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Rare books worth more than 2.5 million pounds that were stolen from a warehouse in west London in a daring Mission Impossible-style heist have been found buried under the floor of a house in rural Romania.
The recovery of the 200 books, which include the first editions of important works by Galileo and Sir Isaac Newton, is the culmination of a three-year police operation that involved raids at 45 addresses in three countries and led to charges against 13 people.
The books were stolen from a postal transit warehouse in Feltham in January 2017 en route to a specialty book auction in Las Vegas. Two men, Daniel David and Víctor Opariuc, broke into the warehouse by poking holes in the roof before abseiling into the building, positioning themselves on shelves inside to avoid sensors that had activated the alarms.
Then, in a five-hour operation, they pulled the books out the same way at 16 holdalls, leaving at 2.15 a.m. with a third man, Narcis Popescu, who had waited in a car. Later, the vehicle was discovered abandoned after being cleaned with bleach.
After the trials of most of the men involved in the case, who were tracked down after a DNA sample, which had escaped cleaning, was found in a headrest in the car, the books were finally traced back to Neamt in the North. eastern Romania. Local police officers who searched the property Wednesday found the books, which included a rare edition of Newton’s Principia, stacked in neatly wrapped packages in a cement pit.
Metropolitan Police said the discovery was “a perfect ending to this operation” and a tribute to the cooperation between British, Romanian and Italian police.
DI Andy Durham said: “These books are extremely valuable, but more importantly, they are irreplaceable and of great importance to international cultural heritage.”
The suspects were identified as part of a Romanian organized crime group responsible for a series of high-value warehouse robberies across the UK, often using the same method. The Met said that the gang had generally avoided prosecution because the members were flown to the UK to commit specific crimes and abandoned as soon as the crimes were completed, and the stolen property was later taken away by others using different methods of transport.
The gang was linked to several prominent Romanian crime families that were part of the Clamparu crime group, the Met said.
The day after the books were stolen, Popescu rented a house in Balham, where the books were kept. Earlier this year, a court heard that a few days later, two others, Marian Mamaliga and Ilie Ungureanu, entered the UK via Eurotunnel in a van, collected the books and drove them out of the country.
The group was also linked to other successful raids using similar methods, stealing laptops and other electronic devices worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. In one case, they used ladders and ropes to scale a warehouse, made holes to get in, and stole laptops worth approximately £ 150,000. Police estimated that an additional £ 2 million worth of property was stolen in 11 crimes.
The group was captured after Romanian police stopped Mamaliga’s van and found around 30 laptops inside with no evidence of their purchase. Twelve of the group have pleaded guilty and will be sentenced later this month. A thirteenth defendant will be tried in March.
