Porters who operated a lucrative crime ring at Paris’s most prestigious auction house have been jailed for the theft of objects worth millions.

A judge sentenced 30 people to between 18 months and three years in prison. They were members of a traditional 110-strong union known as the cols rouges because of the red collars on their black uniforms.

Their scam was rumbled following an anonymous tipoff, which led to a police operation that recovered thousands of paintings, sculptures and other objects stolen from auctioneers Hôtel Drouot.

The Union des commissionaires de l’hôtel des ventes (UCHV) – also known as the Savoyards – worked like a secret society whose members made so much money from their systematic pilfering that many drove luxury cars and one evn bought a Parisian bar.



Three auctioneers accused of involvement in the racket were given 18-month suspended sentences and fined €25,000 (£21,000).



The public prosecutor had demanded sentences of up to five years, but the court imposed a maximum of three years – with half the sentences suspended – along with fines of up to €60,000.



Objects on display at the Drouot auction house in Paris. Photograph: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters

Among the 275 tonnes of objects stolen from the auction house were antique furniture, works by Courbet, Chagall and Matisse as well as jewellery. Items from the estate of the Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray worth an estimated €1m, a Ming dynasty Chinese plate worth €325,000 and rare costumes belonging to French mime artist Marcel Marceau also disappeared.



In March, 49 people were put on trial charged with organised theft, conspiracy to commit a crime and handling stolen goods. Le Monde reported that one of the cols rouges told police: “I cannot give you a single name of a commissioner who didn’t at one time or another steal in the exercise of his job … in fact, at the UCHV, theft was an institution. Everyone had a bite.”



The cols rouges, who could earn up to €60,000 a year, were traditionally exclusively recruited from Alpine villages in eastern France and enjoyed a monopoly and independence granted to them by Napoleon III in 1860. They did not wear name badges but had identification numbers embroidered in gold thread on their collars and chose nicknames, like Chocolat, Corbeau (crow), Beaujolais or Gitan (Gypsy). They could pass on or sell their number to their successor.



The court heard the organisation operated as a kind of secret criminal cooperative for decades, with all revenue collected and distributed equally among members. New recruits were initiated into la yape – pilfering in Savoyard slang – but those who refused to take part were excluded.



During the three-week trial, the prosecution alleged objects were stolen either during valuations of the estates of recently deceased collectors or wealthy individuals, or while the items were being shipped to Hôtel Drouot or held in storage awaiting auction. The auction house handles up to a million items a year.

A mask on display on the eve of a sale at Drouot. Photograph: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images

Le Parisien reported that as well as stealing whole items, the accused would take part of an object, which would then be sold cheaply at auction as it was incomplete. Having bought the item, the missing piece would be replaced and it would be resold at a far higher price.

If an auctioneer became suspicious, the cols rouges would cause havoc. “He would find objects were broken, that they weren’t in the right auction room or were late, which held things up. For us, it was a way of exerting pressure [on them],” one told police.



The scam was discovered when an anonymous caller tipped off police in 2009 that one of the cols rouges had removed an oil-painting by Courbet called Seascape with Orange Sky six years previously. The painting had been stored at Drouot and went missing in 2003.



Police tapped a porter’s phone and subsequently launched an investigation into the UCHV. Detectives carried out 147 separate searches and found about 6,000 paintings, sculptures, jewellery, furniture and other stolen objects. The union, described by police as concealing a “generalised system of theft … with the complicity of certain auctioneers”, was shut down.



Hôtel Drouot, which was a civil party in the legal action, insisted the cols rouges were independent of them and pointed out they were self-employed, but not everyone is glad to see the back of the Savoyards.

One auctioneer told Le Monde: “They were efficient. With the new transporters, it’s total amateurism.”

