Andy Warhol said everybody in the future will be famous for 15 minutes.
And I wanted my 15 minutes of fame.
This is Raymond Scott.
For two years, he's been at the centre of an international mystery
involving a stolen literary treasure worth millions.
I have been charged with the theft,
or the handling of the Shakespeare First Folio.
This book is considered the most important in the English language,
and 12 years ago, a unique copy was stolen from a British university.
The book belongs to Durham University Library. The contents belong to the world.
When it re-surfaced, it sparked a transatlantic investigation
involving the FBI and British detectives.
They thought they were dealing with an international art thief. And they were trying to trace Raymond Scott.
But who exactly IS the mysterious Mr Scott?
He drinks champagne, he smokes Cuban cigars...
He wants people to think that he's a millionaire.
From fine wines,
fast cars
and glamorous women,
Scott had a taste for the high life.
This is a man who thinks he's James Bond.
This is the inside story of how Scott's encounter with the First Folio
turned into a drama of Shakespearian proportions.
All the world's a stage.
This extraordinary tale begins here, in Washington, DC,
at an unassuming library building in the shadow of Capitol Hill.
Preparing for another routine week was chief librarian Richard Kuhta.
It was Monday morning, June 16th. It was 9:05, my phone rang.
I know it was 9:05 because I looked at my watch. I didn't have any appointments,
I was surprised to get a call.
And I was surprised that there was a person here to show me a book.
The person at the library's reception that Monday morning
was 51-year-old Englishman Raymond Scott.
I took the book in a brown leather briefcase to the Folger Shakespeare Library by yellow taxi.
And I went up the steps and presented myself to the reception,
and said, "I have here an old Shakespeare book... which I THINK is a Shakespeare book."
He'd definitely gone to the right place.
The Folger is a world leader when it comes to
knowledge of Shakespeare's works -
especially the Bard's historically significant First Folio.
The Folger Shakespeare Library has 79 copies of the First Folio.
This is Shakespeare's first complete works, published in 1623.
The appraisal values vary according to their condition, according to their completeness -
they can go as high as $4 to $6 million apiece.
And the books behind me are priceless.
Around 700 copies of this first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays were originally printed.
Almost four centuries later, and only 231 precious copies are known to still exist.
So could Scott's Shakespearian book be a genuine First Folio?
Getting authentication on rare books is something that we do actually quite frequently.
All kinds of things come in.
And on that warm June morning, it wasn't just the book that would prove to be of interest.
I met Mr Scott at the security desk.
I came out to see him, and I was greeted by a gentleman in very tropical gear.
He had an oversized T-shirt on, a large fish on the chest,
lightweight summer pants,
loafers with no socks and sunglasses which he never removed
in the entire time we were together that morning.
To all intents and purposes Scott was a wealthy
if somewhat eclectically dressed British businessman,
seeking advice about an historic book.
I didn't realise... I didn't know what I had.
But it just felt interesting and right.
I certainly never imagined that this would be a First Folio.
First Folios don't just walk in off the street -
these are copies that are prized possessions,
and they never come unannounced.
Of the remaining 231 copies of the First Folio,
nine are unaccounted for.
Scott claimed to have acquired this particular volume in Cuba -
but verifying his story wouldn't be straightforward.
The condition of the book was really a problem.
Mr Scott brought it to us to have the book authenticated -
have the Folger verification that it was indeed a First Folio.
But I was looking at the book and it was hard to tell,
the book was mutilated.
But I said "Well, actually I had a feeling some people say that...
"There are certain people with antiques, who can touch an antique
"and sort of feel that it's right.
"Even if they were blindfolded, they could say that's a forgery
"and this is the genuine article."
It looked like a First Folio. But I asked him that I wanted 48 hours
to have my colleagues look at the book
to see that we could really be sure it was a First.
And basically I left the book with him,
so that his experts could examine it.
And then the following day, Tuesday, in the evening, he telephoned me
and said, "Our initial tests are very encouraging. It appears...
"It appears to be a First Folio Shakespeare, hitherto uncatalogued
"and unrecorded." So I was jubilant.
So I opened another bottle of er...
Dom Perignon. Special occasion - celebrate.
