Displaying items by tag: Sentence

Following a trial that was prominently covered in the German press due to its illustrious protagonists, particularly the heirs of billionaire Berthold Albrecht, one of the founders of the German discount supermarket chain Aldi, German art consultant Helge Achenbach was found guilty of fraud by the District Court in Essen and sentenced to six years in prison on Monday.

The 62- year old used to be one of Germany’s most influential art consultants, entertaining long-term business relationships with some of the country’s wealthiest collectors. Berthold Albrecht, who passed in 2012, was one of his most important clients. Achenbach had repeatedly inflated the net purchase prices for art works and vintage cars he procured for Albrecht and other clients.

A Spanish court sentenced a man on Wednesday to 10 years in prison for crimes including the theft of a priceless medieval document considered the first guidebook to Spain's Saint James pilgrimage trail.

Police recovered the unique 12th-century manuscript in July 2012, a year after it was found to have gone missing from a safe in the famous cathedral of the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela.

Judges in a court in the nearby city of La Coruna said in a written ruling that they "consider it proven" that an electrician who worked for years at the cathedral, Manuel Fernandez Castineiras, stole the manuscript.

Art dealer Helly Nahmad has gotten out of jail, well, if not free, at least unexpectedly early.

Mr. Nahmad, 36, has been released from federal prison five months into the one-year-and-one-day sentence he received for operating an illegal gambling business from his Trump Tower home.

The art dealer, scion of the billionaire Nahmad family of Monaco, has been transferred to a halfway house in the Bronx after being incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Facility in Otisville, N.Y., since June, his lawyer confirmed today.

In March of 1990, two thieves posing as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and stole thirteen works of art including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Edgar Degas, and Edouard Manet. Now known as the greatest art heist in history, the case has remained unresolved despite the countless hours of investigating the FBI has conducted. While the Bureau has offered immunity to anyone who assisted in the recovery of the artworks, they have never received a concrete lead.

While it would appear that the reputed organized crime figure, Robert V. Gentile, who found himself in federal court this Wednesday on drug trafficking and gun possession was irrelevant to the Gardner case, the FBI believed Gentile had vital information to share. Gentile, 76, of Manchester, Connecticut, helped federal authorities for 10 months prior to his arrest but none of the information was useful in tracking down the thieves. Gentile’s lawyer claims that his client did know some of the individuals the government believed were involved in the heist, but that most of them were dead by now. Gentile now faces a maximum of 150 years in prison if he is convicted. The government is willing to negotiate his sentence so that his prison term will be reduced to 46-57 months.

Gentile became involved in the Gardner case when Elene Guarente, the widow of Robert Guarente, a mob associated who died in 2005, told investigators that her husband gave Gentile a painting that he had kept in a tube since the 1990s.

In the small 19th-century painting, a young girl is seated in a straight-backed chair, looking forlorn, as if troubled by her role in the strange story of theft and deception that culminated in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday.

It has been a big, if bizarre, year for “Portrait of a Girl,” an oil painting by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, which has been valued as high as $1.35 million in recent years. It was an even more eventful year for Thomas Doyle, the Manhattan man who pleaded guilty in July to one count of wire fraud in connection with his deceitful purchase of the painting in 2010.

Mr. Doyle, 54, was sentenced on Monday to six years in prison — twice the sentence stipulated by guidelines relating to his plea bargain.

Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court called the guidelines “manifestly insufficient” in Mr. Doyle’s case, and said she was acting as “an old-fashioned judge” with regard to his sentencing. During an hourlong hearing, she recounted his 11 convictions over the last 34 years — for the theft of items that included a fur coat in the late 1970s and a Degas statue, a crime he pleaded guilty to committing, in 2007, and for which he served two years in prison.

“You are a career criminal by any definition of the term,” the judge sternly told Mr. Doyle, who was dressed in a khaki-colored prison jumpsuit. “Society needs to be protected from you; you are a predator.”

Ms. McMahon outlined Mr. Doyle’s “cockamamie scheme” to swindle an investor interested in buying “Portrait of a Girl,” and alluded to the investor’s lingering financial troubles as a result.