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Precious Violin Reunited With Owner

By ERIC KONIGSBERG,

The New York Times

Posted: 2007-07-05 20:52:55

Filed Under: Crime News, Nation News

(July 5) - In the canon of every New Yorker’s worst nightmares, it has to rank high: Put in a long night at work. Fall asleep on a muggy subway platform waiting for a train home. Awake to find that your belongings, which happen to include an exquisitely sonorous 1913 violin handmade by Stefano Scarampella, one of the great violin makers of the past 100 or so years, have been stolen.

Celebrating the Find

When Tom Chiu retrieved his stolen violin, he gave an impromptu concert for transit workers. "I played Vivaldi, because one of them requested it," he said. "And then the theme from 'The Godfather.' I don't think most people expect that sort of thing from a classically trained violinist. It's usually played on an accordion."

O.K., so perhaps the missing item in this case is something rare and specific, an object that nobody could appreciate as fully as its rightful owner, Tom Chiu, 36, an avant-garde violinist from Brooklyn. Even so, the sense of loss he felt on Wednesday night last week, when just such a thing happened, was universal.

He was at the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights. The string ensemble he founded more than a decade ago, the Flux Quartet, had just performed at Bargemusic, the floating performing space under the Brooklyn Bridge. The Scarampella, with a value in the $100,000 range, was taken, along other items of both real and sentimental value, like a bow he had been using since childhood — he started playing at 6 — and his laptop computer.

Thus began six days of bereftness and uncertainty for Mr. Chiu that ended, on Tuesday night, with the Scarampella returned to him — after taking a curious detour — courtesy of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with an assist from the person he has come to refer to as “my thief.” His thief still has the laptop.

“I was paralyzed,” Mr. Chiu said yesterday of his initial realization that his violin had been taken. “Actually, it was a weird combination of paralysis and denial. I’ve played this violin since I was 23, essentially all my adult life. It grew into an extension of my body. It was very traumatic not only to me but to my family and the rest of the group.”

Mr. Chiu was born in Taiwan, grew up near Pasadena, Calif., and came to New York by way of Yale and Juilliard. The Flux Quartet is a polyglot and experimental group in the tradition of the Fluxus movement, and the group’s music, figuratively speaking, is something of a high-pitched dog whistle — which means that not everybody gets it, but those who do really respond.

(In The New Yorker, Alex Ross called the Flux Quartet’s 1999 performance of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, a 6-hour 15-minute piece that permitted the musicians no intermission or bathroom breaks, “a disorienting, transfixing experience that repeatedly approached and touched the sublime.”)

As for the Scarampella, Mr. Chiu’s parents had bought it for him from a dealer of antique musical instruments in California. Mr. Chiu’s father taught linguistics and philosophy at Taiwanese universities and his mother is a piano teacher. Mr. Chiu, who lives in Prospect Heights with his wife, Jennifer, would not discuss the price paid, but acknowledged that it was comparable to the cost of his four years at Yale and that committing to it was not a decision to take lightly.

“It’s a very specialized process choosing a violin,” he recalled. “It takes months, if not years, to find one that fits you physically and sonically. It grows into an extension of your body. It creates a unique bond.”

Mr. Chiu reported the loss of his violin to the police right away, but did not know what else to do. He used a backup instrument for three remaining engagements at Bargemusic last week. And, through the help of Christophe Landon, a rare-violin dealer in Manhattan, he was able to send out a mass e-mail message to others in the musical-antiques trade, “describing to them all the aspects about my violin,” Mr. Chiu said. “If somebody showed up trying to sell it, they’d know instantly that it was mine, and stolen.”

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Still, he said, “I was just very nervous about the whole thing. My parents had been robbed at the Hong Kong airport about a month before. They turned away from their cart and somebody took a handbag with their passports. They were blaming me that I didn’t learn from their lesson.”

Mr. Chiu said he and his parents have always been preternaturally wary about letting people know how much the Scarampella cost. “I was calling my parents the whole time about whether or not to declare the value of the violin. It’s very valuable — but even more valuable to me. I was afraid that if whoever took it found out what it’s worth, they’d hold it for ransom or something.”

He was also afraid to answer his phone when the caller ID showed a strange number. “I thought it might be my thief,” he said. “I froze. I thought, ‘What should I say?’ ‘Do I meet him myself?’ And then if I went to meet him, would I somehow blow it and let him know how much it meant to me and he’d hold onto it longer?”

On Friday, Mr. Chiu’s management company contacted several members of the music press, and he began phoning the NY1 studio. On Tuesday afternoon, the New York Police Department issued a statement asking anybody with information to call a toll-free line. Stories went out on the wires, on television, in the newspapers.

