An art thief used several aliases to acquire UCLA library cards that allowed him to check out and steal historic manuscripts from China.
If you fail to return a library book, there is a fine; however, if you return a fake book and the librarians never check, you may be able to skip the penalties and keep the book. Sadly, it did not work out for Jeffrey Ying, of Fremont, California, who swapped out three precious manuscripts from UCLA’s Young Research Library, as the librarians caught on as he attempted a fourth steal.
According to the affidavit by an FBI agent, Ying would use multiple aliases to obtain library cards and check out the rare manuscripts from the UCLA Young Research Library. He replaced the manuscripts with “dummy books” that he returned in the boxes the library uses for the manuscripts.
Ying presumably took the manuscripts overseas, according to his travel history, which shows that he flew to California from Hong Kong, Shanghai or Seoul and back around the time of each of the thefts over the past 13 months.
The UCLA police first alerted the FBI when three rare books from the university’s East Asian Library, two of which were valued at $70,000 and $63,000, respectively, were missing from storage after they had been reviewed by a man calling himself Alan Fujimori. The books need to be reserved in advance because they are kept in secured storage.
Courthouse News Service
Previously:
• How Stéphane Breitwieser stole over a billion dollars worth of art, and the sad desperate destruction that ensued
• The juice bottle that brought down an art thief
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