The owner of a popular Birmingham boozer has vowed revenge on light-fingered customers after a stock of prized Guinness Toucan glasses vanished from his establishment during St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
Peter Connolly, who runs Nortons Digbeth in the city’s Irish Quarter, is now considering employing hi-tech solutions including facial recognition software in a bid to trace the culprits. Around 32 glasses are thought to have been pilfered whilst thousands marked the Irish national holiday at the Meriden Street venue on 17 March, leaving the publican bereft –
but determined to catch and punish those responsible.
A small number of the limited edition glassware, which features the classic Guinness Toucan design, are distributed by the world famous St James’ Gate Brewery business to an exclusive group of ‘battle cruisers’ renowned for the quality of their creamy pints. The glasses are believed to be reaching prices of up to £32 on online auction sites, fuelling black market demand – which intelligence sources suggest may lead to involvement from organised crime groups.
Whilst a number of customers are under suspicion - including a stout man with white hair who is known to frequent Nortons currently being identified by the venue’s security specialists after being captured on CCTV - the hoard, thought to have a street value of £1,916, is still missing. But following the theft, landlord Connolly claims he will stop at nothing to get the coveted pint pots back and vowed payback for the crimes.
Connolly said: “A pint of plain will never be the same now, until the ‘Toucan Collection’ is safely back in our hands. After we realised the highly valuable and collectable glasses were missing, we spoke with our head of security Carole Scanlon, who assessed the situation and delivered a risk threat briefing.
“Since then, pleas to our regulars and an appeal to the Digbeth Institute of Chartered Kleptos have yielded zero results. We’re now forced to look at more radical options including hiring additional security and trialling AI software which can check for facial characteristics that we know correlates with Toucan thieves.
“We are not afraid to take severe steps to protect our most valuable assets – if that means we have to fit all our Toucans with RFID chips to prevent them from being taken past our threshold then so be it.” Around 35% of British public have admitted to taking a glass home from the pub, according to recent research revealed by investigative broadcaster Richard Madeley on GMB recently.