Theives Visit Chateaux

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31904, 4 February 1969, Page 8

Theives Visit Chateaux

Connoisseur thieves are striking against the stately chateaux round Paris, robbing them of priceless works of art and the police suspect, spiriting off some of their booty to foreign buyers, reports Reuter.

In the last week the “Chateaux gangs” broke into four castles and netted a haul of antiques ranging from an eleventh-century chapel crucifix to old masters and seven-teenth-century furniture. Many of the hundreds of stately homes in the Paris region have seen fine Louis XV armchairs, boudoir accoutrements and tapestries disappear in the last two years.

The police are working on the hypothesis that there are two types of gang—amateurs working from chateau to chateau, more or less by chance, and highly organised groups working to the orders of foreign buyers and carefully selecting their booty befo 'ehan 1. In most cases, the gangs use the same technique—driving up stealthily by night and leaving a couple of vans near the chateau grounds, or even driving into the grounds themselves by a discreet entrance.

After breaking open the windows they carry off tables, armchairs, pictures, cutlery, and porcelain as though they were ordinary furniture removers.

Many of the chateaux belong to people In the higher echelons of Parisian professional society and are used as week-end homes. Their burglar protection systems evidently leave much to be desired. When the police caught some of the thieves, recently, they found stolen valuables in automatic baggage lockers at main-line railway stations and airports. It Is impossible to estimate

the value of all the thefti but one of last week's hauls of furniture was worth about $53,575. The size of the objects stolen is of no concern. to the thieves, who are guided solely by aesthetic and antiquarian interests. One theft consisted of t collection of small, first-edi-tion books. This was followed a few days later by the disappearance from a neighbouring chateau of an immense