Category: Modern(ish)

Thief of Ruby Slippers thought they were real rubies

Looting, Modern(ish), Museums

The perpetrator of the daring 2005 smash-and-grab theft of a pair of Ruby Sippers from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, turns out to be surprisingly clueless. Terry Martin managed to steal the iconic shoes, one of only four surviving pairs of the slippers worn by Judy Garland playing Dorothy in 1939 production of The Wizard of Oz, in less than a minute and keep them under wraps for 13 years, even as authorities and fans never stopped searching for them. Despite this appearance of competence, according to a filing made by his lawyer before his sentencing Monday, Terry Martin thought the Ruby Slippers were festooned with actual rubies rather than dyed glass beads and sequins.

It beggars belief, but apparently Mr. Martin, who was 57 years old at the time of the theft and was born nine years after the movie’s initial theatrical release, figured they had to be real rubies to justify the million dollars they were insured for. His cunning plan was to pry the rubies off and sell them piecemeal so nobody would be able to trace their origin. He only realized his mistake when a jewel fence he took one of the beads to broke the news that it was made of glass.

Martin had dealt in stolen jewels and had spent time in prison for burglary, his lawyer said. But he had been out of prison for 10 years at the time of the theft and was living quietly in Grand Rapids, a small city 80 miles northwest of Duluth, when an “old mob associate” contacted him about “a job,” his lawyer wrote.

Martin was initially reluctant to get involved, DeKrey wrote. But “old Terry” beat out “new Terry,” and he gave in to the temptation for “one last score,” his lawyer said. […]

Martin used a hammer to smash two window panes in a door of the Judy Garland Museum and broke open a plexiglass case holding the shoes, leaving behind a single red sequin and no fingerprints, court documents said.

But less than two days later, when the unnamed person who traded in stolen jewels told Martin that the gems were worthless replicas, “Terry angrily decided to simply cut his losses and move on,” DeKrey wrote. “He gave the slippers to the associate who had recruited him for the job and told the man that he never wanted to see them again.”

He was serious about that. Martin was only busted in 2018 when other parties tried to blackmail the insurance company for hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for the shoes. The FBI recovered the slippers in a sting operation, but the blackmailers, who were probably organized crime figures, and the mobster who originally recruited Martin back in 2005 were not arrested. Martin refused to implicate anyone else. He just pled guilty to the theft and is facing his fate alone.

His sentence was gentle. Martin has COPD and is in the last months of his life. He was sentenced to time served, a year of probation and to pay the museum $23,000 in restitution for the theft.

HMS Erebus dives recover sailors’ belongings

Modern(ish)

The 2023 exploration of the wreck of HMS Erebus off the coast of King William Island has recovered and documented a fascinating array of personal belongings and naval tools from the ill-dated 1845 Franklin expedition for the Northwest Passage.

Parks Canada just released the report on the results of the 2023 dives to document and investigate the ship. In the two weeks between September 5th through the 19th, Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology team conducted 68 dives to the wreck of HMS Erebus, moving through the accessible spaces of the ship and debris field. The aim of these dives is to record details about the shipwreck and the objects it carried to shed new light on naval technology and the daily lives of sailors. To that end, the team explored an officer’s cabin, believed to have belonged to Second Lieutenant Henry Dundas Le Vesconte, and found a wealth of instruments pertaining to sailing and navigation, among them a thermometer, a parallel rule and a fishing rod with a brass reel.

Items of daily use were found in what is believed to have been the storage pantry of the captain’s steward (Edmund Hoar) just forward of Franklin’s cabin. Objects discovered there include a leather shoe, storage jars and a sealed glass cylinder that held some sort of pharmaceutical product. The contents look thick and grey like a less shiny mercury (I hope the doomed Franklin expedition crew didn’t use mercury the same way the doomed Mary Rose crew did). The vial is embossed with the letter “K” and the broad arrow that labelled it government issue.

