Alleged driver in $20M Toronto airport gold heist is negotiating a plea deal in U.S.

The alleged driver in the notorious Toronto airport gold heist is negotiating a plea deal in the United States, where he is charged with trying to smuggle a car stuffed with guns into Canada. Durante King-Mclean, 25, of Brampton, Ont., is accused in Canada of being the driver who pulled a white truck into an Air Canada cargo loading bay at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport last year and used an old Air Canada waybill to fraudulently pick up a shipping container within hours of it arriving on a flight from Switzerland.

Inside the container was 6,600 variously sized bars of almost pure gold, weighing 400.19 kilograms, worth about $20 million at the time, along with foreign currency worth about $2.5 million.

When the driver took off with the loot on April 17, 2023, it triggered an intense hunt for the perpetrators of the embarrassingly easy Toronto airport gold heist, considered the largest gold robbery in Canada and the world’s sixth largest in modern history . Police say some of the proceeds from the stolen gold were used to buy black-market guns in the United States to smuggle into Canada, leading the chair of the Peel Police Services Board, Nando Iannicca, to say the case was about “reverse alchemy ..

. how gold becomes guns.” A U.

S. indictment filed in Pennsylvania alleges that King-Mclean travelled to Florida after the heist, where he stayed at an Airbnb in Fort Lauderdale and allegedly bought firearms. On Sept.

2, 2023, King-Mclean was stopped in a Nissan Sen.