Casian Sava’s good fortune ran out in Lynchburg.
The 21-year-old New York City man, reportedly wanted in four states and five Virginia localities, was nabbed in May after turning up at yet another coin show. That was just weeks after Albemarle County police say he and a female accomplice light-fingered $14,000 in gold coins from a dealer near Charlottesville.
Sava, a Romanian national with an address in Queens, appeared Thursday in Albemarle General District Court to face a charge of conspiracy to commit grand larceny. Because he speaks little English, his hearing ground to a halt while the court scrounged up a Romanian interpreter — eventually patched in on a clerk’s cellphone since the new courthouse landline was, as Judge Robert Downer noted, “very staticky.”
In court, the defendant sported the remnants of the bleached, honey-colored hair evident in his Lynchburg booking photo. He may have been betrayed by that same distinctive look, as the coin dealer who reported him as a thief in Keswick happened to attend the Lynchburg show where Sava reappeared.
Police say surveillance video from April 19 shows Sava and a woman browsing cases at the Monticello Coin Club show at American Legion Post 74 in Keswick. After waving what Albemarle police detective Jo-Ann Hannahs called “a large sum of cash” and handling multiple pouches of gold and silver coins, the pair made their move.
”It appears they tried to distract [the victim],” Hannahs wrote in her report.
She contends that while feigning interest in a multi-coin purchase Sava slipped one pouch— containing five gold coins valued at $14,000— into the woman’s grasp before vanishing.
The scheme unraveled a month later when the same victim spotted the same duo about an hour’s drive to the south at the Lynchburg Coin Club’s show at Jordan Baptist Church. There, an off-duty officer working security chased Sava down and captured him, while the woman bolted in a white Ford Explorer.
The May 17 Lynchburg arrest caused several legal dominos to fall. Fairfax authorities, linking a white Ford Explorer to the April 27 theft of $30,000 in gold krugerrands from a coin show in Vienna, filed charges against Sava. So did Stafford, Rockbridge and Franklin counties, each alleging heists topping $1,000.
Rockbridge has already secured two convictions after Sava’s Aug. 11 guilty plea to grand larceny and grand larceny conspiracy charges. There, his punishment is four years of probation and about $3,400 in restitution and court costs, with four years of suspended jail time.
The Numismatic Crime Information Center, a Texas-based watchdog for coin show thefts, trumpeted the Lynchburg arrest. As recently as 2022, the group used an evocative but controversial term for traveling thieves: gypsies. Sava’s own nationality is Romanian, and prosecutors stick to the legal charges: grand larceny, conspiracy and fraud.
In Albemarle, Sava has waived his preliminary hearing and is due for a plea on Friday. He remains jailed without bail, with hearings looming this fall in three other Virginia localities.
As for his alleged accomplices, they remain as elusive as that missing pouch of coins.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com