Brass fishing reel from Second Lieutenant Henry Dundas Le Vesconte's cabin. Photo courtesy Parks Canada.An excavation of a seaman’s chest in the forecastle revealed objects used by regular sailors on the ship. There were some pistols, other military items, footwear, coins, a stoneware bowl and medicine bottles. Only a small selection of the finds were recovered, including the brass fishing reel, the stoneware bowl, the K bottle and one pistol. They will undergo conservation and be studied further in Ottawa before they go on display at at the Nattilik Heritage Centre in Gjoa Haven (Uqsuqtuuq), Nunavut.

Out in the debris field, divers documented one of the ship’s spare propellers (first recorded on the seabed in 2015) and found an ice anchor. This is the first ice anchor found from HMS Erebus or HMS Terror.

The major push to document of the site resulted in thousands of high-resolution digital photographs being taken. They will be used to create extremely accurate and virtually explorable 3D photogrammetry models of the site. The models will allow researchers to follow the effects the movement and sediment are having on the wreck. Already parts of Erebus like the upper deck have collapsed, so scientists are keen to explore the dangers posed by the unforgiving environment.

Stolen Picasso and Chagall paintings found in Antwerp basement

Looting, Modern(ish)

Paintings by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall stolen from a private collection in Tel Aviv 14 years ago have been found in a basement in Antwerp, Belgium. The two paintings, Tête (1971) by Picasso and L’homme en prière (1970) by Chagall, then valued at $900,000, were taken from the villa of the Herzikovich family in February 2010. The thieves disabled the house’s sophisticated alarm system and broke into the safe to steal $680,000 worth of jewelry. They made off with the jewelry and the Picasso and Chagall pieces. There were other important artworks in the house which were not touched.

The case went cold until late 2022, when police in Namur, Belgium, were informed that a 68-year-old Israeli watch dealer residing in Namur was offering the two paintings for sale. The suspect, currently identified by authorities only as Daniel Z, was placed under surveillance in the attempt to confirm the information in the tipoff. Investigators were able to establish that he was indeed in possession of the stolen works.

On January 10, 2024, police raided Daniel Z’s home and detained him and his wife. They found large amounts of cash in the house, but not the paintings. The home of one of his relatives was also searched with nothing found. The suspect soon confessed to police that he had the Picasso and Chagall in his possession, but refused to tell them where they were hidden. Two days later, police searched another location: a building in Antwerp that once housed a sketchy art dealership connected to stolen paintings. There, in the cellar, the paintings were found inside two wooden boxes with screwed down lids. They were in undamaged condition in their original frames.

Daniel Z was arrested and charged with receiving stolen goods.

Lost 4,000-year-old tomb rediscovered in Ireland

Ancient, Modern(ish)

A local folklorist has discovered the remnants of a Bronze Age tomb that was believed to have been destroyed in the mid-19th century. The megalithic structure known as Altóir na Gréine (the altar of the sun) was built on top of a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter, County Kerry, about 4,000 years ago. It was a wedge tomb, a funerary monument containing the cinerary remains of a family or community group but may also have been used for other ceremonial purposes. This style of tomb is typically oriented to the west or southwest and may have had a cosmological connection to the setting sun, hence its traditional appellation.

It was still intact in 1838 when it was visited as a local attraction by Victorian writer and world traveler Lady Georgiana Chatterton. She recounted her visit, complete with a sketch of the “sun altar,” in her best-selling travel memoir Rambles in the South of Ireland.

On the top of the hill were the remains of a very curious piece of antiquity, once an altar, supposed to have been used for offering sacrifices to the sun. We heartily wished we could have had an opportunity of telling the sun, before hand, of our intention of visiting his altar; for a more thick, penetrating rain I think never was experiences, than fell to our lot while poking over the remains of the old stones, and taking the sketch which is here given.

Inspired by Lady Chatterton’s record of her ramble, Kerry antiquarian Richard Hitchcock visited the hill site in 1852 seeking what he called the cromleac (literally “bent stone” meaning a megalithic tomb with two standing stones topped by a capstone) that she had sketched.

I regret to say that this cromleac, or, as Lady Chatterton calls it, “sun altar,” does not now exist, the stones which composed it having been broken and carried away for building purposes, as if there were no others in the neighbourhood! It is, however, fortunate that we have even a small engraving of the monument preserved to us.

