Heard the one about the handbag with the Faberge egg, stolen from the Dog and Duck pub in Soho? It already sounds like a questionable joke, even before you introduce an Irishman into the tale.
Yet it’s actually a real-life multimillion pound international mystery, one that, we can reveal, is getting curiouser and curiouser.
The story of the missing emerald-encrusted Faberge egg and watch set – reportedly worth a cool £2.2million – dates back to 2024 but only emerged this week, when a man called Enzo Conticello was jailed for 27 months at Southwark Crown Court.
His crime? Stealing a £1,600 Givenchy handbag belonging to Rosie Dawson, 28, a director at the drinks company Craft Irish Whiskey.
Having her designer handbag pinched would have been an expensive enough loss for Ms Dawson given that it contained a £1,500 MacBook Air, a set of Apple AirPods, a £350 store voucher, £200 worth of make-up and a £150 Mulberry card holder, complete with all her bank cards.
But it was the fact that there was also a Faberge egg, studded with over 100 diamonds and containing a stonking emerald, in there that had jaws falling open in court. Who knew that Givenchy handbags were so capacious?
What was Miss Dawson doing with a Faberge egg in the Dog and Duck in the first place? And what – more to the point – was she doing placing her bag on the floor?
This was but the first question of many. It transpired that her boss, 45-year-old Jay Bradley – a larger-than-life millionaire Irishman – had commissioned Faberge to make seven eggs and watches for St Patrick’s Day in 2021.
Rosie Dawson’s handbag was stolen in London’s West End. The bag contained an emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg and watch set worth £2.2million
The egg belonged to Dawson’s employer and Ms Dawson had been at a work event earlier in the day where she had been showing it. Pictured: Employer, Jay Bradley
Bradley – who is said to be a friend of controversial mixed martial artist Conor McGregor (L) – has been seen in recent times living the high life on sun-kissed beaches in Thailand, Bali and Ibiza as well as skiing in the French Alps and on trips to the carnival in Rio
Pictured: The emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg
Enzo Conticello (pictured), a garden variety pickpocket, found himself in possession of the priceless Fabergé egg on the night of November 7, 2024
The Emerald Isle Collection – the gift for the billionaire who has everything, perhaps – comprised walnut wood cabinets containing two bottles of 30-year-old rare whiskey, alongside the said jewel-encrusted Faberge egg and watch. (There was more, actually. Each collection also included a humidor with two Cohiba Siglo VI Grand Reserva cigars, a gold-plated cigar cutter, gold plated water pipette, pure obsidian whiskey stones, a hip flask with a sample of the Emerald Isle whiskey, which is said to be the rarest Irish whiskey in existence, and a carafe filled with Irish spring water from the same region where the whiskey was made. One set sold in 2024 for £2.1 million – prompting it to be touted ‘the world’s most expensive whiskey’. But we digress)
In November 2024, Ms Dawson had been at a work event, showing off the ornamental egg and watch set to well-heeled prospective buyers. Afterwards, she had swaddled the precious pieces in bubble wrap and put them in her handbag, before heading to the pub to meet friends.
In the beer garden she greeted them with hugs, not noticing that Conticello, 29, was prowling around, on the hunt for items to steal.
CCTV footage captured Algerian Conticello – who, confusingly, is also known as Hakin Boudjenoune – inside the pub attempting to target another customer, before he was filmed removing the bag and making his escape.Conticello headed straight for, no, not a Swiss bank, but a nearby Co-Op and Nisa Local where he used one of Ms Dawson’s bank cards to buy cigarettes and drink.When Conticello was jailed for 27 months this week he claimed he had given the bag and everything else inside it to his dealer in exchange for drugs, and the judge accepted that he was clueless about the Faberge egg that had been laid, so to speak, within.
While the surreal story resulted in much mirth in some quarters – not least because the court case fell in Easter week – it also led to some remarkable exchanges in court. Questions were asked about where this egg could possibly be now (answer: no one knows, but Russia and China were mooted, given that they are regular destinations in the jewellery black market).
