Mystery of stolen bag, missing £2m Faberge egg and flamboyant owner

Just days after sneak thief Enzo Conticello walked into the Dog and Duck pub in Soho and stole a handbag containing an emerald-encrusted Fabergé egg and watch set worth £2.2million, Jay Bradley was enjoying a night out in his London restaurant.

Standing behind the marble-topped bar at Boha London – the trendy King’s Road eaterie and 1920’s-style speakeasy he helped set up with Made In Chelsea star Harvey Armstrong – Bradley mixed mezcal negroni cocktails before going on to share a £300 bottle of wine with the Italian head chef.

The previous week the flamboyant Irishman had helped revamp a private members club in Soho after it launched a partnership with Craft Irish Whiskey – the luxury drinks brand which Bradley, 45, founded in 2018 and went on to turn into a multi-million pound enterprise.

Seemingly without a care in the world, few casual followers of his social media accounts which highlight his exploits could have imagined the extraordinary financial loss the playboy entrepreneur had just suffered.

In fact the theft of the treasure appears to have been a closely guarded secret until the extraordinary circumstances of its disappearance emerged this week.

It was until this week largely unknown how Conticello, a garden variety pickpocket, found himself in possession of the priceless Fabergé egg on the night of November 7, 2024. 

The piece was on an outing in a Givenchy handbag, with a polished young woman called Rosie Dawson in London’s West End.

The egg belonged to Dawson’s employer and Ms Dawson, who started at the firm as an executive assistant in 2020 and risen up the ranks to director, had been at a work event earlier in the day where she had been showing it, together with a matching Fabergé watch, to prospective buyers. 

She had then covered the two pieces in bubble wrap and put them in her £1,600 large, leather handbag, alongside a MacBook Air, a set of Apple AirPods and a £150 Mulberry card holder containing all of her bank cards.   

At a casual get together in the West End, Ms Dawson placed the bag by her feet as she greeted friends in the pub’s outdoor smoking area.

Meanwhile bag snatcher Conticello, 29, who also goes by the name of Hakin Boudjenoune, was milling around looking for items to lift.

CCTV footage captured the opportunistic thief inside the pub attempting to target another customer, before he was filmed removing the bag and making his escape.

Conticello ‘wanted to obtain some easy cash’ and prosecutors accepted he did not intend to steal the Fabergé egg and watch. 

Within 15 minutes of her handbag being stolen, Ms Dawson received a fraud alert on her phone, showing Conticello had tried to use one of her bank cards for a £33.48 purchase at a Co-Op on Berwick Street, a few metres away. 

Unaware he was in possession of the priceless striking green ornamental egg which contained a large uncut Zambian emerald, Conticello used one of Dawson’s bank cards to buy cigarettes and drink.

Two further attempts were made to use her cards, at 11.30pm and 12.30am, but they had already been cancelled. 

When the pickpocket, who had pleaded guilty to theft and to three counts of bank card fraud, was jailed for 27 months this week he said he had given the bag and everything else inside it to his drug dealer in exchange for cocaine.

But the whereabouts of the egg, as well as the watch, are still unknown.

Now the Daily Mail can reveal for the first time the colourful history of the man whose vision created the world’s most expensive whiskey – from his complex business dealings to his relations with shady Irish crooks.

The treasures Conticello unwittingly stole formed part of a collection created by Fabergé for Bradley which were unveiled on St Patrick’s Day in 2021.

The Emerald Isle Collection consists of seven walnut wood cabinets containing two bottles of 30-year-old ultra-rare whiskey, alongside the egg and watch in two locked side compartments.

Each collection also includes 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 $2.8million (£2.1million) – prompting it to be touted ‘the world’s most expensive whiskey’.

Given the loss, it seems curious that no police appeals were ever launched in the aftermath of the theft.

CCTV footage was never released to the public and Conticello 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.

Despite the staggering worth of the golden Celtic Egg – which is set with 104 diamonds – it was only insured for £106,700.

It is not clear what questions were asked before insurers paid the sum for the treasure that had been in the care of Ms Dawson and her employers.

Another mystery remains over why it took nearly a year for the stolen egg to be registered as lost.

It was not until August 2025 that its 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 beforehand.

The register is also used by owners to help recover stolen property.

Bradley himself made no public appeal for the precious items. Instead his social media posts in the aftermath of the theft focused on promoting his business interests – while highlighting his jet-set lifestyle.

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.

Bradley – who is said to be a friend of controversial mixed martial artist Conor McGregor – 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.

The father-of-four, who is thought to have separated from his 46-year-old wife Tammy Richards, has also enjoyed trips to the Maldives, Japan, Marrakesh and Mexico.

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.

