COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Three family members and a friend of a dead Royal Library worker who stole thousands of rare books, maps and copper prints in the 1960s and 1970s were convicted Thursday of selling some of the items through international auction houses.
The four were convicted by Copenhagen’s City Court for handling stolen goods and selling 104 books and copper prints through international auction houses in New York and London.
The dead librarian was not named, in line with Danish privacy rules.
The three family members immediately appealed the verdict and the sentence, which included the seizure of their personal property.
The defendants included Eva Moeller-Kristensen, the late worker’s 69-year-old wife, who was sentenced to three years in prison; Thomas Moeller-Kristensen, his 42-year-old son, who was sentenced to two years; and Silke Albrecht, his 33-year-old daughter-in-law, and Patrick Adam Peters, a friend, who each got 18 months.
“She found it incomprehensible, she was shocked,” Eva Moeller-Kristensen’s
defense lawyer Merethe Stagetorn said after the verdict.
Peters didn’t immediately appeal, but has two weeks to do so.
All four pleaded innocent, claiming they weren’t aware that the works, which dated from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, had been stolen.
However, the widow and son admitted during the trial that they hid 772 books, all of them bearing the Royal Library’s stamp, in the basement of the family home after the librarian died in February 2003.
During the trial that started two weeks ago, prosecutor Helle Just read a 1997 entry from Moeller-Kristensen’s personal diary that an unidentified friend in Canada had refused to sell three books, calling it “too risky.”
Some 3,200 items, including first editions by Immanuel Kant, Thomas More and John Milton and manuscripts by Martin Luther, disappeared from Royal Library in the 1960s and 1970s. All the works were estimated to be worth about $48.4 million.
When police raided the family home north of Copenhagen in November, they recovered 1,556 missing items. It was not clear what happened to the other works.
The investigation started after Christie’s Auction House in London contacted police in March 2003 and told them that Albrecht tried to sell a volume of poetry written by Spain’s Bartholome de Torres Naharros and published in 1517. The volume had part of the Royal Library’s stamp on it.
In her testimony, Margaret Ford, head of Christie’s rare book department, said just two copies of that book were known to have existed and one of them had been reported missing from the state-owned library.
The defendants told the court that the dead librarian said he bought the books from a Danish book collector.
The four reaped $1.3 million from the books they did sell. Part of the money was invested in bonds, home improvements, vacations and paying bills.
During the trial, library officials acknowledged that security was lax during the 1960s and 1970s, but has since been improved.
The library, which opened in 1648, is part of the University of Copenhagen.
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