[MSN] Thefts rock literary world

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Thefts rock literary world

MONDAY , 16 OCTOBER 2006

By DEAN CALCOTT
The last prosecution from a police investigation into a criminal group of book thieves targeting libraries and museums has wrapped up, leaving a sadder and wiser literary community.

The group grossly breached the trust of New Zealand's public and university libraries, where for many years researchers had easy and virtually unsupervised access to important books and documents.

The lead sentence imposed in Operation Pukapuka – the Maori word for book – was five and a half years on Lee Simpson, 44, for what the sentencing judge called 10 years of systematic thefts. It was reduced to three years on appeal.

The investigation wraps up in November with the sentencing of Simpson's brother Tyler Scott Simpson, 44, who admitted a single charge of receiving.

Operation Pukapuka cracked down on the organised theft of at least 2500 books over 10 years, with a retail value of at least $1 million.

About 1500 were recovered. Museums and libraries from Auckland to Invercargill were targeted. Around Canterbury, victims included the University of Canterbury, Lincoln University, Canterbury Museum, the Christchurch College of Education and Christchurch Public Library.

Lee Simpson gained his knowledge of rare books and manuscripts through his late father, who collected them and worked as a volunteer at the Canterbury Museum.

Simpson began offending in the early 1990s.

Another prolific offender was Lionel Barry Quill, 64, who was jailed after admitting eight charges of receiving stolen goods.

Quill often used a series of false identities to sell the goods. The Christchurch District Court was told that between April 1998 and September 2004, Quill made a total of 112 transactions, with sales totalling $37,966.

Another family group of thieves admitted charges relating to theft of 660 books, with a face value of $34,000, from Christchurch libraries.

Two were jailed, but their names cannot be pub-lished, because further unrelated charges are pending.

Thanks to the police operation, many books were recovered, but many were sold to overseas collectors on the internet, to be lost forever.

The thieves' modus operandi was almost ridiculously simple. They breached the system of trust by enrolling at libraries using a variety of false identities to borrow books, and once at home, removed any marks identifying them as belonging to a library.

The University of Canterbury library holds more than a million items. Librarian Gail Pattie said it was fair to say staff were dumbfounded when they discovered the thefts.

"We have done a thorough review of security. It was a real wake-up call."

But the thefts had a positive impact as well.

"Afterwards, we did a complete inventory. We literally checked every item on the shelves and found our overall rate of loss was quite small."

The pillaging also rocked the local second-hand book trade.

Liberty Books is one of the larger book dealers in Christchurch. Its High Street store manager, Rhys Pasley, said in the end relationships between the book-buying public and dealers had been injured.

The offending had undermined the trust the public had in legitimate dealers. His policy was to steer clear of ex-library books as much as possible. 

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