January 2009

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At last justice has been done to the Johnson family, the most audacious and determined gang of thieves to plague England for many years. It seems extraordinary that this one family, based in a caravan park in Gloucestershire, could over 20 years amass something like £80m before they were finally jailed yesterday – most with sentences of 11 years each. Much of their work was run-of-the-mill but nonetheless profitable smash-and-grab raids at offices and banks, but the case got huge press coverage because of their fondness for stealing art from country houses, in raids carried out with maximum violence – they got round security systems by ramming cars through windows and carried guns.

It is hard to imagine anything more different from The Thomas Crown Affair, but it is disappointing that the way the Johnsons like to present themselves as charming rogues robbing the rich has received so much attention from journalists. The leader of the gang is reported to have said ‘I would like to make it clear to the people out there, to the police and the rich people like Lord Rothschild: if I feel the need to when I have got to rob a stately home, I will do so…I feel I have got the fucking right to rob the lords out there.’ This refers to the gang’s raid in June 2003 on Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury (pictured above), and the theft of the house’s collection of 18th-century gold snuff boxes. The gang’s incompetence as well as greed is shown by the fact that many of these exquisite objects were badly damaged or destroyed in the get-away. I’ve yet to read a newspaper report that emphasises that Waddesdon is not the home of Lord Rothschild but is owned by the National Trust, so the boxes’ loss is felt not by the wealthy but by the 100,000 or more visitors who go there every year to enjoy its treasures, given to the nation by the Rothschild family in lieu of tax in 1957. Why is the temptation to romanticise burglary so irresistible?

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