Lester Lawrence, who worked in the gold refinery at the Royal Canadian Mint in Ontario, is accused of smuggling out $180K worth of gold from his workplace.
A court heard this week that the employee managed to get a number of “cookie size” pieces of gold past the building’s security and metal detectors over several months, before selling them to gold buyers.
A journalist covering the case told CBC: “What they do know is that everybody who works in this area has to go through fairly sophisticated metal detectors.
“So the theory that they’re working on is that there’s only one way this employee could get that gold out and that was smuggled in some kind of body cavity.
“And when you see the size of the nuggets or the ‘pucks’, as they call them… the only conclusion they came to is that they had to be in his rectum.”
Vaseline was found inside the man’s locker, furthering the suggestion that he hid the gold in a body cavity.
Of the possibility that the gold could be smuggled inside a rectum, they confirmed: “There was testimony from the security people that they had actually tested this on a human being.
“This was further evidence that indeed this could very well have been the method by which these ‘pucks’ had left The Mint.”