The THREE mistakes that doomed the $20-million airport gold heist 🧱✈️

uncategorized

The THREE mistakes that doomed the $20-million airport gold heist 🧱✈️


It took precisely one year but I can finallytell you exactly how they pulled the baffling $22 million Toronto Airport gold heist, whois accused of pulling it off, and the two — no, the three — three stupid mistakes that ruined whatlooked like a flawless score. The Mob Reporter here with new details and and exclusive revelationson the biggest ever gold heist in Canada, a job that ranks sixth on the list of all-time biggestgold robberies, and one that was a daring big ticket score of a lifetime. It seemed destinedto be another unsolved mystery and it might well have stayed that way if it weren't for theseseemingly small but significant slips that doomed it all, leading to a wave of arrests in Canadafor the stolen gold, and more in the United States for a related plot — International gun running.I've got both ends covered. Let me tell you.

About it. First the heist. Let's break itdown. 6,600 variously sized bars of almost pure gold, along with $2 million in US cash. It wasall inside a single shipping container aboard an Air Canada flight from Zurich, Switzerland, thattouched down down at 3:56 p.m. on April 17, 2023. It was unloaded from the plane on the tarmac anddriven on an armored truck through an underground tunnel that goes beneath the runways to a cargowarehouse on the edge of the airport. The gold bullion weighed slightly more than 400 kg. Forthose that don't do metric, that's 14,116 ounces of gold, or more than 882 pounds of it. A year ago it wasworth more than 20 million Canadian dollars. Today it's worth more than 35 million. Gold has been on arun. The gold was sent by a refinery in Switzerland and was heading to one of Canada's major banks.It never made it there. At 6:32 p.m., a man who.

Looked like he knew what he was doing arrived atthe airport cargo facility and reversed a plain white 5-ton truck into one of the many loadingbays. He was wearing a hat, glasses, medical mask, and heavy work gloves — but he had a safetyvest on so no one seemed to give him much notice. Inside he talked to Air Canada staff and handedover an air waybill, which was a real Air Canada shipping sheet previously printed from within theAir Canada warehouse. But even though the waybill actually says it's for 1,200 kilos of seafood fromScotland and, in fact, had already been released the day before, someone in the warehouse delivered thelarge shipping crate of gold from Switzerland on a fork lift and placed it inside the white truck. Wesee that going on here: the cargo handler and the driver with a $24 million box. The driver then justdrove away with it. Brink's security didn't arrive.

Until 9:30 p.m.. When the container couldn't befound Air Canada began an internal investigation, police said. And police weren't called until 2:43a.m. — that gave the bandits an 8-hour head start. That's how they pulled the heist off —smooth, quick,simple. No guns, no violence, no noise. Here is the truck trundling off. It looked like they got awayclean. Now here's something new I can tell you — the gold didn't go much further, not at that time. Thegold was whisked into a local jewelry store where most of it was melted in a makeshift forgein the store's basement. That's what the lead investigator told me. Molten gold was pouredinto casts to turn bars into long strips and this machine twisted and turned gold into crudebracelets. They look like cheap bangles but when they're made of pure gold they are worth quite alot. Just six that were recovered are worth about.

$90,000. So, for the bandits it's so far so good.But here's where the bandits made their first mistake. While the driver did a great job ofhiding his face, he made one slip. You see it here. Look closely. He took his glove offhis left hand to hold some paperwork, leaving a wayward fingerprint behind. The lead investigatorconfirmed to me that a fingerprint analysis was their first break that led to identifyingthe driver, as I reveal in my reporting in the National Post. Police identified him as DuranteKing-Mclean, 25 years old, of Brampton, Ontario. When they went to arrest King-Mclean, though, they gothis truck but the driver was a ghost. Until he made made a second big, stupid mistake. 360 milessouth of the airport, across the Canada-U.S. border, in Pennsylvania, a State Trooper pulled over thedriver of a Nissan Sentra on September 2, 2023..

