A former Royal Canadian Mint employee has been found guilty of smuggling $190,000 worth of gold from the building on Sussex Drive — apparently in his rectum, an Ottawa judge ruled Wednesday morning. 
 
 Leston Lawrence "clearly had the opportunity" to steal the gold because he often worked alone and the security cameras would not have caught him slipping gold pucks into his pocket, Justice Peter Doody ruled. 
 
 "His locker contained Vaseline and latex gloves, which could have been used to insert a puck into his rectum," he ruled, adding that there were no cameras in the locker room. 
 
 Lawrence set off the mint's walk-through metal detectors more than any other employee without a metal implant — 28 times between December 2014 and March 2015, court heard. But when a secondary check with handheld detectors failed to alert guards to the gold, Lawrence was able to leave with it each time, Doody found. 
 
 The handheld detectors are less sensitive than the walk-through detectors, and do not detect metal in body cavities, the ruling detailed. 
 
 Video footage of Leston Lawrence setting off the metal detectors0:29 
 
 Though there was no video evidence of Lawrence stealing the gold from the mint, Lawrence was found guilty of stealing the 22 pucks from the mint on Sussex Drive in Ottawa, and of laundering 17 of them through Ottawa Gold Buyers (the cheque for an 18th puck never cleared because that puck was seized by police). 
 
 The weight of the laundered pucks ranged from 192 to 264 grams apiece and were sold for between $6,800 and $9,500 each in 2014 and 2015. Lawrence made $130,000 from the 17 pucks he sold, which he sent abroad to build a house in Jamaica and buy a boat in Florida, among other transactions. 
 
 Lawrence's income was insufficient to purchase the gold he sold, the ruling detailed. 
 
 He was also found guilty of possession of property obtained by crime, conveying gold out of the mint, and breach of trust by a public official. 
 
 Bank flagged police 
 
 Lawrence worked at the mint from July 2008 until March 2015. His job included purifying gold — jewelry, coins and bars purchased by the mint — by melting it, injecting it with chlorine gas and skimming off base metal until the molten gold was 99.5 per cent pure. 
 
 Once he believed the molten gold was pure, he was tasked with scooping some out with a ladle, letting it cool and then testing it for purity. He was supposed to return the pucks into the vat of molten gold after testing. 
 
 In February 2015, Lawrence cashed two cheques from Ottawa Gold Buyers — one for $7,992.27 and another for $7,269 — at the RBC at Westgate Mall, the ruling detailed. He told the teller the cheques were from "gold nuggets" and that he wanted to transfer the money to help his parents rebuild a house in Jamaica. 
 
 When the teller noticed he worked at the mint, the bank notified the RCMP. 
 
 RCMP surveillance 
 
 Under RCMP surveillance, he was seen visiting the Ottawa Gold Buyers store at Westgate Mall on March 9, 2015. 
 
 The RCMP found Lawrence sold a 24-karat gold puck to the store for $7,966.27, and had previously sold 17 similar pucks to the store for a grand total of $138,172.46. But Lawrence only made $130,206.19, because the final cheque for $7,966.27 never cleared. 
 
 The RCMP also seized four gold pucks — roughly the diameter of golf balls with a total value of $27,278.84 — from Lawrence's bank safety deposit box on March 11, 2015, the ruling detailed. 
 
 Experts analyzed the gold pucks, and found that they matched the purity of gold at the mint. The pucks were identical in diameter to those produced at the mint, and fit the ladle used exclusively by the mint perfectly, Doody's decision detailed. 
 
 Lawrence is expected to be sentenced on Nov. 28. ||||| Did a Barrhaven man, rightly or wrongly mocked around the world, actually steal $180,000 in gold from the Royal Canadian Mint by smuggling the precious metal in his rectum? 
 
 We’ll have a better idea Wednesday when Ontario Justice Peter Doody rules on five theft-related charges against Leston Lawrence, 35, a Mint worker accused of slipping gold nuggets — called pucks — past high-end security checks and out of the fortress-like building in 2014 and 2015. 
 
