California man charged with stealing $216,000 worth of rare Chinese manuscripts from UCLA

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A California man was charged with stealing rare and historical Chinese manuscripts valued at a total of $216,000 from the University of California, Los Angeles’ library.

Jeffrey Ying, 38, of Fremont, is charged with theft of major artwork, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison, the U.S. attorney’s office in LA said Thursday.

According to the affidavit by an FBI agent, Ying would use multiple aliases to obtain library cards and check out the rare manuscripts from the UCLA Young Research Library. He replaced the manuscripts with “dummy books” that he returned in the boxes the library uses for the manuscripts.

Ying presumably took the manuscripts overseas, according to his travel history, which shows that he flew to California from Hong Kong, Shanghai or Seoul and back around the time of each of the thefts over the past 13 months.

The UCLA police first alerted the FBI when three rare books from the university’s East Asian Library, two of which were valued at $70,000 and $63,000, respectively, were missing from storage after they had been reviewed by a man calling himself Alan Fujimori. The books need to be reserved in advance because they are kept in secured storage.

Library staff will hand the rare manuscripts in a box to the person who’s requested to view them and apparently don’t check the box’s contents very carefully before they return it to storage.

“Here, the box containing the rare books was in fact located, but the contents were not the original items presented to Alan Fujimori,” the FBI agent said in the affidavit. “Upon opening the box, UCLA staff discovered that the rare Chinese books were replaced with other ‘dummy’ books, affixed with erroneous asset tags.”

The name “Alan Fujimori” turned out to be associated with a known book thief who used a similar scheme at UC Berkeley.

And in October and December of last year, a man calling himself Jason Wang requested to check out six rare Chinese books from the university’s library. Again, the library staff discovered afterward that the books had been replaced with worthless dummies when they were returned.

However, when a man calling himself Austin Chen sought to reserve and review eight rare Chinese books earlier this month, the library staff had gotten suspicious and started to compare the identities of Fujimori, Wang and Chen. They discovered it was the same individual.

When Ying arrived at the library on Aug. 5 to check out the books he had requested, he was arrested by UCLA police.

The police found a fake California ID on him in the name of Austin Chen, as well as two library cards in the names of Austin Chen and Jason Wang. They also found a keycard for a room at a nearby hotel. When police searched the room, they found materials for making the dummy books and fake labels.

The case docket on the federal court’s website didn’t include an attorney representing Ying yet. The prosecutors are asking that he be kept in custody until his trial because they say he’s a flight risk.

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