Millions Worth Of Airline Cargo Stolen - Masterminds - The Air Cargo Millions - Hoa Lam Ong

he ran the biggest airport theft operation in North America he had everything pet adult that's the only way to describe it four years police were fooled by his ingenious system he is a mastermind because he stayed under the radar you gotta respect them for that he sought inspiration for his crimes in a Buddhist temple he had thousand-dollar bills in frames posted on the walls and would pray to the money and made over seven million dollars find out how he did next on masterminds [Music] [Music] [Music] Pearson Airport in Toronto as some of the largest cargo terminals in the world the biggest is the size of two football fields system Wahlstrom facility all computerized and everyday cargo comes in and out of that location millions upon millions of dollars of goods every day arrive in the morning evening and night and it is non-stop if you wanted to steal within that cargo facility there's a lot of product it's like walking into a large candy store the candy store was protected by a force of over 100 police officers on full-time airport duty but in the late 80s authorities discovered entire skids of high-end products some worth up to a half million dollars we're disappearing the cargo that was missing was staggering we had canon cameras we had Fujitsu hard drives we had Kodak cameras they had every Kodak camera that was destined for Toronto area for the Christmas season we had Nike products including their merchandising their clothing we had the entire spring collection of Banana Republic stolen we're looking at 6 million dollars worth of product missing and on for if it wasn't nailed down it was being taken police formed a task force to discover how the thieves were bypassing the airport's heavy security everything is secure on that perimeter you've got a wall or high-stake fence with barbed wire there are video cameras monitoring it and everyone can see video cameras posted nearby there are also security guards posted they view your tag check its validity and then allow you access but in spite of these precautions cargo kept disappearing and years of police investigations went nowhere there are a number of difficulties inherent in investigating any occurrence at the airport typically they call us saying we can't find merchandise in our vast warehouse and now we believe it's stolen can you investigate the theft from a week ago police found the closed world of the air cargo workers impossible to penetrate the employees we spoke to were very guarded with some of their remarks those people have worked together for such a long time and anybody that tries or attempts to infiltrate those groups is looked upon as an outsider if we are doing surveillance at a mall we could blend in with thousands of other cars at the airport it's not like that but their investigation did lead police to one conclusion the thefts were the work of an organized crime ring operating inside the airport the reason why we thought it was a large number of people was you needed to know all of the ins and outs of the cargo operations the flight landings the waybills the information that came on those waybills you had to know people in security you had to know supervisors managers you had to know drivers so all of these factored into our idea that it was a large group of people of stealing the stuff out of cargo but the police were wrong the thefts weren't the product of a large criminal organization they were the work of a lone truck driver Poel a moth had found a way to bypass security steal over seven million dollars in cargo and sell it worldwide the question is how did he do it Paula lamb on emigrates from Vietnam to Toronto in the late 1980s the aim with $50 in his pocket when he arrived in Canada but on has a burning desire to become rich hidden beneath an easygoing charm he always was kind of like a Centerpoint whenever you would see him meeting other people he seemed to stick out and he had a bubbly personality in the tight-knit Asian community he makes friends easily and earns the nickname smiling he soon meets a fellow Vietnamese immigrant Theresa pang at his local Buddhist temple they met through a mutual friend sparks flew and next thing you know they were married smiley moves into Theresa's apartment and adopts her teenage son Benny Teresa worked at golden jet freight for he met on Pearson Airport they're responsible for shipping property from the cargo facilities she helps Miley get work with best choice another shipping company his job is to pick up goods from the airport and deliver them to businesses throughout the city but it pays only 400 dollars a week to realize his dream of making it big he decides to break the law nobody Minh never visit the threshold would point to a break how bad he need the money that's what when he comes down to smiley calculates that if he can keep even a fraction of the merchandise that passes through his hands he'll be a very rich man he spends months trying to gain access to the goods inside the cargo facility within cargo you must display your pass you must have it on you at all times the problem is Smiley's pass limits him to a tiny area of the warehouse he realizes the only way to steal the goods is to get the cargo workers on his side you got a way of dealing with people go be able to be smooth you gotta be able have that gift the gab he's interacting with employees all around the airport and developing relationships sizing them up smiley gets to know the guys and quickly identifies whose hard out for cash over a period of time he would offer them gifts he would hand them a box of frozen lobster and say hey you know the next time I see it maybe he can help me up so he'd come in for a legitimate load he'd pick up three or four skids in his truck then he would approach an employee within the cargo facility ask them if they could throw something extra on his truck and he could supply them with some extra money Smyly invests every dollar he has to kick-start his cargo theft operation but now that he has the goods he needs a way to sell in the beginning when he started working smiling would search people out for the goods he started off small and selling it through different friends different fences as we call them