A thief or a crew of thieves has just accomplished one of the biggest goals in California history, breaking into a warehouse in Oakland, California under the cover of darkness and making off with more than a thousand valuables.
Oakland police say the break-in happened shortly before 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 15, which is four days before robbers stole a trove of napoleic treasures from Paris.
(Oakland Museum of the California Police Department / Oakland)
Items stolen from the Oakland museum include Native American baskets, jewelry, laptops, daguerreotype photographs and finely carved hory tusks.
The Oakland Police Department is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s special operations team to investigate the heist and recover the missing items.
“It was devastating. It felt like a real violation. It felt like someone breaking into your home,” said museum director Lori Pogarty.
Fogarty said FOSOSA staff were not working at the storage facility on the day of the break-in and found it the next morning, Oct. 16.
“Our mission is to preserve and care for and steward California’s cultural, artistic and natural heritage,” she said. “So it feels like it’s not just a loss for me and the employees that accrues, we also feel like we’ve lost the community.”
The Oakland Museum of California has over 110,000 square feet of gallery space and 2 exhibits dedicated to telling the story of the Golden State.
(Oakland Museum of the California Police Department / Oakland)
Los Angeles Police Capt. John Romero, who led the crime department of the Department of Commerce, said that if the break was completed without putting security, it means that the person or people behind it had inside information, he said inside information, he said. The fact that the heist took place in an off-site storage unit also indicates that the suspect or suspects were able to obtain privileged information, he said.
“If it’s a nondescript writer, the whole brick structure is very difficult for anyone to find [what it is] From the outside, it’s almost always a worker, a former contractor, contractor or vendor who sees it, and talks about it and approaches it to deliver something,” he said.
This is not the first time that museum items have been stolen. In 2014, Andre Taray Franklin, a 46-year-old parolee, was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing and reselling a 19-year-old gold jewelry box from a museum. He was also a suspect in 2012 in a museum where gold nuggets and gold were taken.
“Lightning has struck twice in my career,” said Fogarty, who looked closely at the break and connected to Franklin and the latest Heist.
“Hey [Franklin] He was caught, identified and found guilty … and we found very important and important works, “so I will believe deeply that these things will find their way back to the museum.”
Given that the break happened two weeks ago, there’s a good chance that many of the items were sold, Romero said. Traditional thieves – artifact thieves usually try to load their haul before word gets out that the items have been stolen.
“These people have a desire for quick money, not the full value of analysis,” he said. “They need to finish quickly.”
Romero thinks that investigators will look more at platforms like craigslist and eBay, as well as groups that collect stolen goods for the Oakland Museum and identify those responsible.
Known stolen items have been difficult to sell because of the rush of undercover agents and the reluctance of buyers to buy something that could later be caught by authorities, Romromero said.
Targeting a higher price for long-known artifacts can make it easier to sell loot, he said.
Romero said this month’s break represents one of the largest museums he’s heard of in California in terms of the number of items taken.
The former famous museum includes the museum of 2012 in the Museum of California in Mariposa where the thieves took Gold and Gems worth $ 2, and the redgen-in young in the MH demon Memorial Museum in San Francisco where four paintings, full.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Oakland police at (510) 238-3951 or submit a tip to the Crime Squad online or by calling (800) 225-5324.
