Paul Thomas Bryntwick, 64, is behind bars for Christmas. That's nothing new for a man considered one of Montreal's top bank heist masterminds.
Bryntwick and four others face charges related to five armed truck robberies in the Montreal area between 2011 and 2015, as the men allegedly descended on two-man crews to grab booty.
They are also suspected of planning another failed heist and of robbing an armoured car together way back in 1999.
Bryntwick made his bones with a legendary Vancouver heist in which he, Stevie Johnson and a three others tunneled into a vault with 1,200 safety deposit boxes in 1977, making off with an estimated $2.5 million in gold bars.They were nabbed at the airport when a clerk spotted their conspicuously heavy hockey bags.
It's said that much of that loot was never recovered and some suspect that it was the biggest theft in the history of Canada.
Bryntwick later told the parole board that other larcenous louts would pick his brains for tips, according to documents cited by the excellent Paul Cherry.Bryntwick's fellow accused are also well past their nightclubbing best-before dates: Walter Butt, 54, David Stachula, 47, Serge Fournier, 64 and Gary Marsden, 63.
If convicted, the mature gentlemen face a long sentences for such misdeeds as kidnapping, armed robbery, and forcible confinement.
A guilty verdict could conceivably see them end their lives in prison.
So why would Bryntwick - who has spent plenty of time behind bars already - be possibly involved a such a series of risky heists?
Nobody knows what lies within a man's soul but cherchez la femme as the detective would have it.
Bryntwick was married to a woman named Francine Allard who was very loyal to him before her death at the age of 57 in 2009.
The two do not appear to have had kids, so it was just the two of them against the world.
Allard was charged with possessing goods obtained through crime in the fall of 2000.
So authorities seized the $300,000 proceeds from the sale of the home at 55 des Pins in Laval, which was under her name.
Bryntwick also had a concurrent year tacked onto the 12-year sentence he was was already serving.Paul and Francine were not happy with losing out on the cash from their home at 55 Des Pins in Laval.
So they fought it in court.
They lost..
So would a 64-year-old man might have been involved in the young man's game of robbing Brinks trucks?
Bryntwick, while in the September of his years, still had some fire in his belly, perhaps fueled by what he considered the injustice of the seizure or perhaps through the boredom of losing his wife.
One West End Gang veteran suggested that the Coolopolis board was overthinking this, "If he did it, it's because it's what what he always did."
Bryntwick and the others are, of course, presumed innocent.