything, it'll be for this heist.

00:17:48.140 I mean, if they even can.

00:17:50.780 That remains to be seen.

00:17:53.460 You said they needed, in the diamond heist, they needed to find a way to get that back into the legitimate market.

00:18:00.940 And that might be easier for diamonds than gold.

00:18:05.900 Gold, you've got all these bars.

00:18:07.180 You've got to be able to melt them down to get rid of the serial numbers, perhaps.

00:18:11.020 Or sell them to somebody who doesn't care that they've got stamps and serial numbers on them.

00:18:18.300 That'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.

00:18:26.360 Well, the thing with diamonds is there's a lot of different ones there.

00:18:30.720 But 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?

00:18:45.720 And diamonds can move very quickly in the diamond district or anywhere in the world, really.

00:18:50.480 They could just change hands, you know.

00:18:52.100 There are some diamonds that you would have to do work on and you would need a corrupt polisher to polish something off.

00:18:59.480 Or there are a few that would be really difficult to move.

00:19:02.040 So if you have a very large, fancy, you know, colorful diamond, that's hard.

00:19:09.180 There's diamonds, for instance, diamonds from Canada.

00:19:11.920 Canada does this amazing job with marketing, right?

00:19:14.320 Because there are concerns about the environment, about human rights, about blood diamonds, all these sort of things.

00:19:21.280 So 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.

00:19:31.020 So that's the sort of thing that you might have to remove.

00:19:33.480 But you're right.

00:19:34.080 Like, 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.

00:19:44.720 But, yeah, gold is going to be really difficult because it is going to have these serial numbers on it.

00:19:50.620 And things have changed.

00:19:51.720 Like, 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.

00:20:00.900 But obviously now there would be a million questions.

00:20:02.900 So 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.

00:20:20.700 Or if you don't know how to do that, to just, you know, hide it until you do.

00:20:26.220 And the good thing about stealing gold is gold basically keeps up with inflation.

00:20:31.780 So 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.

00:20:37.720 So it just sort of depends.

00:20:38.920 But I would imagine, as we talked about previously, you and I, that it's left the country.

00:20:46.740 All right.

00:20:46.900 We'll talk about that when we come back from this quick break.

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00:21:50.560 So you case the joint at Pearson for a while.

00:21:53.120 You sit with the Brinks truck drivers behind the diner across the street from the cargo area.

00:21:58.460 You figure out patterns.

00:22:00.060 You pull off the heist.

00:22:01.160 But what do you do with the gold after that?

00:22:04.200 That 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.

00:22:14.660 Scott, 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.

00:22:26.880 Small amounts, small amounts, trading it in because we can't trace foreign banknotes.

00:22:32.340 We just, the police don't have the capability to do that.

00:22:35.280 But getting gold out of the country, it's not like you can just turn around and put it on another airplane all that easily.

00:22:42.800 Unless you're smuggling it out in small amounts, getting that big cargo thing on there, there's going to be paperwork.

00:22:49.980 You're going to have to explain what it is.

00:22:51.760 You're going to have to vouch for it.

00:22:54.180 So all of these things would be a record.

00:22:56.620 But 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?

00:23:07.920 That depends on who our thieves are, right?

00:23:11.280 So if these are people with deep connections to organized crime, then 100%, right?

00:23:17.000 They're just going to tap into existing networks that would be used in Canada for illegal drugs primarily, right?

00:23:24.240 Those are similar sizes, similar high values, right?

00:23:29.020 And there are other parts of the world where there are smuggling things, smuggling methods already in place for gold, right?

00:23:37.100 Because, for instance, somewhere like India, if I remember correctly, is like 18%.

00:23:42.560 There's these huge taxes.

00:23:43.920 So it's the sort of thing where people smuggle for those reasons.

00:23:47.480 But again, this depends on who our thieves are, right?

00:23:50.380 If 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.

00:23:58.440 They may have been so focused on getting the gold, they may not know.

00:24:02.120 There also could be small-time thieves that are in over their heads.

00:24:05.440 You know, maybe this is more than they expected.

00:24:07.940 That's happened.

00:24:08.940 And then they would probably just go to whoever the local fence is.

