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

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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.”

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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.”

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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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

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“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.

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“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.

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A shipment worth $20 million disappeared in April 2023 from this Air Canada cargo holding facility at Toronto’s Pearson airport. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post

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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.

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

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

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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.”

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He was asked about the driver’s mask.

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“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.”

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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.”

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

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“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.

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

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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.