Tiger, tiger, and other odd thefts
You would think the Empress Hotel had killed an actual tiger, not just a bar that shared a name with one. When the storied Bengal Lounge disappeared during renovations in 2016, martini-clutching patrons reacted as though the portrait of the Queen had been replaced by one of Kim Kardashian. Monocles popped. Pith helmets trembled. Empires fell.
Maybe the fuss is what led the lounge’s tiger skin to wander off that May, leaving — as the Times Colonist’s Carla Wilson put it — nothing but a sooty silhouette above the fireplace, where the pelt had held pride of place for decades.
Yes, somebody stole the Empress’s Bengal tiger.
At first, people thought the theft was a prank, just like the time in 1980 when someone absconded with the tiger skin only to drop it off inside the Times Colonist loading dock shortly thereafter.
Nope. Twenty months after the latest caper, the tiger is still on the loose.
Which raises the question: What would drive someone to steal a tiger skin?
Which leads to the answer: A) money B) alcohol C) money and alcohol.
Comb through the files, there’s no shortage of stories about Vancouver Island thieves making off with weird stuff: artificial legs, sex toys and cremation urns, the latter as loaded as the thieves who often turn out to be to blame.
Many a strange theft has turned out to be the product of 80-proof logic. Anyone recall the old Russian submarine that was once moored in front of the Canoe Club as a tourist attraction? It was burgled one night in 2000. Victoria police solved the crime when they came across three 5 a.m. drunks wearing what were described as “big, fuzzy hats” downtown. (Q: “Where did you get the hats, boys?” A: “Shubmarine.”)
The police themselves can be victims: Many years ago, a Victoria thief made off with the light bar from a cop car (though the best stealing-from-the-law story still goes to retired VicPD legend Doug Bond, who once told the tale of a local drycleaner who would occasionally “lose” police officers’ garments until he had finally pieced together an entire uniform. “I was jealous,” Bondo said. “He looked better in uniform than I did.”)
Some of the odder thefts are just a matter of opportunists going for a quick buck. Four years ago, VicPD recovered eight timepieces — including a gold pocket watch that notorious train robber Bill Miner left behind when he broke out of New Westminster’s B.C. Pen in 1907 — that a frequently light-fingered couple stole from the Old Town exhibit in the Royal B.C. Museum. As museum heists go it wasn’t exactly The Thomas Crown Affair, though you would think ol’ Bill the bandit would have appreciated the initiative nonetheless.
At the other end of the planning scale was the 1995 theft from the adjacent provincial archives. A man using an assumed name signed out nine books including a 1601 edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first known collection of world maps. When no one was looking, the visitor sliced out 20 maps, including one of the earliest ones of the Pacific Rim and another pointing to a possible location of the Northwest Passage.
The thief turned out to be the appropriately named Gilbert Bland, a seemingly unremarkable Florida antique-map-store owner whose nondescript look helped him avoid detection while removing $700,000 worth of plates from rare and ancient atlases and old books held by a score of institutional libraries around North America.
His was far from the only well-calculated theft of odd items on the Island. In 2009, someone filched 42,000 dime-sized baby geoduck clams from a supposedly secret growing site off Campbell River, where they had been tethered in sealed trays six metres below the surface. Unfortunately for the culprit, that was only good for second place in the Weird Theft of the Year competition.
The gold medal went to whoever snuck onto a Cowichan Valley farm and swiped a container holding $25,000 worth of bull semen and cattle embryos.
Whoever did it must have known that the artificial insemination of dairy cattle is a big, hightech, global business. Bull semen is collected in straws (no, I don’t know how they collect it and, more to the point, don’t want to know) that can be worth hundreds of dollars, depending on the quality of the bull.
Likewise, if you breed the Ryan Gosling of bulls with the Emma Stone of cows, the resulting embryo can be sold for big bucks and implanted in another cow anywhere in the world. Pretty sure this is Donald Trump’s dream immigration model, too.
But I digress. We’re supposed to be talking tigers, not Trump, the difference being that Victorians still miss the former