Tome raiders: solving the great book heist
Everything went exactly to plan. Late on the evening of 29 January 2017, Daniel David and Victor Opariuc parked up and made their way towards the Frontier Forwarding customs warehouse in Feltham, less than a mile from Heathrow. After cutting a hole in the fence, the men made their way to the side of the building and scaled a wall to the roof. There, they cut through a skylight and lowered themselves on to shelving inside the building. The warehouse burglar alarms stayed silent; the men had carefully avoided tripping motion sensors positioned by the doors.
Once inside, with several lookouts posted around the surrounding industrial estate, the men took their time. Over the next five hours and 15 minutes, they broke padlocks off packing cases and placed items inside 16 large holdalls taken from inside the warehouse. The men escaped the same way they had entered: out through the skylight and back into the night.
About 12 hours later, Alessandro Meda Riquier received a phone call from his shipping company. Riquier was at home in Italy when he learned that 52 valuable books that were meant to be on their way to a major trade fair in the US had been stolen. Riquier was one of three book dealers affected by the theft. In total, around 240 books and manuscripts were taken, including works by Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci and the 18th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. The total value was estimated at more than £2.5m.
Riquier immediately called the , a trade body for rare book dealers
