Police are still searching for gold mine bandits

At presstime for this issue, Ontario and Quebec provincial police were still searching for two armed men who over a week ago robbed the Virginiatown, Ont., gold mine of Golden Shield Resources of a gold bar worth approximately $300,000.

Two masked men forced mine employees at gunpoint to open a vault containing the gold, police said, and escaped on foot. Police have since continued a search using a helicopter and tracking dogs, but as yet have found no trace of either the bandits nor the gold, according to Superintendent J. P. Crozier, criminal investigation branch of the Ontario Provincial Police.

Company President Raymond Mongeau says the bar is fully insured.

It’s the second gold robbery at the Virginiatown mine, formerly owned and operated by Kerr Addison Mines. About 10 years ago thieves using a float plane for their escape made off with a substantial amount of gold, seized at the Larder Lake rail station while awaiting transport to the mint.

Just two years ago, also in Ontario, thieves took concentrates from a gold circuit at the Timmins operations of Kidd Creek Mines. Three men were arrested and their case is now before the courts, Superintendent Crozier tells The Northern Miner.

Gold thefts of this kind from mines seem to occur, at least in Ontario, in roughly 5-year cycles, Crozier said. Much bigger gold hauls have occurred at airports in Canada, he said, instancing the theft at the Toronto International Airport a few years ago.

Press reports on the latest theft at Virginiatown mentioned an opp “gold squad,” but Crozier said there is no such organization per se.

“We do have criminal investigators who have experience in this kind of crime, though,” he said, “and it is this group that forms a kind of ex-officio gold squad.” The Quebec Provincial Police have much the same kind of organization.

Back in the 1920s, even the Ontario Mining Association recognized the then more prevalent problem of high grading gold, mostly, at that time consisting of miners themselves walking off the job with high grade ore samples, etc.

The oma formed a high grade committee early in the 20s, to keep a kind of watch on thefts of that kind, association executive Bruce Campbell tells The Northern Miner, but it was disbanded in 1964.

“You don’t hear much about internal high grading now,” Campbell said. “Security is very much tighter in gold mines these days.”

What seems to happen in cases like the most recent external theft at Virginiatown, Superintendent Crozier said, is a problem that arises with all security, where because of the long time gaps between such events, “familiarity (with security procedures), begins to breed contempt.”