00:24:12.220 But it's very different bringing in $22 million in gold to the guy that you normally sell stolen TVs to, right?

00:24:18.580 So there could be all sorts of issues.

00:24:21.700 And if it were me, if I didn't have very strong ties with local organized crime, honestly, I would just stay away from them.

00:24:28.940 Because I would be much more afraid of them than the police, right?

00:24:32.000 Because 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?

00:24:46.600 So even if you figure out who did the robbery, you're not going to connect it to whoever, you know, moves it on.

00:24:52.460 So, again, I just, I'm not really sure.

00:24:56.260 There's a lot of factors at play.

00:24:58.400 And 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.

00:25:06.860 Oh, 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.

00:25:22.540 But I can't imagine being that person and then sitting there not knowing what to do with that much gold.

00:25:31.000 I mean, I would be afraid, and, you know, there'd be people I'd be much more afraid of than the Canadian police.

00:25:41.060 We've, you know, whether it's movies, Thomas Crown Affair, Great Train Robbery, Goodfellas, things of this nature have been portrayed.

00:25:52.760 And oftentimes the people are caught.

00:25:55.680 Other times there's not.

00:25:56.740 I 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.

00:26:10.520 How often do people get away with these big heists?

00:26:14.880 Is it more often than not?

00:26:17.400 You've looked at the European networks like the School of Turin or the Pink Panthers. 0.91

00:26:23.100 I mean, if they always get caught, you know, they wouldn't go through with it, I guess.

00:26:29.580 Well, there's a risk, right?

00:26:31.300 So there's a few things at play.

00:26:34.640 You know, the ability to do this.

00:26:36.580 These are these sort of art heists.

00:26:39.260 Honestly, a lot of them, it doesn't take a lot of ability.

00:26:42.500 But a $22 million gold heist, that takes a lot of ability, right?

00:26:46.400 Or hundreds of millions of dollars in diamonds.

00:26:48.900 But there's also a risk element, right?

00:26:50.500 So 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.

00:27:06.360 There'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.

00:27:13.760 But for a lot of people, that would be worth it.

00:27:16.460 You know, it would very much be worth it.

00:27:17.860 And, you know, they would try to do this.

00:27:21.980 I 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.

00:27:38.060 So it was a short jail sentence.

00:27:39.260 And they thought, man, two years, I can sweat that.

00:27:41.580 And then I know where the millions are at the end.

00:27:43.940 So I would have trouble with the morals of it above and beyond the jail time.

00:27:49.600 I mean, I'm the same, but there's a lot of people that wouldn't.

00:27:53.200 I 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.

00:28:00.020 I mean, there's people that would do it.

00:28:01.660 The legal concept that you're referring to is known as double jeopardy, right?

00:28:06.220 If you've already been tried for a crime, you can't be tried for it again.

00:28:10.120 But that can get a bit complicated, right?

00:28:13.840 Because, for instance, you can't be tried again.

00:28:16.900 Whether you're found not guilty or guilty doesn't matter, right?

00:28:19.500 But you can't be tried again for the actual heist.

00:28:22.620 But there's going to be other things these days.

00:28:25.280 You know, the way you're moving the money, what you're doing with it, there could be things that they could do.

00:28:30.120 And there also might be civil things where the government's able to take the loot away from you.

00:28:35.920 But, so yeah, personally, I wouldn't just do two years just to get rid of that double jeopardy aspect.

00:28:43.940 You mentioned earlier the School of Turin.

00:28:47.220 And it fascinates me that there are these groups that, quite frankly, sound like Ocean's Eleven.

00:28:55.660 And they exist.

00:28:57.940 There's School of Turin, there's Pink Panthers. 1.00

00:29:00.120 I think they're based out of France.

00:29:01.360 Do these groups exist in North America as well?

00:29:06.800 Or the high-end syndicates that will spend years planning a high-end robbery?

00:29:12.400 Do they just exist in Europe?

00:29:14.860 No.

00:29:15.480 And the Pink Panthers, they'll travel anywhere in the world. 1.00

00:29:19.500 They came out of the just brutal dissolution of Yugoslavia right after the fall of the Soviet Union.

00:29:26.380 So their MO is the opposite of the School of Turin.