 Lawrence, now fired, is also charged with possession of stolen property, laundering the proceeds of crime and breach of trust in what the Crown alleges was the ultimate inside job: “secreting the gold” inside his body. 
 
 In video obtained by the Citizen, Lawrence, an operator in the refinery section, can be seen setting off the “arch” metal detector through which all employees must pass when leaving secure areas of the Mint on Sussex Drive. 
 
 In the Feb. 2, 2015 clip, he is then inspected with a hand-held wand — without any apparent problem — and allowed to leave. Throughout the exchange with security staff, he appears to be in a jovial mood, as though the beeping detector was just a minor nuisance. 
 
 The trial heard that Lawrence, in fact, set off the overhead detector more than any other employee at the Mint, save those with metal medical implants. In three months, he set off the sensitive detector 27 times — sometimes with extremely high readings — but always passed the secondary hand-test. 
 
 Still, with all those warning signals, the Mint never began an internal investigation into Lawrence’s conduct. (It was only later that the RCMP recovered a jar of vaseline in his locker, as well as latex gloves. The Mint was so convinced the gold was smuggled in the anal cavity that it tested the method — successfully — with a security employee.) 
 
 The case actually broke open, not from the inside, but from suspicions raised by an alert bank teller, who noticed Lawrence was regularly depositing cheques in the $7,000 range from a gold buyer in same mall, at Westgate on Carling Avenue. (The pucks weighed about 210 grams, or 7.4 ounces.) 
 
 The bank’s security staff was alerted when the teller noticed Lawrence was also a Mint employee. 
 
 When the RCMP eventually obtained a search warrant, four of the so-called gold pucks were found in his safety deposit box — pucks that exactly matched the shape of a dipping spoon Lawrence used in the refining process. 
 
 Records seized from Ottawa Gold Buyers showed 18 pucks were sold by Lawrence between Nov. 27, 2014 and March 12, 2015. Added to dozens of gold coins that were also redeemed, the total value of the alleged theft was estimated at $179,015. 
 
 Court also heard that thousands of dollars were wired from his Royal Bank account to a construction contractor in Jamaica, while another sizeable sum was sent to an Atlantic coast marina as deposit on a boat. 
 
 When the Citizen broke the story in September, it was picked up by news outlets around the world, even leading to a memorable mention in Stephen Colbert’s monologue on The Late Show, with the tag-line, Gold Sphincter, and the music from the Bond classic, Goldfinger. 
 
 Lawrence’s defence lawyer, Gary Barnes, told Justice Doody that the Crown had not proved the unmarked gold found in Lawrence’s possession even came from the Mint. Nor could the Crown corporation explain with certainty how the gold left the building, or even if records indicated it was missing any of the metal. 
 
 In effect, the Mint did not know when, or even if, any gold had been stolen, leading Barnes to call its security measures “appalling.” 
 
 There are more than 200 security cameras inside the Mint and a sizeable internal security team. It has since enhanced several security layers within the facility. 
 
 To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com 
 
 Twitter.com/kellyegancolumn
– A Canadian man who smuggled $145,000 in gold out of the country's mint is on his way to prison—and will probably be searched extremely thoroughly on the way in. Leston Lawrence, found guilty in November of smuggling 22 gold "pucks" out of the Royal Canadian Mint in his rectum, has been sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay his former employers the full market value of the stolen gold, the CBC reports. Ontario Judge Peter Doody ruled that if the 35-year-old can't come up with the money within three years of getting out of prison, he'll have to go back behind bars for another 30 months. Lawrence—who set off metal detectors at work many times but always passed searches with a handheld wand—was convicted of conveying gold out of the mint, breach of trust by a public official, and possession of property obtained by crime, reports the BBC. Prosecutors said he used the $100,000 or so he made from selling the gold to Ottawa Gold Buyers to buy a house in Jamaica and a boat in Florida. Investigators, first alerted by a suspicious bank teller, found Vaseline and rubber gloves in Lawrence's work locker. In his safe deposit box at a bank, they discovered four unsold gold pucks, which had about the same diameter as a golf ball and matched the size of the ladle Lawrence used to test gold at the mint, Radio Canada International reports. (You'll never guess how this teen tried to smuggle a gun.)