The trooper said he spotted the car swerving outof its lane and its windshields were tinted too dark. Troopers say the driver ran away when theystopped him, but he didn't get far. It was Durante King-Mclean. A police database flagged himas being wanted by police in Canada. When state troopers opened the trunk of the Nissan,they didn't find stolen gold, but they did find 65 handguns. The firearms were being smuggledinto Canada, according to an indictment filed in U.S. court. Two of the guns were modified to befully automatic, 11 had been stolen, and one had an obliterated serial number. The U.S. federal ATFtook over the gun-running case. They searched the driver's phone and allegedly found messageson Threema, an encrypted messaging app, and through Instagram, between King-Mclean and Prasath Paramalingam,a 35-year-old Brampton man. Messages from shortly.

After the gold heist discussed King-Mclean illegallycrossing the border to get guns to smuggle back to Canada, the indictment claims. Paramalingamtold King-Mclean he is going to leave Portugal to get cash for him, and the next day he sent King-Mcleana photograph of large stacks of Canadian currency wrapped with rubber bands, the indictmentsays. That description matches cash Canadian police seized in the case; these stacks, $430,000 inCanadian currency. Investigators on both sides of the border kept unraveling both a gold and agun plot. The U.S. indictment was unsealed on April 16th. The next morning, on the one-year anniversaryof the gold heist, officials gathered about 4 miles from the scene of the crime to make a surpriseannouncement: Five men accused in the heist were arrested in Canada and had already been releasedfrom custody pending trial. Four more are wanted.

In Canada, although one, King-Mclean, the allegeddriver, is in custody in Pennsylvania. Four people were indicted in the U.S. in the gun case, includingKing-Mclean and Paramalingam, who was pinched in Canada and may face extradition to the U.S. One guy, ArchitGrover, 36, of Brampton is considered a fugitive in Canada and the United States, wanted in both cases.Now this next part is key to how they pulled off the heist. Among those accused in Canada are twomen who were Air Canada employees at the time. Get this: one of them Simran Preet Panesar, was a managerin the cargo warehouse who even gave police investigators their tour of the crime scene at thefacility shortly after the heist. How's that for an inside man. A few months later he resigned from AirCanada, but when police went to speak with him he had already disappeared. He's still a fugitive, at leastat the time I made this video. How many people were.

Involved in the heist? We get a clue to that here.In their raids, police found these two versions of a debt list. Investigators believe they outlinewho received a portion of the profits from the job, and although police blurred the names before I gotthem, there appears to be 18 names on each list. And the names are the same on both. Police are tryingto identify them all. Now, here is the third big mistake. After the heist, one of the accusedAir Canada cargo employees, Parmpal Sidhu, posted photos of his lavish lifestyle on his Instagramand Facebook pages. “Wow, what a gorgeous pool, uh, Infinity pool, on the third floor at the St..” “Checkout this wine cellar at the St Regis bar. Insane. I've never seen anything like this.” His postsdocument a jetsetter's life of international travel, first class plane tickets, fancy watches,and feasting and drinking in hedonistic bliss..

He documented a trip to Dubai just weeks after theheist and another there in December. “One last trip to close off a wonderful year,” he said, leavingfrom Pearson airport to Dubai. Dubai, by the way, is one of the world's top dirty gold trading hubs.It's impossible to believe that police wouldn't be looking carefully at a guy on a warehouseman'swage living it up like a millionaire Playboy while 22 million in gold and cash is missing. Maybeit will all be explained away, perhaps in court. After all, charges are only allegations. Pleasegive this video a like, and leave a comment to juice the algorithm. Make sure you're subscribedto my channel, and please tap the Thanks button to leave me a tip. That all helps keep myfire burning. Thanks for watching to the end.

Sharing is caring!

3 thoughts on “The THREE mistakes that doomed the $20-million airport gold heist 🧱✈️

Leave a Reply