Scott appeared to have good reason to break out the bubbly.
He was adamant he'd discovered a book that's the cornerstone of English literature,
a book he could potentially sell for millions.
Three of the surviving First Folios are kept here, in Stratford,
just yards from where Shakespeare was born.
While not classed as rare, the book's high value
is based simply on what's contained inside its fragile leaves.
The First Folio has been called the most important book in the English language.
And the reason why it justifies that title
is the intrinsic value of what's in the book.
Because if we didn't have this book
we wouldn't have about half of Shakespeare's plays.
And those plays include one of Shakespeare's great comedies, Twelfth Night,
the great late play, the Tempest,
and arguably one of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, Macbeth.
I think it's certainly the case that Shakespeare wouldn't have the enormous status that it has now,
the one who is so much ahead of every other writer who's ever lived,
without this book.
It's no surprise, then, that academics around the world
have extensively studied every full stop, sentence and soliloquy contained within the First Folios.
This is a book we know very well. No two copies are the same.
And this is one of the things that helps us track and trace these books.
Early printing methods resulted in the same work
having significant variations between books,
which makes every remaining copy of the First Folio unique.
It's like having a DNA sample or fingerprints of the book.
And the question was, where did the copy come from?
As Scott relaxed in the luxurious surroundings of Washington's five-star Mayflower Hotel,
alarm bells were ringing on the other side of town.
I was uneasy from the very beginning.
On one hand, Mr Scott
professed ignorance
of what the book was.
On another hand, when I raised some doubts myself,
he was quick to assure me that it was a First Folio.
In fact, he was TOO quick to assure me that it was a First Folio.
So I had a gentleman in front of me who knew perfectly well what he was showing.
Unaware of the Folger's doubts about where the Folio had come from,
Scott was eager to publicise his remarkable find.
So, I said to him, "I'd like to go to the Washington Post." I suppose it's a bit of an egotistical move.
Andy Warhol said everybody in the future will be famous for 15 minutes,
and I wanted my 15 minutes of fame for discovering and bringing out of Cuba
this cultural icon, this unrecorded First Folio Shakespeare.
Mr Scott announced that he had just
brought the book from Cuba.
Well, that's a hard thing to verify.
Scott's fantastic tale had started to arouse suspicion.
Could this supposedly new copy actually BE one of the missing nine Folios?
To confirm his initial doubts about the book's origins, Kuhta drafted in
additional expertise from the world's largest library.
It wasn't unusual to get a call from Richard
to come over and take a little look at a book -
we do this on occasion when he needs some outside consultation.
Convinced that the Folio would be authenticated, Scott planned an elaborate party.
I bought a cake that had been prepared by the maitre chef de cuisine at the Mayflower Hotel.
But his confidence wasn't shared by Daniel de Simone.
It didn't take me long to realise that the book had been stripped.
The chef suggested a rather anodyne lemon drizzle cake...
The preliminary leaves were missing, the leaves at the end of the book were missing.
..which had on it, "The First Folio Shakespeare, 1623"
followed by a question mark.
This wasn't a book
that had just been... found in an attic and was all dusty.
This book had been cleaned and prepared.
And we had a non-alcoholic party with the lemon drizzle cake.
I was feeling very honoured, lionised and feted.
From my perspective, there was a problem with this situation.
De Simone's assessment raised serious doubts about Scott's Cuban claims.
So where could this Folio have come from?
Needing more evidence to back up their suspicions,
the Folger's investigation switched from the US capital to the Big Apple.
There, a rare book expert would provide key information about the Folio's true provenance.
I got a message from Richard Kuhta,
who asked me if I'd come down, professionally,
to look at what everybody was saying was a First Folio of Shakespeare.
I looked at the book...
and within 15 seconds, I kind of knew what I was looking at.
Using data gathered in a census and published by Anthony James West, a world authority on First Folios,
Massey was able to eliminate all but four volumes.
Here was the list. The numbers were
West 219, West 220, West 221, West 7,
and I just...
..took the measure out, looked at things,
and said, "Yeah, it's got to be this one."
The specific dimensions would narrow it down to just one possible Folio.
And West 7 is Durham University Library copy, stolen December 1998.
