Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/GettyLast September, New York City’s Swann Galleries were advertising the sale of an invaluable piece of Spanish and Mexican history: a 500-year-old letter involving Hernán Cortés, the Spanish military leader and colonizer. The letter was expected to sell for somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 until a group of academics intervened. Reuters reports that the letter was one of a cluster of Cortés documents that had been stolen out of the National Archive of Mexico (AGN) and put up for sale. What’s even more shocking is that this is not the first time that important and valuable pieces of history have been stolen from a national archive, prominent library, or museum and ended up on the block at a prominent auction house.The thefts would have gone unnoticed had it not been for the investigations of amateur sleuths and professional academics María Isabel Grañén Porrúa, a scholar of Spanish
A proper page turner: ‘The men had carefully avoided tripping motion sensors.’ Illustration: R Fresson/The Observer
Everything went exactly to plan. Late on the evening of 29 January 2017, Daniel David and Victor Opariuc parked up and made their way towards the Frontier Forwarding customs warehouse in Feltham, less than a mile from Heathrow. After cutting a hole in the fence, the men made their way to the side of the building and scaled a wall to the roof. There, they cut through a skylight and lowered themselves on to shelving inside the building. The warehouse burglar alarms stayed silent; the men had carefully avoided tripping motion sensors positioned by the doors.