The Pigeon Heist

Chapter 1
LIMBURG, Belgium — The Chinese businessmen arrived in the Belgian countryside driving luxury sports cars, ferrying translators and bags of cash. When they parked in front of Tom Van Gaver’s small brick farmhouse, he knew why they had crossed the world to see him.
They wanted his pigeons.
Van Gaver, 38, had been breeding racing pigeons since he was 5. It was a hobby he inherited from his father who inherited it from his great grandfather. The pigeons could find their way home from hundreds of miles away, flying at 50 miles per hour. Van Gaver’s birds, which he entered in national races, were among the best in Belgium.
For a century, pigeon racers — they call themselves fanciers — were mostly Flemish farmers who invested more in the sport than they made from it. Van Gaver, blond hair swept across his forehead and stray feathers on his hoodie, was a secretary at the local police department. He had time on his hands after a soccer injury and a breakup (he named one of his best pigeons after his ex-girlfriend). The sport was a way to fill his weekends. The idea that it could be lucrative seemed absurd.
Then the Chinese discovered pigeon racing.
They learned that the most refined pigeon lineages were in the Belgian countryside. And some of the very best were in Van Gaver’s backyard.
Beginning in around 2019, wealthy Chinese industrialists started spending millions on Belgian pigeons. That year, a pigeon named Armando sold for $1.4 million at an auction outside Brussels. In 2020, another bird named New Kim sold for $1.9 million. Pigeon races in major Chinese cities became opulent symbols of China’s economic boom, with purses over $100 million — exceeding most of the world’s major sports.
Suddenly, a Van Gaver pigeon was a prize for the Chinese elite. The buyers began showing up at his house several times a week. They knew which pigeons they wanted by name. Their top choice was almost always the same bird: Finn.
Finn was 11 inches tall and weighed about a pound, with a splash of gray around his beak and black spots on his wings. He was, in short, a pigeon that looked like a pigeon. But Finn was breathtakingly fast. By the time he was 2, he had won multiple national and provincial championships. Van Gaver, beaming, considered Finn a kind of son. “The Mona Lisa of the pigeon world,” he said.
The Chinese buyers threw out large sums. They offered to negotiate higher. But Finn, Van Gaver told them, was not for sale.
“They acted like they could change my mind if they showed me enough money,” Van Gaver said. “But that’s not how I work.”
He turned the buyers away, or redirected them toward Finn’s offspring, which he sold for several thousand dollars per young bird. He bought a Land Rover. He hung a billboard-size photo of Finn on his wall. He started a business called TVG Pigeons with the tagline: “Let your dreams of winning take flight.”
And that’s how things might have continued.
Except that one night last November, two masked men cut through the fences of Van Gaver’s neighbors and snuck toward his house. They climbed onto his pigeon loft. They cut a hole in the roof and descended inside. A third man waited in a getaway car.
A security camera captured footage of the heist. The thieves inspected each pigeon, apparently looking for particular birds. Then they stuffed them in bags, wings flapping.
It was one of a rash of pigeon thefts that swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in 2024 and 2025. Dozens of pigeon lofts were raided; hundreds of pigeons were taken. “A crisis,” said the Belgian pigeon fanciers’ association in an alert to its members.
“The pigeon mafia seems relentless,” wrote Jan de Wijs on his popular blog, Pigeon Boss. “These organized gangs don’t see our beloved sport as a passion but as a business. They target top pigeons that can be sold for astronomical sums abroad.”
When Van Gaver checked his loft on the morning of Nov. 22, he saw that it had been breached. The door was jammed. He used a screwdriver to force it open.
Then he looked at Finn’s coop and gasped. It was empty.
Chapter 2
Platters stacked with cash
Van Gaver knew Maggie Liu because everyone in the Belgian pigeon world had come to know her. She was a glamorous 20-something Chinese aristocrat, educated between Beijing, Paris and Los Angeles. She was one of China’s premier pigeon brokers.
“You could say pigeon influencer,” Liu clarifies.
She had grown up as a competitive equestrian, but in 2019 a friend who knew of her connections in Europe mentioned the rise of pigeon racing among the Chinese elite.
“He was like, ‘What if you started posting about pigeons on social media?’” she recalled.
Liu started translating Belgian pigeon news and pigeon auction results into Mandarin on social media platforms like Kuaishou, posting under the user name, “Little Princess of the Pigeon World.” She broadcast the performances of top racers like Van Gaver, building their celebrity. Within a few months, she had tens of thousands of followers.