One of the world's nine missing First Folios
was stolen from here in Durham
12 years ago.
It was just one of ten rare books and manuscripts
snatched from the university library on a bleak winter's day.
Paul Whelan was one of the officers tasked with tracking down those responsible.
The theft was from the Cosin's Library.
A glass cabinet... The books were in the glass cabinet, padlocked,
and it looked like somebody had come along and forced the padlock
and took the opportunity to take the books.
Unfortunately in this particular case
there wasn't any forensic evidence, CCTV - the normal lines of inquiry
on any crime of this nature.
So, we tried to get it out amongst the international art dealers
if you like, that these books had been stolen, and making them aware
that once somebody comes in with these,
to contact us and then we'd be straight on to the case.
But the items had seemingly disappeared
into the murky and secret underground world of stolen artworks,
and the trail quickly went cold.
When you're thinking about your career, you think,
"This is a case that I haven't solved.
And it's quite frustrating, actually.
You start to sort of think, "Are we ever going to get this back?"
But on speaking to the people within the arts world,
they always sort of indicated that one day this book will turn up.
Could Durham's missing treasure be the Folio at the Folger?
With the US experts still unsure of the copy's origin,
the quest to identify the book
shifted to Britain,
where archivists at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
delved back into history to unearth more vital clues about the mystery Folio.
So, what we have here is the original returns
from Sir Sidney Lee's census of the First Folio.
He wanted to compile a list of all known copies in 1902,
and this is his list of all the people that he knew owned it.
And fortunately, it was also indexed,
so I could find the Durham one and find it was number 67.
So I then came and checked whether or not we had number 67 - which we did...
Lee's study contained specific information indicating
how Durham's copy differed from every other surviving First Folio.
Is there anything missing? So, we know that Ben Jonson's verses were missing...
The title page and the last leaf have been remounted at some point.
And then of course whether the pages match up,
and in this copy the pages don't match up
because in Richard II they say it's 23 to 43 -
in the Durham copy it's page 45.
So you can prove it from all these little differences that it was the right copy.
The evidence from Stratford was the final piece of the jigsaw
that the Folger team needed to positively ID the copy.
The book matched every point that we could think of
with the documentation that was provided.
We examined everything that we knew how to do. We looked at the binding,
the fragments of goatskin, the dimensions,
we looked at the placement of the sewing supports on the spine...
and in each case it matched the Durham Folio.
A book was brought to the library that had been stripped.
That for all intents and purposes couldn't be identified -
and we identified it.
The question now for experts was who'd stolen it in the first place?
Unfortunately, Raymond Scott couldn't provide the answers.
He'd already mysteriously left Washington.
With a suspected hot book in his hands, Kuhta called in the FBI.
Special Agent Gregg Horner was assigned to the case.
We had interviewed everybody at the Folger that had
had any contact with the book - we interviewed them.
Anybody that had any contact with Mr Scott.
We did our normal background investigations on who Mr Scott may be...
We weren't really coming up with anything in the United States.
Tracing Raymond Scott had become top priority, and the investigation
into the Folio's theft had suddenly gone global.
Detective Inspector Michael Callan would head up the British side of the hunt.
We got a call into our control room from the British Embassy in Washington,
informing us that the stolen Durham Folio had been recovered in the Folger in Washington.
They told me all about the details of Raymond Scott,
who had informed them that he was a millionaire,
selling the family business in Scotland of heavy plant machinery.
His mother living in Monte Carlo.
Lichtenstein connections, and him living in Cuba.
From the Durham perspective, we believed that we had a stolen item from our theft,
and our involvement was trying to trace Raymond Scott.
Scott may have left the Folio in Washington,
but unfortunately for police he'd left few other clues to his whereabouts.
Oblivious that a worldwide search was under way to locate him,
Scott was attempting to broker the Folio's sale.
So I telephoned Stephen Massey,
and basically he says, "I've got some good news and some bad news."
And I said, "Well... Tell me the good news."
He says, "The book that you took into the Folger Library's
"a First Folio Shakespeare all right. And a very fine copy."
I said, "Fantastic."
I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming.
What could the bad news possibly be?
