LONDON - Two men have been jailed for stealing a £4.8m gold toilet from an art exhibition at Blenheim Palace. Thieves smashed their way in and ripped out the functional 18-carat, solid gold toilet hours after a glamorous launch party at the Oxfordshire stately home in September 2019. James ‘Jimmy’ Sheen, 40, pleaded guilty to burglary, transferring criminal property and conspiracy to do the same in 2024, while Michael Jones, 39, was found guilty of burglary in March. The men, from Oxford, were sentenced to four years and two years and three months in prison respectively. During sentencing at Oxford Crown Court on Friday, Judge Ian Pringle KC described it a “bold and brazen” heist that took “no more than five-and-a-half minutes to complete”. Sheen was a key player - a career criminal and the only man convicted of both burglary and selling the gold. He pleaded guilty last year after police found his DNA at the scene and gold fragments in his clothing.
Police also recovered his phone which contained a wealth of incriminating messages. Shan Saunders, the senior crown prosecutor on the case, said it was “unusual to have a phone that when downloaded contains so much information”. During the trial, jurors heard voice messages sent by Sheen to Fred Doe, a Berkshire businessman who was convicted for conspiring to sell the gold in March. Saunders said interpreting the messages was “a long and complicated process”, due to the blend of coded language, Romany slang and Cockney rhyming slang used. In one message, Sheen confirmed he was in possession of some of the gold toilet. It read: “I think you know what I’ve got... I’ve just been a bit quiet with it.” He also used the word “car” as code for gold. “ The car is what it is mate, innit? The car is as good as money,” he said. Within two weeks of the heist Sheen had sold 20kg (44lb) of gold - about one fifth of the toilet’s weight - to an unknown buyer in Birmingham for £520,000. A BBC investigation in March revealed Sheen’s criminal history. It found he had been jailed at least six times since 2005 and led organised crime groups that had made more than £5m from fraud and theft - money which authorities had largely failed to recover.
There was no reaction from either of the men when their sentences were read out.
Sentencing Sheen, Judge Pringle said he had a “truly shocking list of previous convictions”.Speaking directly to Sheen, he said: “You were almost certainly the figure who carried the sledgehammer on which your DNA was found and which was used to sever the functioning toilet from its connecting pipes.”
Sheen was already serving a 19-year sentence for previous crimes, and he will serve the four-year sentence for the heist consecutively.