that could be people that owned flea markets that could be people that owned computer companies clothing companies various merchandise and stores he had to have all those connections within his community and that's where his empire started to grow using his profits he starts drawing in more accomplices [Music] Smyly carries a wad of cash with him fifties hundreds people referred to him as always having a lot of money and that would allow for instant payment for property but smileys ability to buy everything cargo workers have to offer soon creates a serious problem some of the property is very difficult to move in high-volume it's quite difficult to get rid of 80 pairs of pants within a day unless you've got a clothing buyer and there's not quite as many of those people as there are for electronic companies that are willing to buy 80 of a particular item but help is close at hand through her shipping job teresa has access to detailed information about income and cargo theresa was very important to smiley she could tell him the flight that it came in on the amount that it's worth which area that this product would be brought into the two of them were like two peas in the pod they bounced ideas off of one another they knew that they had to survive together in order for this operation to continue using the information from Teresa smiley carefully studies what cargo is going to which warehouse he cross-references this two lists of employees he knows he can bribe smiley would look at his schedules and figure out who was working what time the product was coming in so he's very keyed in on those factors but he had to have a group of people working within that could be anywhere from five to ten people on any given day by targeting expensive goods that are in demand Smyly is now able to pay up to ten thousand dollars for a single skin of merchandise his accomplices inside the warehouse inform him when the most desirable cargo will be available then it just began to grow and growing it was like a snowball rolling down the hill and just incredible but as smiley further expands his network of connections it draws the attention of organized crime gangs they demand a piece of the action the message given helped by a lot of these guys was that [ __ ] you mess with us and life won't be the same for you he would have to pay certain people within that facility a certain amount of money in order to continue operating smiley makes the payoffs and stays in business now free to steal with impunity he turns over his distribution network to step sunny Betty pang he had to get some people around him that he trusted they could help him move that product and make extra money benny was utilized by his stepfather as just a pawn in the scheme of things smiley assigns Benny to sell computer parts to small businesses throughout the city he would go and profess that he was a part of this particular company and sell them hard drives at a good price and he sold a lot of them there to make the business look legitimate smiley prints professional-looking invoices and business cards for Benny the business cards he had were first name of Joe and some of those computer store operators knew him as Joe hard drive a lot of these companies thought they were actually buying legitimate product Benny proves to be an excellent salesman but even he can't move all of Smiley's growing inventory the business was being overwhelmed his ability to bring the goods in was much better and mr. pegs ability to move it out and it was essentially stacking up because renting public storage space is risky he buys two suburban houses Smyly use them was a storage facility for all the product that was being sold and out of Pearson Cargill warehouses it was a great way for smiley to wash money through real estate buy some property and investments that would make money over time when his new neighbors meet him smiley turns on the charm they acknowledge that they had seen some of this activity but smiley was very friendly and he said I'm you know shipper or receiver and they bought into that so they never questioned whether or not he was involved in some sort of illicit activity smiley now expands his operation to cover the entire airport because they figured you know this stuff is selling the more we can get the more himself these guys were just getting bigger and bigger smiley on is at the top of his game making millions but a random break-and-enter will soon threaten to bring him down Smyly owns cargo theft operation is now North America's largest but he's struggling to sell his enormous inventory he turns to his Buddhist faith for inspiration and flies in a monk from China both houses had a prayer room and these rooms were immaculate they didn't have any stolen property in them simply areas for prayer prosperity is certainly one thing that you pray for they had thousand-dollar bills in frames posted on the walls and they would pray to the money smileys prayers are answered by the internet he instructs Benny to set up an account with eBay and this is where a lot of the money was made selling the stuff at a cheaper price and not having to go out and physically drop off the product which made it much easier it's it's it's a dream for anybody selling stolen property and basically it's a license to print money it's also a dream for a seller who wants to is identity when they registered their name with eBay ahead the credit cards then blow on them the invaders their fictitious smiley now creates an eBay assembly line for the first time he can quickly move products like cameras and clothes that are hard to sell door-to-door Benny monitors the bidding Teresa is the shipping department he had everything headed all was a mail-order Costco's what it was that's the only way to describe it there was 19,000 transaction in total we're talking a lot of checks in a lot of cash we're talking about thousands of dollars of goods per day he had a lot of money he did and he didn't show it by the way he dressed already drove [Music] by day he continues to keep a low profile working his connections at the airport but by night smiley hits the casinos to launder his cash to launder money at a casino you put down a couple thousand dollars he might lose three or four hundred dollars that night and once