Charlatan borrowed priceless violins. But he was just stringing owners along.

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A California man was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for robbing a bank and orchestrating a scheme to steal priceless violins, some of which were 200 years old, authorities announced this week.

Mark Meng of Irvine posed as a connoisseur interested in growing his collection - but instead stole instruments that area stores had loaned him, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Violins he stole included works from the 19th and early 20th centuries; one instrument from 1823 was valued at $175,000, prosecutors said.

“[Meng] gained the trust of these violin shops by representing himself as a violin collector who wished to purchase the violins,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote in court filings. “[Meng] knew the representations that he made were false and fraudulent because he had no intention, at any point in time, of either paying for or returning the violins after the trial periods.”

At the same time that Meng was supposed to be testing the violins, he was working to sell them to other buyers, prosecutors said Wednesday. He resold a few to an unwitting buyer for tens of thousands of dollars.

“To better understand the affects of Mr. Meng's crime, it is important to understand the nature of the antique stringed instrument business. It is a rather close-knit industry with many family-run shops like ours,” David Brobst, one of the violin dealers Meng robbed, said in court filings. “In the case of Mr. Meng, he manipulated our well-established system of honesty and trust for his own financial gain. He damaged our business and our industry by acquiring instruments under false pretenses.”

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter sentenced Meng, 58, in the Central District of California after he pleaded guilty last September to one count of wire fraud and one count of bank robbery, federal officials said.

Meng ran the violin theft scheme from August 2020 to April 2023. He robbed a bank last April and has been in custody since May 2024, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Anthony M. Solis, Meng’s attorney, said his client began stealing the instruments to keep up with gambling and drug addictions.

“The violin scheme was strange but once he really started having debt problems and impaired judgment from the drugs issues it led him to do things like the bank robbery, which for a highly educated guy doesn't make a lot of sense,” Solis told Paste BN. Meng was born in China and received both a master’s and bachelor’s degree. “People get into deep holes and when you get into a deep hole it’s really hard to emerge from that and people become desperate.”

Authorities involved in the case included the FBI’s Art Crime Team, the Irvine Police Department and the Glendale Police Department, prosecutors said.

How much were the violins worth?

Meng knew violins from playing the instrument. The violins he stole as part of his scheme were exquisite, according to court records. The instruments dated all the way back to the early 19th century and were valued at as much as $175,000, according to court filings.

The amateur violinist stole the instruments by expressing interest in buying them but said he needed to test them out first and then never returned them, court documents say. He gained the trust of shop owners by demonstrating his knowledge of the instruments, according to prosecutors. 

A federal guilty plea agreement says Meng stole six violins and one violin bow. The value of all the items stolen is estimated in court papers at roughly $350,000.

He proceeded to sell three of the violins and the violin bow - a Francis Lott bow stamped “Lupot” and worth $7,500 - to an unsuspecting buyer for $44,700, court filings say.

The oldest and most expensive violin was the Lorenzo Ventapane from 1823 valued at $175,000, according to the guilty plea. Ventapane was a Neapolitan violin maker who lived from 1780 to 1843, according to Tarisio, a marketplace for high-end violins.

Meng stole the Ventapane as well as a Guilio Degani violin from 1903 worth $55,000 from Brobst’s store in Alexandria, Virginia, court documents say.

Also stolen was a Gand & Bernardel violin from 1870 valued at $60,000, court filings say. Gand & Bernardel was a Parisian violin-making firm active in the late 1800s, according to Tarisio.

How much was stolen in the bank robbery?

Meng hoped to make off with a significant amount of money robbing a bank in Irvine but instead he left with only $446, according to the guilty plea.

He entered the bank wearing a hat, sunglasses, blue latex gloves and a bandana covering his face and passed a note to the teller: “$18,000. Withdraw. Please. Stay Cool. No harm. Thx,” it read, according to court filings.

The teller said she didn’t have that much so Meng told her, “Give me whatever you have.”

No one was hurt, according to court filings.

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Big losses in small world of high-end violins

Brobst of the Brobst Violin Shop wrote to the court to describe how Meng’s theft impacted the business his grandfather and father founded in 1963. His father, now 90, and mother, 89, still run the shop, according to his letter. 

It’s customary for violin dealers, he said, to loan out instruments to prospective buyers because it is so “rare that an instrument would go out to anyone other than a person who is genuine in their desire to purchase it.”

The trade runs on trust and “a love for music, classical instruments, art, history and the desire to further these things throughout our culture,” Brobst wrote. Instead, “he took advantage of our trust and good nature to simply steal our treasured instruments.”

Brobst said Meng’s theft of the two violins - valued together at nearly a quarter of a million dollars - caused significant loss in revenue for the business. He also says they spent countless hours trying to recover them.

He wrote: “Our business model has been damaged and its vulnerability exposed in a way that harms our customers and our industry, the vast majority of whom rely on trust and being trustworthy as a principle of life and method of conducting business.”