Judge Martin Griffiths pondered how one goes about correctly valuing a Faberge egg when, as he put it, ‘unfortunately, you can’t ask Mr Faberge, can you?’.
Legal proceedings were, of course, concluded when Conticello was sentenced. But the whole thing did have the air of the opening chapter of a thriller, rather than the full story.
So many questions remain unanswered.
Why, for instance, was the theft of such a spectacular item, in such circumstances, not in the news at the time, or at the very least the subject of a police appeal? Similar thefts involving, say, Stradivarius violins or priceless artworks tend to be reported quickly, so that international dealers can be on the alert.
CCTV footage was also never released to the public, and there does not appear to have been an international manhunt for Conticello.
He was only arrested by complete chance at the start of this year, in Belfast, after carrying out an unconnected theft in Northern Ireland in 2025.
This picture shows the case in which the egg and whisky would have been stored
The emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg and watch set is worth £2.2million
Craft Irish Whiskey heralded the accompaniment as ‘the world’s first Celtic Egg from Fabergé’
The treasures Conticello unwittingly stole formed part of a collection created by Faberge for Bradley which were unveiled on St Patrick’s Day in 2021
In fact it was not until August 2025 – a full nine months after the theft – that the egg’s disappearance was featured on the Art Loss database, which auction houses and private collectors use to check for stolen items, meaning it could have been sold legitimately in the interim.
The register is also, of course, used by owners to help recover stolen property.
In truth, the theft of the treasure appears to have been a closely guarded secret until this week.
Then there is the fact that, despite the staggering worth of the golden Celtic Egg – which is set with 104 diamonds and opens up to reveal a large uncut Zambian emerald – it was only insured for just over £100,000.
Bradley himself made no public appeal for the precious items, even though he’s usually very quick to share aspects of his lavish lifestyle with his fans. Why so little fuss?
Indeed to look at his social media from that time – full of private jets and yachts in Monaco, stays in high-end hotels and trips to Bali, the Maldives, Rio, Japan, Marrakesh and Mexico – you’d never have been able to tell he had suffered a financial blow at all.
Just days after the Faberge egg went awol, Bradley was enjoying a night out in his London restaurant Boha, the trendy King’s Road eaterie he helped set up with Made In Chelsea star Harvey Armstrong. He was mixing cocktails and sharing a £300 bottle of wine with the head chef.
The previous week, he’d helped revamp a private members club in Soho after it launched a partnership with Craft Irish Whiskey – the luxury drinks brand which Bradley founded in 2018 and went on to turn into a multi-million pound enterprise.
The Faberge debacle has, belatedly, turned the spotlight on this Dublin-born but now Dubai-based entrepreneur – who is said to be a friend of controversial mixed martial artist Conor McGregor.
Bradley is most definitely a colourful character. A racing-loving (he owns a racehorse) father-of-four whose parenting approach includes only giving pocket money when his children have read how-to business guides. He expects them to be able to pay for their own first-class travel one day, he says.
He has generated extraordinary wealth over the past eight years.
This is a man who turned a £15,000 start-up into a £176 million business empire based around generating what Bradley himself describes as ‘liquid gold’.
There have been rumours of some dubious connections along the way, however, and his rise has had its rollercoaster moments, but he seems to revel in being the ‘red-headed step-child’, as he puts it, of the spirits industry.
The entrepreneur – who lives in Dubai and regularly features in influential Forbes magazine – frequently shows off his adventures aboard private jets and yachts in Monaco on his Instagram account
Much of his travels involve his business while Bradley’s love of racing has seen him run his own horse Craft Irish at Ascot while his company has sponsored the prestigious Prestbury Cup at the Cheltenham Festival
Bradley was born into a family who had owned a chain of butchers shops. As a youngster he lived an itinerant lifestyle, growing up with his three siblings and their parents, Shay and Anne, in Australia and the United States.
In interviews he has talked about how his father made a fortune in America after persuading high-end restaurants in Palm Beach to buy whiskey-smoked salmon.
