Not guilty plea in Harvard theft

The husband of a Harvard University graduate student pleaded innocent last week to charges of stealing 1,700 items worth $750,000 from Harvard's libraries. Jose Torres-Carbonnel, 35, of Grenada, Spain, pleaded not guilty to 16 counts of theft and destruction of property at an arraignment last Tuesday. Carbonnel is being held on $5,000 bail and had his passport revoked, according to Cambridge, Mass., Police Sgt. Richard Mederos, the detective in charge of the case. Mederos added that a pretrial hearing for the case is scheduled for March 12. Carbonnel was arrested last August after Harvard librarians confronted him about items he had advertised in a Spanish catalog, according to Harvard spokesperson Alex Huppe. At the time, the suspect admitted that some of the advertised items bore the Harvard library stamp and confessed to stealing them by using his wife's Harvard identification card to gain access to university libraries. Mederos said police found more than 1,500 rare books, prints, maps and plates in Carbonnel's Cambridge home, including valuable 18th- and 19th-century Spanish etchings. And in September, Mederos flew to Spain to retrieve $250,000 worth of books belonging to Harvard's world-renowned collection that authorities recovered after they had been sold to Spanish art and antique dealers. Huppe explained that Carbonnel damaged many of the books by cutting out pictures and plates and selling them individually for upwards of $5,000, noting that several of the books were one-of-a-kind and cannot be replaced. Mederos added that this is not the first time valuable items have been stolen from Harvard's libraries, which house the largest private collection of rare books, documents and prints in the world. "There have been other incidents in the past, but never anything on this large a scale," he said. But Huppe said security at the libraries is tight, and there have been relatively few thefts "considering how many valuable items the Harvard collection contains." Harvard students and professors are required to show university identification to enter the libraries and check out books, according to Huppe. He added that library materials are tagged to set off an alarm if they are removed without being properly checked out. Huppe said library security guards may not have noticed that Carbonnel was using his wife's identification card to get into Harvard's libraries. But he admitted that he does not know how the suspect managed to smuggle such a large number of items out of the libraries without being caught. Mederos said library thefts are not unique to Harvard, noting that detectives at other universities also deal with cases involving stolen library materials. Penn has also been struck by such thefts in the past, with the most recent incident occurring when a former Van Pelt employee stole $1.8 million worth of rare books and documents over a five-year period ending in 1990.