This is all over the news in Britain, and an absolutely fascinating story. It involves a clan of Irish gypsies that were at the center of a huge crime wave for the last 20 years in which they – the Johnson clan – stole more than the equivalent of $160 million of antique goods, including what is thought to be the largest-ever domestic robbery in the history of the U.K., to the tune of 80 million pounds.

This story is quite complex and works on several levels. Five members of the Johnson family – Richard "Chad" Johnson, 33, and Daniel O'Loughlin, 32; Michael Nicholls, 29; Albi Johnson, 25; and Ricky Johnson, 54 – were given varying amounts of prison time, between eight and 11 years for their crimes. I don’t know about you, but for the amount of property they stole, and the brazenness with which they did it, those sentences seem a littlie light. Especially when you consider the only about $24 million worth of the stuff they hauled has been recovered and accounted for. The rest, I reckon, is buried in the hills, scattered to the wind or has been sold on the black market for a fraction of their true value.

They’ll be out in a decade or so and I can’t imagine there would be much standing in the way of starting up the family business again.

That’s an incredible amount of money that these guys stole, and they were evidently amazingly well organized for what they were doing, not to mention unbelievably greedy. Here’s the thing, though: The Johnsons lived in relative squalor. They had trailers, grungy clothes, several days worth of beard growth; the whole gypsy bit. Yet they were illegally worth millions of dollars. They were the subject of a BBC documentary, and pretty much flaunted that they had no problem stealing from Lords and Ladies in England, in their own words, “to feed my family.” You’d think a few million pounds could feed a couple families.

For my part, I imagine they saw themselves as some kind of modern-day Robin Hood and his more-surly-than-merry band of thieves, robbing from the rich. In a distinctly 20th-century twist, however, they didn’t give to the poor. They simply sold their ill-gotten booty to other thieves. Twisted.

It took the police a long time to catch these guys, and they were evidently sentenced in January, but the story didn’t break until now because of charges pending against one of the perpetrators.

I’ve linked here to the Guardian U.K., but you can literally find this story in a hundred different places if you look. As I said, it’s a fascinating story. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a movie, a mini-series, a graphic novel or at the very least an episode of Law & Order or CSI based on the story.

-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 11, 2008