Then she began visiting Belgian pigeon lofts and taking videos of the birds, lifting their wings, describing their bone structure. Offers from China rolled in. Suddenly, Liu was brokering deals.
Some of the Chinese — owners of construction and pharmaceutical companies, ports and factories — purchased homes in Belgium where they left their pigeons to breed. Some hid their birds in undisclosed locations across the Belgian countryside. Some hired Belgian pigeon racers as custodians. Some insisted that Liu acquire birds like Finn, which were not for sale.
It was a glimpse into the power that the Chinese elite now possessed across Europe and the property they had amassed, from Parisian real estate to Italian soccer teams to the continent’s best pigeons. In 2000, the Chinese economy was smaller than Italy’s; by 2018, it was bigger than the entire European Union’s.
Back in China, Liu was invited to the country’s biggest pigeon races as a special guest and an auctioneer. She entered a few of her own pigeons into some races. Even with a middling performance, she won a Mercedes-Benz. The prize money distributed to winners in comically large checks was supplemented with millions in wagers on individual birds. Racers posed holding platters stacked with cash.
Social media accounts like Liu’s became a document to the sport’s excesses: One club 200 miles south of Beijing housed its pigeons in a castle that resembled Buckingham Palace. Another, Tangshan Sunshine Pigeon Village, was a series of villas west of Beijing with an indoor swimming pool and a helicopter landing pad.
To ensure 24-hour care, pigeon trainers were given housing for their families next to the birds. When Liu posted videos of the ostentatious lofts, the responses were a mix of envy and bewilderment.
Some of the lofts she visited were occupied by the descendants of Finn, or descendants of his brethren: Little Finn, Crazy Finn, Supreme Finn, Hot Finn.
Van Gaver’s star rose in China just as Liu’s business boomed. On trips to China, he was approached by racers who wanted his photograph.
“They were like: “Finn! You are the owner of Finn!” he recalled.
The pigeon gold rush was full of opportunities to get rich. Belgium’s biggest pigeon auction house opened an office in Beijing. Flemish pigeon racers began scouring local universities for Chinese students who could work as translators. The publication of a coffee-table book with photos of famous Belgian pigeons created a frenzy at a fair in Lang Fang, with visitors fighting for copies.
But there were signs that pigeon racing was on a crash course with the Chinese Communist Party. The government under Chinese leader Xi Jinping began cracking down on conspicuous displays of wealth and illegal gambling. Pigeon racing had thrived at the intersection of both.
By 2023, China’s Ministry of Public Security began prosecuting cases of illegal gambling on pigeons. Last September, Ding Tao, the director of the Tengzhou Pigeon Association in a city about 350 miles south of Beijing, admonished his fellow pigeon enthusiasts in a speech, published by the city’s sports bureau, for engaging in “illegal profit-making activities.” He could not be reached for comment.
Then, this year, the country’s biggest pigeon club, the Tianjin Pioneer Club, in northeastern China, became embroiled in a high-profile embezzlement case. Its members accused a club shareholder, He Bin, of stealing millions of dollars that were meant to be allocated to race winners. State media picked up the case as an example of corruption and theft that needed to be excised from Chinese culture. He has denied the accusations. Bin, the Pioneer Club and the China’s Ministry of Public Security did not respond to requests for comment.
The China Racing Pigeon Association began suspending races and the sport began moving underground. The era of Chinese businessmen boasting about purchasing million-dollar pigeons was over. Now, anyone who wanted Belgian racing pigeons would need to import them surreptitiously. The pigeon association did not respond to requests for comment.
Liu could feel the impact of the government crackdown on her work. There were fewer deals being made. She was no longer asked to showcase the glitz and glamour of the sport.
And then she started hearing about the thefts.
Chapter 3
Homing in
No one knows how pigeons find their way home.
Since Ancient Egypt, the birds, which can live up to 20 years, have been used to carry urgent messages — about the flooding Nile, the deployment of troops, the price of grain. The Reuters news agency was launched with homing pigeons. The CIA strapped cameras to their breasts and used the birds for espionage across the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Drug traffickers used them to move small quantities of heroin.
But ornithologists still can’t decide how the birds geolocate. Do they use visual landmarks or high-frequency sounds? Two Oxford University zoologists believe pigeons pass down navigational information across generations — “a form of collective intelligence,” they wrote.
For weeks after the theft, Van Gaver waited to see if his birds would fly home. He had his own ideas about how they would make it. Maybe the thieves would momentarily lose control of the stolen pigeons while shuffling between safe houses. If his birds saw a sliver of daylight, they would dart back to his loft. On clear days, he scanned the sky around his house, looking for Finn.
