Two members of a gang behind the ‘brazen’ heist of a gold toilet worth £4.75 million from Blenheim Palace have been jailed.
James Sheen, 40, Michael Jones, 39, and three other men stole the fully-functional 18-carat bog – a sculpture by artist Maurizio Cattelan, creator of the infamous £4.5 million banana duct-taped to a wall – from the Oxfordshire stately home in 2019.
Detectives believe they then broke down or melted the 98kg piece – titled ‘America’ – to sell the gold, which would have been worth around £2.8 million.
No trace of it has ever been recovered.
The heist happened shortly after a glamorous launch party held for the UK unveiling of the sculpture, which was on loan from New York’s Guggenheim mmuseum.
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The gang waited for guests to leave before ramming through the gates to the palace grounds in a vehicle and smashing a window to get inside the building, where Winston Churchill was born.
They used a sledgehammer to sever the toilet’s connecting pipes before lugging it away.
A court heard they were in and out in ‘no more than five-and-a-half minutes’.
Sheen, was already serving 19 years for a museum burglary, a fraud and cash machine heists.
He was jailed for another four years, to run consecutively, after admitting burglary, transferring criminal property, and conspiracy thereof.
The court heard he was ‘almost certainly the figure that carried the sledgehammer’, on which his DNA was found.
Jones, who was found guilty of burglary following a trial, was jailed for two years and three months after the court his role may only have been casing the palace.
‘You paid visits on two occasions to Blenheim Palace in the days leading up to the burglary, Judge Ian Pringle KC told the 39-year-old.
‘That your role was to carry out a reconnaissance of the museum, to know exactly where the golden toilet was situated and to work out the quickest route in and out of the palace, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever.
‘Although you have no witnesses to where you were on the night in question, I cannot be sure that you were part of the group of burglars who broke into the palace that night.’
A third member of the gang, 36-year-old Frederick Doe, was sentenced to 21 months imprisonment suspended for two years and ordered to do 240 hours unpaid work for his role in the heist.
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