00:29:28.880 And the School of Turin are professionals who have legitimate businesses in the field that enable them to learn.

00:29:35.360 So a locksmith business, an alarms business where they never rob their customers.

00:29:41.200 And they'll travel around Europe and do a job.

00:29:43.640 And their MO is you show up Monday morning and discover you've been robbed, right?

00:29:48.020 The Pink Panthers are the opposite. 0.86

00:29:49.400 It's a military-like approach where they show up with overwhelming force and they take what they need and they get away.

00:29:59.640 It's more like a – yeah.

00:30:02.000 So the School of Turin is more Ocean's Eleven.

00:30:04.940 It's a magic trick, whereas the Pink Panthers are more like a Mission Impossible, some sort of Hollywood thing. 1.00

00:30:11.040 They've literally had things where they've gotten away in speed boats, you know, just crazy stuff.

00:30:15.260 But 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.

00:30:28.800 And 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?

00:30:36.700 So there's two sort of characters.

00:30:38.240 It's sort of like in the Cold War, there's the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

00:30:41.360 So 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.

00:30:50.660 Maybe one of your listeners would have that skill set.

00:30:53.000 I don't know.

00:30:54.820 Maybe somebody tuned in just for this subject.

00:30:56.860 But 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?

00:31:11.800 So that is an issue.

00:31:14.140 Two years.

00:31:15.460 The Antwerp Diamond Heist was at least two years in the making.

00:31:20.080 And there are other groups.

00:31:21.820 I mean, the groups I mentioned are well-known at this point.

00:31:24.700 I 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.

00:31:34.400 You know, so that sort of cuts off the connection.

00:31:37.320 And 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.

00:31:50.480 And 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.

00:32:01.700 And so, for instance, in Dresden, Germany, just two days ago, people were sentenced for a very big jewelry heist there out of a museum.

00:32:10.960 And this was a local criminal group that handled all sorts of stuff.

00:32:15.080 It was a crime family that had come to Berlin in the 80s.

00:32:18.960 And they knew how to do this kind of stuff, and they were willing to do it.

00:32:25.220 There are an increasing number of hotel heists you've told me about.

00:32:30.520 Now, you know, just from breathing the air, we would all know about the Kim Kardashian jewel heist in Paris a few years ago.

00:32:39.400 You couldn't escape that.

00:32:40.420 It was in the headlines everywhere.

00:32:41.680 There are $10 million worth of jewelry stolen out of a hotel safe.

00:32:46.300 I feel weird leaving my passport in those little hotel safes.

00:32:50.760 I'm sure Kardashians had a nicer hotel and a better safe, but still, it's not high-end security.

00:32:57.360 Is that becoming a target for these syndicates or crime groups?

00:33:03.400 It can be.

00:33:04.420 It even could be locals.

00:33:05.660 I 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.

00:33:17.900 You know, for the tourists, it could be, you know, losing 1,000 euros could be a real big hit.

00:33:22.480 But in terms of people looking to target the bigger scores, I mean, this is definitely a soft target, right?

00:33:32.180 When 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.

00:33:39.900 That's a really hard thing to do.

00:33:41.380 But, 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.

00:34:01.720 And 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?

00:34:11.200 And so that could be something worth targeting.

00:34:14.980 And a really interesting thing now is also social media, right?

00:34:18.140 So you see that there's a certain celebrity.

00:34:21.840 You see what they're wearing.

00:34:23.000 You see where they're going.

00:34:24.100 You see that they're, you know, out on the town.

00:34:26.200 And they're not doing a delay.

00:34:28.360 Like, maybe the ones that are really security conscious, they're waiting until, you know, some time has passed.

00:34:33.060 But a lot of these things are live, especially with video.

00:34:35.660 So it's almost like having a big sign, like, hey, I'm not in my hotel room.

00:34:40.540 I've got emeralds around my neck.

00:34:43.320 They'll be in the safe later on.

00:34:45.460 A hundred percent.

00:34:46.700 And obviously, breaking into a hotel safe is, I mean, there's a lot of people that could do that.

00:34:52.020 That's like one step up from being an expert pickpocket.

00:34:55.280 I 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.

00:35:08.060 I just realized that we didn't really get into the 1952 heist too much.

