It may surprise Ottawa residents to learn they can still walk into the lobby of the Château Laurier to check out the architecture and decor of the landmark hotel, even after a beloved Canadian photograph was snatched off the walls and replaced with a fake.
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The brazen caper made international headlines this year when Yousuf Karsh’s iconic portrait of Winston Churchill, stolen from the hotel almost three years ago, was recovered by Ottawa police after a lengthy trans-Atlantic investigation.
In keeping with Karsh’s wishes, the Roaring Lion, as the image is known, will be back on the wall of the reading lounge this month following an extensive ground-floor renovation at the historic hotel.
This time it’s not going anywhere, vows Genevieve Dumas, the hotel’s general manager.
“I can guarantee you when the portrait is back, it’s going to be very secure and it’s not going to move from the wall,” she said in an interview. “We were not specialists in art security before but we are now.”
The hotel’s electronic security has been upgraded to a state-of-the-art system that features more cameras and a greater capacity for storing footage for a longer period of time. What’s more, each one of the prints in the collection is now wired to a system that sounds an alarm if an intruder gets too close.
The scenario was much different three years ago. Although there were cameras throughout the hotel, the capacity to store footage was limited and there was no electronic security on the prints. They were secured to the wall with a manual locking mechanism.
How the Roaring Lion went missing
The portrait vanished during the 2021 Christmas season when the hotel was dead quiet because of the pandemic lockdowns and cancellations prompted by the rapidly spreading Omicron coronavirus variant. There were no guests and a skeleton staff was on duty.
At some point, the famous picture was replaced by a copy in a cheap frame, complete with the forged signature of the late photographer.
No one realized it was missing until the following summer. Maintenance engineer Bruno Lair was making his rounds of the hotel on a busy morning in August 2022, and noticed the print was crooked.
The tiny flaw caught his eye because he helped hang it 26 years ago, decades before he became the boss of the hotel’s maintenance department.
At the time, Lair was a master painter and plasterer who had been asked to help put up a series of framed photographs presented to the hotel by Karsh and his wife, Estrellita, as a farewell gift. It was a permanent loan that came with the stipulation the prints were to be displayed.
The Karshes lived in a suite in the hotel for 18 years, and Yousuf had a studio on the sixth floor. Lair, who was first employed by the hotel in 1988, remembers Karsh as a “very lovely man” who was polite and gentle.
“If we knocked on the door and Mrs. Karsh wasn’t there, the door was open,” Lair recalled. “He’d let us in to do whatever needed to be done. Mrs. Karsh was a little more stern. She protected him. She’d say, ‘Sorry, he’s having a nap. Nobody’s coming in.’ ”
The centrepiece of the collection gifted to the hotel was the wartime portrait of a scowling Winston Churchill. Karsh took it in Ottawa — in the Speaker’s Chambers, to be exact — on Dec. 30, 1941, moments after the British prime minister delivered a speech to Parliament.
As the story goes, Churchill puffed on a cigar while Karsh was adjusting his gear, only to have the photographer turn around and pluck it out of his mouth with a polite, ‘Forgive me, sir.’
“By the time I got back to my camera,” Karsh recalled years later, “he looked so belligerent he could have devoured me.”
Karsh captured in the 67-year-old leader an expression of fierce resolve that was viewed as the face of Britain’s unwavering stance against fascism. It was a momentous shot, made even more powerful in the darkroom, and established the Armenian-Canadian as a photographer of international renown.
“I knew after I had taken it that it was an important picture, but I could hardly have dreamed that it would become one of the most widely reproduced images in the history of photography,” he would later say.
Churchill himself was grudgingly impressed. “You can even make a roaring lion stand still to be photographed,” he is reported to have said, coining the phrase used to title the piece.
To see this Ottawa treasure askew in 2022 was unusual, but on a busy day, Lair initially thought little of it. He took the print down and brought it to an office for safekeeping, with a reminder to himself that it needed to go back on the wall.
A few days later, on a Friday, he was tying up the loose ends of the week and went back for the photo, bringing the tools to rehang it properly. He quickly realized something was wrong.
“I thought, ‘Whoa this doesn’t fit,’ ” Lair said in an interview at the hotel, pointing out the empty spot the portrait had hung. “It was too small. It didn’t fit the dimensions it was supposed to fit.”
Dumas happened to be nearby and Lair called her over.
“Boss, we have a problem,” he told her, detailing the discrepancies between it and the other Karsh prints. “It’s not the same frame, not the same size and we never used wire to hang it. We have big issues.”
There was some head scratching as the pair wondered if there was any legitimate reason for someone to swap the photo. Drawing a blank, Dumas took it back to her office.
Her first step was to remove the print from the frame to verify Karsh’s signature with Jerry Fielder, a Washington-based expert on the Karsh estate. She sent him a photo of the signature and immediately got a response.
“That’s a fake,” was his verdict.
The next call was to the Ottawa police.
“That’s where it all started,” Dumas said over coffee at the hotel’s Laurier Café. “If the signature is a fake then the picture is probably fake.”
Still, it took the Ottawa police a week or so to launch an investigation. Dumas surmised they probably didn’t realize the historical significance of the loss.
In the meantime, she was determined to figure out how long the original had been missing.
Her staff dug into the hotel’s photo archives, and then put out a call on social media asking people to submit their recent photos of the Roaring Lion. It wasn’t hard to tell which images portrayed the fake print because it was hung above a piece of moulding, while the original had covered the moulding.
Thanks to a January 2022 photo submitted by CBC reporter Paul Hunter, the window of disappearance was narrowed to the 12-day period between Christmas Day 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022.
In other words, no one noticed the original was missing for eight months. “When you see a picture every day, it’s the same,” Dumas said. “It’s Winston Churchill and he looks the same so you don’t realize.”
