John Tillman
Sometimes referred to as one of the most successful thieves in Canadian history, John Tillman made a name for himself stealing. Really anything he could get his hands on but he especially targeted precious books, artefacts, and works of art amassing over 10,000 items in his home in Nova Scotia.
Tillman’s Background
Before we get into his crimes let’s discuss his background a little bit. He was born on February 21, 1961, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He grew up in the Halifax suburb of Fall River. In the 1990s we can already get a really terrible vibe from him because he was a major organizer for the Reform Party and he made headlines at this time with his strong statements in support of white nationalism. If you Google him there are a shocking number of pictures of him holding Nazi symbols and flags prudly. So…….yeah. That.
In the 1990s, after this, he graduated from university with his MBA and travelled to Russia where he lived in the Izmaylovo District of north-east Moscow for a number of years. While there he owned and operated street kiosks and learned to speak Russian. It was also there that he met his wife, Oxana Kuzina.
His Crimes
This might get a little extensive but I’ll try to keep this reigned in as much as possible. The problem is that Tillman was so prolific and motivated to steal that there are so many individual crimes it would be impossible to discuss each one. In many of what he referred to as “missions”, he was accompanied by his wife as sort of a Bonnie and Clyde type thing and later her brother Vladimir was added to their little team. They were regarded as criminal masterminds and each had a role to play; Oxana was the distraction, Vladimir was an expert in computer hacking and alarm disabling, and Tillman was the organizer and mastermind behind the heist as a whole.
His thefts started small with him taking small things from antique stores and bookstores while an accomplice distracted the shop owner. But over the years they became more daring.
In one heist he even used his mother as his accomplice. They went to the Nova Scotia legislature in downtown Halifax dressed as maintenance workers in overalls, a ladder, and radios clipped to their belts. His intended target was a 200-year-old watercolour painting that was hanging in the library. They simply walked in there with confidence, set up their ladder, took the painting down, and left. They looked so convincing that a member of the legislature even held the door for them on their way out. In The Fifth Estate documentary on him, Tillman says (of this heist) “ordinary people can be made to believe the most absurd of situations given the right props, the right confidence, the right look, the right acting” (Tillman, 2016). He had this confidence that he thought that whatever he wanted to do, he could accomplish it.
There are tons more examples of this including a time he stole a painting from St. Mary’s Basilica in Halifax right from the priest’s residence. He also saw the first edition of Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species, while he was studying at Mount Saint Vincent University, that they keep under lock and key and he told himself that he was going to come back one day and “liberate” it for himself. It was as if he felt entitled to these things and with that attitude, he just walked into places and discreetly would take things off shelves, from displays, from small museums, bookstores, antique stores. If he saw something he wanted and liked he just took it. He was sometimes referred to as a kleptomaniac with taste.
He wasn’t pulling off huge heists in massive museums most of the time so he was able to fly under the radar for many years. No one even knew he was doing this even though he was amassing quite a substantial fortune, he purchased a house on a lake with no mortgage and filled it with beautiful antiques. He even got so cocky as to invite a newspaper to come and photograph his home, with stolen items on full display, and include it in their interior design section.
Unbearably cocky and he really thought that he would never get caught. Luckily he did. He was already on the Halifax police’s radar but surprisingly enough not for these art crimes. Instead, it was for past charges for violent crimes including assault, extortion, threats, and assault with a weapon. So they definitely had this guy in their sights.
Capture and Aftermath
One day in 2012, Tillman was stopped by a Halifax police officer in a routine traffic stop. The officer noticed something on the passenger seat, it was a letter that looked really old. The officer didn’t know what it was and took it out to look at it and noticed that it had General James Wolfe’s signature at the bottom. It was written in 1758 and had been stolen from Dalhousie University. This was the beginning of the end for Tillman.
As an aside, he was able to steal this letter and others from the Dalhousie archives by posing as a researcher and befriending the archivist at the University. Eventually, he was able to obtain a key and made a copy before returning it discreetly. He waited in the washroom until the security rounds were done and the archives were closed. Then he had all night to decide which papers and artefacts he wanted to stuff into his backpack and take away with him. No one suspected a thing and he had already scoped out where the good stuff was while in there pretending to be doing other research. Sneaky.
In January 2013 the cops showed up at his lakefront house with warrants and started really looking around the house. What they found shocked them. On full display above his fireplace was a painting by W.H. Yorke from 1891 estimated to be worth $30,000 - $40,000, standing beside that was a full suit of armour. How do you steal a full suit of armour casually?? Speaking of value, experts also estimate that the Wolfe letter alone, that started this, is worth around $18,000.
Darryl Morgan of the RCMP said, “it wasn’t like a hoarding, he had it on display. He was kind of a curator of his own little museum - in a little twisted way” (Hutchins, 2014). They also found that Tillman had attached his own stickers to many of the stolen items that said how much they were worth and had a little mark on each one saying they belonged to the “Tillman Collection”. Morgan walked around the house with a book containing numbers of antique shops in the area and he would call them asking if they had ever had something stolen and more often than not the thing that they described would be found in the house.
Needless to say, Tillman was arrested. In September 2013 Tillman pled guilty to 40 charges including theft and fraud and was sentenced to nine years in prison. The police report they have confiscated over 10,000 “exhibits” from his home, the exact number has not been released, and they are storing them in a temperature-controlled vault while they try to find the rightful owners of each item. This was a difficult task since they didn’t want to release a list of the items since people could come forward falsely claiming to be the owner so they asked Tillman himself for help.
He revealed to authorities once caught that the appeal came from the adrenaline rush he got while carrying out these “missions”, and from the money he was able to make selling stolen pieces, but also because he was a lover of history and felt connected to the past while holding something created 200 years ago. Go to the museum and feel connected like everyone else John.
Luckily, the police have been able to return many of the things that were stolen to their owners. In a particularly heartwarming story, a 100-year-old man was looking for help restoring a little red chair, a precious family heirloom, for his home. Tillman, using an alias, offered to help, took the chair away and never brought it back. The man thought he would never see it again but the authorities found it on display in Tillman’s bedroom and at 102-years-old the man was reunited with the little red chair.
Unfortunately, it’s thought that Tillman actually stole a lot more than what was in his house since in 2001 he established a company called Prussia Import and Export Inc. They think he used this to launder the money he made as an “antique dealer” so many of the stolen items could be anywhere with people who might think they bought them legitimately.
In 2016 Tillman was granted full parole and was back out in society. In 2018 he signed a book and movie deal with Nimbus (a Canadian publishing company) because he had started writing a book about his story in jail. However, in 2019 Nimbus announced it would not be publishing the book probably because of Tillman’s neo-Nazi views. He had those all along Nimbus, get it together.
He died on December 23, 2018, still shrouded in mystery. There are still things that are missing and many unanswered questions but I will say that he was not sorry for anything he did and stood by his vile beliefs until the very end. So I’d say we’re well rid of him.
Works Cited
CBC News. (2016, April 8). John Tillman: The Collector - The Fifth Estate [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL-HOAz0k64
Frisko, Bruce. “Infamous Nova Scotia Art Thief Dies, Shrouded in Mystery”. 2019. CTV. https://atlantic.ctvnews.ca/infamous-nova-scotia-art-thief-dies-shrouded-in-mystery-1.4296128
Hutchins, Aaron. “He’s Turned into one of Canada’s Most Infamous Antique Thieves”. 2014. Maclean’s. https://www.macleans.ca/society/life/hes-turned-into-one-of-canadas-most-infamous-antique-thieves/