I said that nothing would give me greater pleasure
than to sell it at auction -
but, I emphasised,
if I did that,
I would be strung from a beam. Why?
He says, "I think it's West 7.
"I think it's a copy that used to be in Durham."
And I said, "What, Durham sold it...?"
"Oh, no. Durham didn't sell it," he said.
"It was stolen from Durham, together with other rare books and manuscripts, in 1998."
This was all a bolt from the blue, this was all a bombshell.
I said, "How can you be so sure?
He says, "Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. I'm a world expert."
It's pretty unusual to have a stolen copy of the First Folio come on the market.
How dumb can anyone be to steal a First Folio -
because it is THE most documented book in the world?
With the chance of a high-profile sale falling apart,
Scott made a series of phone calls to America
in a bid to convince the specialists his Cuban Folio wasn't Durham's stolen copy.
However, these conversations would help detectives pinpoint
just where in the world the elusive Raymond Scott was.
Mr Scott called Richard Kuhta one morning,
and Richard noted the telephone number on his caller ID,
immediately called me with that number, and I conveyed
that number to Michael Callan,
and that's really how the whole case began to come together.
As a result we made inquiries immediately over here in Durham,
and quickly identified that Raymond Scott was at Washington.
Washington, Tyne and Wear - not Washington, USA.
They thought initially they were dealing with obviously an international art thief,
and they didn't really know that he was a UK resident
living ten miles away from the scene of the theft -
because of the details that he'd given to Richard Kuhta.
The image of a wealthy, eccentric Englishman living a life of luxury
was somewhat removed from the more modest reality.
Within two or three hours from being contacted,
we had officers outside Raymond Scott's house. He was there pruning his roses.
We then went to arrest him,
and we were quite certain it was the Raymond Scott who'd been the man in the Folger Library.
As Scott was booked in by detectives for questioning, a second police team searched his home,
looking for other rare works taken during the 1998 theft at Durham University.
No missing literature was found, but the search did provide police
with a valuable insight into just who the mysterious Mr Scott really was.
Durham Police headquarters - and the clues to Scott's flamboyant lifestyle
are gathered in a small unlit room.
This is all the property that we seized from Mr Scott's home address.
When we went through the door we weren't expecting to be dealing
with Raymond Scott as the person who he is.
I'm almost 52 years of age next year, on the 12th of February. Aquarius - the water carrier.
When we locked him up on the night he was saying, you know,
"I only drink the best champagne, and I only drink after six o'clock."
That was the type of individual we were dealing with.
I wouldn't say that I'm a wine snob...
..but I can tell the difference between a good bottle and an indifferent bottle.
He seemed to be an extrovert, and liked the best things in life.
The freshness of the cigars that I got in Cuba
were of a different league, a different class...
He would go into shops and buy a pair of trunks for £100.
And I don't buy trunks for £100!
Shall I put it this way - I would rather have one item of quality
than 100 items that were indifferent.
There was about 1,300 odd books in his house.
A lot of them looked as though they'd never been read.
It is possible to erm...
to live a champagne lifestyle on a lager budget.
If you're careful. You know.
While detectives were surprised at the contents of Scott's house,
his choice of car seemed to suggest even cannier budgeting skills.
This is the Ferrari
that was parked outside of Raymond Scott's house when we arrested him.
This is the kind of thing that the man portrays to be.
This is the car that his neighbours say that he goes out
in his pyjamas and his dressing gown and irons the seats.
It was Scott's extravagant lifestyle that had aroused suspicions.
He claims that his mum's the owner and driver of the vehicle -
but clearly it's his. How many people have cars like this?
This is a man who lives on benefits.
The man lives in a three-bedroom semi with his 80-year-old mum,
and this is the sort of thing he's driving and using.
The supercar-driving playboy with a taste of the high life
was in fact a jobless Geordie living at home with Mum.
Although I still, at the moment,
am living, domiciled in my mother's house,
there's nothing false, or faux or plastic about me.
This is who I am.
He's an eccentric character.
This is a man who thinks he's James Bond.
However, Scott's cool persona would start to be shaken and stirred
as detectives questioned him
about the stolen folio.
The very first time that he was interviewed,
he didn't really say a lot, and he relied a great deal upon letters
that had been recovered from his house.