She provided police with the timeline she had sketched out. “That’s where they really kicked in and realized it was a big thing.”
Ottawa police detective Avika Geller was assigned to the case. He suspected an inside job, and cautioned Dumas not to get her hopes up. Most of the artworks stolen in Canada are never recovered.
But Dumas kept her fingers crossed as detectives went about their business. Every one of the 12 members of the maintenance team was a suspect, interviewed by police at least once and subjected to polygraph tests.
There was no security footage to review because the system didn’t have long-term storage capacity.
Lair, the most senior member of maintenance, was questioned twice and given a lie-detector test, despite the hotel’s full confidence in his integrity. The 65-year-old passed the test with flying colours.
“I never thought any of them did it,” Dumas said, “especially Bruno. This hotel belongs to him. He’s been here for over 30 years. He loves this hotel. I just could not picture that. Never. But I could not say it until proven wrong. I was hoping it would be found so we could at least clear our employees.”
The employees were eliminated as suspects and the investigation continued. Det. Geller, who declined an interview, has revealed very little of the process to avoid tainting the case, which is before the courts.
However, it’s clear a breakthrough came when an investigator found an online listing for the print on an auction site. It had been listed for sale through Sotheby’s in London, and had already sold to a buyer in Italy — months before anyone realized it was stolen.
The search for Winston Churchill goes global
Sotheby’s has noted the portrait was not listed on any stolen-art databases, including the Art Loss Register, which the auction house checks regularly as part of its standard procedure in vetting items sold at auction. To see an early print of the Roaring Lion come up for sale would not be cause for concern either. Karsh’s studio produced many copies of the print — what makes this one special is the fact that it was signed and personally gifted to the hotel by the photographer in the same city in which it had been created.
Before closing the studio and moving to Boston, the Karshes donated Yousuf’s collection of images, including the original Roaring Lion negative, to Library and Archives Canada in 1992. No further copies of the original negatives are permitted by the estate.
Ottawa police took more than a year to untangle the case, with the help of several international organizations, including the FBI, the London Metro Police and Italy’s Carabinieri, and the full co-operation of Sotheby’s.
Eventually, they located the print in Italy and verified it was the one belonging to the Château. They also learned that the shipment to Sotheby’s had originated from an address in Ottawa.
In April, police arrested a 44-year-old man named Jeffrey Iain Wood. He was charged with stealing and trafficking the portrait, as well as forgery and theft over $5,000.
He appeared in court and was released on two $5,000 bonds posted by a pair of court-approved sureties, David and Jennifer Moore, who are former OPP officers, and ordered to reside with them in Powassan, Ont.
Wood’s next court date is a Gardiner hearing scheduled for March 2025. A Gardiner hearing establishes an agreed statement of facts and usually accompanies a guilty plea.
His defence lawyer’s scheduling of a Gardiner hearing suggests he does intend to plead guilty, but some of the facts remain in dispute.
The other unwitting player in this Ottawa-centric art heist was the buyer, Nicola Cassinelli, a lawyer in Genoa, Italy, who was looking for an interesting piece to fill a spot on the wall of his living room. He bought the portrait in May 2022 through Sotheby’s for a reported 5,292 British pounds (almost $10,000 CAD).
Six months after his purchase, Cassinelli told the Canadian Press that he received a call from the auction house advising him not to sell or transfer the portrait because of an investigation by Canadian police. Another few months passed until he heard from the auction house again, letting him know that police wanted to talk to him.
Cassinelli delivered the portrait to Italian police, who worked with Canadian officials to authenticate it. That same day, he bought an inexpensive copy of the famous photo to keep on his wall as a souvenir of his role in the caper.
The lawyer told the Canadian Press he had been “partially reimbursed” for the financial loss, but was not especially concerned about the money. He felt the print should return to Ottawa. “I wanted the Roaring Lion to be at his home,” Cassinelli said.
In September, police and hotel management held a media conference to announce the recovery of the Roaring Lion. Det. Geller deferred most questions about the investigation, but allowed that it was a challenge because of the number of international partners.
“We used forensic analysis, open-source information and tips from the public to really direct where to go and what happened to it,” Det. Geller said. “It was the most complex investigation that I’ve been a part of because of the international aspects. A lot of diplomacy went into this.”
However, the police bungled in withholding the accused’s name at the media conference, mistakenly believing it was under a publication ban. After reviewing the documents, they apologized for the “inconvenience” and confirmed Wood’s name. There was no further clarification on the error.
As for Dumas, she was gobsmacked to hear the print had been found, and relieved that it was in good shape. She said it had been rolled to be shipped but the auction house had touched it up and reframed it nicely.
“We’ve been waiting for this day for over two years now and I’m beyond excited to know it’s finally coming back here,” she said. “It’s a part of Canadian heritage, a very important piece of Canadian art and very important to the Château Laurier.”
A triumphant return to Château Laurier
Dumas and Geller were among the party of Ottawans who travelled to Rome to retrieve the print. The handover took place during a September ceremony at the Canadian Embassy.
During the Roaring Lion’s absence, a major renovation took over its home in the lounge, updating the room and merging it with Zoe’s, the adjacent bar/restaurant.
A grand opening takes place on Nov. 15 that will not only reveal the new space, renamed Zoe’s Lounge, but also serve as a welcome-home ceremony for the Lion.
The photograph will be secure this time, partly because of the new security system but also because Lair is intent on doing the job of hanging it himself. Naturally, he’ll be keeping an eye on it, too.
“Ooooh yes. I am going to hang the picture back up,” he said. “That’s a promise. Nobody hangs that but me. I found it (was missing); I’ll put it back up.”
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