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| Gold toilet: Two men jailed for £4.8m Blenheim Palace heist | Gold toilet: Two men jailed for £4.8m Blenheim Palace heist |
| (31 minutes later) | |
| The solid gold toilet weighed 98kg (216lbs) and was insured for $6m (£4.8m) | The solid gold toilet weighed 98kg (216lbs) and was insured for $6m (£4.8m) |
| Two men have been jailed for stealing a £4.8m gold toilet from 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. | 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. | |
| James Sheen (left) and Michael Jones were both part of the audacious heist | |
| Sheen was a key player in the heist - 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". | |
| Sheen sent this picture of a bag of bank notes with the message: "520,000 ha ha ha" | |
| 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. | |
| 'Truly shocking' | |
| 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. | |
| Sentencing Sheen, Judge Ian Pringle said he had a "truly shocking list of previous convictions". | |
| Sheen was already serving a 19-year sentence for previous crimes, and he will serve the four-year sentence for the heist consecutively. | |
| Jurors were shown selfies that Jones took with the toilet | |
| Sentencing Jones, Judge Pringle said he also had a "long and unenviable list of previous convictions". | |
| In the week leading up to the heist, Jones, who worked for Sheen as a roofer, paid two visits to Blenheim. | |
| Just a day prior to the raid, on Sheen's instructions, he booked a timeslot on Blenheim's website to use the gold toilet. | |
| While inside the cubicle, Jones snapped pictures of the golden toilet and a lock on the door. | |
| In one of the trial's lighter moments he confirmed he did use toilet, calling the experience "splendid". | |
| CCTV of the daring raid was shown in court |