That last line proved prescient. The location of the lost tomb disappeared from collective memory and nobody had ever noted its coordinates when it was still apparent on the landscape. It was Lady Chatterton’s sketch that bore mute witness to its presence 185 years later when folklorist Billy Mag Fhloinn came across megalithic stones on a tomb-mapping project on the Dingle peninsula run by Sacred Heart University. He was very familiar with the drawing and specifically had it in mind when he climbed the hill looking for the long-lost Altóir na Gréine and filmed the stones he saw there.

When converting the video into a 3D scan he noticed that a stone in the undergrowth resembled one from Lady Chatterton’s Victorian-era sketch.

He sent the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, which dispatched archaeologist Caimin O’Brien, who confirmed it belonged to a so-called wedge tomb dating from the early bronze age between 2500BC and 2000 BC.

There is a capstone and several large upright stones called orthostats, comprising about a quarter of the original tomb, Mag Fhloinn said on Thursday. “People had assumed it was all destroyed.”

Met acquires large Tiffany window by Agnes Northrop

Modern(ish), Museums

A spectacular three-part window created by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s renowned glass studio and designed by Agnes Northrop has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The monumental windows adorned the Great Hall of Linden Hall, the stately home of in Dawson, Pennsylvania, before they were sold and disappeared into a private collection in 2005. Now they will return to public view.

Agnes Northrop, Tiffany Garden Landscape Window (1912). Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As part of the Museum’s American Wing 100th anniversary, the window will be installed in the Charles Engelhard Court beginning November 2024. The window will be dramatically framed by the columns from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Long Island country estate.

The window was commissioned by Sarah Cochran, a former housemaid who married Philip Cochran, the son and sole heir to a coal fortune, and thus became lady of the estate she had once cleaned. She was widowed young and their son died while still in college, so she took on management of the family’s complex business interests, earning her the sobriquet “Coal Queen.” At the same time, she traveled around Europe seeking inspiration, furnishings and antiques for the new home she was having built back in Pennsylvania.

Construction of Linden Hall began in 1911. Sarah commissioned Louis Comfort Tiffany to create the stained glass windows for the great hall in 1912. Agnes Northrop, one of Tiffany’s most prominent female designers who started in the 1880s as one the “Tiffany Girls,” the group of women who created some of the glassworks’ most iconic designs for windows, lamps and other decorative pieces that have gone down in history as the signature Tiffany style.

Northrop was the head of the design crew for a short time, before graduating to working on solo projects in her own office. She pioneered the stained-glass landscape windows of iridescent glass, designed them first in gouache watercolor and pencil, before the glass was created from her designs at the Louis Comfort Tiffany studio in New York. Northrop’s gouache of the central window for the Linden Hall commission is already in the collection of the Met and has been since 1967.

The finished window was so spectacular that Louis Comfort Tiffany briefly put it on display in his Manhattan showroom at 37th Street and Fifth Avenue before it was installed at Linden Hall. The lush flowers, tree-lined arbor, formal garden with central fountain and mountain pine forests on the horizon were designed to mimic Linden’s actual gardens. Light and colored flooded into the Great Hall through the northern exposure windows.

Sarah Cochran died in 1936, bequeathing Linden to her brother. It passed through several hands over the next few decades, include an order of monks, before the current owners, the United Steelworkers Union, bought the estate in 1976. In 2005, the USU sold the windows to a private buyer for $6.8 million, replacing them with simple clear panes decorated with a heraldry crest in the middle of each panel. The union explained this seemingly inexplicable decision as unfortunate but necessary as the astronomical costs of insuring the Tiffany windows became increasingly unaffordable.

For nearly two decades the Linden Hall Garden Landscape was out of view. Earlier this year, funds from a variety of donors made it possible for the Garden Landscape to be brought back into the light for all to see two miles south of where it had once graced the Tiffany Studios showroom.

Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, said: “This stunning work of art is an extraordinary example of the transformational creativity of Agnes Northrop and Tiffany Studios. Magnificent in concept and execution and more than grand in size, it deepens the American Wing’s Tiffany holdings and will enhance the already stunning Engelhard Court with a powerful, immersive viewing experience.”