From the head of Rosie the stuffed rhino at Ipswich Museum to the collection of the African Museum on the tiny French Island of Ile d’Aix, no rhino horn was safe.
The thieves used ram raids, sledgehammers, distraction and pepper spray in burglaries from a museum in Gothenburg, Sweden, to châteaux in the Czech Republic. When Europol warned of the thefts many museums removed their horns and installed fakes. They, too, were stolen.
Even the Co Cork home of Michael Flatley, the dancer, was targeted during the four years that the gang of Irish travellers known as the Rathkeale Rovers were active.
Yesterday, after an investigation that lasted more than three years, four key players in a conspiracy thought to be worth more than £100 million were convicted in the last of three trials in which 14 men have been jailed.
In all, nine members of the notorious O’Brien family face jail for conspiracy to commit burglary. The other men were hired thieves.
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After museums at the universities of Cambridge and Durham were burgled for antique Chinese jade and articles made from rhino horn, detectives from Durham and Cambridgeshire unpicked a web of phonecalls that placed the members of the Rathkeale Rovers at 22 raids, failed burglaries and reconnaissance missions across Britain.
The two-month trial at Birmingham crown court led to the jailing of members of the O’Brien family for a bungled attempt to steal a rhinoceros head from Norwich Castle Museum in February 2012; the theft of 18 ancient Chinese jade pieces from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that April; and three raids on the Durham University Oriental Museum, in which they stole a rhino horn libation cup and two jade artefacts worth about £2 million.
None of the 18 jade pieces stolen from the Fitzwilliam Museum have been recovered, but the bowl and figurine stolen in Durham were found hidden on waste ground a week after they were stolen and the libation cup was found on one of the gang’s leaders.
It can now be revealed that the gang has been linked to thefts of rhino horn in France, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic and Portugal, dating back to 2010.
In almost every case nothing was recovered and any culprits caught were petty criminals or labourers hired for a few thousand euros, given simple instructions and often a map. Invariably, an Irishman or a man with a strange accent had made enquiries.
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As has happened with rhino horn, a boom in the Chinese market has more than quadrupled the value of jade and the O’Brien family had latched on to the market through Donald Chi Chong Wong, a millionaire antiques dealer whose three-storey home overlooks Clapham Common in south London.
Wong, 56, was the go-between in the jade deals and was observed meeting the O’Briens and handling plastic bags stuffed with cash. He made frequent flights to Hong Kong, often timed around the raids.
Detective Superintendent Adrian Green of Durham police, said: “This is the longest, most complex investigation I have worked on — four years of my career spent finding a group in the shadows. These men were cowards using vulnerable people.”
The conspirators used a 15-year-old boy as part of a team to break into the Fitzwilliam Museum in a raid described as “an act of cultural vandalism”. After they were convicted in a sting operation in Colorado in 2010, Richard O’Brien Jr, 31, and Michael Hegarty, 43, his brother-in-law, became silent partners in the raids.
The trial of Hegarty, Richard O’Brien Jr, his brother John “Kerry” O’Brien, 26, and their uncle, Daniel “Turkey” O’Brien, 45, was told that a computer used for incriminating internet searches was found at a house in the Co Limerick village after which the Rovers were named. Another relative, Patrick Sheridan, was extradited to the US in September charged with trafficking black rhino horns.
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The men convicted yesterday will be sentenced at Birmingham crown court on April 4 and 5.
Champion of Dale Farm led robbery spree
When a pair of assailants stormed the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris during the daytime, using tear gas to incapacitate the guards, they stole only the horn of a white rhino (John Simpson and Sean O’Driscoll write).
Few would have suspected the involvement of the eloquent chairman of the Dale Farm Housing Association, who was in Strasbourg two days later to campaign against the eviction of the illegal settlement in Essex.
As Richard Sheridan announced his intention to bring a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights fewer still would have imagined the vast wealth that his burglary gang was amassing.
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Less than a month later a bungled raid at Durham University’s Oriental Museum became the first in a series that would prove the undoing of Sheridan and his family-run multimillion-pound operation stealing rhino horn and artefacts for the Chinese market.
Yesterday four of his accomplices were found guilty of hiring and overseeing burglars across the UK after a trial that had gone unreported on the orders of the judge because of the sheer number of linked crimes.
Sheridan’s father, John “Cash” O’Brien, his uncle, Daniel “Turkey” O’Brien, and cousins John “Kerry” O’Brien Jr, Richard “Kerry” O’Brien Jr and Michael Hegarty, have links to Rathkeale in Co Limerick.
Richard O’Brien Jr, of Dale Farm, is the son of a prominent member of the Rathkeale traveller community and has been jailed in the US for smuggling rhino horn.
The sprawling mock-Victorian mansion of his father, Richard “Kerry” O’Brien Sr, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Rathkeale, was raided in 2014 when his son was arrested. Mr O’Brien Sr has not been accused of any crime.
