A solid gold toilet worth £4.8 million was stolen in a brazen burglary at Blenheim Palace in 2019, a UK court heard on Monday. The heist, which took only five minutes, involved a group of masked men who broke into the stately home using sledgehammers.
The toilet, an 18-carat gold artwork titled America by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, was fully functional and had been plumbed in as part of an art exhibition.
However, prosecutors told Oxford Crown Court that the stolen piece was most likely broken down into smaller amounts of gold and has never been recovered.
Michael Jones, 39, from Oxford, has denied a charge of burglary, while Fred Doe, 36, from Windsor, and Bora Guccuk, 41, from London, have pleaded not guilty to conspiring to transfer criminal property. The court was informed that a fourth suspect, James Sheen, 40, from Northamptonshire, had already pleaded guilty to burglary and money laundering in April this year.
According to prosecutor Julian Christopher KC, the burglary took place in the early hours of September 14, 2019, when five individuals forced their way through the locked gates of Blenheim Palace using two vehicles. They then smashed their way into the building with sledgehammers, which were later found abandoned at the scene.
"The work of art was never recovered. It appears to have been split up into smaller amounts of gold and never recovered," Christopher told the court.
The court was shown a photograph taken about 17 hours before the heist, allegedly by Jones, as part of what prosecutors described as "reconnaissance for the burglary."
Evidence recovered from mobile phones belonging to Sheen, Doe, and Guccuk allegedly showed negotiations over the sale of approximately 20kg of the stolen gold, with a price of £25,632 per kilo. Guccuk, who ran a jewellery business in London’s Hatton Garden, was said to have made an estimated profit of £3,000 per kilo from the transactions.
The gold toilet weighed 98kg and was insured for $6 million. At the time of the theft, gold prices indicated its raw material alone was worth around £2.8 million.
Blenheim Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is famously known as the birthplace of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
