About five months ago, Leng Tch'e was playing a show in Ostrava in the Czech Republic when someone broke into their van and stole a whole lot of their gear. Now five months later and a bit of a shady interaction with a seemingly less-than-reputable pawn shop owner, the band has gotten most of it back!
Leng Tch'e doesn't paint a very nice picture of the shop owner in their story, saying they feel he only reached out because he couldn't sell their stuff, and that he tried to make them pay €2000 to get their gear back. Not cool. Though with the involvement of the Ostrava police, the band got it all back and never had to pay.
Read the story below.
So… After 5 long months, part of our stolen equipment is finally back in our possession. This is how it all went down…
A couple of weeks after we got our van broken into and our gear stolen in Ostrava, we received a mysterious e-mail from an even more mysterious, disposable e-mail address. This person claimed he bought our gear from some junkies, and that he didn't know it was stolen. In reality it was the owner of a pawnshop who couldn’t sell our gear to anyone because everybody in the Czech Republic and beyond knew it was stolen. (This is one of the reasons why you have to keep sharing posts about stolen equipment!!!)
In the meantime we got in touch again with the Ostrava police department who gave us instructions on how to handle this situation. Since they don’t speak much English, all communication went through our friend from the Guttural Gore Grind Mafia festival in Ostrava. Communication was rather slow and difficult, going back and forward for days.
The pawnshop owner wanted us to pay €2000 to get our own gear back (!!!). We obviously weren't going to do this so we set up a meeting with our contact who was joined by an undercover police officer, and the owner of the pawnshop to get our stuff back. This guy had the audacity afterwards to call us dishonest because he didn't want to give the stolen gear back to its rightful owners…
A big thank you goes out to our good friends Anxur Moravian and Dalibor who invested so much time and energy together with the Ostrava police department in coordinating this operation, and to our amazing fans who exposed our social media post to over 300.000 (!) people: we cannot thank you enough. This would not have been possible without you.
We are still missing Olivier's drum pedals (Pearl Demon Drive) and a lot of effects pedals, as well as a box of "Razorgrind" gatefold vinyl and t-shirts. So please keep an eye out for those. More info at this link.
Thank you once again and we'll catch you on the road.
Leng Tch'e
