Guilty Plea in $216,000 Rare Manuscript Theft at UCLA Library

Jeffrey Ying of Fremont, California, has pleaded guilty to a charge of stealing a historical Chinese document from the East Asian Library at UCLA (University of California Los Angeles). Actually, he stole many documents at UCLA and other places before, but one is enough to get him sentenced after a guilty plea. He is to be sentenced on January 5 and the Judge can sentence him to up to 10 years in prison.

Ying had a fairly complex procedure, but it was effective (at least until it wasn't) to enable him to steal an estimated $216,000 worth of documents. For UCLA, there is a lesson here concerning lax security procedures. For Ying, ironically there is also a lesson concerning lax security.

Ying's procedure was to go to the UCLA library and take out rare and valuable manuscripts. He used a fake ID to obtain them. To the library, he was known as Alan Fujimori. He would then take the documents home and prepare to make a switch. He created copies that looked the same on the outside but lacked the valuable manuscripts inside. He would put something else in there, sometimes even blank pages. He then returned the fakes to the library. After a theft, Ying took flights to Hong Kong or Shanghai, where presumably he exchanged the real manuscripts for a more negotiable form of currency.

There were several places where the library was too lax, but on the final step they evidently didn't even open the books when they returned them to storage. They didn't notice that what was inside the covers was obviously not what belonged in there. For Yang, his mistake was to keep coming back rather than quitting while he was ahead. He must have figured if he got away with it once, he could let his guard down and do it again and again.

Recently, the library became aware that some documents were missing from their covers. But, who did it? It was then that they realized “Alan Fujimori” had also conducted thefts at other libraries. Ying tried to protect against this by using a couple of other aliases. However, the damage had been done. The UCLA librarians checked the video cameras and discovered what Ying alias Fujimori looked alike. When “Austin Chen” ordered some other books to “borrow” from the library, the UCLA police were waiting for him. They realized that “Chen” was the same person as “Fujimori” who was one and the same with Ying. Ying was arrested on the spot. Another mistake Ying made was to reuse the “Fujimori” ID which was tainted by its previous use. Careless. When Ying was arrested, they discovered a key card from a hotel on him and when they went to that room, they found the materials needed to make the fake copies. They had a case sufficient to convince Ying to make a deal and plead guilty rather than go to trial and risk harsher punishment.