Trial hears of two mysterious phone calls the day $22M in gold and cash stolen from Toronto Pearson airport

Shortly before a large shipping crate of gold bars and cash worth more than $22 million was stolen from Toronto’s Pearson airport, a worker inside the Air Canada cargo warehouse where it was stored received two mysterious phone calls.

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They seem mysterious now, when revealed in court and knowing what was about to happen — the largest gold heist in Canadian history — at the time, though, it all seemed normal, the employee testified. Court heard on Wednesday from several staff who moved the crate stuffed with gold and cash — seemingly unknowingly — around the large facility without anything seeming suspicious.

It was business as usual, cargo workers said.

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So much so that nobody realized the crate of gold and cash had been stolen until hours later when the real customer — armed Brink’s guards in an armoured truck — arrived to collect it, and no one could find it for them.

“It was just a regular day, doing the duties, like day to day, whatever was required of me,” said Vatsal Vaid, who helped run the computer end of facility’s automated sorting and moving machinery.

Vaid was one of several workers at the warehouse testifying on the third day of the trial for Parmpal Sidhu, one of those accused of pulling off the notorious Pearson airport gold heist on April 17, 2023.

At the time of the heist, Vaid, 27, was working inside Air Canada’s cargo warehouse for Katlyn International, a third-party contractor to the airline that provided the automation equipment to manage the movement of freight through the facility at Canada’s busiest airport.

The system allows cargo to move around the warehouse on a device not unlike an enormous baggage carousel for passengers at the airport terminal.

Vaid was a controls technologist working in the Hub Operations Control Centre, known as HOCC, which is the control centre for incoming and outgoing cargo. He sat in an office with Air Canada cargo managers providing system assistance and solving problems that came up to ensure containers kept moving to where he was told they should go.

“They would reach out me if there’s any technical problem, otherwise, everything worked automatically most of the times,” Vaid said.

The system was automated to take cargo that is specially tagged to the appropriate pit, a staging area for containers where they are unpacked into their component packages, if that’s what the codes told the workers to do, and moved into a storage space until picked up by a client.

Cargo that must be kept cold, such as food, flowers or pharmaceuticals, goes to one place, called the cool-chain; cargo marked high-value goes to a secure area; those marked priority go to a pit where they are dealt with first by warehouse workers. Containers that aren’t specially coded wait their turn and are distributed randomly to one of five pit areas, court heard.

Vaid testified that after he learned of the gold heist, he thought back to the day before. Police investigators asked him to tell them what he remembered, he said.

He said he got a phone call from inside the building, from a container processing area called Pit 5, sometime after 6 p.m. It seemed a routine call.

The caller said a shipment was going into the system in about half an hour — there “were a couple units ahead of it,” he recalled him saying. The caller said something like “this is a high value cargo going into the system. Tell the managers working at the desk.”

About half an hour later, he received a second phone call, Vaid said. This one appeared to come from the cargo manager’s office phone saying that an import manager required a unit to go down to Pit 1 and told him to generate the appropriate command in the conveyer system, “because the customer is here to pick that unit up, and it’s a priority unit.”

Vaid told court he didn’t know who was on the phone. It was a male voice, he said.

The caller, he said, “knew what they were doing, or they had an idea of the system and everything, like how to approach or do some certain stuff within the system, so I was just following the orders in my job.”

The specific impact of those phone calls on the gold heist was left hanging by court by the end of the day. It was not even said whether the phone calls were legitimate or nefarious, but Vaid said he wanted police to know about them.

John Iheme, who worked as a station attendant within the cool-chain, testified about his unfortunate position of unknowingly delivering the crate of gold to the driver of the heist crew and even helped him load it onto the truck that hauled it away, never to be seen again.

He didn’t know of his role until he was called in to speak with Peel Regional Police investigators.

“When I was called to the police station to go give a statement, I was shown a video and that’s when I realized that I had served the driver that came in to pick up the shipment,” he told court.

“If someone needs help, I just step up and help… the gentleman came to the back and needed help, so, I just got up and went and helped,” he said of the man who came to collect the shipping crate.

Court watched video of Iheme, wearing a bright orange safety vest and a ball cap, striding through the loading bay to a man standing beside the open back of a truck that had backed into one of the loading docks.

In the video, he greets the driver with a fist bump. The driver’s face is covered.

“I can’t even remember dealing with the gentleman to be honest, but on the video, I can see myself serving him.”

Police were interested in the fist bump. It could suggest familiarity. Iheme said he was just being friendly. “I do it with everyone,” he said. “I’ve never seen them before.”

He was asked about the driver’s mask.

“I don’t know why he would be masked up,” he said. “It’s not my job to check what people wear and how they’re dressed. I serve you and I move on. He could be sick. I don’’t know.”

He said there was nothing peculiar about the delivery. He took the air waybill from the driver, which is a receipt for picking up a shipment, and looked at it “to make sure it’s got the stamps that you need,” he said. “There was no stamps missing.”

He then went back to find the container; it wasn’t hard, it was already in the cool-chain area.

“I didn’t have to go and get it out, it was already there and I picked it up,” he said. Video shows him navigating a forklift to raise the hefty crate. He said he didn’t know what was inside — staff aren’t to open containers unless they’re told to.

He drove the forklift back to the loading bay, helped the driver load it into the truck and said goodbye.

Court heard previously that somebody had used Air Canada’s internal computer systems and login credentials for various Air Canada employees to change the routing tags in the systems that tracked and automated cargo handling while the crate was in the air from Zurich, Switzerland.

The tag that it was high-value cargo was deleted, which prevented the automated machines from directing it to the secure storage area, which is locked and guarded. Court heard that the digital hygiene at the facility was dreadful and workers routinely shared logins and passwords and workstations were left logged for weeks, month, or years.

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