Stolen basses and bows

[Ken Smith]

Those are all beautiful basses. I would bet it was a local job as those are the 'cherries' especially the Baldantoni and the Salvadori. Both fairly rare basses.

Who should be contacted if we hear anything? Is there a police report on file?

The Bow collection has some special sticks as well. I owned two of Lucchi's early sticks as well and met him personally. The classics there are not cheap at all. At least a good bass or two worth of bows gone as well.

[Brent Nussey]

Yeah, I tend to think that whoever did it really knew what they were doing. The shop had a lot of stock, and those were the most expensive instruments and bows. The bass community here is relatively small and tight knit though, so I wonder if the thieves don't have some plan to try and remove the instruments or at least the bows to other countries (maybe other asian countries) to get rid of them.

If you should hear anything about any of the stuff, you can contact the shop directly, at:

Contrabass shop ATTO
http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~atto/
TEL +81-422-41-2213
FAX +81-422-46-8491
E -MAIL attobass@festa.ocn.ne.jp

if there seems to be any language barrier, I can be reached at online@brentnussey.com to translate. I'm sure there's a police report, and investigation, this sort of theft is pretty rare here. But I just wanted to make a list of what was lost in English and get it out there, just to make it harder for the thieves to get rid of it.

The shop was really cleaned out of all of it's best stuff, here's hoping some of it can be found and the criminals brought to justice.

Thanks,
Brent

[Brent Nussey]

So this story fortunately has a happy ending. It turns out that the basses (5) and bows (19) were stolen by a 26 year old bass enthusiast. He said that he saw the instruments and bows online, and came to want them. So when the dealer went on vacation, he came by, broke in, and helped himself! The stuff was all found safe and sound in his place in Atsugi, a town a bit outside of Tokyo. He was caught when he tried to break into another shop in Meguro to do the same thing....

That said, the whole thing might make a great ad for the mini-cooper. He took the 5 basses and 19 bows in 2 separate trips in the car shown at the end of the video below. The trip would be some 50km.

http://news.tbs.co.jp/jnn/asx/news4514644_12.asx

Anyway, just goes to show it's not a good idea to let people know when you'll be on vacation.

Brent

[Thomas Erickson]

Wow!

That guy must enjoyed himself for a while - hopefully he learns his lessons in jail and gives something back to the bass community someday. He clearly loves the instrument enough!