Because Van Gaver worked for the local police, other victims asked if he could nudge the authorities to investigate. There was Luc Vervoort, whose dog woke him up as pigeon thieves made off with 14 birds, dropping wire cutters as they fled. There was Jos Cools, 79, a retired carpenter and the owner of world-renowned short-distance racers, who lost 29 birds one December night. There was Luc Odeurs, a high school teacher whose 32 pigeons were stolen in January, including a winner of the prestigious International Barcelona race — one of Europe’s premier pigeon racing events.
“I feel the pain of this theft deep in my own heart,” wrote de Wijs on Pigeon Boss after the Odeurs theft. “We must remain vigilant and support one another.”
The men shared theories of who they believed was behind the thefts. Some were certain they had noticed suspicious figures hovering around their lofts in the weeks before the invasions. Some had seen drones overhead. There were some buyers who, in retrospect, had behaved strangely. One remembered a man who he found surreptitiously taking pictures of the perimeter fence on his way to the bathroom.
After each theft, the local police came to the crime scene, interviewed the victims, took photographs and dusted for fingerprints. But it didn’t seem that they were seriously interested in solving the crimes. Van Gaver wrote an email to the federal police conveying the birds’ soaring values and how they had become global commodities.
“My last online auction of 24 youngsters went [for] 338,000 euros,” Van Gaver wrote.
But it didn’t seem like the police were interested in the case.
“To them they are just pigeons,” he said.
That inaction left Van Gaver and the other victims to conduct their own amateur investigations, looking at previous pigeon thefts that might shed light on the recent wave of burglaries.
There were the birds stolen from members of a Belgian pigeon club by a rival racer. There were the hundred pigeons stolen by Lithuanian thieves in the Netherlands, valued at $230,000, which Dutch prosecutors believe were brought to Germany. There was the case in which Chinese thieves allegedly cut the legs off 14 pigeons belonging to a top Belgian racer, stealing their identification rings, without which the birds lost their value as breeders.
“All they have to do is fit the stolen identification rings in China onto a bird worth a fraction of the value, which they then pass off as an ace racer,” said Pierre De Rijst, president of Fédération Royale de Colombophiles Belges, at the time.
For weeks, there was no news about the thefts. Then one day, Cools, the 79-year-old retired carpenter, noticed a female pigeon sitting on the roof of his loft. It was one of the stolen birds. It had apparently escaped from its thieves, returning home thanks to whatever mysterious talent allowed pigeons to navigate unfamiliar skies.
Cools looked at the bird, its eyes darting around the loft, and wondered what it would tell him if it could speak.
Chapter 4
An inside job?
The Fugare Pigeon Exhibition, the largest pigeon convention in Europe, was scheduled for mid-February, as the pigeon world reeled from the spate of thefts. The parking lot filled with cars emblazoned with pigeon bumper stickers.
A pigeon security company had set up its booth near the entrance of the convention center, an hour outside Brussels, selling alarm systems and cameras. The company had recently designed a system for a $1.6 million pigeon. Demand at the exhibition was high.
“These pigeons are worth more than horses,” said Jo Desomviele, the owner of the company. “It’s crazy.”
Racers gathered over beers to talk about the danger facing their sport. Cools and Van Gaver were there, fielding a flurry of condolences. Poster-size images of famous pigeons lined the walls with their names in English and Chinese characters: Porche 911, Super Ace Gerard, Crazy Fighter. An auction house promoted its offerings: “Pigeons from paradise, available on earth.” A handful of Chinese brokers with selfie sticks live-streamed the event for their patrons back home.
There was a growing suspicion among victims that the thieves had come from within the pigeon world. Some racers wondered aloud whether they might be somewhere in the exhibition, doing reconnaissance. But no one knew who to look for. Even if the pigeons were being sent to China, they speculated, it was unlikely that the thieves themselves were Chinese.
Days after the Fugare exhibition, the suspicion increased. There was another attempted robbery at the loft of André Leideman, who had been fending off offers for his best pigeon, Goed Grijs, from Chinese enthusiasts for years.
“We had already decided not to sell this bird at any price,” he said.
The interest was enough to prompt Leideman several years ago to install a sophisticated security system. The alarm went off at 10 p.m. on Feb. 22. The thieves were caught on camera running away from the pigeon loft, after cutting the fence. Their bags were still empty.
Leideman was certain why the thieves chose that night for their invasion: It was the evening of the annual Gouden Duif, or Golden Pigeon celebration, the most important social event of the Belgian pigeon racing community. Top pigeon enthusiasts knew that Leideman would be there and not at home.
