The Strange Journey of John Lennon’s Stolen Patek Philippe Watch

In late 2013, to prepare for an auction, Auctionata had the watch professionally photographed. (In the picture, the watch floats in a vacuum, a very carefully lit token of commerce, divorced from all psychological and human context.) Erhan G obtained cool feet. Some years earlier, Ono had filed a claim against a former worker that had actually slipped out of the Dakota with Lennon memorabilia; Frederic Seafarer, Lennon’s last individual assistant, confessed to having taken journals comparable, if not similar, to those which Karsan and Erhan G had actually stashed away. (He later returned them.) Searching for a personal customer, Hoffmann came close to Mr. A, a man he knew from the rare-watch circuit. A deal by “exclusive treaty”– a sale concealed to the general public– was reached, and in March, 2014, Mr. An agreed that he would consign an option of Rolex and Patek views from his own collection, whose sale profits would approach settlement for the Lennon 2499, which was valued at 6 hundred thousand euros (regarding 8 hundred thousand dollars). “This, somehow, was more valuable than auctioning the watch,” Hoffmann informed me, describing that Auctionata’s watch division needed the stock. The vintage views Mr. A consigned, a lot of which Hoffmann valued at between twenty thousand and forty thousand euros each, remained in overall most likely well worth more than the 2499.

I located an idea as to what took place following by placing together fragments of information from numerous members of the watch intelligentsia who had all “listened to” that the Patek had been swiped. Karsan, a professional member of Ono’s oft-shuffled personnel– relied on sufficient that he had full access to her home– had actually simply gone berserk in December of that year, threatening to launch embarrassing photos and exclusive conversations he would certainly been videotaping unless Ono paid him two million dollars; he purportedly claimed that if she refused he would certainly have her and Sean killed.

Mr. A pointed to Ono’s very own version of the tale. “Following the fatality of the late [John Lennon],” the Swiss court’s judgment reviews, in a recap of a deposition that Ono provided to detectives from Berlin at the German consular office in New York City,” [Ono] intended to provide something belonging to her to those who had functioned extremely consistently for her. So, she told [ Karsan] to take a watch.” Ono, nonetheless, included that she in no chance suggested the “watch she ‘d given the late [John Lennon]” What watch did she imply? Mr. A asked rhetorically. “There was only the Patek.”.

“This, in some means, was more helpful than auctioning the watch,” Hoffmann told me, discussing that Auctionata’s watch division required the inventory. The charms court attested the reduced court’s decision that Ono was the “single legit owner of the watch,” Mr. A–” a watch collector and longtime expert in the market, of Italian race”– was releasing one more allure. He discussed the supply that had actually been taken of Lennon’s belongings after his death, which was referred to in the judgment; he asserted that just two watches were detailed– a gold watch (probably the Patek) and another that Mr. A claimed was a pocket watch Ono had actually auctioned with Sotheby’s in 1984, 2 years before Karsan promised she provided him the Patek.

The watch never appears to have actually provided anyone tranquility and joy for long. He would certainly had an event with the Bakelite heiress, Barbara Baekeland, and by 1980 he was spending his time handling Greta Garbo, Diana Vreeland, and Ono.

According to a story that Karsan would certainly later inform, Ono– who was understood to get in touch with psychics– ended up being anxious one day in 2006 that a forecasted heavy-weather event may endanger some purposeful Lennon items, consisting of 2 sets of Lennon’s eyeglasses and several New Yorker desk diaries (which he made use of as journals during the last 5 years of his life); she asked Karsan to locate a much safer place to keep them. Unbeknownst to Ono, when Karsan was ultimately deported, these items, in addition to the Patek, followed him.

Sometime around 2007, in the early days of social media, a brand-new kind of watch compulsive appeared, equipped with native computer abilities and a recognition for the locations where pop culture and the high-end market intersect. In those pre-Instagram years, fanboy wonks traded watch esoterica online: a photo of Picasso putting on a lost Jaeger-LeCoultre; Castro with 2 trendy Rolexes strapped to one arm; Brando, on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” “flexing,” as watch nerds state, a Rolex GMT-Master without its timing bezel, an alteration he made to far better live in the role of Kurtz; and– the Google image-search locate of them all– two frames of an uncredited snapshot of Lennon and his Patek.

In the photograph, Lennon, trim and in shape from a macrobiotic diet plan, wears denims and a freely bound striped weaved tie adorned with a jewel-encrusted American-flag pin. The photo was taken in the Struck Manufacturing facility, where he and Ono had been videotaping “Double Dream,” his very first cd in five years.