00:35:13.200 And I know you've studied that.

00:35:14.320 That 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.

00:35:30.560 So Phil is in on that one.

00:35:33.020 And my understanding is a bunch of gold showed up.

00:35:37.060 Only some of it made it to its destination.

00:35:40.800 That's true.

00:35:41.560 And I will say in terms of movies and books, I mean, it really helps if it's solved.

00:35:46.860 Right.

00:35:47.060 I mean, if it's high profile enough, like the Gardner heist, a famous heist at a museum, then sure, people are going to write about it.

00:35:54.060 They'll speculate, you know, or D.B. Cooper when he, you know, stole money and jumped off a plane.

00:35:59.840 I mean, in the Pacific Northwest, that's worth talking about.

00:36:02.860 Right.

00:36:03.800 But even a big heist, it disappears from the news.

00:36:07.200 Right.

00:36:07.400 So you're local.

00:36:08.340 You're covering this amazing story by you.

00:36:10.720 But eventually it'll peter out, you know, five, 10 years.

00:36:13.660 It's not going to be a movie.

00:36:14.900 But if you catch these people.

00:36:16.400 Right.

00:36:16.760 And then you have a record of their criminal proceedings that might be worth, you know, a book, a movie script.

00:36:22.640 Yeah.

00:36:22.800 Yeah.

00:36:23.740 So the very thing.

00:36:26.120 So it's very ironic because the very thing that makes the 1952 heist so amazing is also the thing that makes it something that.

00:36:33.460 People might not want to make a movie out of, which is that this gold just disappeared.

00:36:38.240 You know, it was.

00:36:40.460 And it's also I love rooting these things in the history of the place and the time.

00:36:44.960 And this is Canadian history.

00:36:46.260 So basically what was happening to fill you in a little bit is.

00:36:51.860 It's basically it's a story of a magic trick in which half a ton of gold disappeared.

00:36:55.880 Right.

00:36:56.460 While it was in secure transit.

00:36:58.500 And so gold is pouring out of the mines in northern Ontario.

00:37:01.600 And it was coming into smelters in Toronto.

00:37:04.160 And they turned it into industrial quality gold.

00:37:06.960 So this isn't what's just being sold to normal people.

00:37:09.600 Right.

00:37:09.900 It's 22 carat.

00:37:11.320 And so basically what happened is it was a Tuesday afternoon, September 24th, 1952.

00:37:18.060 Once again, a Brinks armored car pulls in to the same exact airport, different name, same airport.

00:37:23.760 It has 10 reinforced boxes of industrial gold.

00:37:27.260 Right.

00:37:28.100 Brinks is there just to do the handoff.

00:37:29.820 They watch the handoff to the cargo people and they leave.

00:37:33.060 Right.

00:37:33.260 They've done their job.

00:37:34.760 So the cargo workers, they measure it, make sure it matches the manifest, sign off on them, give a receipt.

00:37:41.940 And then they put it in a temporary storage area.

00:37:44.660 Right.

00:37:44.880 A cargo storage area.

00:37:46.920 And then there's a lot of confusion about exactly what happened.

00:37:50.740 There was a cargo handler.

00:37:52.320 I'll just use his initials.

00:37:53.700 I assume he's dead by now, but you never know.

00:37:55.900 Right.

00:37:56.100 I'll just say HH, young man at the time.

00:37:58.140 And he was sort of responsible for getting on the plane, but there was a lot of moving parts.

00:38:03.100 He left it unattended to help some people.

00:38:05.480 Some other people were doing some other stuff, but everybody thought that it was on the plane.

00:38:09.840 Right.

00:38:10.800 So the plane, the plane is, is in air.

00:38:16.520 It's an airline that no longer exists called TCA, Trans-Canadian Airlines.

00:38:22.540 Right.

00:38:24.020 And it came in a bit late.

00:38:25.780 There's a rush to unpack it and, um, oh, sorry, this is in Montreal and the cargo holders,

00:38:33.800 it's their job to empty this out.

00:38:35.300 And they see that the manifest lists 10 boxes, 10 boxes are put on, but there's only four boxes.

00:38:42.740 So six boxes, and these are heavy.

