‘Old-time crook’ heads back to jail
Lust for fast bikes has serial offender facing another lag
Fast motorcycles are a recurring theme in Anthony Ricardo Sannd’s criminal history. He bought one with his cut of a $300,000 armed heist.
He crashed one while on the run from prison; escaped on another after stealing an $8 million Tissot painting.
Now, at an age most people are enjoying retirement, Sannd’s heading back to prison after stealing a motorcycle worth $130,000.
“He was old school, quite respectful of authority but still one of those old-time crooks,” former police officer Neil Grimstone said after Sannd was arrested for the theft.
“A crook is a crook and he will always be a crook.”
Menace to society
Sannd, also known as Riccardo Genovese or Romanov, is one of New Zealand’s most prolific career criminals.
He’s a contemporary of Leslie Maurice Green, the late Chas Willoughby and Ronald Terrence Brown, godfathers of the criminal underworld.
Then aged 33, “a graphic artist of Glenfield” according to Herald archives, Sannd was arrested with Green and Willoughby and charged with the aggravated robbery of a security van outside a North Shore supermarket in 1984.
Wearing balaclavas and waving guns, three men took $294,529, the most money stolen in an armed holdup at the time.
Despite a “rock solid” alibi from his mother (he was apparently at home all evening on the night in question, apart from 30 minutes when he went to buy petrol and motorcycle magazines), Sannd was convicted.
He was jailed for 10 years in 1986 by Justice Evan Prichard, who described him as a “menace to society” and a “hardened criminal resolved to live outside the law”.
While serving this sentence, Sannd escaped from prison and went on the Anthony Sannd said in a 2012 interview, in which he vowed to go straight, that a dream of his was to ride his Ducati Desmosedici RR like that at right. One year later he was arrested for stealing an identical machine.
Without removing his crash helmet, he ran inside yelling “get down” while holding a pistol in his right hand and a shotgun in his left.
“I did not react. He told me this was for real,” Neil Charlwood, a part-time security guard who was in his 60s at the time, later told the court.
“I still did not react so he slammed the shotgun into my chest, which literally put me on the floor.”
Wrenching James Tissot’s 1874 masterpiece Over the Top from the wall with a crowbar, Sannd smashed the glass and hacked the canvas from the frame.
He rolled up the canvas, put it into a bag and fled, again firing a warning shot at someone who gave chase.
Police found the painting, badly damaged, hidden under Sannd’s bed eight days later.
The ransom note signed by the “Chameleon” demanding $500,000 was later forensically Sannd’s typewriter.
The shotgun cartridge fired at the Art Gallery also matched his firearm.
Sannd was also convicted of two armed robberies of security vans in Bombay and Waiuku, after which he fled on high-powered motorcycles.
In sentencing Sannd to 16 years and 9 months in prison, Justice Judith Potter said he had “total contempt for the law”.
The Tissot painting once worth an estimated $8m, was valued at $2m despite the efforts of gallery conservator Sarah Hillary to restore it.
[Sannd] slammed the shotgun into my chest, which literally put me on the floor. Neil Charlwood, trial witness
A second escape
linked to Proving that nothing had changed, Sannd managed to escape from prison for a second time.
In 2006, as part of a working party collecting firewood, he slipped away from a distracted guard and went on the run for 27 days.
His mother was on her deathbed, Sannd later explained in an interview with the Herald on Sunday.
“She didn’t want my brothers to know I’d visited her — and neither did I. She died three months later.”
While on the run, he stole a BMW and burgled a house and ended up getting a few more years added to his sentence.
One of the first things he did when freed from prison in 2012, was give that Herald on Sunday interview.
He swore his days of crime were over, he wanted a fresh start.
He had two dreams: to visit the graves of his wife and mother for the first time and to enjoy his only possession — a $130,000 red and white Ducati Desmosedici RR motorcycle.
The bike, according to Sannd, was bought by an English friend with the proceeds of a house they owned together in Somerset. But it had been purchased with the $80,000 the police never recovered from his first armed robbery.
It had been in the UK ever since, waiting for Sannd to get out of jail and raise the money to ship it home.
Sannd did end up riding the rare $130,000 motorcycle — but not his one. He was charged with stealing an identical Ducati a year after the interview, then convicted at a retrial this year.
Tomorrow, he will be sentenced in the Auckland District Court to what is likely to be yet another stint behind bars.