An Ass Full Of Gold

This post is about a story out of Canada regarding the criminal trial of a man accused of smuggling a metric buttload of pure gold out of the Royal Canadian Mint. But as you read this story, remember that it’s entirely based on speculation and circumstantial evidence. The Royal Canadian Mint never noticed any missing gold, they don’t know if there even is any gold missing, and our man was never actually caught with any gold in his actual butt:

An employee of the Royal Canadian Mint allegedly smuggled about $180,000 in gold from the fortress-like facility, possibly evading multiple levels of detection with a time-honored prison trick.
Hiding the precious metal up his bum.

All they really know is that he worked in the Mint and was selling a lot of gold:

Court was told that, on multiple occasions, Lawrence took small circular chunks of gold — a cookie-sized nugget called a “puck” — to Ottawa Gold Buyers in the Westgate Shopping Centre on Carling Avenue.
Typically, the pucks weighed about 210 grams, or 7.4 ounces, for which he was given cheques in the $6,800 range, depending on fluctuating gold prices, court heard. He then deposited the cheques at the Royal Bank in the same mall.
One day a teller became suspicious at the size and number of Ottawa Gold Buyers cheques being deposited and Lawrence’s request to wire money out of the country. She then noticed on his account profile that he worked at the Mint.

The “pucks” he sold were suspiciously similar to the pucks he worked with in the Mint:

The Crown was able to show the pucks precisely fit the Mint’s custom “dipping spoon” made in-house — not available commercially — that is used to scoop molten gold during the production process.
Lawrence, who has since been terminated, was an operator in the refinery section. Among his duties was to scoop gold from buckets so it could be tested for purity, as the Mint prides itself on gold coins above the 99 per cent level.

But how did he get them out of the mint? Could the Vaseline in his locker have been involved?

Court was told Lawrence set off the metal detector at an exit from the “secure area” with more frequency than any other employee — save those with metal medical implants. When that happened, the procedure was to do a manual search with a hand-held wand, a search that he always passed.
Investigators also found a container of vaseline in his locker and the trial was presented with the prospect that a puck could be concealed in an anal cavity and not be detected by the wand. In preparation for these proceedings, in fact, a security employee actually tested the idea, Barnes said.

Wait, what?

…a security employee actually tested the idea…

Yes, gentle reader, your wondering eyes do not deceive you. A security employee of the Royal Canadian Mint actually volunteered — or was ordered — to shove a greased seven-ounce puck of solid gold up his or her ass so that they could test the vital question of whether it could be detected by the hand-held metal detectors used for backup screening. I ask you, is that dedication to your job, or is that dedication to your job?
And further consider this: the “let’s test these wands” project had to be documented fairly well, or what’s the point of the exercise? Somewhere in the bowels (you will forgive this pun if you forgave the “metric buttload” characterization at the top of the post) of the Royal Canadian Mint, there is almost certainly video of a security guard waddling through a checkpoint with an extra half-a-pound of unaccustomed gravity in his or her stride while Canadian-polite co-workers try very hard to act like nothing abnormal is happening…