Shakespeare fraud earns 8 years' jail

LONDON - An antique dealer who planned to sell a stolen copy of a rare first collection of Shakespeare's plays was jailed for eight years on Monday.

Raymond Scott, 53, took the 387-year-old First Folio, which was stolen from Durham University in 1988, to the famous Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, where he asked to have it verified and valued, claiming he had found it in Cuba.

The book had been damaged in an apparent attempt to make it look like a different copy from the one that had been taken from Durham. But staff at the library recognised the book and notified the FBI, the British Embassy and British police.

Last month a jury at Newcastle Crown Court found Scott guilty of handling stolen goods and removing stolen property from Britain. He was acquitted of stealing the book.

Passing sentence, Judge Richard Lowden said Scott - who drove a Ferrari and posed as an international playboy, despite being £90,000 ($194,944) in debt - was a "fantasist" and had tried to make money from the book to fund a lavish lifestyle to impress a woman he had met in Cuba.

The judge said the harm to the First Folio, of which only 228 still exist, amounted to the "cultural vandalisation" of a "quintessentially English treasure". He said Scott, an alcoholic with 25 previous convictions, had either deliberately damaged the book or was party to the damage.

During the trial, the court heard that Scott was unemployed and living with his mother in Washington, Tyne and Wear, at the time of his arrest.

But previously he had met dancer Heidy Garcia Rios, 21, in Cuba.

At a party with Rios and another friend, Odieny "Denny" Perez Leon, he came up with the plan to split the proceeds of the sale of the folio, which contained 36 Shakespeare plays.

Copies in mint condition are worth about £3 million ($6.5 million). But when he took it to the Folger library, minus some pages, the head librarian became suspicious.

- INDEPENDENT