On a Saturday evening in February, Mark Baker and his wife went out for about ninety minutes. When they came back, a first floor window of their home in Oxshott, a commuter village south west of London, had been used as both an entrance and an exit. Jewellery was gone. A Rolex was gone. So were Chanel handbags and Louis Vuitton luggage, some of it holding things that mattered to Mrs Baker for reasons that had nothing to do with resale value. The total came to roughly 65,000 pounds, about 87,500 dollars.
It was Valentine’s Day. That detail is in the court reporting, and it is the sort of thing that sticks with a family long after the insurance is settled.
What nobody in the house knew that night was that the two men who had just walked through it were not opportunists working a wealthy postcode. Both had already been convicted over one of the most notorious art thefts in modern European history, a raid on the Kunsthal in Rotterdam in which seven paintings by Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Lucian Freud and Meijer de Haan were lifted off the walls inside a few minutes and have never been seen since.
This month, at Inner London Crown Court, they were sentenced again. Radu Dogaru, given as 41 in most reports and 40 in one court newsletter, got four years. Adrian Alempi, 34, got five. And the thing that put them there was not clever forensics or a tip from the art world. It was a second burglary, three days later, a few miles away, and a bus.
Mark Baker is not a household name, which is part of why this story is stranger than it looks. His work is. He studied at the National Film and Television School, and he was nominated for an Academy Award three times for animated short films, for The Hill Farm at the end of the 1980s, for The Village in the early 1990s, and for Jolly Roger later that decade. Those are careful, quiet, slightly melancholy pieces of hand drawn animation, the kind of thing that wins the respect of other animators and almost no public recognition at all.
Then in 1994 he set up a studio with Neville Astley, later joined by the producer Phil Davies, and in 2004 the two of them put out a programme about a bossy pink pig with one visible eye on each side of her head. Peppa Pig became one of the most valuable children’s properties ever made, running in dozens of languages, selling merchandise on every continent, and eventually ending up inside a corporate portfolio after Hasbro bought Peppa’s owner Entertainment One in a deal reported at around 3.8 billion dollars. Baker drew the character. He did not stop being an animator who liked drawing farms.
That is the man whose bedroom two convicted art thieves went through while he was out for an hour and a half.
It is worth sitting with the strangeness of the pairing for a moment, because the two halves of this story come from worlds that never meet. One half is a career built on patience. The Hill Farm took the kind of time that only a film school will tolerate, and it moves at the speed of weather. Peppa Pig moves at the speed of a five year old, but the drawing underneath it is the same hand, economical and warm and faintly rural. Nothing in that body of work has anything to do with security systems or property registers. The other half of the story is a trade in which the only value of an object is how fast it can be turned into cash, and in which a painting and a handbag are the same category of thing.
To understand why that sentence carries weight, you have to go back to a night in October 2012, when the alarm at the Kunsthal Rotterdam went off at roughly three in the morning. The Kunsthal is not a museum with a permanent collection; it is a hall that hosts exhibitions, and at the time it was showing highlights from a private Dutch collection to mark its own anniversary. The intruders were inside for a matter of minutes. The alarm worked. The police response was too slow to matter.
Seven works went out of the door. Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London. Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin. Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune. Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte. De Haan’s Autoportrait. And Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed, a small, unsettling painting that Freud himself had considered one of his better late portraits.
The numbers attached to that haul vary enormously depending on who is doing the counting, and it is worth being honest about that rather than picking the biggest figure. Insurance and prosecution documents have been reported at figures around 18 million euros in European coverage and around 24.4 million dollars in English language coverage. The director of the Art Loss Register suggested at the time that the most desirable of the paintings, if they could ever be sold openly at auction, might fetch hundreds of millions. All of those numbers describe the same basic problem, which is that a stolen masterpiece is simultaneously priceless and worthless. There is no legitimate buyer. There is barely an illegitimate one.
That is the trap every thief who takes a famous painting walks into, and it is why so many of these cases end badly for the art. A watch has a resale price. A recognised Monet has a catalogue entry, a photograph in a dozen reference books, and a listing in international stolen art databases that every serious dealer and auction house checks as a matter of routine. The moment it leaves the wall it becomes an object that cannot be shown to anyone who would pay for it. Investigators who work these cases will tell you the same thing, which is that the people who steal famous paintings almost never have a buyer, because the buyer is largely a fiction of films. What they have is an object they cannot move and a rising sense that holding it is more dangerous than not holding it. That is the point at which paintings get abandoned in car parks, left in luggage lockers, hidden in a relative’s house, or worse. Arrests followed in Romania the next year. A prosecution followed in Bucharest. Dogaru was reported to have been sentenced to six years, Alempi to five, and both were out again by 2018.
And then there is the part of the Kunsthal story that has never been settled, and that this article is not going to pretend has been.
During the Romanian investigation, Radu Dogaru’s mother, Olga, told investigators that she had burned the paintings in a stove to protect her son. She described doing it. Investigators searching the ash reported finding traces of pigment and old nails of a kind consistent with period canvas stretchers. Later, in court, she withdrew the claim. Since then the story has been picked at from every angle. Some specialists believe the paintings were destroyed. Others think a mother facing the imprisonment of her child said the most final thing she could think of to make the search stop, and that the canvases went somewhere else entirely. In 2018 a claim surfaced that one of the Picassos had been located in Romania, and it collapsed under examination almost immediately.
