Key Points
Wasnt it a little odd, thought the night manager, that the woman in room 107 should be peckish so soon after finishing the hotels 14-course tasting menu, a paean to the pig featuring tuna belly with red lard, scallops and pigs trotters, pork jowl pudding with caviar, and Iberian meatballs with cod tripe that had concluded, inevitably, with chocolate and coffee served with aged ham..
At the moment the manager was assembling the salad, the couple were engaged in a meticulously planned attempt to relieve one of the worlds finest restaurant cellars of its greatest treasures in a 1.6m wine theft that would make headlines around the world, trigger an international police operation and end, two months ago, with lengthy prison terms...
Top of the pairs list that night was a rare and long-lived Chteau dYquem, a bottle whose pale gold tint had darkened to tawny in the two centuries since it was created in 1806, a year that began with Admiral Lord Nelsons state funeral at St Pauls Cathedral in London and ended with the premiere in Vienna of Beethovens Violin Concerto in D major..
The defendants counsel was a cool, combative lawyer called Sylvia Crdoba, who frequently irked the presiding judge with her persistence on her clients behalf, even as the circumstantial evidence piled up: the witness identifications, the CCTV footage, the DNA, the phone activity, the discovery of a getaway car and the phone conversations with an apparent middleman in which Dumitru spoke of his difficulty in shifting the bottles and broached the possibility of swapping some for a Mercedes GLS..
Of particular significance, the judges added, was that Dumitru had been arrested in Madrid on 14 October 2021 less than two weeks before the Atrio robbery in connection with the theft from an upmarket restaurant and wine shop of two bottles of Romane-Conti with an estimated value of 40,000..
