Thirty years ago on this day news emerged of a burglary in King Charles’ apartments in St James’s Palace.
The King was Prince of Wales at the time, and still married to Diana, although the couple had stopped living together two years earlier.
But the rumour mill about his relationship with Camilla Parker-Bowles had been working overtime, and in 1994 Charles and Camilla were described as ‘close friends’, their relationship under constant scrutiny.
So the press jumped with great interest on the fact that letters between Charles and Camilla had been stolen, along with ‘personal items of great sentimental value’.
These included a pair of cufflinks, in the shape of two C’s intertwined, given to Charles by Camilla.
The haul was valued at £50,000.
At the time, Charles was ski-ing in the Swiss resort of Klosters while his apartment was being renovated.
But only weeks earlier, a naked paraglider had landed on Buckingham Palace, and Charles had been attacked by a man armed with a starting pistol.
Naturally the main thrust of the coverage was, after the Camilla angle, questions about royal security.
Soldiers in combat gear patrolled the streets around the palace, an investigation was begun by Scotland yard’s International and Organised Crime branch and Labour MP David Young declared that the burglar could have been an IRA assassin.
The bizarre truth about St James’s Palace apartment burglary
The truth about the burglary turned out to be stranger than fiction.
Three years later, when an Italian statute of limitation had expired, meaning the thief could no longer be prosecuted, an Italian ‘gentleman’ thief came forward and claimed it was he who ‘accidentally’ broke into Charles’s apartment.
Notorious burglar Renato Rinino said he had moved to London after coming off drugs, but old habits die hard.
One day, while passing St James’s Palace, he spotted some unattended scaffolding on one of the walls.
He shinned up, forced a window and went in, landing right in Charles’s private residence.
Unnoticed by guards
Back out he went, unnoticed by guards, with a number of gold and silver items, and the letters.
He claimed he didn’t know who his famous victim was until reading the newspaper reports the next day.
He went back to Italy, smuggling the goods inside toothpaste tubes, and the case remained unsolved for three years.
When he fessed up, he said he would give the items back in exchange for an audience with Prince Charles.
Letters still missing
That never happened, but the Italian police did recover the stolen items, all except the letters.
Rinino tried his hardest to turn his Royal exploit to commercial advantage, and for a while was a hit on Italian TV, with a documentary made of his story and his struggles with crime.
There was talk of a biopic of his life story too — but a few years later, Rinino’s rollercoaster existence came to an abrupt end.
In 2003, he was shot in the head and died at his home in Savona, north-west Italy.
His brother Paolo had opened the door of their apartment to a lone gunman, taking shots to his chest and elbow.
Italian thief Renato Rinino slain with a shot to the head
The gunman pushed through and slayed Rinino as he lay in bed, killing him with a single shot to the head.
Some said it was a gangland killing, but others suggested the killing was carried out by disgruntled former employees of St James’s Palace who lost their jobs over the theft and were out for revenge.
Neighbour feud
Valerio Burli, who directed a 2015 documentary about Rinino said: “In reality, it was just his neighbour, who shot him out of spite. Rinino had this over-the-top personality and he could really get in people’s faces.”
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