A choose sentenced two males who stole Maurizio Cattelan‘s 18-carat gold bathroom throughout a 2019 raid at England’s Blenheim Palace, in keeping with a launch from Crown Prosecution Service.
The 227-pound bathroom, titled “America” (2016), was dismantled in a five-minute raid solely two days after it was publicly displayed in England. The piece, which first appeared on the Guggenheim Museum in New York a number of years earlier, was featured in an exhibition of the artist’s work on the 18th-century fortress and household residence of Winston Churchill.
James Sheen was convicted of the theft and acquired a 4 yr jail sentence, whereas Michael Jones, who staked out the palace, acquired a 27-month jail sentence.
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A jury at Oxford Crown Court docket beforehand discovered Jones responsible of housebreaking and Frederick Doe responsible of conspiracy to transform or switch legal property. Sheen, a builder who employed Jones, beforehand pleaded responsible to housebreaking.
Sheen was previously sentenced to 21 months in jail, suspended for 2 years, and ordered to do 240 hours of group service.
“Given the extent of planning that enabled the raid to be carried out inside 5 minutes, it was uncommon that the offenders left such a path of proof of their wake. From cellphone messages to DNA traces present in a stolen automotive and on the sledgehammer used within the housebreaking, this wealth of proof finally enabled us to safe their convictions,” Shan Saunders for the Crown Prosecution Service stated in a press release.
Jones allegedly visited Blenheim Palace twice: as soon as previous to the bathroom’s exhibition and once more after it was put in to take images of the scene.
On September 14, 2019, round 5 a.m., Sheen and the accomplices drove two stolen automobiles by way of the palace’s locked gates. As captured on CCTV, the group used sledgehammers and crowbars to interrupt into the palace and take away the bathroom. They then loaded it into the again of one of many automobiles earlier than escaping.
Sheen contacted Doe within the days following the housebreaking about promoting the gold utilizing coded messages. The pair mentioned a pay out of £26,500 ($34,500) per kilogram of the stolen gold.
“We reviewed almost 30,000 pages of proof as we constructed our case, together with a major quantity of fabric from James Sheen’s cellphone. We examined textual content messages, photographs, and hours of voice recordings, a lot of which implicated different people. Sheen and people he communicated with used code and slang, and it required cautious evaluation to decipher these messages to grasp how the raid was carried out and the way the stolen gold was disposed of,” Saunders continued.
“Three of the people concerned on this crime have now been sentenced, and we imagine this prosecution has performed a component in disrupting a wider crime and cash laundering community,” he added.
Insured for roughly $6 million, the bathroom nonetheless has not been recovered.
