There is a particular kind of courtroom performance in which a man stands up, under oath, and demands to be recognized as the sole author of one of the most famous thefts in Canadian history. “[The] planning of the gold heist was all me. I planned it,” Arsalan Chaudhary testified on Tuesday in a Brampton, Ont., courtroom, according to CBC’s live coverage of the proceedings. This is, you have to admit, a lovely flex. Chaudhary is serving a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty this spring to his role in the 2023 theft of roughly $20 million in gold from a cargo facility at Toronto Pearson airport — the plain-vanilla job of the century, as these things go — and he flew back from Dubai in January 2026 to surrender to police and take his medicine.[2] Now he is testifying at the trial of Parmpal Sidhu, a former Air Canada employee facing charges of theft over $5,000 and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. The Crown wants Chaudhary on the stand. Chaudhary, on the stand, mainly wants credit.
I think the interesting question is what, exactly, “all me” is supposed to mean here, because the entire point of the trial is that it wasn’t all him. Cargo gold heists, like most large thefts, are a division-of-labour business. Somebody has to know where the gold is, when it arrives, and which piece of paper makes a warehouse full of security shrug and load it onto a truck. That knowledge tends to live inside the airline that flew the gold in. Sidhu is accused of being that somebody: the inside man. The prosecution’s theory requires an insider, and the prosecution’s star witness is a man insisting, with some vigor, that he alone planned the whole thing. These are not necessarily contradictory positions — you can plan a heist and still need a guy at the airline — but you can see why a defense lawyer might enjoy the transcript. The Crown is calling a witness whose proudest claim is that the accused was, at most, staff.
What Chaudhary did remember, he remembered vividly. The gold, he testified, arrived in “biscuit-size” bars stamped with the letters “TD.” After the heist, the truck carrying it had a “destination to follow,” and he followed it, taking his own cut “somewhere up north” — about one third of the haul, he said, which he stashed in a condo. He then melted his bars down using a gold-melting machine supplied by one of his “buddies” in Pakistan. Asked how he knew how to melt gold, he explained: “it’s not brain surgery.” Fair enough. Then, he testified, he got his “friend to take it to a jewelry shop where I got cash for it.”
Now do the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is the whole story of why stealing gold is easier than keeping it. Chaudhary’s one-third share of a $20 million theft works out to something like $6 or $7 million in metal, at face value. He testified that his portion converted to “around $200,000 to $300,000” in cash. That is a haircut of roughly 95 percent — a liquidation discount that would make a bankruptcy practitioner wince — paid cheerfully, because the alternatives were either holding several million dollars of serialized, extremely identifiable TD-stamped biscuits in a condo, or not stealing them in the first place. Stolen gold is a great asset and a terrible currency. The spread between what it’s worth and what you can get for it is, more or less, the entire economics of the crime. Chaudhary lived on the wrong side of that spread.
Asked what his plan for the money was, Chaudhary said he didn’t have one. He did, at one point, admit to travelling to Pakistan, saying he wanted to invest the money and “buy a business or something.”
What he was much fuzzier on was almost everything the Crown actually asked about. Crown attorney Vlacic read him a cell phone number and asked if it was his; he said it was possible but he didn’t remember. Asked about a contact named “Jazz,” he couldn’t recall having one. Asked about messages with that contact — conversations that, per CBC’s account, depicted planning around truck unloading and driver availability — he said he didn’t recall the conversations, didn’t know what they pertained to, and had “no clue” whether they were on his phone, “at times vigorously shaking his head no.” He struggled with when he lived at the condo where the gold was stashed, and when he left Canada for Dubai after the heist, repeatedly suggesting the Crown consult his passport. At one point he grew agitated enough, interrupting Vlacic and saying no over and over, that Justice Gordon Cudjoe paused the examination to tell him to “take a deep breath.” Chaudhary apologized.
Chaudhary offered an explanation for the gaps: he told the court he has “closed out” a lot from his head because of “drama” he went through, and the drama is not a metaphor. During his time in Pakistan, he testified, he was kidnapped. He said he “didn’t know what the f--k was going on,” that his captors administered electrical shocks — he declined to go further on the question of treatment — and that when they released him, the gold heist money he had brought into the country was gone. Asked how he felt about that, he said he was “lucky to be alive.” “I wanted to get the f out of Pakistan,” he testified. He flew to Dubai.
So, to total it up: the gold was worth $20 million. His share was a third of that. The jewelry shop paid a few hundred thousand. The kidnappers, apparently, took the rest of what he carried. Chaudhary then got on a plane, came home, surrendered, pleaded guilty, took four years, and showed up in court to claim, accurately or not, that the whole ingenious plan was his. Somewhere in this chain there is a party who actually made money on the Pearson gold heist, and it isn’t the airline, and it isn’t the guy doing the time, and it isn’t the accused sitting at the defense table while the mastermind waves his passport at the Crown. It’s the people who figured out that the cheapest way to launder the proceeds of a gold theft is to wait for the thief to bring the money to you.