What is documented is this: fourteen years on, not one of the seven paintings has been recovered. Everything beyond that is reportedly, allegedly, according to. A civil judgment in 2014 ordered those convicted to pay damages running into tens of millions of dollars, which is the legal system’s way of writing down a loss it cannot reverse.
So the men who came out of prison in 2018 came out with a particular kind of record: enormous notoriety, no money to show for it, and a conviction attached to objects that may no longer exist.
The Surrey burglary, by comparison, was ordinary. That is exactly what makes it interesting. There was no cut alarm loop, no rope, no inside knowledge of a collection. A first floor window, ninety minutes, and a suitcase carried out of the front of a house. Not long afterwards the two men were seen at Claygate station, the next stop along the line, carrying bags. One of those bags was a Louis Vuitton suitcase that had been in the Bakers’ home an hour earlier.
Three days later they went into a house in Kingston and took a safe containing jewellery, gold bars and cash. By that point police were watching. Officers stopped them as they were getting onto a bus with the contents of that safe in their backpacks, which is not the ending anyone writes for master criminals, and is very much the ending real burglary investigations tend to have. A search of Dogaru’s address recovered several items taken from the Baker house.
Alempi pleaded guilty to a second matter alongside the burglaries. He had been deported in 2014 and had entered the country again unlawfully, and an additional year was attached to his sentence for it. It is a real conviction and it belongs in the record. It is also worth saying plainly what it is not: it is not the explanation for anything either man did. People with long acquisitive crime records commit acquisitive crime. That is the pattern, and the pattern is boringly consistent across every border you care to look at.
The part of this case that will stay with most readers is not the paintings, and it is not the sentences. It is what Mrs Baker described in her statement to the court.
She did not want to leave the house any more, because she could not stop thinking that she would come back and find it had happened again. And on one occasion her own husband walked up behind her wearing dark clothes, and she screamed, because for a moment she thought he was a burglar in her home.
That is the actual cost of a residential burglary and it almost never appears in the reporting, because the reporting is organised around value. Sixty five thousand pounds of watches and handbags is a number an insurer can process. A woman who flinches at movement in her own hallway is not. It is also why judges in these cases increasingly say out loud that the intrusion is the offence and the property is only the evidence of it.
It explains, too, why the sentences here are longer than the value of the haul alone would suggest. Sentencing for domestic burglary is driven less by the price of what was carried out than by what the court decides about the person carrying it: whether the house was occupied, whether the entry was planned, whether there is a record, and whether the offending is a habit rather than an episode. Two men with previous convictions for stealing from a public gallery, arrested within days on a second break in with a stolen safe in their bags, sit at the wrong end of every one of those questions.
There is a tidy moral available here about how the mighty fall, and it is not quite true, so it is worth resisting. The men who took the Kunsthal paintings were never mighty. They were opportunists who got lucky against a building with a slow police response and then discovered, as every such crew discovers, that the second half of an art theft is impossible. The Peppa Pig burglary is the same people doing the same thing at the only scale that actually pays: houses, watches, handbags, bags that can be sold on within a week.
Which is the genuinely unsettling idea underneath this case. We file art theft and suburban burglary in separate mental drawers. One belongs to heist films and museum security conferences; the other belongs to neighbourhood alerts and doorbell cameras. But the distance between a gallery wall in Rotterdam and a bedroom in an English commuter village turns out to be almost nothing. The same hands, the same method, the same fortnight of opportunism. The paintings simply happened to be hanging somewhere with a famous name on the door.
It is also worth noticing what actually solved it, because it was nothing glamorous. Not image recognition, not an art market sting, not an international taskforce. Officers watching two men, a second break in that gave them a reason to move, a stop at a bus door, and a search of an address that turned up a handbag and some jewellery belonging to a family in Oxshott. Ordinary police work closed a case involving two men whose names appear in books about the great unsolved art crimes.
There is a quiet lesson in that for anyone who follows these stories. The public imagination of crime detection runs on databases and specialists, and the public imagination of crime runs on planning and expertise. Both are mostly wrong. The Kunsthal raid succeeded because a building’s response time was slower than a few minutes, not because anyone was brilliant. The Surrey burglary was solved because two men kept going until they were caught with the proceeds on them. In between those two events sit fourteen years, two prison sentences, a deportation, and seven paintings that the world has effectively written off.
Some of what was taken from the Baker house came back. Not all of it. That is usually how it goes, and the items that do not come back are rarely the expensive ones. They are the ones with a person attached to them.
And the seven paintings are still gone. A Monet, a second Monet, a Picasso, a Matisse, a Gauguin, a de Haan and a Freud, worth somewhere between eighteen million and an amount nobody can responsibly name, either destroyed in a domestic stove in a Romanian village, or sitting somewhere in the dark waiting for a market that does not exist. Fourteen years of investigation has not answered that question, and the two men who could probably answer it have both now been sentenced for something else entirely.
Mark Baker will almost certainly keep drawing. That is what he has done since the 1980s, through three Oscar nominations and one of the most successful children’s characters ever made, and there is no reason a broken window changes it. But somewhere in a police property store there is a list of the things from his house that were never found, and somewhere in the court file there is his wife explaining why she screamed at the sight of her own husband in the hallway. Those are the two records this case leaves behind. One of them is about objects. The other one is the case.