It was a normal working day. The co-pilot had done his service: A line of flight to Cuba, Accommodation in Havana, in the evening, it should go back to Germany. The Crewbus was ready, because the twenty-first went thirty years back through the hotel hallway. There it hung, with a beaded band around a lamp hung: An image that triggered something in him. It is only now that it occurred to him. Two birds, which move around each other, like in a relationship. A simple, no-frills presentation. Impulse, the Pilot did something that he can explain it in retrospect only as a “promotion of mental derangement” – he took the frame from the wall, went to the toilet, took out the picture, rolled it up and hid it in his Trouser leg. The next day it was in Germany.
Anna-Sophia Lang
editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
F. A. Z.
The Cuban state, the image of the contemporary artist Roberto Fabelo belongs to, didn’t need long to be, thanks to surveillance images of the theft to the attention of. $ 18,000 is worth it, he told the German law enforcement authorities. If that’s true, is unclear. But representatives of the Ministry of the interior travelled down to pick it up. The Pilot lost his Job, now lives out of unemployment money and moved back to his parents, to be able to the debt from the pilot training to pay off. In the Crewbus, on the way to the airport, bad Conscience and fear that plagued him, he says to the magistrates ‘ court where he must answer on Tuesday. But by then it was too late. When the call came from the employer, he confessed to everything immediately. Preferably, he says, he would have brought the picture back to Cuba. He had just want to have for themselves. Idea of art, he has not. Terribly embarrassing to him, his fact, but he says: “I know I’m to blame.”
Before the court, it’s all about everything. He is convicted, he loses his license and has no Chance to work again in his profession. “The damage, both professionally and privately, is now immense,” says his lawyer. However, the Prosecutor’s office is locked against a setting method of the anti-money edition and pleads 8000 Euro fine. The presiding judge finally finds a middle ground: A warning with the Caveat that a monetary penalty of 3000 Euro to a charitable institution. “He deserves a second Chance.”
