The Shakespeare Thefts (5 page)

But Scott was not authentic. He was neither an antiques dealer (as erroneously reported by the Newsquest Media Group and repeated in many media outlets that picked up the story) nor a book dealer (as reported by both the
London Times
and the
Telegraph
). Scott was an apparent millionaire who, at age fifty-three, had never had a job, had never gone to college, and lived in a small brick house in a working-class neighborhood … with his eighty-two-year-old disabled mother. His only known means of support was a small “carer’s allowance,” a $100-per-week subsidy provided by the British government to people who look after someone with a disability. Neighbors reported that Scott was often seen polishing his Ferrari in his silk dressing gown before taking the bus into town to go shopping. Scott explained, “I take the bus because I usually have a drink
at lunchtime and I am not going to do something as stupid as drinking and driving.”
⁸

Scott’s self-dramatizing character emerged most fully in his appearances at a series of pretrial hearings. In February 2009, he arrived at North Durham Magistrates Court in a silver stretch limo, dressed all in white, holding a cigar and a cup of instant noodles, and reading aloud (
A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!
) from Shakespeare’s
Richard III
.

At a subsequent hearing in August of that year, Scott arrived in a horse-drawn carriage led by a bagpiper playing “Scotland the Brave”; he was dressed in a kilt of Royal Stewart tartan (he claimed to be distantly related to Bonnie Prince Charles), a Harris tweed jacket, and a pair of limited-edition £1,000 Fendi sunglasses.

He was then photographed swigging from a bottle of Drambuie malt whisky. In February 2010, he appeared at Newcastle Crown Court wearing green combat army fatigues (held up by a Gucci belt) and a pair of black Dior sunglasses, apparently emulating Che Guevara. His invariable response of “Aye, that I am” to questions soon angered Judge Richard Lowden, who told him, “Don’t be so dramatic please, just speak normally.”
⁹
After the hearing, Scott sprayed reporters with a bottle of champagne.

Front-page photos of Scott became a staple of the British tabloid press. Indeed, Scott began texting journalists
each night to offer previews of the stunts he planned for the following day. When asked about his colorful public appearances, Scott quoted Shakespeare:
All the world’s a stage
.
¹⁰
Later he would complain when the massive media interest in his trial dipped somewhat in early July 2010, supplanted on the front pages by sensational news of the manhunt for Raoul Moat, who had shot three people two days after his release from Durham Prison.

According to Scott, he had been in the habit of traveling to Cuba “for sun and cigars” for a number of years. In October 2007, he met a twenty-one-year-old dancer named Heidy Garcia Rios at Havana’s Tropicana Club, and they fell in love. Given that Cuban authorities frown upon locals socializing with tourists, Scott began looking for a rental property so that the couple could have privacy. Rios introduced him to a friend, Odeiny “Danny” Perez, a former major in the Cuban army and one of Fidel Castro’s bodyguards.

Perez had recently inherited a villa from his mother, and he rented it to Scott. The villa contained a library of fifty-four antiquarian books, all of which were in Spanish, save for what the family called “el libro viejo en inglese.” Scott claimed that in June 2008 “they asked me to take a look at it as they knew I had an interest in old books. Odeiny told me it had been kept in a wooden bible box and had been in the family since 1877. Further back than that they couldn’t go, but Odeiny is a white
Cuban of European descent, whose family came over from Galicia in Spain in the 19th century.”
¹¹

To a First Folio hunter, the possibility of a copy being transported out of Spain in the late nineteenth century is provocative, given that the copy owned by Count Gondomar is known to have disappeared around that time, and we know that Gondomar had a residence in Galicia where part of his library was stored; however, the Massey identification was very convincing, so our hearts didn’t truly flutter.

