Ever since a hooded gang smashed its way into Blenheim Palace — an English stately home that was Winston Churchill’s birthplace — and stole a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet more than five years ago, the glittering john has been missing seemingly without a trace.
On Tuesday, two men were found guilty over the theft and sale of the shiny commode, an artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, the Italian conceptual artist best known for another high-profile piece — a banana taped to a wall that was auctioned off last year for $6.2 million.
His toilet, titled “America,” was insured for $6 million and, despite that high value, is believed to have been divided up and sold.
After a three-week-long trial at Oxford Crown Court, a jury found Michael Jones, 39, guilty of burglary, and Fred Doe, 36, guilty of conspiracy to convert or transfer criminal property.
A third man, James Sheen, 40, had already pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to burglary, transferring criminal property and conspiracy to transfer criminal property. The police found Mr. Sheen’s DNA on a sledgehammer left at the crime scene as well as in a stolen truck used in the raid. Investigators also found hundreds of gold fragments on a pair of his sweatpants.
All three men will be sentenced at a later date.
The jury found a fourth defendant, Bora Guccuk, 41, a London jeweler, not guilty of conspiracy to convert or transfer criminal property.
During the trial, Julian Christopher, the lead prosecutor, told the court that the crime had begun with an “audacious” five-minute raid. Just before 5 a.m. on Sep. 14, 2019, Mr. Christopher said, a gang used a car and truck to smash through wooden gates that blocked a road up to the palace, and then used sledgehammers and crowbars to smash one of the building’s windows to gain entry.
Once inside, the gang dislodged the toilet, causing a small flood in the room. Security cameras then captured several men rolling a large item toward the car and placing it into the vehicle’s trunk, the court heard. Those cameras also captured someone carrying what appeared to be a toilet seat toward the vehicles, he said. The gang then sped off.
Mr. Christopher said it appeared that the artwork, which weighed over 200 pounds, had since been “split up into smaller amounts of gold” and sold on.
During the trial, prosecutors told the court that Mr. Jones had visited Blenheim Palace to scout Mr. Cattelan’s artwork and taken a photograph of the lock on the toilet stall’s door.
Mr. Jones denied any involvement in the raid, and told the jury that he had visited the palace because he was interested in seeing Mr. Cattelan’s art. He said he had even used the toilet, as visitors were permitted to. Asked what that was like, Mr. Jones replied, “Splendid.”
The toilet, which Mr. Cattelan has described as both an absurd statement on inequality and a gift to museumgoers to get up close to something so valuable, had made headlines worldwide long before its theft. Three years earlier, the artist had installed it at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where it became a social media sensation that visitors lined up to see it.
Mr. Cattelan said in an email on Tuesday that the 2019 burglary wasn’t “exactly the heist of the century,” but it was “one of the most bizarre.”
The artist is known for pulling some prankish stunts of his own: He once stole the contents of a gallery in the Netherlands and then presented the looted goods as his own work. Mr. Cattelan said that friends and acquaintances had for a long time been “absolutely convinced I was the mastermind behind this Blenheim affair — even more so than the actual thieves.”
“Let’s hope,” Mr. Cattelan added, “this verdict finally clears my name.”
