Everything was quiet around the Delnite mine property on the night of June 2, 1950. The staff from the gold refinery office had long since cleared out and called it a day. Not 50 yards away in a house supplied by the company, the mine manager slumbered peacefully. So no one noticed the two figures as they slipped from the shadows and scurried toward the refinery office. Working quietly, the two men forced their way into the office through a window, where they found a large safe the size of a small room. A short distance away in the mill, a work crew was changing shift. The afternoon shift was readying for home while the graveyard contingent was about to take up their duties. The sound of an explosion is not a rare occurrence around a gold mine, so nobody took notice when a muffled blast shook the refinery office — not even the mine manager, snoozing only yards away.
Once inside the large safe, the two men confronted a second strongbox, a 400-lb behemoth that they knew contained three gold bars. They tried manfully but without success to break it open. Having exhausted their dynamite supply in the first blast, they feverishly attached a heavy chain to the safe and dragged it out of the larger vault, across the office floor and out the door to a waiting getaway car, which had also been stolen. And that’s when things started going dreadfully wrong for the thieves.
With their adrenaline pumping wildly, the pair hoisted the safe over the back of the car and into the open trunk. But the safe was so heavy the rear of the car sagged so that the wheel wells sat squarely on the back tires. The car was going nowhere. And besides, the safe was too big to close the trunk. In desperation, they heaved the safe out of the trunk and began rolling it, end over end, into the nearby bush where, presumably after studying what now appeared to be a hopeless situation, they abandoned it. And so ended one of the more amazing and daring would-be thefts from the history of the Timmins gold camp.
Two arrests were made in the case six days later, but both men, who are still in the Timmins area, were acquitted. The total value of the three gold bars in the safe was $75,000. This story was related by Kevin Vincent, a well- known local journalist with an insatiable appetite for the history of gold thefts in and around Timmins. Vincent is writing a definitive history of gold heists and the miners’ once prevalent and illegal passion for collecting rich gold nuggets from underground, a practice known as “high- grading.” Vincent has entitled his book Bootleg Gold.
He has spent countless hours in the Timmins Public Library, reading old copies of The Daily Press and The Porcupine Advance, looking for items on gold robberies and high-grading in the area. His extensive research has turned up a startling 1,700 individual cases in Timmins since 1912. One of these involves a $96,000 gold robbery from the Coniaurum mine on Aug 2, 1950. It was, at the time, the largest gold robbery in Canadian history. Apparently, two hooded bandits broke into the Coniaurum refinery, surprising night watchman Bill Edwards. They gagged him and bound him to a chair and stuck him in a corner of the room, where he could watch the proceedings. The robbers walked around in a crouched position and disguised their voices to make identification more difficult. Using an acetylene torch, they burned the lock off a large, walk-in vault. Inside the vault was a floor safe, which they promptly blasted open, sending glass and metal flying about the room.
They removed the three gold bars in the safe and took them out to the watchman’s car, a 1934 Buick, for which they had appropriated the keys. After placing the gold bars on the back seat of the Buick, they dumped the acetylene tanks and torches on the back seat and made their getaway driving east out of Timmins. About 26 miles from town, one of the robbers lit a cigarette and threw the still- burning match out the window. It blew into the back seat, where acetylene was leaking from a valve in the tank. When the tank caught fire, the car, of course, careened out of control and wound up in flames in a ditch. The two robbers escaped, one of them with serious burns. They somehow made their way back to Timmins — without the gold, which in their frantic haste, they had left behind.
About six hours later, Ontario Provincial Police Constable Rusty Baldwin was on a routine patrol when he spotted the smoldering wreck in the ditch. He left his cruiser to check it out and discovered the gold bars. No one was ever charged in the robbery.
These robberies and hundreds of others finally convinced the authorities that a special squad was required to police the gold mines. Eventually, an elite Gold Squad was formed and even today the opp’s South Porcupine detachment has an unofficial Gold Squad of two officers. Richard Buell is a freelance writer based in Timmins, Ont. — 30 —
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