Art dealers jailed for theft of pounds 200,000 Lowry paintings

TWO "DESPICABLE" art dealers who stole valuable L S Lowry oil paintings from their helpless 94-year-old owner were each jailed for four years yesterday.

Michael Openshaw, 51, and Robert Barrett, 54, who police believe have spent years preying on elderly people in southern England, ignored the protestations of Dr Percy Thompson-Hancock and plucked the canvases from his lounge wall.

As partially-blind Dr Thompson-Hancock, who is a retired cancer specialist, continued to plead with them, the two dealers dropped pounds 10,400 in cash on the table and left with Children on a Promenade and Family of Three tucked under their arms. Although they put a further pounds 6,000 in the post a few days later, it still came nowhere near the paintings' true value, London's Southwark Crown Court was told.

The distraught doctor and his family desperately tried to get the prized paintings back, unaware they had been auctioned off by Bonhams for pounds 78,000.

Eight months after they were stolen, the works, painted by Lowry in the 1960s, appeared for sale at a Bond Street art gallery for pounds 215,000.

Fortunately, the former Harley Street doctor's granddaughter spotted them as she walked round an exhibition being held at the gallery.

Neither Openshaw, of Hillbrow, Hove, East Sussex, nor Barrett, from East Drive, Hove, showed any reaction as the jury convicted them of two counts of theft in November 1996 and rejected their claims that they had been victimised by the former doctor's "greedy" relatives after they had realised how much the oils were worth.

Passing sentence, Judge David Elfer QC told them: "What you men did was despicable ... it was in fact a determined crusade by you to get from the doctor the best pieces that he had."

He said they had pestered their elderly victim repeatedly to part with the paintings, until finally they decided to take no more notice of his refusal to sell.

"What you did ... indicates the heartlessness and the greed of you two men and you ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourselves.

"I treat each of you as equal partners in this because you were equally determined to sell these two paintings in order to make money from them.

"They were, and you knew it, valuable. This sort of behaviour cannot be permitted to go on and 'knockers' like you must be warned, when convicted, that this is what will happen to them," the judge added.