The man accused of stealing one of the most famous portraits of the Hotel Château Laurier in Ottawa and changing it for a falsification during a Covid-19 closure declared himself guilty of three of the six charges against him.
To the hotel the impression of The roaring lion, A portrait of the former British prime minister Winston Churchill, in 1998 by the famous photographer and resident of the hotel for a long time Yousuf Karsh.
At some point around New Year’s Day 2022, while Ottawa was in a COVID-19 block, the portrait was stolen and replaced by a false framed, despite being placed with special bolts that required specific knowledge and unique tools to unravel.
The crime went unnoticed until the next August, when a member of the hotel staff noticed something wrong with the portrait.
The robbery reached international headlines and took the investigators of the Ottawa police to a search that covers several countries and two continents. Finally they determined that the portrait had been bought through a London auction house by a man in Genoa, Italy.
The buyer had no idea that he had acquired a precious piece of Canadian history, much less stolen, and when the police contacted quickly, he quickly agreed to return it.
Look | Returned portrait presented again with additional security:
A portrait of Winston Churchill by the acclaimed Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh, which was slipped, replaced by a copy, stolen six months later and recovered in Italy 18 months after that, has been returned to the wall of the Fairmont Château Laurier hotel in Ottawa.
When they revealed last September that the portrait had been found, the Ottawa police also announced six charges against Jeffrey Wood.
Powassan’s 44 -year -old man, a municipality of approximately 3,300 people to the south of North Bay, declared himself guilty on Friday for falsification, theft of more than $ 5,000 and the traffic property obtained by the crime.
The procedures continue on Friday afternoon.