What Mr. A never ever anticipated was that his fate would certainly come to be linked with that of Auctionata, which went insolvent in early 2017. A German court brought in a personal bankruptcy professional and attorney called Christian Graf Brockdorff, that, in a review of the business’s inventory, stumbled on the eighty-odd various other Lennon items that Erhan G had actually consigned for a high-six-figure sum. That the case itself ever came to be is curious, yet its verdict set a legal structure that the Swiss judgment pointed out in proclaiming that Mr. A is not the watch’s rightful owner.

When I got in touch with Gruen, who is currently seventy-eight and lives in New York City, he had no concept that his photograph had actually become the talk of the horological world or why he ‘d never ever been offered credit report for it; he ‘d released the image in a book, entitled “John Lennon: The New York City Years,” in 2005. He bore in mind the evening he took the photo– Lennon’s fortieth birthday celebration. Since late that summer season, Lennon and Ono had been investing a great deal of time in a multiroom workshop on the sixth floor of the Struck Factory building, then on West Forty-eighth Street. “I was among the few individuals who had an open invitation,” Gruen informed me. “They liked to burn the midnight oil.” Gruen, that said he was surviving on a “steak-and-Cognac diet regimen” in those days, showed up after twelve o’clock at night, having attended the thirty-sixth-birthday party of the singer Nona Hendryx. “I assumed I ‘d bring John a piece of her birthday celebration cake,” he said.

Having actually reached its last appeal– Ono has so far prevailed– the instance is now in the hands of the Tribunal Fédéral, Switzerland’s High court, which is anticipated to provide a decision later on this year. The watch continues to rest in an unrevealed area in Geneva, a city that specializes in the risk-free, secret storage space of lost prizes.

Ono, that is ninety-one and resides in seclusion in upstate New York, declined to comment. Of Karsan, Sean Lennon informed me, “He made the most of a widow at an at risk time. Of all the incidents of individuals stealing things from my moms and dads, this one is one of the most painful.”.

Lennon holding up his birthday Patek in the autumn of 1980 is among the happiest minutes captured on film in the last years of his life. That summertime, he ‘d started making music once again, during a journey to Bermuda which he would certainly really hoped would aid fix the well-publicized stress in his marital relationship to Ono. Lennon’s “shed weekend break”– more than a year invested residing in Los Angeles with May Pain, a former aide who became his lover– was not that much in the past, and Ono had actually fallen into an infatuation with an art-world socialite named Sam Environment-friendly. (It remained in Bermuda that Lennon wrote “I’m Shedding You.”).

Was there a new beginning? By the time “Dual Dream” was completed, Ono had actually disliked Green, and Lennon, who had actually simply composed and tape-recorded no less than 4 love tunes regarding her, seemed a delighted guy. The weeks they invested with each other at the Struck Manufacturing facility that year had actually been charmed, which means that the Lennon Patek captures an action of time that nothing else watch ever before will– the little they had actually left together. ♦.

Auctionata, which live-streamed its public auctions, was among Germany’s dot-com darlings, admired in journalism for interrupting the old auction-house version, controlled by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, which had yet to create a digital-first organization. Investors including Groupe Arnault, Holtzbrinck Ventures, and Hearst Ventures had actually set up greater than a hundred million bucks of equity capital for the firm. Hoffmann claims that the C.E.O., Alexander Zacke, recognized what an attention benefit offering John Lennon’s lost watch would be and promoted a means to do it with or without alerting Ono. (Zacke did not react to an ask for comment.) Teams of lawyers studied the watch’s provenance and puzzled over how to supply it up for sale without raising eyebrows. A file called an essence was acquired from Patek Philippe, which indicated that the watch had actually not been registered as stolen, and Karsan himself travelled to Berlin, where he signed a paper in front of a notary affirming that Ono had offered him her hubby’s Patek as a gift in 2005. When it comes to the credibility of the watch, there was no question: on the instance back is an identifying engraving that has actually never been revealed outside Germany.

Lennon had spent the previous 5 years holed up in the Dakota as a self-proclaimed “househusband,” increasing his son Sean to ensure that Ono, whom Lennon called Mother, might take her turn at being the decision-maker of the music-business business they would certainly called Lennono. While Ono handled Beatles frustrations, regulated the bag strings, and invested in real estate, Lennon occupied himself by watching soap operas, eating bran biscuits and rice, cigarette smoking Gitanes, and listening to either classical music or Muzak. “If I listened to anything poor,” he later explained, “I would certainly wish to fix it, and if I heard anything great, I ‘d wonder why I hadn’t considered it.”.