“It comes from inside,” Leideman said. “Someone gives the green light to go.”
Chapter 5
Operation Komkomkom
The police investigator was sitting on her couch in early January watching the nightly news. A piece on a local pigeon theft flashed on the screen.
“Together the stolen ones are worth about 100,000 euros,” the reporter said.
There was something about the nature of the robbery — the specificity and the shocking value of the birds — that caught her attention. She spent her days leading a police unit that focused on high-profile thefts. She spoke on the condition that her identity not be disclosed because her work is undercover.
She had noticed a pattern to her targets, which were usually organized crime groups.
“With the pigeons, I thought, ‘This is really something we should investigate.’”
She told her boss at the station, a brick building in the Flemish city of Hasselt. He was not intrigued.
“He was like: ‘Pigeons? I don’t think so.’”
But weeks later, there was another string of thefts. The local police reported it up to the federal police. The investigator got a message from the same boss who had denied her initial request.
“He was like, ‘We really should investigate these pigeon thefts.’”
The undercover officer shrugged and then opened a new case file, informally named after the singsong expression Flemish pigeon racers use to beckon their birds: “Operation Komkomkom.”
She and her colleagues reviewed CCTV footage around the sites of the burglaries. They pooled cellphone data to see who was present at the times and locations of the crimes.
At first, some officers struggled to take the crimes seriously. They made pigeon puns and jokes.
“Normally we fight against international organizations that traffic cocaine or shoot each other. In the beginning there were some questions like, ‘Should we even do this?’” said Tom Vandersteen, the director of operations at the department.
But the lead investigator on the case became obsessed with finding the pigeons. She learned how emotionally attached the racers were to their missing birds. She immersed herself in pigeon research.
“My husband had to tell me to please stop talking about pigeons at home,” she said.
Over the last several years, her unit had responded to robberies planned by gangs based in Eastern Europe, mainly Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. Because those countries are part of the European Union, it was easy for thieves to drive into Belgium, commit crimes and swiftly return home, officers said. The stolen goods were often resold across the world. For example, iPhones heisted off the streets in Europe are often tracked to Chinese resellers in Shenzhen, police said.
“Crimes by travelers” is how the unit labeled the crimes. The European Police (Europol) calls them “Mobile organized crime groups.”
The thefts across Belgium were often focused on a particular commodity, police said. One gang exclusively took racing bicycles. Another targeted construction cranes. One stole dozens of expensive trumpets.
The investigators knew how Chinese demand had led to the skyrocketing value of pigeons. It seemed possible that European organized crime groups could target the birds with an intention to resell them on the black market in Asia, allowing them to skirt the Chinese government’s scrutiny. It would also give them access to birds, like Finn, that Belgian racers had refused to sell.
The Belgian police reviewed the surveillance footage from Van Gaver’s loft. They constructed a database of pigeon thefts by compiling information from the country’s local police units. They posted a map on the wall of the police station with pins across the country where robberies had occurred. They counted at least 14 thefts, but they knew there were likely more. They estimated the birds’ total value at 2.5 million euros.
After two months of work, the police started narrowing in on a group of suspects. But they needed more time to understand the group’s hierarchy. The officers wanted to know: Who had directed the thieves to some of the world’s most famous pigeons?
Chapter 6
Closing the coop
The two-story yellow home on Harmony Street had just enough room for a small pigeon loft in the backyard. That’s where Doru Ionica, 45, kept his underperforming birds.
Ionica — square-jawed with a crew cut — had moved from Romania several years ago to the Belgian municipality of Vilvoorde, settling into a suburban life with his wife and five children. He found himself near the geographic center of the pigeon racing world.
Ionica started entering local races with little success. His wife served drinks at the local awards ceremony, even though Ionica rarely won anything. His dream, he told members of the local pigeon club, was to perform well at the International Barcelona. But when he entered last year, none of his birds cracked the top 1,000.
It was a challenge facing most rookie racers. The only way to excel in the sport was to acquire champion pigeons and their offspring. But those birds were now prohibitively expensive. Ionica’s loft, full of no names, was a case study in how difficult it had become to penetrate the upper strata of pigeon racing in the wake of the Chinese boom.
And then one morning before sunrise in late March, more than a dozen police officers surrounded the yellow house on Harmony Street.
Investigators, after weeks of surveillance and wiretaps, said they believed Ionica was part of the gang behind the pigeon thefts, but wouldn’t provide details on what led them to him. He had allegedly been robbing his fellow competitors, they said. Was his plan to breed their birds, or sell them? The police weren’t sure before they rang Ionica’s doorbell.