00:38:45.540 Uh, I did the math.

00:38:46.720 It's, uh, I think it's 848 pounds.

00:38:49.860 Um, we're just gone.

00:38:51.560 Each, each box is total.

00:38:54.660 Sorry.

00:38:55.780 That's a lot of weight.

00:38:56.960 Yeah.

00:38:57.200 That would have been the Hulk, but that's still a lot.

00:38:59.280 Right.

00:39:00.220 So, um, you know, and as we talked about before with sort of coverups, it's kind of like, um,

00:39:06.280 maybe you noticed something was missing at work and you want to first, you know, make sure

00:39:10.120 it's just totally gone before you call the police.

00:39:12.440 So it's kind of like that.

00:39:13.500 They're trying to look into this, sort this out, figure out what's going on.

00:39:16.780 Eventually they bring in the police and it's just a dead end.

00:39:20.880 The police look at the cargo loaders.

00:39:22.960 They, you know, they follow them in life, you know, but this guy that I mentioned, he's

00:39:27.720 not living large.

00:39:28.960 He doesn't suddenly have, um, you know, a Ferrari.

00:39:31.460 He doesn't suddenly have a lake house.

00:39:33.640 Um, but these are things that people look at.

00:39:36.400 So, you know, we talked about this, you and I, a little bit before, but that's going to

00:39:40.140 be one thing with this heist.

00:39:41.400 Maybe if they can't sort out the most recent airport heist, right?

00:39:44.660 If they can't sort it out right away, they will be keeping an eye on these people, right?

00:39:49.100 And people today, hopefully they're, well, hopefully for them, they're smart enough not

00:39:52.940 to just suddenly buy a big house, you know, something like that.

00:39:55.760 But they, you know, might have some vacation stuff, you know, um, one of my favorite things,

00:40:02.020 I think it's Superman too, is Richard Pryor's a computer hacker who steals a bunch of money

00:40:06.420 and the bosses at the company say, we'll never catch this guy.

00:40:10.000 And he shows up at the company at work in a brand new car with brand new clothes, right?

00:40:14.660 So, um, yes, we'll be on the lookout for the, uh, the Richard Pryor Superman to telltale

00:40:22.700 sign.

00:40:23.080 That's always there.

00:40:23.980 And you got to realize, I mean, people mess up, people talk, people get drunk.

00:40:29.700 Um, things happen.

00:40:31.000 Maybe their, their spouse knows and later they get a divorce. 1.00

00:40:34.040 Somebody drops a dime on them.

00:40:36.060 Uh, maybe somebody gets caught for something else.

00:40:39.060 Uh, maybe there's a reward put out.

00:40:41.480 Um, you know, things, things happen.

00:40:44.860 Um, not so much with these monetary things, but especially with some of these big art heists

00:40:49.120 that aren't really worth that much money or they're impossible to move.

00:40:53.580 Um, maybe somebody later on turns in the loot.

00:40:56.100 I mean, that's, that's happened before.

00:40:58.000 I looked at, uh, you mentioned a museum heist in your area before a while back and there were

00:41:05.180 some similar heists.

00:41:05.860 There were a lot of museum heists at the time and, um, in some of them that people just

00:41:10.300 turned in the works later.

00:41:11.600 Uh, and ironically, it also turned out that some of these works weren't actually what anybody

00:41:16.060 thought they were.

00:41:16.820 They weren't actually, you know, a Rembrandt that's happened as well.

00:41:21.520 Scott, thanks so much for your time.

00:41:23.180 It's been a fascinating conversation and, um, I'm sure people have their own favorite high

00:41:28.040 story or things to watch.

00:41:29.360 And, uh, we'll continue to be fascinated by this strange side world of, of crime.

00:41:37.060 Thank you so much for having me on Brian.

00:41:38.460 I really appreciate it.

00:41:40.100 Full comment is a post media podcast.

00:41:42.680 My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:41:44.200 This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:41:48.460 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:41:51.020 Remember, you can subscribe to full comment on Apple podcasts, Google, Spotify, and Amazon

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00:42:07.860 I'm Brian Lilly.

Full Comment - May 29, 2023

Cracking the $20-million Pearson Airport gold heist

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