During the lengthy, dull days of the pandemic, I chose to see what I might figure out. A number of years went by, as I traced the trip of the watch from where it was stored after Lennon’s death– a locked room in his Dakota home– to when it was stolen, apparently in 2005. From there, it moved around Europe and the watch departments of 2 public auction houses, prior to ending up being the topic of a recurring claim, in Switzerland, to identify whether the watch’s rightful proprietor is Ono or an unrevealed man a Swiss court judgment describes as Mr. A, that claims to have purchased the watch legally in 2014.

What makes this 2499 also rarer– and maybe the most valuable wristwatch out there– is just how little we understand concerning it. Ono offered it to her partner for his fortieth birthday, on October 9, 1980, two months before he was fatally shot by a crazy man outside the Dakota. For the next three decades, the presence of the watch remained unidentified other than to a handful of family and friends.

The fundamental itinerary of the Patek’s odyssey and its current area had been uncovered, however the human information of exactly how it had passed from wrist to wrist, concealing location to concealing place, still hadn’t been reported. What’s even more, where had Ono ever before got the idea of providing a person like John Lennon– eater of carob-coated peanuts, vocalist of a track regarding envisioning no ownerships, peacenik– a watch that was a standing symbol of lockjawed great preference? And what was its famously secret inscription?

A gift from Ono, the watch is more than anybody would certainly ever before require to inform the time. A perpetual-calendar chronograph, it is, as Paul Boutros, the head of watches at the American arm of Phillips public auction home, states, a “mechanical microcomputer, the most searched for of all Pateks.” Between 1952 and around 1985, Patek produced just 3 hundred and forty-nine of them. The watch, which Ono bought at Tiffany on Fifth Opportunity, records time in 8 various methods; the dial houses three apertures (day, month, moon phase) and three subdials (seconds, expired minutes, day). If you never remembered the mnemonic “thirty days hath September,” no worries– the 2499 Patek hath. Its amazing ganglia of little wheels and bars will certainly adjust its readings to the unusual imperfections of the Gregorian calendar, including leap years. Nothing else watch manufacturer was able to produce a perpetual-calendar-chronograph activity little adequate to suit a watch until 1985.

After Lennon’s death, Ono had a complete stock taken of her hubby’s ownerships, a file that amounted to virtually a thousand web pages. She then put the Patek in a secured space of her apartment or condo. And there the watch stayed for more than twenty years.

Mr. A told Hoffmann that he prepared to maintain Lennon’s watch in his collection, which has included items possessed by Eric Clapton. Within months, he took the Lennon Patek to the Geneva workplace of Christie’s.

A tall, square-jawed guy with a thick burr of white hair, Karsan, after that fifty, was arrested. In a collection of initial hearings in a Manhattan court room, he defended himself against fees of extortion and attempted grand larceny by declaring, as the Times reported, that Ono had actually “humiliated and degraded him, trashing his marital relationship and making him so worried that he ground 8 of his teeth to the bone.” A letter he had actually written to Ono describing himself as her “driver, bodyguard, assistant, butler, registered nurse, handyman and more so your lover and confidant” was additionally become part of the record. Ono contested Karsan’s cases about a romance, however the prosecution allowed him to beg guilty to a lesser fee, and he was purchased to return to his native Turkey.

If the Supreme Court verifies the appellate court’s judgment, the watch will likely return to New York. He added, “I’m not a watch man. “To me, if anything, the watch is simply a symbol of how hazardous it is to count on.”.

In August of 2023, a reporter named Coline Emmel, that benefits a little yet resourceful Internet site in Switzerland called Gotham City, found something fascinating in a stockpile of papers filed that summer season by the Chambre Civile in the canton of Geneva– an appellate judgment in a civil situation that had been taking place for five years. European personal privacy legislations, specifically those in Switzerland, make legal files uncommonly hard to decipher. The Swiss judiciary makes use of a system of letters and numbers to develop pseudonyms for applicants, respondents, and any individual else entailed, transforming a situation documents into a cryptogram. Emmel understood sufficient about Beatles background to acknowledge that “C _____, widow of late F _____, of Japanese citizenship and domiciled in [New York City] was, as a matter of fact, Yoko Ono. The charms court affirmed the reduced court’s decision that Ono was the “sole reputable owner of the watch,” Mr. A–” a watch collector and long time specialist in the sector, of Italian citizenship”– was releasing an additional appeal. Emmel published a short summary on Gotham City, together with the information that a last judgment was now being awaited from the Swiss High Court.

Gruen remembered Lennon being abuzz over the pin and the tie, a nod to Lennon’s fourth wedding anniversary as a green-card holder. He doesn’t remember speaking about the watch.