‘Starting out with a little tiny pick-up he would dump all the sides of salmon into the bathtub in a motel to keep them cold because he didn’t have enough money for a refrigeration truck,’ Bradley has recalled.
‘Finally he built that up over time hustling and getting into all these fancy hotels.
‘Eventually he got himself a refrigerator truck and built a nice business up until it all came crashing down when the smokehouse burnt down.’
Bradley left school at 15 to start an apprenticeship in a furniture business, then worked for a spell selling software in Australia.
It was here that he was said to be associated with notorious criminal Stephen Keating, a member of a gang known as the ‘Irish Boys’.
In 2020, Keating was sentenced to eight years in prison in Australia for leading a group of ‘predatory’ fraudsters who duped more than 160 people out of more than £1.1 million in a cold-call scam operation.
Bradley has insisted he broke all ties with Keating, moving back to the US years before the Australian police began their investigations into the scam.
Nevertheless he’s found it hard to shake off the taint of the association.He also had a stint in New Zealand before he returned suddenly to Ireland in 2018 when his father was terminally ill with cancer.
Bradley delights in telling journalists how he was fulfilling his dad’s dream when he went into the whiskey business – a plan they had masterminded together.
As a youngster he lived an itinerant lifestyle with his family, growing up with his three siblings and their parents Shay and Anne in Australia and the United States
In 2018 he founded the Craft Irish Whiskey Co, launching the Devil’s Keep brand – then the world’s most expensive Irish Whiskey retailing at more than £8,000 a bottle.
In January 2024 the price tag was spectacularly eclipsed when US collector Mike Daley paid £2.2 million for the first Emerald Isle triple-distilled single malt to be sold – complete with, oh yes, a Faberge egg.
Since then two more of the seven sets have been sold.
At the same time as launching his whiskey brand, Bradley started an alternative investment company called Whiskey & Wealth Club.
The London-based business offered investors the chance to buy into cask Irish whiskey and scotch at cheaper prices than directly from distillers themselves.
The company bought casks in bulk from distillers at a reduced cost before offering them to investors.
In its opening seven months, it recorded a mind-blowing £4.35 million in sales.In 2019, Bradley said the company aimed to sell around 120 pallets of Irish whiskey a month, and expected monthly revenues of around £1.75 million.
Investors could purchase casks of whiskey, with a minimum purchase of six casks for £14,662.
The whiskey was stored in a controlled warehouse owned by HMRC to be left for ten years or more, in order for it to increase in value.
In 2020 Bradley said: ‘People have chosen to ditch traditional styles of investment such as property, because of factors like the 2008 financial crash.’
The industry proved controversial, however. In 2023 the firm was in hot water for claiming it was the only cask ownership business in Britain regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority – not true, although the company called it an ‘oversight’.
There was greater controversy last year over the wider whiskey barrel industry after the BBC revealed that hundreds of people had been conned out of millions of pounds in investment schemes that turned out to be scams.
While Bradley’s business was not involved, questions marks appeared over the entire industry.
The father-of-four, who is thought to have separated from his 46-year-old wife Tammy (pictured) Richards, has also enjoyed trips to the Maldives, Japan, Marrakesh and Mexico
Ms Dawson started at the firm as an executive assistant in 2020 and rose up the ranks to director
Last September, Bradley resigned as a director of the cask business he ran with Maltese business partner Scott Sciberras, although he has denied this was linked to the BBC revelations.
While his business activities appear very complicated – in recent years Bradley has been the director of at least 10 different companies most of which have been dissolved while two are dormant – his bespoke whiskey operation is going from strength to strength and he’s now looking to buy a distillery in Ireland.
It remains to be seen whether he is looking to acquire any more Faberge eggs.
What of Ms Dawson’s career? Happily, it doesn’t seem to have been affected by the Dog and Duck mishap. Her Linkedin profile show she remains in post as Director at Craft Irish Whiskey.
Speaking at the family’s detached riverside home near Exeter, Devon, her mother Leslie told the Daily Mail this week: ‘Rosie is very upset about it all. The story has gone viral.’