They are all part of the trappings of wealth he has apparently generated over the past eight years after an extraordinary turn around in his fortunes.

He has told how he turned a £15,000 start-up into a £176million business empire based around generating what Bradley himself describes as ‘liquid gold’.

The colourful businessman was born in Dublin to a family who had owned a chain of butchers shops.

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.

The family lived in Orlando Florida when he was aged between six and 12.

He once told how his father made a fortune in America after persuading high-end restaurants, hotels and golf courses in Palm Beach to buy whiskey-smoked salmon.

Describing how the business operated he said: ‘Starting out with a little tiny pick-up truck 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.

‘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 recounted the story after he returned to the billionaire’s playground to finalise a deal when he sold his first $2million bottle of whiskey.

He left school at 15 to start an apprenticeship in a furniture business his father was running at the time.

He 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 £1.1million over 18 months.

Keating headed up a ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ style cold-call scam operation from boiler rooms employing at least 45 people on Australia’s Gold Coast

The gang convinced victims into paying around £10,000 each after telling them they would make more than £40,000-a-year in profit.

Bradley has insisted he broke all ties with Keating long ago and has said he moved back to the US years before the Australian police began their investigations into the scam.

He had left Australia for America, this time the west coast, where he began a career in real estate.

He wound up in New Zealand where he worked as a chef and ran a bar and restaurant.

But he returned suddenly to Ireland in 2018 when his father was terminally ill with cancer.

Bradley relocated his family from a six-bedroomed house in New Zealand to move back in with his parents.

He has told how he was fulfilling the dream of his father, who died in 2019, when he went into the whiskey business – following up a plan they had masterminded together.

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 £2.2million for the first Emerald Isle triple-distilled single malt to be sold, complete with 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 £4.35million in sales through its offers with West Cork Distillers and Drogheda-based Boann Distillery.

In 2019, Bradley said the company aimed to sell around 120 pallets of Irish whiskey a month, which expected monthly revenues of around £1.75million.

Investors could purchase casks of whiskey, with a minimum purchase of six casks for around £14,662.02.

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.

‘Unlike other investments – whiskey actually increases in value the older it is which is the opposite of what happens if you invest in something like motors.’

The industry proved controversial and in 2023 the firm found themselves in hot water over claims it was the only cask ownership business in Britain regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

The FCA ordered it to contact every customer and explain that its whiskey investments were not regulated, and ordered a similar clarification to be published on its website.

In response the company said it regretted the ‘oversight’ that led to the lack of a disclaimer in the advert, which was being addressed ‘as a matter of urgency’.

There was greater controversy last year for the whiskey industry after the BBC revealed that hundreds of people had been conned out of millions of pounds in whisky barrel investment schemes which turned out to be cruel scams.

Victims ploughed their life savings and pensions into casks that were overpriced or did not exist, while some individual casks were sold multiple times to different investors.

While Bradley’s business was not involved in the scams it raised serious question marks over how the industry was run.

Last September, Bradley resigned as a director of the firm which he ran with Maltese business partner Scott Sciberras.

Interviewed by the Sunday Times last November, Bradley insisted his exit from the cask investment trade was unrelated to the scandal.

He said: ‘I didn’t really want to be involved in the cask investment business.

‘I never really did, to be honest. It was always a short-term thing for me.’

Bradley said the documentary highlighting the scams was ‘a necessary corrective’ to an industry evidently plagued with bad practices.

Bradley said: ‘That BBC documentary didn’t help the industry, but it shook out a lot of the bad actors and, you know, the ones that are doing it the right way will come out a lot better.’

Bradley said he sold more than £140million of investments in casks of whiskey since it was founded but split over several different companies in Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia, the overall picture of its financial performance remains unclear.

And last month HMRC petitioned the High Court in London to wind up the firm.

The most recent publicly-available accounts for the UK arm of the business are for 2023.

They show that the unit had generated turnover of £15.8million that year and made a £1.5million pre-tax profit.

It had total equity of £202,000 at the end of that year, having paid out £8.3million of dividends.

It noted that those dividends were paid to its immediate parent firm as part of a transaction to allow repayment of loans from directors and connected individuals.

The immediate parent firm of that entity is Brollachaun Holdings, which is controlled by Bradley.

The latest set of accounts it has filed with Companies House in the UK are for 2022, which were filed in 2023. Its accounts for 2023 were due to be filed by the end of 2024.

In recent years Bradley has been the director of at least 10 different companies most of which have been dissolved while two are dormant.

While his business activities appear complicated his bespoke whiskey’s appear to be going from strength to strength and he’s now looking to buy a distillery in Ireland.

And Ms Dawson’s career doesn’t seem to have been affected by her unfortunate mishap.

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.’