In these letters seized by police, Scott had written a detailed account
of exactly where and when he claimed to have acquired the book.
With Scott revealing little else in his interview, these letters were all detectives had to go on.
In the letters, he was saying that from the middle of May 2008,
he'd been in Cuba.
It's a place that he'd been many times, he'd holidayed there.
And during the course of his visits he'd met two people - Heidi Garcia Rios and Deni Mareno Leon.
It's against a backdrop of Havana's crumbling facades and battered '50s cars
that the Cuban folio's story begins, according to Raymond Scott.
And like many of Shakespeare's works, this particular tale starts with romance.
Well, she was dancing at the Parisien nightclub and I saw her.
I was staying in the presidential suite at the Hotel Nacional De Cuba
in late October/early November of 2007, and I saw her dancing.
I suppose it's an old hackneyed cliche, but I suppose, it was love at first sight.
And our eyes sort of met and I waited about 20 minutes,
and then I met Senorita Heidi Garcia Rios,
and life's never been the same since.
What began as a holiday fling with a 21-year-old dancer,
would develop into a full-blown love affair, leading Scott to propose marriage.
His subsequent engagement to Rios
would result in him making more interesting Cuban connections, notably Deni Leon.
He used to be a personal bodyguard to Fidel Castro.
He is a big guy, an affable guy.
I call him a big Cuban teddy bear.
Deni himself, is a white Cuban of pure European descent,
the majority of his ancestors came from Galicia, in Northwestern Spain.
And always, in his family,
they had had this book which they referred to as "el libro viejo en ingles,"
the old English book.
The book had been in Deni's family in Cuba for... I think he said about 100 years.
And when I saw it, I wasn't particularly impressed.
For a start, it is a disbound copy -
it has no front and back covers.
On the 6th June, he says that the three of them went to the National Library in Havana...
La Biblioteca Nacional De Cuba.
..and researched the book they had in their possession.
And there we found out...
That's Heidi, me and Deni, about the First Folio Shakespeare.
And it started to look interesting.
Scott's back story was certainly rich in colourful detail.
However, one very significant part of his alibi wasn't adding up.
Well, that happened in May.
That happened in May.
Scott said it was all Macbeth and mojitos in downtown Havana that spring,
but in reality, someone looking remarkably like him was somewhere far less exotic.
One of his favourite shops was the House Of Fraser.
We know he was in here during the time that he said he was in Cuba.
We know that because we have him on CCTV.
We have his credit cards, which were used.
We have the receipts we recovered from his home address.
And we have the clothing that he bought.
So when he's saying he's in Cuba, we know for a fact he's definitely lying to us,
and he's in House Of Fraser.
From shopping centres in the Northeast to London's West End,
Raymond Scott was actually on a spending spree.
The day he's claimed to have first seen the book in Havana,
he's in New Bond Street, London, buying designer shoes.
And when Scott claimed to have uncovered what the mystery English book was,
a day he dubbed Folio Friday,
he was in Sunderland, spending £100 on two T-shirts.
He's left footprints from May onwards throughout the UK.
So I don't know if he was naive or he was just plain stupid,
but thankfully, it was fairly useful for us to plot his movements.
The detectives would have to be patient.
The focus now switched to Scott's account of how he'd taken the folio to Washington.
So, I thought, logically,
the next step was to take this book to the Folger Shakespeare Library.
But, of course,
I'm in Cuba,
but I've got a British passport.
But I can't fly directly from Cuba to the United States Of America,
so I have to do some island-hopping,
by flying from Jose Marti Airport in Havana
to Nassau, New Providence in the Bahamas,
staying there overnight and then flying from Nassau
to Ronald Reagan Airport, Washington DC.
Which is what I did, taking the First Folio Shakespeare with me.
Smuggled it out of Cuba, if you like,
if you want to be dramatic.
But on the day he claimed to be making his cloak-and-dagger dash across the Caribbean,
detectives uncovered Scott actually took a rather more mundane journey.
Unfortunately for Scott, thanks to this taped conversation, so did the police.
The only island-hopping Scott actually did on the 15th of June
was from the British Isles direct to Washington's Dulles International Airport.
