Sunday, August 9, 2015

Roman Totenberg’s Stolen Stradivarius Is Found After 35 Years


The label inside the violin said “Stradivarius,” but plenty of fakes claim that, too. So after a California woman asked Phillip Injeian, a violinmaker and dealer, to appraise the instrument, he met her at a Manhattan hotel in late June and examined every inch of it, from its nicks to the somewhat pointy curve of its F-holes to its distinctive wood grain, before delivering his verdict.

“I told her, ‘I have good news and bad news,’ ” Mr. Injeian said in an interview Thursday. “I said: ‘The good news is that it’s a Stradivarius. The bad news is that it’s a stolen Stradivarius. And this is one that

The Stradivarius — which was made in 1734 by Antonio Stradivari and is known as the Ames Stradivarius — disappeared after it was stolen in 1980 from the violin virtuoso Roman Totenberg. So as soon as Mr. Injeian recognized it, he called in law enforcement officials, setting off a train of events that ended on Thursday afternoon with the return of the long-lost violin to Mr. Totenberg’s three daughters: Amy, Jill and Nina Totenberg.


“The mystery was solved,” Nina Totenberg, the legal affairs correspondent for NPR News, said at a news conference at the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, where the violin was returned to her family. She said it appeared that her father, who had long harbored suspicions about who had stolen his violin, had been right all along.

The violin was stolen in May 1980 from Mr. Totenberg’s office at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass., where he was then the director. Mr. Totenberg, a teacher and virtuoso who performed as a soloist with major orchestras and worked with Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Leopold Stokowski and Arthur Rubinstein, died in 2012 at age 101. His violin was valued at $250,000 when it was stolen; these days, the finest Stradivarius violins often sell for millions of dollars.

The violin did not surface again until June 26, when a California woman, identified in court papers as Thanh Tran, brought it to New York to have it appraised by Mr. Injeian at a meeting at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan. According to Mr. Injeian, Ms. Tran said that her ex-husband gave it to her before dying in 2011. But it was in a locked case, so she put it aside for several years before she and a boyfriend broke the case open.

Nina Totenberg said that the man who had left Ms. Tran the violin, Philip S. Johnson, whom she described as “an aspiring violinist,” had long been suspected of stealing it.

“He was seen loitering around the place where it was taken, and later his ex-girlfriend would tell my father that she was quite sure that he had taken it,” Ms. Totenberg said at the news conference. “That, however, was not enough for a search warrant, and my mother was so frustrated that she would famously ask her friends if anyone knew someone in the mob who would break into Johnson’s apartment and do a search for the violin.”

That led Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, to weigh in. “Just one point of practice,” he said, looking around at the assembled prosecutors, F.B.I. agents and New York Police Department officials. “If you do lose something, and it goes missing, and you don’t know how to get it back, don’t actually call the mob.”

A stipulation and court order that was signed this week, paving the way for the return of the violin to the Totenberg family, said that Ms. Tran had “voluntarily relinquished” the violin to the Federal Bureau of Investigation after learning that it might be stolen. She “represents that she received the Ames Stradivarius from her former spouse prior to his death, and that she did not have knowledge” that it had been stolen, the papers said.

Ms. Tran did not return several calls seeking comment. Law enforcement officials said they had no evidence she knew the violin had been stolen.

Little was immediately known about Mr. Johnson. He was not named in the court papers, but several law enforcement officials confirmed that he was the woman’s ex-husband, and had been a longtime suspect. One law enforcement official said the F.B.I. case file and subsequent leads shed no light on a motive. An official at Boston University said that a Philip Johnson with the same birth date had attended Boston University’s School for the Arts from 1976 through 1979; Mr. Totenberg was on the faculty during part of that period.

Detective Michael O. Gildea of the New York Police Department, who worked on the case with Christopher McKeogh, an agent with the F.B.I.’s Art Crime Team, said that it was strange that the violin had apparently been locked away for so many years, only to surface now. “It was very odd to me that someone would risk so much, and yet did so little with it,” he said. Stolen Stradivarius violins, like famous purloined paintings, are hard to sell because they are so recognizable.

Ms. Totenberg said she was sad that her father was not alive to see his instrument restored. The bond between musicians and instruments is a powerful one. After the theft, Mr. Totenberg, who had owned the violin for 38 years, told CBS News in 1981 that it had taken two decades of playing the instrument before it reached its potential. “It took some time to wake it up,” he said, “to work it out, find all the things that it needed, the right kind of strings and so on and so on.”

But she said that he would have been furious “if he’d known that the person that he’d thought took it had in fact taken it, and all these years had it hidden away, not maintaining it the way one should, not caring for it as a special baby, not having it played.”

Ms. Totenberg said that the family had now paid back the insurance money that Mr. Totenberg collected after the violin was stolen, and that it planned to have the Ames Stradivarius restored and sold — but to a musician who will play it, not a collector who will lock it away.

“None of us play the violin, and we know that Stradivarius owners are really just guardians of these great, great instruments,” she said. “They are meant to be played by great artists. And so the Ames Strad — now perhaps known as the Ames-Totenberg Strad — will eventually be in the hands of another great artist, like my father, and the beautiful, brilliant and throaty voice of that violin, long stilled, will once again thrill audiences in concert halls around the world.”


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