Sometime after 10 p.m., Mr. Chiu said, he got a call from a transit official at the Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue station. “He asked if I was missing something,” he said. “I described the contents of the violin case. He said there were a bunch of bow ties in it and I knew it was mine.”

The official, Mr. Chiu said, told him that the violin had been sitting on a desk at the station for a while — perhaps days. “He found something with my name and address on it inside the violin case and figured it must mean something to somebody, so he called me.”

The Coney Island station, however, does not house the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s official lost-and-found. “I think it’s for things that were found on trains on all the lines that end there,” Mr. Chiu said. The Clark Street station, where Mr. Chiu and the Scarampella had last been together, is on the 2 and the 3 — which do not go to Coney Island.

The violin had changed trains.

Mr. Chiu is certain that it was no accident that the violin came back to him. “My thief had broken the zipper on the side pouch of the violin case, but he’d taken all the papers out — sheet music, programs, a bunch of CDs — and returned them with the violin in a plastic bag. The only things he held onto were the laptop and my backpack.”

When Mr. Chiu and his wife arrived at the subway station to retrieve the Scarampella, workers on the night shift asked for an impromptu concert, so he played a few numbers.

“I played Vivaldi, because one of them requested it,” he said. “And then the theme from ‘The Godfather.’ I don’t think most people expect that sort of thing from a classically trained violinist. It’s usually played on an accordion.”

2007-07-05 13:23:15

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355 comments

jeffhado 11:24:45 AM Jul 07 2007

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take a cab, *******!

jfl149 10:43:57 AM Jul 07 2007

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No one seems to have a kid word for the theif. Of course stealing is wrong. But,the theif is not entirely undeserving of some respect, at least. Look, she/he did a most decent thing, in arranging for the return of the most precious things the man had "lost." I was impressesd that ALL the "sentimental" and irreplaceable" items were also included.

We don't know what really motivated the theif---and spare me the New York cynics who 'd say, "Well, he/she was just afraid to be caught, trying to sell such aa easily recognizeable thing---but we might assume she/he has some compassion and wanted to have some better self-regard, as well.

{No...I am NOT the theif. I am a 77 year old man, with some understanding that a basically decent person might do a bad thing.

metam6 07:48:18 PM Jul 06 2007

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Dis ees one lucuky hombre, back in PR we don play de fiddle so we has no use fer it so wes give et bac

jontevans 07:06:06 PM Jul 06 2007

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falling asleep on the subway platform????????? He is lucky all that was taken were replaceable material items. They could have taken his virginity as well.

kartomeg 06:01:46 PM Jul 06 2007

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idiot what were u doing asleep!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

karenrkane 05:56:39 PM Jul 06 2007

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About 15 years ago someone broke into our house while we were visiting my husband in the hospital. He had a heart attack earlier in the day. The only thing the thief took was my jewelery box. It didn't contain a lot of things of great monetary value but alot of things with great sentimental value. My grandmother's engagement ring and my husband's grandmother's engagement ring are only 2 of the items I still miss to this day.

cobbcoinc 04:40:20 PM Jul 06 2007

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When I was 8 years old, my step-father (an Auschwitz survivor) gave me a necklace that had belonged to his only sibling, who was slaughtered there along with his mother. It was a beautiful rose cameo in blue lapiz and gold and I never took it off, even when I went to bed. It became such a part of me that I forgot to take it off when jumping into the lake and as I felt it come over my head, I try to catch it, but felt it slip through my groping fingers in the murky water, and fall to the bottom of the lake. I never forgave myself, since it was the only personal possession he had of hers. But it also taught me a valuable lesson - never give something of great value (especially sentimental) to a child.

joanbway 04:32:26 PM Jul 06 2007

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If the thief is reading these comments on the laptop he stole, I want him to know that he did a wonderful thing when he returned the violin. Prayerfully, his life will turn around and he will be able to find a respectable manner to support himself. Meanwhile, thank you for returning the violin.

joanbway 04:31:39 PM Jul 06 2007

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user735515 02:44:14 PM Jul 06 2007

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vjrut, your comment shows how niave you are. A laptop is easily replacable, a violin made by a master who's been dead for half a century or more is irreplacable. I would be furious if someone stole my guitar. So I can't imagine how that guy felt when a violin worth hundreds of times more in cash and sentimental value is stolen.
Lastly...to all the people talking about how there are good people in the world; the theif isn't a good person damnit...if he were he wouldn't be a theif to begin with...it's much more likely he had no idea of it's value and had no where he could fence it.

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