The truth of the matter is, you weren't in Cuba.
On 15th June you were in the Marriott Hotel at Heathrow.
We have him sitting on the plane. He's only got one passport and that passport was used at Heathrow.
We can plot him from 19th May, nearly every day up to and including 15th June.
The only fact that both investigators and suspect agreed on
was Scott's movements in Washington DC.
But if Scott's Cuban folio was genuine,
why did he take it to America when it could easily have been authenticated back home?
It's clear that he couldn't bring it to anywhere in the United Kingdom -
to Oxford, the British Library, or Cambridge.
It was, sort of, too close to home.
He thought by bringing it overseas and announcing that it was coming via Cuba
that it would be something of a surprise to us.
I think in many respects this is the worst place he could have brought the book,
because it's a book with which we are very familiar.
However, this particular copy of the First Folio had been damaged almost beyond recognition.
That binding that was stripped is no different than taking a razor blade to Van Gogh's Sunflowers.
It's no different than taking a sledgehammer to Michelangelo's David.
It's not just a book, this is cultural property that was stolen.
The book belongs to Durham University Library, the contents belong to the world.
From an estimated £1.5 million, the damage to the folio had more than halved its value.
Back in Durham, and despite the mounting evidence against him,
Raymond Scott continued to deny any wrongdoing.
And then he kind of threw himself back in his chair and said,
"There's a very simple explanation to all of this."
Scott changed his story,
he now claimed to have brought the folio back from Cuba to the UK in February 2008.
His springtime trip to Havana and the magnificent discovery on Folio Friday
hadn't actually happened.
I think he's planned it for several months.
He's met the people in Cuba in...certainly November, certainly in February, which is true,
and he's planned his story to start in May.
And he's used his experiences in Cuba to give a story, to give a front story.
With that front beginning to crumble,
Scott would blame the confusion on his fiancee and the "big Cuban teddy bear."
But there was nothing to substantiate Scott's allegations
of the Cubans' involvement in the plot.
Released on police bail but unable to leave the country,
his thoughts soon drifted back to Cuba and his young fiancee.
It's very reminiscent of the seaside promenade, the Malecon, in Havana.
The only difference is that I can't see any gorgeous,
nubile, brown-skinned, bikini-clad Cuban girls.
I miss Havana, and I miss Heidi like the deserts miss the rain.
Which is not a quotation from Shakespeare.
At least, I don't think it is.
Scott had planned to marry Senorita Rios,
but the police investigation resulted in an extended engagement instead.
According to Scott, Heidi was still prepared to stand by her man.
Well, she finds it rather incredulous, really, um...
that I should be charged...
with the theft and or handling of a book
that, to the best of her knowledge and belief, I didn't steal or handle.
That's his story.
But neither Heidi nor Deni have publically supported Scott's tale of the book.
However, the Cuban story did help police establish a motive behind his attempts to sell the folio.
He's obviously met this Heidi in Cuba,
I would suggest he's infatuated with her.
He's a 50-odd year-old man, she's a 20-odd year-old dancer,
I'm not naive as to the reason why he'd suddenly become infatuated with her.
And he's continued his lifestyle.
Between January and May, and bearing in mind this is a man who doesn't work
and is in receipt of income support,
he'd sent £10,000 across to Cuba for Heidi.
And that money has been withdrawn in Cuba.
£10,000 in that short period of time, is a lot of money.
So, you can imagine why she was still interested, you know, in Raymond.
Using a Post Office Travel Card given to Heidi by Scott,
someone was withdrawing around £1,000 a month from the account.
A tidy sum, considering the average monthly income in Cuba is around £10.
But funding his lover was just the tip of a large financial iceberg that was sinking Scott.
So he was living on 10 or 12 different credit cards,
maxed right up to the top.
So it wasn't his own money,
it was the bank's money that he was using.
But he had to use that money
to live this lifestyle of Champagne and cigars etc.
Scott explained that his extravagant lifestyle had been funded by his parents.
There was an element of truth to his claims.
Scott's perilous financial situation didn't seem to trouble him, though.
Because of his rapid growth of indebtedness, through credit cards,
and latterly, through Heidi Rios and Cuba,
it's forced his hand, really. He's had sell it to try and put himself right financially.
