Anniversary of the perfect crime

It was and remains the perfect crime.

At the time is was also the biggest gold heist in Canadian history with various reports estimating the value at between 215 to 330-thousand dollars (depending on whether the fixed price or black-market price was used). In today’s value that would be over 2-million dollars.

Not only was no-one hurt, no shots were fired, no guns seen, but in fact, no-one even saw the robbery of gold bars and to this day no-one was caught and it’s not even certain even as to how the theft was accomplished.

In 1953, the International Monetary Fund had relaxed gold regulations which meant that the many gold mining companies in Canada could sell gold on the open market to industrial clients rather than specifically to the Canadian Mint.

The Mint had stipulated that “industrial” gold must be 22-carat to distinguish it from their monetary quality of 24-carat.

Thus northern Ontario mines regularly shipped gold for refining to companies in Toronto, where it was debased to 22-carat before shipment to Montreal and then on to industrial buyers in England and Europe.

On this date September 24 in 1952, ten boxes of gold bars were waiting in a locked steel cage in the Trans Canada Airlines warehouse at Toronto’s Malton airport (now Pearson Int”l)  to be loaded onto a cargo flight to Montreal.

When the plane arrived in Montreal later that night, only four boxes were found.

The idea of a theft was not even considered at first. The airline first thought the boxes were misplaced, then that they had been loaded onto a wrong plane.

Eventually, they contacted their own police service, and only late the next day were the RCMP, Ontario, and municipal police brought in.

After questioning all the staff and observing another of the regular gold shipments. They noted at the time that the wire cage would be difficult to break open and indeed had not been tampered with.

The timeline they established said the gold arrived by armoured truck at 16:46 at the airport. The airline official signed for the ten boxes. They were then weighed and locked in the secure cage.

At 20:10 a single  employee began loading the boxes on to a cargo cart as was the established practice. He said it took him about six minutes as each box weighed about 40kg and he could only load one at a time.

Police said this meant that the theft probably involved more than one person.

On his way to the tarmac, he stopped to get mail destined for Montreal, leaving the cart unattended for about 3-4 minutes. He then took the cart over to the plane which had arrived late from Winnipeg.

Leaving the cart aside he helped unload the plane, then went to get some documents from the terminal. Arriving back at the plane, he found his cart empty and that someone had loaded the gold on the plane.

The plane then took off and upon arriving in Montreal it was discovered six boxes were missing.

Lengthy interrogations of all staff involved turned up nothing and police were baffled.

At the time a roadway ran right along the airport buildings, and police theorized that a gang made a lightning raid on the gold aboard the cart, took it to cars beside the storage area and then drove away. Intially they thought it was smuggled to the US and then overseas, but much later, felt it probably had been hidden in Ontario until the heat was off.  At the time gold prices were kept artificially low at around 35$ an ounce, but on the black market it could easily fetch double.

Because of that, there had been a rash of large gold thefts in Ontario and Quebec in the early 1950’s.

In this case, the biggest ever, police firmly suspected someone “inside” had tipped off the thieves , likely a well-organized gang with international connections.  In the end Trans-Canada Airlines was criticized for its lax handling of the gold, and paid to customers in Switzerland and England for the lost gold.

Although there were bigger gold thefts in later years, in this case, the gold was never recovered, and no-one was ever charged.

It remains the perfect crime.