Ionica was asleep. Officers showed him their search warrant and strode toward the small loft behind his home. There were about 70 pigeons flying in and out. Officers noticed a separate cage that was locked with 17 pigeons inside. Initially, Ionica said that the birds were his. But it became clear to the officers that the cage was locked for a reason: The birds were stolen.
The police arrested Ionica on charges of theft and organized crime. They seized phones and laptops from his home. They learned that the thieves had been searching the internet for birds that had won major races. They Googled, for example, “Winner of Barcelona pigeon race.” Once they had the name of a winning bird, it wasn’t hard to track down the addresses of its owners, which were listed on pigeon racing websites.
“These pigeon owners are unfortunately very easy to find,” the investigator said.
The police learned that more pigeons had been driven to Romania. Ionica had asked his parents to take care of them, calling them several times from Vilvoorde to check on the birds.
“You are taking good care of the pigeons, right?” he asked on a wiretapped line, investigators said.
In late April, following Ionica’s trail, the Belgian officers flew to Bucharest where they met with their Romanian counterparts, part of the country’s organized crime and terrorism unit. The Romanians were aware of Ionica from thefts he had made from storage units in France years earlier, police said, which had prompted his deportation back to Romania. Through his attorney, Ionica declined to comment.
The police drove through western Romania, before arriving in a region called Breznita-Ocol, a smuggling hub on the Serbian border. The region had one other notable characteristic: Residents there, including the mayor, had become passionate pigeon racers. Almost every other family in Breznita-Ocol kept a pigeon loft in the backyard.
The officers stopped at a newly built yellow house with a black steepled roof. It was the home of Ionica’s parents.
The officers presented a search warrant and questioned the couple. But there was no sign of the pigeons. Ionica had instructed his parents from a Belgian prison phone to hide the birds, according to Romanian authorities. It seemed they had listened.
The Belgians, frustrated, returned to the airport. But before their flight back to Brussels, they got a call from a Romanian police officer. The Romanian unit had stopped a car near the village of Magheru. There were 69 pigeons inside. The driver, it turned out, was Ionica’s niece. One Romanian officer stared at the birds, transfixed.
“They were beautiful,” he said.
When they learned of the bust, the Belgian officers high-fived in the airport terminal.
The rescued pigeons were transported in cages to a loft run by the Belgian pigeon association outside Brussels. Their identification rings had been cut off. The police planned DNA tests to confirm which birds were registered with which owners. Victims of the thefts were invited to see if they could identify their birds.
Van Gaver arrived one morning, his heart beating quickly. By then, he had become obsessed with protecting his birds, outfitting his loft with layers of electric fencing and sensors.
He scanned the cages, each with a single recovered pigeon. There were two of his young birds, grandchildren of Finn. He recognized them by the pattern on their wings. But there was no sign of Finn. He put the youngsters in his truck and drove them back to his loft.
“They reminded me of their grandfather,” he said.
Hundreds of birds remain missing. Two suspects remain at large. The thefts have expanded across Europe: In April, nine racing pigeons were stolen in eastern Germany. In late August, another theft occurred in southern Spain, where three birds worth nearly $200,000 were stolen. Among the similarities to the Belgian cases: The thieves targeted only the best racers.
Van Gaver hopes that the police will be able to get more information from Ionica, or the other two men currently in custody, perhaps offering lighter sentences if they disclose where the stolen pigeons are. There is speculation among police and racers that they might have already been sold on the black market in China or elsewhere.
“The thieves know,” Van Gaver said. “Maybe one day they will talk.”
But the police are worried about another matter. Many of the recovered birds have still not been matched to their owners, most likely because they were taken in thefts not recorded by the Belgian police.
It is increasingly likely, investigators say, that there will be only one way to reunite the birds to their owners: They will open the cages and hope that the birds still remember how to fly home.
About this story
The Washington Post is examining the globalization of Chinese organized crime and Beijing’s selective use or tolerance of criminal groups for geopolitical purposes. Mixing illicit activity and patriotism has become a hallmark of some Chinese organizations with overseas interests.
Design and development by Hailey Haymond. Photos by Chloe Sharrock. Editing by Peter Finn, Reem Akkad, Joe Moore, Olivier Laurent. Video editing by Zoeann Murphy. Copy editing by Gaby Morera Di Núbila. Additional reporting by Koba Ryckewaert in Brussels, Ana Poenariu in Breznita-Ocol, Romania, Pei-Lin Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Cate Brown in Washington.