ART THIEVES
AN ORGANISED GANG. HANDIWORK AGAIN DETECTED. Britain’s best-dressed crook did not leave his visiting card behind when he raided the mansion of Earl Winterton on the Surrey-Sussex border and removed a Reynolds’ £lO,OOO masterpiece, but he left enough of his handiwork for detectives to know that the elegant, immaculate figure of "The Gent’ was behind the robbery. “The Gent” is the guide, overseer and ruler of Gang No. s—fifth skilled art gang to operate in England since the beginning of the century. Gang No. s’s crimes include the disappearance of two oil paintings from the Mayfair homes of Sir Gervase Beckett; the theft of 20 Bronze Age palstaves from Winchester City Museum; the £3OOO haul of pictures from Alton Lodge, Roehampton; and the £lOO,OOO robbery of old masters from Chilham Castle. When Gang No. 5 go to work it is either an “order” job, with a market in readiness to receive the stolen goods, or a “work back.” In the first instance the order comes from an unscruplulous crank collector who is willing to take anything as long as he gets possession of a treasured work of art. In a “work back,” the property is returned through various underground channels for the handsome reward offered.
But this is only resorted to when the criminals fear the risk of smuggling the treasure out of the country to America, the most likely resort of “crank” collectors. How the hauls are handled for transport is best illustrated by the methods of the Smith-Robson gang which came to grief in 1923, when the police got on their trail after the £1,000,000 country mansion crimes.' Rare pictures were concealed in the sides of wooden crates, sandwiched between the outer covering and a thin striping of plywood on the inside. The crates were filled with china. The entire Wernher collection of 300 priceless objects d’art, stolen from the Red Room, Bath House, Piccadilly, and valued up to £250,000 was “booked” for America — but fate changed its destiny. Such was the publicity given to the robbery that the American receivers got scared and refused delivery. The collection was “worked back.”
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 October 1938, Page 5
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355ART THIEVES Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 October 1938, Page 5
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