you go to reclaim your money the money's already washed you'll come back out with $20 bills and $50 bills smiley also make sure his business contacts at the airport are kept happy he used to bring people out to strip bars and would pay for their night out and they thought he was the best guy in the world he ran a well-oiled machine it was almost like a corporation and he managed to do it and he managed to do it well 13 years into the investigation police are no closer to identifying the mastermind they intensify their efforts by going undercover but still can't determine when a crime is occurring if you watch the car will be loaded onto various trucks within that facility you wouldn't be able to tell if it was actually being stolen right in front of your face or it's just business as usual it's also nearly impossible to narrow down the list of suspects on any given theft in the cargo facility you'd have 300 suspects but it just takes one mastermind to actually figure out a system and put their system in place and once that system is in place it takes investigators a long time to actually follow it Smyly definitely state under the the radar of most investigative techniques but then in November 2001 police finally get a break within a skid of cargo Smyly steals is a box of hard drives as soon as the theft is reported police enter the serial numbers of these hard drives into a new system designed to track stolen goods some get stolen auto you put in the system and every Police Department in Canada has access to that and can check it so you know being able to locate stolen properties so much easier a week later Benny pang sells the stolen hard drives to a computer parts company that computer company put them in their warehouse and on that very same weekend that warehouse gets broken into the thieves take the same hard drives that smiley had stolen from the airport police discovered that the product serial numbers from the computer company theft match the numbers from the airport theft for the first time police have traced some of the stolen goods this was a huge huge break in the case for us we finally realized that we were gonna be able to track where the product was being stolen from and where it was going police questioned the computer merchants whose warehouse had been robbed we asked the owner who are you purchasing these hard drives from he indicated all he had was a pager number and a name of Joe when investigators checked the number they discover it belongs to Benny Pei that was our first breakthrough to find out who actually was bringing these hard drives to these various computer company police begin surveillance on Benny surveillance took us all across subtle meeting people in parking lots going to their houses we knew a great player the surveillance was quite intense it led us to a lot they opened the garage door it's a wall of property we found out that the owner of the house was mr. smiley ho Alam on but police hold off on making an arrest we knew that we had to build a larger case to find out where the product was coming from where it was going to we had to actually physically see that investigators follow smiley - best choice that was the key we were static we had waited so long for so many years and we finally had our connection 13 years after smiley young began stealing air cargo police are ready to make their move and what at some point in time you say okay we've got enough let's close the door let's get it done we had Benny for the short and curlies basically Benny was done we had him good on December 13th 2001 they take down Benny at one of the storage houses Benny ping was surprised he was just shocked now the police move on smiley and Teresa Teresa paying along with smiley opened the door and they were standing there in their pajamas they were very surprised they realized that the jig was up we could tell through their eyes that they look like two deers caught in the headlights of a large steamroller then proceeded to go in with the videotape and it's when everybody's jaw hit the floor and our wildest dreams I never thought there was that much property there you could hear people shouting you need to come down and look at the room I'm in and I was shouting you need to come up and look at the room that I'm in because every room is stacked with stolen property that's what property they barely had room to move the police are also staggered by the amount of cash they find there was money everywhere $80,000 in a Versace wallet there was money hidden under the night table there was money in Betty's room the total value of currency that was recovered was in excess of a million I believe it was 1.2 million dollars smiley young and Teresa and Benny pang are arrested on the charge of possessing stolen property before trial smiley agrees to plead guilty on the condition that Teresa and Benny are released whole among stepped-up and acknowledged that he was fully responsible for the entire operation and he was the only one that was sentenced because he cooperates with police and forfeits over 6 million dollars in cash and property master thief smiley on gets a reduced sentence in March 2004 he starts serving a two-year prison term we cut the heart out of the operation since our arrests of Smiley's organization we haven't had a major organized theft at Pearson Airport he was well organized she was doing he was very determined and had a good business plan probably a business plan that the Bank of Montreal would have proved if it was siliceous its smiley is a mastermind because he managed to keep himself afloat and always stayed under the radar you got to respect him for that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: TOP BOX TV

Views: 845,255

Keywords: Reality, Genius, TV, Thieves, Fraud, Criminals, Scams, Crime, Documentary, air cargo, masterminds tv show, masterminds full episodes, air cargo documentary, master minds, masterminds tv, master minds episodes, master minds bank robbery, masterminds crime documentaries, masterminds documentary, til debt do us part full episodes, Lufthansa heist, goodfellas lufthansa heist, goodfellas real story, Hoa Lam Ong, airport heist, pearson airport robbery

Id: p2I3k8vCOxI

Length: 23min 8sec (1388 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 20 2018