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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