BURST
While suspects in the Toronto airport gold heist were under intense, around-the-clock police surveillance, one of them franticly made increasingly angry and desperate phone calls chasing down money, feeling cheated and abandoned by his friends, court heard.
“It’s already falling apart,” a caller identified in court as Parmpal Sidhu said over the phone nine months after more than $22.5 million in gold bars and cash was stolen after arriving at Pearson airport on a flight from Switzerland.
As a police net tightened around them, suspects fled Canada, tried to dodge surveillance, hired expensive lawyers and viciously turned against one another, police wiretaps show.
“Everybody’s on their own. Everybody’s worried about themselves,” he said in a call. “Everyone got money and I’m stuck here,” he said in another.
Sidhu was an Air Canada employee in the Pearson airport cargo warehouse from where the crate was stolen on April 17, 2023. He was arrested April 5, 2024, one of the first of nine men to be charged and the first to plead not guilty and face trial in the spectacular case. Only about a kilogram of the gold has been recovered.
His trial on Tuesday in Ontario Superior Court in Brampton, Ont., heard a handful of the thousands of wiretap recordings Peel Regional Police made in their probe.
“I am not paying 10 grand for this lawyer. I am going to make a f–king deal. I’m in my car. My other phone is here. It’s probably tapped. I got a tracker on my phone. I am fed up of the lies,” he said in a call.
“You guys literally threw me in the ditch. That’s what you did.
“I’ve been trying to get you guys to do the right thing. Nobody’s listening to me, and now I’m the one who’s getting all the f–king heat.”
The phone calls, by a voice identified by a Peel police officer as Sidhu’s, reveal a man facing a financial apocalypse. His credit cards were maxed; his American Express card had been declined; he took money out of his line of credit, “freaking out” his wife. He spoke of borrowing from his mother.
“I am not joking,” he said in one call, “I am telling you, I am in a hole, and I am going to have to look out for myself.”
Peel police Det. Sarah Angevine testified that people suspected of pulling off the largest gold heist in Canadian history were under police scrutiny, including physical surveillance, phone wiretaps and microphone probes planted in their homes and cars.
The wiretap recordings, most of which are partially obscured by background music and noise, show an apparent escalation of paranoia, anger, financial problems and efforts to be paid money.
Angevine said the people on the wiretaps often used code names or nicknames for people that police believed to be some of the others accused in the heist.
There are references to someone called by the Punjabi word for “Black,” believed to be code for Durante King-Mclean, the accused driver in the gold heist who is Black and the only person not of South Asian descent accused in the heist.
Someone named “Grove” is a reference to Archit Grover, Angevine said, who is accused of supplying the truck used to move the stolen gold from the airport warehouse.
There are also references to someone referred to as “Dubai.” Court heard earlier that Ansalan Chaudhary, who admitted he was one of the masterminds of the heist, had flown to Dubai after the heist.
“This is what Dubai doesn’t f–king understand: I’ll make sure if I lose my cut then f–king Grove will lose his too,” Sidhu is heard saying in one of the wiretaps, court heard. “You think Grove’s just gonna walk away unscathed? No f–king chance.”
He also complained of people leaving Canada after the heist — “who’ve just taken off and left,” he said. Grover, Chaudhary and the man who court heard was the second mastermind behind the heist, Simran Preet Panesar, a former Air Canada manager, are all known to have travelled abroad.
Sidhu complained in another call, “I didn’t know he was going to f–king vanish,” court heard. “His promises are absolutely, utterly worthless.”
He implored the person on the other end of one call to intercede on his behalf: “Make it clear. You need to explain the situation,” he said. He said the guy “didn’t believe me that I got charged.”
“You know how f–king angry it makes me, because I never cheated anybody.”
He also made apparent threats amid his anger.
“I’m going to f–king tear him apart now,” he said.
In a call on Jan. 14, 2024, he said he had been warned he “can’t go after them” or he risks being “arrested,” but that money was coming, however, it is “not going to be what you’re expecting.”’
By the sound of the calls, the payout never came.
In one call, he is heard musing with someone about sending a frightening message with what sounds like a drive-by shooting.
“Can somebody just go there and like spray them — not hurt anybody — but spray like the cars, the house, or something like that, or whatever. Something to worry?”
Court also heard that an analysis of Sidhu’s phone records showed he talked and texted with Panesar, his Air Canada manager and fellow accused in the heist, more than he did with his wife before the theft.
Court heard that three months before the Toronto airport gold heist, a bank draft for $30,000 was deposited into Sidhu’s bank account.
Const. Michael Asanin, a Peel police fraud investigator, testified that he examined 1,121 pages of bank records for Sidhu, spanning several bank accounts and pointed out a large bank draft deposit of $30,000 on Jan. 5, 2023, which was three months before the gold heist.
Sidhu’s lawyer, Shale Wagman, asked Asanin if he knew whether the gold heist plot was underway at the time of the deposit. He said he didn’t know.
Wagman asked him if the money could have an innocent source.
“I have nothing to say that this particular draft was or was not fraudulent,” Asanin said.
The trial continues.
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