Was Pearson heist an ‘inside job?’ Questions swirl with $20M in gold, goods stolen | 24CA News
As Toronto-area police probe $20 million price of stolen gold and different “high-value” objects at Canada’s largest airport, specialists say the heist has components of an “inside job.”
Peel Regional Police, who examine crime within the cities of Mississauga and Brampton, are probing how a container carrying the gold and different dear items vanished from Toronto Pearson International Airport earlier this week.
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Container with $20M in gold, ‘high value’ objects stolen in Toronto Pearson airport heist
The heist, which made worldwide headlines Thursday, has the hallmarks of an inside job, stated Stephen Schneider, a criminology professor at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
“It certainly sounds like something that was planned, premeditated and obviously required some level of organization not simply to access the gold, but to be able to remove it from the airport,” he advised Global News.
“This is something that goes on at ports of entry all the time — the theft of the cargo — but very rarely is the value of the cargo this expensive or this valuable.”
According to Peel Regional Police Insp. Stephen Duivesteyn, an plane carrying the dear cargo landed at Pearson on Monday night. Its cargo was transported to a holding facility the place it was “removed by illegal means.”
“We’re looking at all angles on how this item was stolen, so I don’t really have a lot of details on how it was stolen to provide or any suspect,” Duivesteyn advised reporters Thursday. He didn’t say which airline shipped the cargo, the place the cargo was headed, or the place the aircraft got here from.
“We’re unable to provide specifics to this investigation because we’re three days in.”
Peel Police Insp. Stephen Duivesteyn speaks to the media concerning a theft at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Mississauga, Ont., on Thursday.
Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
Police had no new data to share as of publication time Friday.
The public first grew to become conscious of the heist Thursday. Earlier that day, the RCMP advised Global News that Peel police was investigating a “gold heist” at Pearson. The drive’s airport division has been main the investigation.
The “very rare” theft is believed to be an remoted incident, Duivesteyn stated.
The facility the place the heist occurred isn’t managed by Pearson’s operator, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA). It made that time in a press release Thursday night time.
“The GTAA wishes to clarify that thieves accessed the public side of a warehouse that is leased to a third party, outside of our primary security line,” a spokesperson stated.
“This did not involve access to Toronto Pearson itself and did not pose a threat to passengers or GTAA staff.”
If the ability was managed by the authority, it could have “very high sophisticated security everywhere,” stated Patrick Straw, govt director of the Canadian Security Association.
Regardless, $20 million price of cargo would have warranted excessive safety on the facility, he stated.
“Not only would there be physical protection, surveillance and everything else, but generally the whole procedures from what happens in money handling right from the time it’s removed off of a vehicle and put into a storage facility and picked up, everything has to be logged in and out — there’s usually fairly sophisticated procedures to negate something like this happening,” he stated.
“If somebody who works in the facility, who is authorized to be there, is involved in the process — it’s way easier (to steal) … it would be surprising … if somebody just randomly walked in and took it, because it’s not a very easy thing to do in those kinds of warehouses.”
Gold, items probably ‘long gone’
During Thursday’s news convention, Duivesteyn stopped in need of saying it was an expert job.
But police are probably probing the concept of an inside job with hyperlinks to organized crime, Schneider stated.
“The two are linked in the sense that criminal groups are known to have operatives work at official ports of entry … the first thing they’ll look at is: to what extent was this an inside job? The second thing they’ll look at, given the fact it was so organized, (is) … individuals or groups that may have been involved in cargo theft in the past, groups that are capable of carrying this out that would have the equipment, the means to do so,” he stated.
“You’re looking at … identifying individuals who would be capable of carrying this out, and even possibly doing everything possible to try to track these goods down … (but) it’s pretty much guaranteed the goods are probably out of Ontario and perhaps even on a cargo ship heading out of Port of Montreal or Halifax, somewhere to Europe or Africa.”
Selling these items could be robust, but it surely’s a lot simpler to get them in another country and promote it on the black market, Schneider prompt.
“In Toronto … there are tens of millions of dollars worth of luxury cars that are stolen every year from the GTA that are shipped off through the Port of Montreal or Halifax to Africa, to Eastern Europe, to the Middle East,” he stated.
“It’s not the bulk or even the value that’s the important variable — it’s the internal conspiracies inside a port that are able to manipulate the data to get past customs … that’s why I say something like this is obviously well-organized and obviously someone on the inside (is) helping out.”
— with information from Global News’ Hannah Jackson, Kyle Benning and The Canadian Press
© 2023 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
