Bizarrely similar to the $20\u002Dmillion airport heist in April, a Post investigation unravels the mystery of the unsolved 1952 gold caper.
Howard was a very clever guy but he’s a tough guy alsoHoward was born in 1932 and as he grew, he ran with a tough bunch on Toronto’s working-class midtown streets. Most were rowdy hoodlums, swinging like Sinatra, scrapping like Brando. Howard pulled it off. Good looking, dark-haired, outgoing, and athletic.
“Some of them became very close friends but they got into fistfights all the time because they were so stubborn and hotheaded,” Elkind says. The commission found Gordon used “extremely high-pressure methods” to push unsophisticated Americans into dubious investments. Gordon was “a front” for “other interests,” according to commission records. The shadowy men behind him weren’t named.That gave him connections to where Canada’s gold originated. Gold from mines in northern Ontario was routinely flown to a handful of refineries in Toronto before being exported as gold bars to Europe and the United States.
“I don’t disagree with your thinking that it was my grandfather Gordon who helped plan it,” says Heather as we discussed the heist. “Because he was very clever; clever but a bit of a crook. Howard Halpenny was 20 at the time of the heist and apparently lied about his age to get the job, at what was then called Malton Airport, giving his older sister’s birthdate.This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.That gold theft, like the recent gold theft, involved a Brink’s truck, an airplane, cargo handlers, and smooth crooks who could vanish unseen. Both jobs would need inside help.
The cargo was seemingly loaded onto the plane, but when it landed in Montreal, only four of the 10 crates of gold were found on board. The airline did a frantic search before reporting it missing the next day. “It wasn’t any picnic,” Howard was quoted saying. He said he left the gold for “not more than five minutes.”
When a $13,000 reward was offered three weeks later, investigators said the job was likely “the work of an international gang,” and the gold likely whisked to the Netherlands, Tangier, Hong Kong or Syria.A September 1952 newspaper clipping from the Globe and Mail about the gold heist. I knew the name. I knew him to be a talented old conman with Mafia ties. It seemed an impossible coincidence he was handling the gold when it disappeared.
More importantly for me, I wanted to know what happened to the gold, and whether Howard and Gordon lived like kings, like Hollywood tells me they should have.Howard’s dark pursuits didn’t emerge until after the gold theft, after it faded to a cobwebbed cold case.Howard and a friend posed as vegetable wholesalers and ordered 950 bushels of onions from a farmer in Holland Marsh, north of Toronto. That’s a lot of onions.
Shortly before the robbery, Toronto police’s hold-up squad burst into an apartment and found two guns, one of them loaded, two silk stocking face masks, and rubber gloves. Three months later, four of the five were convicted. Howard was one of them. While Howard was inside, he later told Hermiston, the prison’s warden wanted a flag that was tangled atop the institution’s flagpole to be unfurled. This was at a time when wardens had tremendous independence and power.
Howard kept a gangster vibe, said someone who was close to him in the 1970s and ‘80s but didn’t want to be named: “He was always a show off; clothes, cars, gold watches, gold rings.” For their meeting with Papalia, Howard insisted on driving Elkind from Toronto to Hamilton. He wanted to show off his success, and few things did that better than pulling up in a brand-new black Cadillac. He still liked looking like Sinatra.
“Halpenny wants to set up deal with Corrigan to have every Teamster truck driver purchase a bumper sticker advertising new place and the money goes to help kids,” police notes say. “Out of every dollar collected in this fashion, 25-cents will be kicked back.” Nothing seemed to come of it. “They had bitten off a bigger piece of sausage than they could choke back,” Heather eventually says of her father and grandfather. “When the big boys found out, when they got involved, they moved in.Article contentHeather’s coda to the heist puts a damper on the folkloric buzz of working-class outlaws outsmarting impenetrable Swiss banks.
“We don’t know who got the gold after that, that’s where everybody’s lips are sealed…. And I bet you only one or two people really know — and they’re probably dead.”“It gave no advantage to any of us. There was no money for us.” They saw no sudden bump in their lifestyle.Article content It seems criminals much bigger than Gordon and Howard eyed their gold job with jealousy and wonder, and their biggest wonder was why they didn’t get a good piece of it.
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