Not just gold missing from mint

The biggest gold heist in Canada remains the 1974 Ottawa airport theft by the Stop Watch Gang headed by Paddy Mitchell, the most infamous hood to come out of Ottawa. In an article he wrote for this newspaper in 2000, Mitchell revealed how the trio stole more than $750,000 in gold from the Ottawa airport and en route to the mint.

"We needed an inside man who could tell us when the gold arrived and how much there was," Mitchell wrote. "The guy I recruited worked on the night shift and was a petty thief who had been stealing things at the airport for years -- mostly nickel-and-dime stuff.

"We had to get past an armed guard into a locked warehouse, break into a security room, lug out six gold bars weighing 65 pounds each and hope that the RCMP or the city police didn't drive by the busy access road and notice something amiss.

"Minutes later the guard's head was covered and he was handcuffed to a steel bar. Stephen (Reid) let Lionel (Wright) in through the door, the gold bars were loaded into the car and they hit it down the road with the car 4,380 troy ounces heavier than it was when it arrived. At least, that's what know-it-all journalists and book authors wrote. The truth is we just re-labelled the boxes in the cargo area and Air Canada very generously delivered them to us in Windsor the next day.

"I shipped five bars of gold across the Windsor-Detroit border, collected $250,000 cash as a downpayment and got a promise of another $250,000 when (a middleman fence) sold the gold. I never saw another dime from it."

Mitchell was convicted in 1977 on that and other crimes, and sentenced to 17 years behind bars. He escaped from a Kingston prison two years later. He died in a U.S. prison in 2007.

Before the Stop Watch Gang, the "Flying Bandit" is believed to have held the Canadian gold theft record. Winnipegger Ken Leishman, a bush pilot-turned-bandit, staged a series of bank and other robberies in the '60s and '70s, escaping from police in a small plane.

In March 1966, he and two accomplices dressed in Air Canada overalls pulled up to a small plane that has just landed with a reported 360 kilograms of gold ingots being delivered to the mint's Winnipeg plant. Leishman signed a receipt and the men drove off with the gold, valued at $400,000.

Globally, the biggest gold theft in modern times remains the 1983 London Heathrow Brinks Mat job. More than three tonnes of gold ingots, then worth about 26 million pounds sterling or $110 million Cdn based on today's price of gold, were stolen by six armed men dressed in security uniforms.

The suspects burst into the security company's Heathrow Airport depot the morning of Nov. 26, 1983, disarmed a security system, doused two guards with gasoline and threatened to set them on fire unless they revealed the combination to a vault.

Expecting to find cash, they instead found the gold packed into 76 cardboard boxes, plus two boxes of diamonds.

A handful of men were arrested and imprisoned, including another warehouse guard who gave the gang inside information. But police believe as many as 15 suspects were in on the heist, some of whom retired to luxurious European homes and villas.

The BBC reports some of the gold simply vanished into a criminal underworld and reappeared in foreign bank accounts in Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Miami and the Bahamas. Much remains missing today. It is claimed in some quarters that anyone wearing gold jewelry bought in the United Kingdom after 1983 is probably wearing Brinks Mat.

imacleod@thecitizen.canwest.com

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