If he sells it for half a million, a million, whatever he sells it for,
that'll clear his debts and he'll be able to go and allegedly marry Heidi.
I think she was the final nail in the coffin for him to make that decision.
Well, the thing is,
the police are just putting a negative spin on everything,
but I bent over backwards to, um... Um...
..to get Heidi and Deni in a position
where they can tell their version of events.
But the police aren't interested in it,
because it goes contrary to their view
that I stole and handled the First Folio Shakespeare.
Despite Scott's claims, officers had sought to question Heidi and Deni about their involvement,
but were unable to gain entry visas for Cuba.
Back in Durham, and a decade after the theft,
detectives returned to the scene of the crime -
the Bishop Cosin's Library at the city's university.
The disputed folio was collected from the Folger in Washington
and would be housed here until the conclusion of the criminal investigation.
We are just going to look after the book.
We're going to keep it in secure,
and conservationally sound conditions for the police.
It's actually going into their custody.
While library staff were keen to welcome back a book they believed to be Durham's missing treasure,
Scott's continued counter-claims about the folio's provenance
would mean even more analysis would be needed.
There is a census that was published,
a single author went round and looked at all the existing copies of the Shakespeare First Folio,
and he did a detailed description of them.
And luckily, he did it before ours was stolen.
That man was Anthony James West,
considered the world's leading authority on Shakespeare's First Folio.
In a bid to disprove Scott's Cuban claims, detectives summoned West to Durham to examine the disputed copy.
Having handled Durham's folio 14 years earlier,
his task this time, was to provide irrefutable proof that this stripped copy was indeed the stolen book.
This is the moment I have been dreading,
because this book has been totally mutilated.
The first thing I want to check is to go to something that I know is still here, and here it is.
It's a manuscript where somebody has written in "Troilus & Cressida."
This is one of the most important pieces of information to identify this as the Durham copy.
The sewing support - there, there, there, there and there,
shows the complete identity of the volume
with a photograph that was taken before it was stolen.
Again, confirmatory of the fact that it is the Durham copy.
West's previous analysis had recorded every unique feature specific to the Durham copy.
Even with prominent marks removed, disguising the book's true identity would be virtually impossible.
It is goatskin, which ties in 100%, of course, with what I recorded in my census.
All the three edges are gilded.
If this weren't gilded, we'd have a problem.
It was completely original leaves,
it still is completely original leaves.
West's definitive examination would finally give an ultimate answer on the disputed copy's origins.
I've now verified EVERY aspect and EVERYTHING matches,
so I'm able to say now with complete conviction
that this IS the Durham copy.
Armed with the positive evaluation,
police moved to formally charge Raymond Scott.
He wasn't going to come quietly, though.
I thought, "Well, I can arrive in some rusty old minicab,
"dressed in the clothes I normally do the gardening in..."
It almost looks as if I've got something to hide,
like those photographs you used to see of the Great Train Robbers,
leaving court with blankets over their head.
He came to the police station to answer bail in this Hummer. Ridiculous.
I just decided to arrive as I did.
His outlandish clothing and his cigar, and his Champagne and his Pot Noodle...
I mean, what's all that about?
All the world's a stage.
The media attention may have been a new experience for Scott,
but time in police custody certainly wasn't.
Prior to this, he had convictions for stealing books.
I have been charged with the theft,
or the handling of the Shakespeare First Folio.
And even while he's been on police bail for these matters,
he's been up to Newcastle and he's stolen books from there as well.
I will, of course, be pleading very much "not guilty".
Generally, he's a petty thief,
but when he chanced across the First Folio, he took it to another level.
I will relish my day in court.
Two years to the day since Raymond Scott walked into the Folger Shakespeare Library,
he was making another grand entrance.
This time, he wasn't hoping to make millions from the Durham First Folio,
he was facing jail for stealing and handling it.
But one wish had come true -
he'd finally got his 15 minutes of fame.
Anything to say this morning, Mr Scott?
Well, I'm feeling extremely confident, of course,
because I'm an innocent man and this is fair England.
And by and large, innocent men do not get wrongly convicted of things that they haven't done.
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