200 Rare Books Were Stolen in a Thrilling Heist—Three Years Later, They’ve Been Found Buried in Romania

In January 2017, a pair of agile bandits cut holes in the roof of a London warehouse, rappelled down shelves—steering clear of motion sensors—and absconded with 16 bags of rare books worth about $3.2 million. The mission took about 5 hours to complete, and by 2:15 a.m., the perpetrators had fled the scene in a getaway car, which they bleached clean before deserting. The stolen cache of tomes included first edition works by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, and Francisco Goya, and an international coalition of investigators from the UK, Italy, and Romania (plus additional help from European Union forces) has spent more than three years trying to recover it. Now, they finally have.

As The Guardian reports, Romanian police officers located around 200 missing volumes all carefully wrapped and buried in an underground cement pit inside a house in Neamț County, Romania. The crime wasn’t an isolated incident; the thieves are members of a Romanian organized crime gang linked to a number of similar warehouse heists. According to a statement from London’s Metropolitan Police, they’ve managed to elude capture for so long partly because they pilfer abroad, but also because they don’t keep evidence on them for very long (the warehouse operatives pass their spoils on to cohorts and quickly leave the country).

For this particular crime, however, they were sloppy. Investigators discovered DNA on one of the vehicle’s headrests, which helped lead to the arrest of 13 people involved in the book burglary and related crimes. That was in June 2019; it took another 15 months to track down the books themselves.

“This recovery is a perfect end to this operation,” London detective inspector Andy Durham said in a statement. “These books are extremely valuable, but more importantly they are irreplaceable and are of great importance to international cultural heritage.”