While we don’t know if Scott researched the Gondomar copy, he stated that he did know enough about Shakespeare to recognize that the book kept in the bible box was a collection of the plays, and through subsequent Internet research he learned about the First Folio and the Folger Shakespeare Library; reportedly, he and his Cuban friends referred to the day on which they realized the potential value and historical significance of the book as “Folio Friday.”
¹²

Scott claimed that he and Perez agreed that if the book proved to be authentic, they would sell it at auction and split the proceeds, “with some of the money being donated to children’s charities” in both the United Kingdom and Cuba. Because of the American travel embargo forbidding Cubans to visit the United States, Scott claimed that he volunteered to take the volume to Washington in hopes that the experts at the Folger
would authenticate it. He further claimed that he gave Perez a £5,000 ($10,000) deposit before leaving with the book in early June 2008.

Rios’s version of events differed from Scott’s in the important matter of whether Scott left Perez with a good-faith deposit on the book or whether he bought it from him outright. According to Rios, “Back in February Danny told Raymond that he had a book that had been passed down through his family… . I did not know what the book was called but it looked very old and a few inches thick. Raymond was very interested in the book. He did not discuss it much with me, but when he came back in June he had $10,000 to buy the book from Danny.”
¹³

One further inconsistency that undermined the credibility of both narratives is that Scott claimed he had proposed to Rios at a party with her family and friends in February; Rios said he had proposed in June in a Havana restaurant.

For his part, Perez maintained that the book he sold to Scott was called
The Tempest
. When a reporter showed him a photo of the First Folio, Perez said, “That is not the book I gave to Raymond. I have never seen it before. My book was called
Tempest
and had the front and back covers missing.”
¹⁴

Although the first play in the folio collection is
The Tempest
, Scott’s assertion that “the opening page is
The
Tempest
, which is where the confusion has arisen,” was not correct: Most of the preliminary pages, including the table of contents listing thirty-six plays, are intact in the copy that Scott brought to the Folger; the title page of
The Tempest
does not appear until page 19.

Scott’s ability to create characters was well established, but his least successfully formed character was that of an “innocent victim” who lived “quietly at home with his mum.”
¹⁵
When Durham police arrested him there in July 2008, they recovered stolen drivers’ licenses, credit cards, and personal organizers. Known to use aliases such as Andreas Benatar and the unimaginative variant Andrens Bewatar, Scott had a police record of twenty-five convictions dating back to 1977, some for the most petty of crimes, including stealing a smoke alarm from a Newcastle department store in 1994 and shoplifting bottles of whisky and brandy from a local supermarket. Scott apparently had funded his lifestyle by accumulating more than $180,000 in debt using credit cards obtained through identity theft. As Detective Constable Tim Lerner told him, “You are buying these on credit cards obtained fraudulently, not just in your name but in your mother’s and [dead] father’s.”
¹⁶

In the months leading up to his trial, Scott continued to assert that he had yet “to be shown any evidence that my book and the stolen book are one and the same” and demanded that Durham return “his copy.” Indeed, Scott
told the Durham police that he suspected a conspiracy among the experts to frame him:

I am not saying that the experts are lying or that they are being deceptive but it rather looks as if their brief has been to compare the Cuban copy with known records of the Durham copy and look for similarities. It is all a very cozy world. It is sort of like a conspiracy; they are ganging up against me.
¹⁷

As the date of the trial approached, the prosecution reached out to expert witnesses—Richard Kuhta of the Folger Shakespeare Library and my colleague, Anthony James West, to make the Massey identification iron-clad. This was exciting. Anthony had discovered that there was a triangular piece cut out of the Durham copy—we don’t know how or when this vandalism happened, but the fact of it is like a fingerprint and one that presumably would take Scott down.

And then Scott and his attorney completely changed direction.

They
admitted
that the First Folio Scott had brought to the Folger was indeed the Bishop Cosin copy. (But they maintained that Scott didn’t steal it.)

So the case of proving its provenance became unnecessary.

