A golden ring once given as a present by the famed Irish writer Oscar Wilde has been recovered by a Dutch “art detective” nearly 20 years after it was stolen from Britain’s Oxford University.
The frie ndship ring, a joint gift from Wilde to a fellow student in 1876, was taken during a burglary in 2002 at Magdalen College, where the legendary dandy studied. At the time it was valued at £35,000 (US$45,143).
The trinket’s whereabouts remained a mystery for years and there were fears that the ring — shaped like a belt and buckle and made from 18-carat gold — had even been melted down.
Photo: AFP
Yet Arthur Brand, a Dutchman dubbed the “Indiana Jones of the Art World” for recovering a series of high-profile stolen artworks, used his underworld connections to finally find it.
Magdalen College home bursar Mark Blandford-Baker said that they were “very pleased to have back a stolen item that forms part of a collection relating to one of our more famous alumni.”
“We had given up hope of seeing it again,” he said.
The ring will be handed back “at a small ceremony” on Dec. 4, Blandford-Baker said, adding: “We are extremely grateful to Arthur Brand for finding it and returning it to us.”
The ring was an important part of Magdalen’s large collection of memorabilia related to Wilde, who penned classics such as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.
It was a present from Wilde and fellow student Reginald Harding to their friend William Ward in 1876 while the Irishman was a student at Magdalen, one of the three dozen colleges that make up Oxford University.
The ring bears the inscription in Greek that says: “Gift of love, to one who wishes love.” It also has “O.F.O.F.W.W. + R.R.H. to W.W.W.” written on the inside.
Disaster struck in 2002 when a former college cleaner named Eamonn Andrews broke into Magdalen, got drunk on whisky from the college bar, then stole the ring and two unrelated medals.
The college at the time offered a £3,500 reward for the ring’s safe return — but after he was caught, the burglar told a court that he had sold the golden band to a scrap dealer for £150.
That might have been that, had Brand not picked up the scent a few years back.
“Rumors started in 2015 in the art underworld that a Victorian ring has surfaced ‘with some Russian writing on it,’” Brand told a correspondent, who saw the ring at an apartment in Amsterdam.
“I knew that Oscar Wilde’s ring was stolen from Magdalen College at Oxford and that it had a Greek inscription on it. It could have only been the same ring,” he said.
The Dutchman then started to put out feelers. Together with a London-based antiques dealer named William Veres, their inquiries eventually led them to George Crump, a man whom Brand described as a “decent man with knowledge of the London criminal underworld because of his late uncle, a well-known casino owner.”
Through Crump, Brand and Veres finally managed to track down and negotiate the safe return of the stolen ring.
Brand has previously hit the headlines for returning stolen artworks including a Picasso painting stolen from yacht in France, and Hitler’s Horses, two bronze statues made by Nazi sculptor Joseph Thorak.
The story of this latest find could have a final twist worthy of one of Wilde’s tales.
Wilde’s ring might have never been discovered were it not for another heist, when a gang of elderly criminals raided a vault in London’s jewelry district in 2015 in what was described as the “biggest burglary in English legal history.”
“There are very strong indications that the appearance of the ring is linked to the 2015 burglary at Hatton Garden Safe Deposit,” Brand said.
“Rumors that the ring has reappeared first started a few weeks after the burglary, and I was given the ring right in front of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit ... which I thought was a bit of English humor,” he said.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
OVERHAUL: The move would likely mark the end to Voice of America, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and operated in nearly 50 languages The parent agency of Voice of America (VOA) on Friday said it had issued termination notices to more than 639 more staff, completing an 85 percent decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda. US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) senior advisor Kari Lake said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of US President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum. “Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a