On April 17, 2023, Air Canada Flight 881 departed Zurich on time, for a scheduled arrival at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport at four P.M. Eastern Standard Time.
This was no ordinary flight. In addition to the 300-plus passengers on board, the Boeing 777 was carrying precious cargo in the form of 6,600 gold bars, worth approximately $15 million at the time (a figure that has since nearly tripled, with the increase in the price of gold, surpassing $40 million).
The gold, contained in a nondescript, bubble-wrapped crate, had been sent from Valcambi, the Swiss precious-metals refinery, for delivery to the TD Bank in downtown Toronto. Brink’s, the international security-transport company known for its armored trucks, had been hired to ensure that the gold, as well as $1.9 million in cash headed for the Vancouver Bullion & Currency Exchange, made it to their destinations safely.
Flight 881 landed at 3:56 P.M., four minutes ahead of schedule. From there, the gold was unloaded from the plane’s cargo hold and taken directly to the Air Canada cargo terminal, for collection later that night by Brink’s. Instead, three hours before two armed Brink’s guards arrived, the crate was forklifted from the storage area into an unmarked truck and never seen again—6,600 bars of gold, gone in less than 30 minutes.
Here’s how it happened.
On an average day, Air Canada handles several thousand shipments of goods that are stored across 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space. The shipments arrive in the form of cardboard boxes, wooden crates, or plastic-wrapped pallets that are unloaded from arriving flights and taken directly to one of the airline’s three storage terminals. There, they await collection from consignees, who are required to provide an official waybill in order to access their shipments.
April 17, 2023, started out like any other Monday at Pearson airport. But, unbeknownst to authorities, during the course of that day a carefully planned robbery was being set in motion.
In a deserted parking lot just a few minutes’ drive from the airport, Durante King-Mclean, a Canadian 25-year-old with ties to Toronto-area criminal gangs, spent several hours anxiously seated in the cab of his white five-ton truck.
He was waiting for the green light from Arsalan “Sonny” Chaudhary, 45, a former forklift driver at the Leclerc biscuit factory in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto with a tightly knit South Asian community located seven miles away from the airport. That day, Chaudhary, the alleged mastermind of the heist, was stationed in a room at the Four Points by Sheraton airport hotel, where he was expecting a text message from Simran Preet Panesar, a 33-year-old cargo-terminal supervisor who also hailed from Brampton, confirming the arrival of Air Canada Flight 881.
In the lead-up to the plane’s arrival, Chaudhary, Panesar, and another of the accused exchanged 772 calls and messages. Then, finally, the text that set it all in motion: Flight 881 had landed.
Just under two hours later, Panesar confirmed to Chaudhary that a nondescript, bubble-wrapped crate had been taken to the Air Canada storage terminal. Panesar had given instructions via his access to Air Canada’s computer system that the crate be delivered to a specific cargo facility where another inside man was working. Chaudhary then texted King-Mclean with instructions to head to the cargo terminal to collect the crate.
At 6:23 P.M., King-Mclean backed his truck into Air Canada loading dock G12. Wearing a hat and a pandemic-style mask, he got out of the truck and handed a waybill to an Air Canada warehouse employee. The waybill was forged—a duplicate of one that was used to collect a shipment of Scottish salmon from the Air Canada storage terminal the previous day, it had been produced using an office printer inside the cargo terminal and then altered to match the gold-shipment description. But the warehouse employee didn’t seem to notice and waved King-Mclean through.
Under instructions from Panesar, the other inside man, believed to be Parmpal “Parm” Sidhu, 56, also an Air Canada employee from Brampton, operated the forklift that loaded the crate into King-Mclean’s truck at 7:27 P.M. Three minutes later, King-Mclean drove off with the precious cargo.
It was not until 9:30 P.M. that a Brink’s armored truck and its two armed guards arrived at the cargo bay with the authentic waybill for the gold shipment. Air Canada’s night-shift employees searched in vain for the crate before informing the Brink’s guards that it had already been collected. After interviewing cargo-terminal personnel, Air Canada reported the theft to Peel Regional Police at 2:43 A.M.
King-Mclean’s truck was eventually tracked via a series of roadside and highway cameras heading west on Highway 401. It was last spotted a half-hour later exiting the highway and driving north past the Toronto-suburb town of Milton, at which point police lost sight of the truck—and the gold.
The day after the robbery, Chaudhary exchanged WhatsApp messages with a co-conspirator believed to be Panesar. “It’s insane,” he wrote. “I’m fuckin’ going nuts right now. Holy shit.”
In many respects, the Pearson-airport gold heist resembles the notorious 1978 Lufthansa robbery, which saw six armed men steal more than $5 million in cash and nearly $1 million in jewelry from the German airline’s cargo terminal at J.F.K. Airport.
That robbery, allegedly orchestrated in part by Henry Hill, a member of New York’s Lucchese crime family later immortalized by Ray Liotta in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, is believed to be the largest such theft in Mob history and one of the largest cash heists in U.S. history. The money from the Lufthansa job was never recovered, and the only person convicted in the case was the airline cargo agent who knew of cash transfers coming from Germany and tipped off the robbers.
It also has echoes of the Pink Panthers, a Balkan crime gang of former Serbian special-forces members which has stolen more than $500 million in jewels, including from Harry Winston in Paris, Graff in London, and the Carlton hotel in Cannes, and, of course, the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, which netted $35 million worth of gold, cash, and diamonds from a warehouse near London’s Heathrow and inspired the 2023 BBC series The Gold, starring Slow Horses’ Jack Lowden.
But what sets the Pearson-airport heist apart from virtually every other major robbery is its staggering simplicity. None of the alleged perpetrators was a professional criminal (with the exception of King-Mclean, the getaway driver). Rather, they were a friendly bunch from a quaint Canadian suburb. And they carried off the heist, now considered one of the top robberies in history, by presenting a single forged document. No guns, no violence, no clashes with the police—and no breadcrumb trail.
Harold von Kursk is a Stockholm-based journalist and screenwriter
