How a thief swapped a famous portrait of Churchill with a forgery

A famous portrait of Winston Churchill, replaced with a forgery by thieves two years ago, will soon go back on display.

Police say thieves stole the famous portrait from Ottawa’s Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel in the weeks after Christmas 2021. The 1941 portrait, titled “The Roaring Lion,” was taken by Yousouf Karsh, an Armenian-Canadian photographer known for portraits of celebrities including Martin Luther King Jr., Queen Elizabeth and Alfred Hitchcock.

The theft went unnoticed until August 2022, when a hotel employee noticed that the frame looked different from the other photos on the wall and that the photo was hanging crooked, The Associated Press reported.

Police found the portrait after it resurfaced at a London auction house, where two unwitting buyers from Italy purchased it, Ottawa police said in a news release. Police have charged Jeffrey Iain James Wood, 43, of Powassan, Ont., with forgery, theft and human trafficking in connection with the crime.

According to AP, Nicola Cassinelli, a lawyer from Genoa, Italy, bought the portrait at auction for £5,292.

Cassinelli told the newspaper that the auction house called him in October and advised him not to sell or transfer the portrait because of the investigation into the Ottawa theft.

Ottawa police said in a statement that they worked closely with Italian police and the buyer of the portrait to get it back to Canada.

Ottawa police Detective Akiva Gellar told the newspaper that police conducted “a very extensive investigation” that took more than two years to recover the portrait.

Gellar said much of the investigation “is still very sensitive because it’s before the courts” and that “many details of how we discovered it” will be released Thursday at a ceremony in Rome.