Two men have been found guilty of stealing America, the 18-carat gold toilet, worth £4.8m, created by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. First displayed at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016, it was installed in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, Winston Churchill’s family home, in 2019. Visitors were able to use the fully functioning toilet. It has never been found, and is thought to have been melted down and sold. Michael Jones, a builder from Oxford, was convicted of the burglary, which took place in September 2019. He had visited Blenheim twice before the theft (on one occasion, he used the toilet, describing it as “splendid”). Another man, Frederick Doe, was convicted of helping to sell the gold. In 2019, Edward Spencer-Churchill of the Blenheim Art Foundation had explained why the 98kg…
