LONDON (AP) — Two men who stole a $6.4 million golden toilet from an English mansion were sentenced Friday to more than two years in prison.
The 18-carat fully functioning toilet was on display as a piece of contemporary art at Blenheim Palace — the country mansion where British wartime leader Winston Churchill was born — when five burglars smashed a window and yanked it from its plumbing in a brazen early morning raid in September 2019. It was never recovered and was believed to have been chopped up and sold.
James Sheen, 40, a roofer who pleaded guilty to burglary, conspiracy and transferring criminal property was sentenced in Oxford Crown Court to four years in prison.
Michael Jones, 39, who worked for Sheen and was convicted of burglary at trial, was sentenced to two years and three months.
The toilet weighed just over 215 pounds (98 kilograms) and was worth more than its weight in gold. The value of the gold at the time was 2.8 million ($3.5 million), but it was insured for 4.7 million pounds (more than $6 million).
The toilet was part of a satirical commentary on consumer culture, titled “America,” by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose work of a banana duct-taped to a wall was sold in 2024 for $6.2 million at auction in New York.
“This bold and brazen heist took no more than 5 1/2 minutes to complete,” Judge Ian Pringle said in recounting the crime. “America has never been seen again.”
The piece that poked fun at excessive wealth had previously been on display at The Guggenheim Museum, in New York, which had offered the work to U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term in office after he had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.
Jones had booked a viewing of the toilet the day before the theft to take photos, check out the lock and have his own private session on the golden throne. He deemed the experience “splendid” during his testimony.
The next morning before dawn the gang of thieves crashed through the wooden gates of the palace in two stolen vehicles and tore well-tended lawns. They pulled up to the estate’s courtyard and smashed a window that Jones had photographed the day before.
The thieves used sledgehammers and a crowbar to wrench the toilet from its foundation, causing considerable damage to the 18th-century property, a UNESCO World Heritage site filled with valuable art and furniture that draws thousands of visitors each year.