A West Island resident, who was one of the first people to be charged after more than $10 million worth of silver was stolen from the Port of Montreal three years ago, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to being in possession of a fraction of the loot.
Norberto Cordeiro, 52, made a brief appearance before Quebec Court Judge Sylvie Durand at the Montreal courthouse where he pleaded guilty to being in possession of proceeds obtained through crime. As part of the same hearing, Durand agreed with a joint recommendation on a sentence that will leave Cordeiro, a resident of Pointe-Claire, with no criminal record. In preparation for the hearing, Cordeiro had already made a total of $15,000 in donations to three groups.
He is the third person to plead guilty in Project Silver — the Montreal police investigation into the audacious heist carried out in broad daylight on Sept. 2, 2015 — and end up with a sentence involving no jail time. The trucker who managed to sneak the container out of the port alleged he was intimidated into using a biometric security pass, that gave him access to the port, to carry out the theft. The man who allegedly intimidated the truck driver was charged in the case, but has since been acquitted.
Cordeiro was initially charged with being part of the theft, but that accusation was withdrawn in 2016.
On Wednesday, prosecutor Cynthia Gyenizse informed Durand that Cordeiro only became a subject of interest in the investigation after the silver was split up following the heist. She said investigators quickly learned that the contents of the container were quickly divided and loaded into three different trucks. Investigators were only able to locate one of the trucks and placed several individuals who were linked to it under surveillance.
It was that part of the investigation that led them to Cordeiro, the prosecutor explained. Investigators managed to identify him while two cars were parked back-to-back and a load of silver ingots was transferred from the trunk of a car to the trunk of his vehicle. A search warrant was later carried out at Cordeiro’s home where the Montreal police located some of the precious metal.
“Spontaneously, he said (to the police): ‘they’re not gold ingots but silver’,” the prosecutor said. She was unable to provide the Court with a precise value of the ingots found inside Cordeiro’s home, but estimated it was “more than $100,000.”
The only person to be convicted of a charge directly related to the theft was the truck driver, Daniel Octavian Popa. He collaborated with the Montreal police and was prepared to testify against the person who intimidated him, but no one else has been convicted on charges involving the actual theft. According to sources familiar with the investigation, roughly two-thirds of the silver was never recovered.
Cordeiro’s lawyer, Claude Olivier, said the plea agreement was reached following long discussions held before a facilitating judge who took part in discussions, held outside of a court of law, and weighed the evidence against Cordeiro before agreeing that a sentence leaving him with no criminal record was fair.
Olivier said Cordeiro had already paid considerably for his crime because he invested significantly to purchase the silver and then had to invest heavily in his defence. He said Cordeiro wanted a sentence that would leave him with no criminal record because he is a representative for a company that sells cleaning products and his work requires that he travel to Portugal and the United States.
Two months before the heist was carried out, a Montreal police investigator testifying at a bail hearing for Darrell Van Elk, a 52-year-old Dollard-des-Ormeaux resident charged in a large-scale cocaine trafficking case, alleged that Cordeiro was believed to be a drug trafficker. The investigator said this while reading off a list of alleged organized crime figures Van Elk met while under surveillance. On Wednesday, Olivier told the Montreal Gazette that Cordeiro “completely denies” the allegation that he was ever involved in drug trafficking.
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A Montreal police investigator unloads a silver brick from the rear of a tractor trailer in Pointe-Claire in 2015. Police arrested five men in connection with the theft.