A Desperate Smash-and-Grab for a Banksy Leaves London Holding Its Breath

A midnight break-in, a £270,000 print, and a debt collectors’ shadow — how a fragile artwork survived a violent detour through London’s underbelly.

ART News

18 Nov 2025 — 3 min read

A late-night smash-and-grab for a Banksy print sent shockwaves through Fitzrovia as a man driven by drug debt pressure tore into a gallery door. The artwork survived unscathed. The thief didn’t. Photo by Maxim Kotov / Unsplash

The glass didn’t crack — it screamed. Fitzrovia was half asleep when a lone figure swung a blunt weapon into the Grove gallery’s door, shards scattering across the pavement like ice under streetlight. Minutes later, a signed Girl With Balloon print was gone, lifted from its frame with the cold focus of someone who wasn’t chasing profit, only survival.

Larry Fraser, 49, told the court he didn’t even know what he was stealing when he stepped into the night. What he did know was the weight of an old drug debt tightening around him. Pressure. Fear. A job handed to him by people who didn’t leave room for refusal.

CCTV watching from above caught everything: the waiting, the swinging, the quick march to a single artwork inside a £1.5m Banksy exhibition. No rummaging. No hesitation. Straight to the target, as if someone had pointed a finger on a map.

The print — numbered, signed, worth roughly £270,000 — vanished into Docklands for four days. Then it resurfaced, intact, after a whisper reached police. Relief washed through the gallery’s staff like air after a held breath.

At Kingston crown court, Judge Brown called the burglary “brazen,” her voice cutting through the quiet of the room. Thirteen months in prison. Serious enough that no suspended sentence would make sense. Fraser listened, hands fixed in front of him, a man whose life had veered back toward the darkness he thought he’d outrun.

He had been clean for years, caring for his mother, staying off the radar. His last conviction was more than a decade away. But desperate debts twist old scars open. The court believed he’d been pressured. It didn’t change the outcome.

The Met’s flying squad moved fast, almost surgically. Four days from shattering glass to restoration. The gallery’s manager said seeing the recovered piece felt like a weight sliding off his chest — the kind of relief you don’t plan for, only hope for.

In the end, the print survived without a scratch. Fraser didn’t.