As the trial commenced, the disputed copy was brought into court in a padlocked black strongbox; the First Folio was taken out and presented on a pillow next to the witness box. The chief prosecutor, Robert Smith, pointed to the missing binding and title page and asserted that “the removal of specific pages is highly suggestive of trying to remove identifying features.” Head Folger librarian Kuhta testified that the book “is a cultural legacy that has been damaged, brutalized, and mutilated.”
¹⁸

The large press corps turned out for the trial. The focus leading up to it was dominated by descriptions of Scott’s outfits (under the headline “Jobless Man ‘Mutilated’ Stolen Shakespeare Folio,” the
Telegraph
observed that “he sat in court wearing Valentino sunglasses, Versace crocodile shoes and a Louis Vuitton waist pouch”).
¹⁹
They were not to be given more material, though, for Scott did not testify in his own behalf. Perhaps like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, he finally realized that
the better part of valor is discretion
.

In the American judicial system, a defendant has the right to refuse to testify, and jurors are instructed not to draw any inferences from the decision to exercise that right. But the British system allows prosecutors more leeway. In his pretrial rants to reporters, Scott had compared himself to a character from Franz Kafka’s
The
Trial:
“a person is accused and brought to court and yet the crime is unspecified. I know in my case what the specified alleged offences are all too well but I am completely innocent.”
²⁰
The prosecutor asked the jury to consider how it could be that someone supposedly so misunderstood would fail to explain himself to a jury.

The defense argued that Scott was gullible and being played by the Cubans to pawn off their stolen book. Reportedly, Scott did not appreciate this line of defense, in which his own attorney characterized him as

just the sort of bizarre, naive, out-of-the-mainstream type of character who could be taken in by someone much more worldly and cynical in Cuba. Is this naive mummy’s boy simply out of his depth? He’s someone who genuinely believes a 21-year-old dancer is his fiancée. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no fool like an old fool.
²¹

The British press archly observed that the defense “chose not to address the issue of how the Cubans managed to get to a library thousands of miles away, though just a stone’s throw from Scott’s house.” For its part, the prosecution challenged the Cuban connection with evidence of credit card receipts proving that Scott was, in fact, making purchases in Britain during the time that he said he was in Cuba; video surveillance footage also showed
Scott at London’s Heathrow airport during the time he was supposed to have been in Cuba.

Even without his testimony, though, for courtroom observers hoping for surprising developments, Scott did not disappoint. On July 1 at 6:45 p.m., he walked into the Peterlee police station in County Durham with a Vivienne Westwood carrier bag containing a valuable Latin dictionary printed in Oxford in 1627. According to the officer on duty that evening, Scott said that he had “purchased it in Cuba and he said that he didn’t know whether it was stolen” and that he’d “brought the book back from Cuba in 2008 with a set of Shakespeare volumes.”
²²
He also brought in two paintings worth around $2,000, which he admitted to stealing from Fenwick’s department store in Newcastle in October 2008.

The next day, reporter Mike Kelly (with whom Scott would later write a book about the trial) asked Scott why he had turned over the book and paintings. Scott responded: “The Russian chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal used to sacrifice pieces—a knight or a bishop—just to confuse his opponents. Think of this as my Tal move.”
²³

In the end, the Tal move didn’t work. In the closing statement of Scott’s attorney, the best that he could do for his client was to characterize him in an extraordinary sequence of insults:

Raymond Rickett Scott, shopper and shoplifter, serial credit card user, of cards sometimes not even obtained in his own name, a Walter Mitty fantasist, international traveler and playboy with an extensive line in sharp clothes from the apparently bygone age, a Ferrari driver and fine cigar smoker, no doubt last seen in a cinema near you starring in “Boogie Nights,” a 53-year-old, still living at home with his elderly mother, complaining in text messages about having to ask for permission for another night or two away, international playboy with a single bed in Washington, Tyne and Wear, pockets empty, bank accounts stripped by a beautiful young woman in Havana who seems to have got through 111 times the national average wage in six months.
²⁴

He concluded by asking the jurors, “May it be that he’s been had over? No doubt loving every minute of it. But if that may be the case, your verdicts in respect of these charges would be not guilty.”

The jury of seven women and five men returned guilty verdicts on the charges of handling stolen property and removing stolen property from Great Britain but did not find Scott guilty of actually stealing the folio. The judge adjourned the case to allow a psychiatric report to be prepared before passing sentence.