How a thief replaced a famous Winston Churchill portrait with a forgery that went unnoticed for months
Walter Stoneman/Getty Images
- Thieves stole a famous Winston Churchill portrait from an Ottawa hotel in late 2021.
- The 1941 portrait was replaced with a forgery and went unnoticed for over 6 months.
- Police recovered the portrait in London, charged a suspect, and are returning it to Canada.
A famous Winston Churchill portrait that thieves replaced with a forgery two years ago will soon be back on display.
Police say thieves stole the famous portrait from the Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel in Ottawa in the weeks after Christmas 2021. The 1941 portrait — titled "The Roaring Lion" — was captured by Yousouf Karsh, an Armenian-Canadian photographer known for portraits of famous people like Martin Luther King Jr., Queen Elizabeth, and Alfred Hitchcock.
The theft went unnoticed until August 2022 when a hotel worker spotted that the frame looked different from others on the wall and the picture was hanging crooked, according to The Associated Press.
Police found the portrait after it resurfaced in an auction house in London where two unknowing buyers from Italy purchased it, Ottawa Police said in a press release. Police charged Jeffrey Iain James Wood, 43, from Powassan, Ontario, with forgery, theft, and trafficking charges related to the crime.
Nicola Cassinelli, a lawyer from Genoa, Italy, purchased the portrait at auction for 5,292 British pounds, according to the AP.
Cassinelli told the outlet that the auction house called him in October and advised him not to sell or transfer the portrait due to the investigation into the theft in Ottowa.
Ottowa police said in the statement that it worked closely with the Italian police and the portrait's purchaser to bring it back to Canada.
Ottawa police Detective Akiva Gellar told the outlet that police conducted "a very extensive investigation" that took more than two years to recover the portrait.
Gellar said that much of the investigation is "still very sensitive because the matter is before the courts" and "a lot of the details about how we found it" will be released at a ceremony in Rome on Thursday.