Looking through Eco-friendly’s documents, which go to Yale’s Beinecke Library, I got a spooky feeling. I found a number of journal entrances that affirmed his close partnership with Ono (” Yoko all the time and night,” many symbols review), and a handwritten tally for greater than twenty-five thousand dollars– the price of furniture that Eco-friendly had actually sourced to select the Struck Manufacturing facility studio. Whether Eco-friendly was the one who recommended the Patek as a birthday present for Lennon is tough to validate, but the cursed history of the watch welcomes conjecture.

One evening in 2013, in Berlin, Erhan G fulfilled an executive who worked for a brand-new, much hyped digital auction system called Auctionata. He could not withstand boasting regarding the Patek 2499 et cetera of the Lennon chest– some eighty items. Quickly, a dinner was organized with Oliver Hoffmann, Auctionata’s twenty-eight-year-old director of watches. “He told me the tale of exactly how he ‘d obtained the watch,” Hoffmann remembered, of his conference with Erhan G. “It was weird, however it felt entire and real. It was credible because of the several information.” Erhan G, who claimed that he was the watch’s rightful owner, per a contract with Karsan, didn’t strike Hoffmann as a man determined for cash. “He possessed a successful business and lived in a big apartment in a structure near Potsdamer Platz,” Hoffman claimed. (Erhan G might not be grabbed remark.).

(Bloomberg’s Subdial Watch Index tracks the value of a package of watches created by Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet, like an E.T.F.; the Boston Consulting Group reported that, between 2018 and 2023, a comparable selection outshined the S. & P. 500 by twelve per cent. From there, it moved around Europe and the watch departments of two auction residences, prior to ending up being the subject of an ongoing claim, in Switzerland, to figure out whether the watch’s rightful owner is Ono or an unrevealed guy a Swiss court judgment refers to as Mr. A, who declares to have gotten the watch legally in 2014.

Christie’s, informed that the watch had been taken, maintained the 2499 safeguarded in its Geneva vault, where it sat for a number of years. Mr. An informed me that he ultimately decided to go on the offensive. In 2018, he launched a civil suit against Ono to prove that he was the Patek’s rightful proprietor.

For several years, John Lennon’s Patek Philippe 2499 has actually been the El Dorado of lost watches. Lennon was known for gathering expensive things: homes in the Dakota (five); guitars (one apartment or condo was mostly for music equipment); nation estates; jukeboxes (3); and Egyptian artefacts, consisting of a gold-leafed coffin containing a mummified princess, that Yoko Ono thought was a previous self. But the Patek shows up to have actually been his only watch.

In order to discover even more regarding the photo, I tracked down Jack Douglas, the kept in mind record producer who look after “Double Fantasy,” and sent him the image by e-mail. He responded right away. “Bob Gruen took the photo,” he wrote, describing the well-known documenter of the seventies and eighties rock scene.

I had currently touched with Mr. A; 3 days prior to Emmel posted her scoop, he would certainly terminated a planned conference with me in Italy. Instead, we set up to speak over Zoom. Seated in a panelled space, he informed me that, when Ono had actually found the watch missing, her advise demanded its return. It was a difficult legal situation, because Ono, having never recognized that the watch was gone, had not reported it stolen, and due to the fact that the situation covers several national jurisdictions. Mr. A described that he really did not return the watch since he really did not believe it to be swiped residential or commercial property. He mentioned the supply that had actually been taken of Lennon’s belongings after his fatality, which was described in the judgment; he claimed that only 2 watches were noted– a gold watch (most likely the Patek) and another that Mr. A said was a pocket watch Ono had auctioned with Sotheby’s in 1984, 20 years before Karsan vouched she provided him the Patek.

(Bloomberg’s Subdial Watch Index tracks the worth of a bundle of watches produced by Rolex, Patek, and Audemars Piguet, like an E.T.F.; the Boston Consulting Group reported that, in between 2018 and 2023, a similar choice outshined the S. & P. 500 by twelve per cent. There was never ever a reference of that took the image, where it was taken, or even where the watch may be.

Douglas informed me that he and Lennon later wrist-checked each various other. “Although I assumed his watch was beautiful,” he created in an e-mail to me, “I informed John it really did not have the pizzazz of my black elegance, and we had a great laugh.”.

In a series of follow-up e-mails, I asked Mr. A regarding what John Lennon’s Patek indicated to him. “I’m even more of a Rolling Stones male,” he replied, mentioning that he has actually played bass in a neighborhood band for several years. Still, “to own the JL watch is truly a double fellow feeling,” he claimed, including that he remained confident that he might “use it immediately.”.

Around 2009, he revealed Lennon’s watch to a Turkish pal visiting from Berlin named Erhan G (as he came to be known owing to German privacy legislations). Karsan tossed out an idea: he would certainly give the Lennon Patek to Erhan G as security for a loan.