For a few weeks last November, a bizarre crime-wave swept through some of London’s top restaurants and shops. The first target was an armful of white orchids worth £400, stolen from Petals at Bibendum, an upmarket flower shop at the Michelin Building on the Fulham Road.
Five days later, a pack of sirloin steaks worth £800 was ripped out of cardboard delivery boxes at dawn on the doorstep of Galvin La Chapelle, a Michelin starred restaurant in Spitalfields, east London.
A couple of weeks later, and this time in daylight, a box of 40 langoustines worth £300 was filched from outside Elystan Street, another starred restaurant in Knightsbridge – where furious chef Phil Howard was forced to removed his dish of ‘extra-large Scottish langoustines with chilli, spring onions, lemon zest and garlic’ from the menu.
At about the same time, two more boxes of langoustines – worth £400 and from the same supplier – went missing from outside 104 Restaurant in Notting Hill. On top of all that, a selection of vitamins worth hundreds of pounds and a pair of nail clippers were stolen from ZEN Pharmacy on super-posh Beauchamp Place.
The thefts were caught on CCTV footage – and this is where it gets interesting. Because the thief was a slim, attractive brunette with shiny hair and an expensive-looking soft leather tote bag slung nonchalantly over one shoulder.
And she seemed to know what she was doing.
The dots really started joining up when Phil Howard posted his footage on social media with the caption ‘caught stealing our precious langoustines this morning – you low-life scum bag’, and appealed for help identifying her.
Which was when Max Cansdale the owner of Petals at Bibendum, realised this was the thief who’d been reaching through his security gates to help herself to prime white orchids. ‘She’s wearing the same white clogs!’ he cried.
The ‘langoustine lifter’ was identified as Ekaterina Frolova when a 46-year-old woman was convicted in January of stealing the langoustines, steaks, flowers and vitamins
CCTV footage showed a thief dressed in jeans and slippers taking langoustines from a Michelin-starred restaurant
And across London, after seeing the post, Chris Galvin remembered the theft of £800 of his best beef earlier in the month, studied his CCTV footage from November 4 and realised he’d been victim of the same culprit.
‘Those cheekbones! The hair and the movement!’ he said. ‘I’d put money on it being the same woman.’
Naturally, the story took off. She became the mystery ‘langoustine lifter’, the ‘crustacean criminal’ the ‘steak-snatching senorita’. But the police – as so often – did very little, so the victims absorbed their losses, tightened their security and changed delivery times.
And then it went quiet. Until earlier this week when it was reported a 46-year-old woman had been convicted in January of stealing the langoustines, steaks, flowers and vitamins, fined £350, held on remand pending the hearing, but had avoided jail.
Her name was Ekaterina Frolova and she lived in Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, one of London’s most salubrious addresses.
But the photograph released by the Metropolitan Police, presumably taken at her arrest in December, showed a very different-looking woman to the one in the CCTV footage. This Ekaterina was dishevelled, scratched, scabbed and dirty. She looked dreadful.
Which left a lot of questions.
Who was she? Why was she stealing langoustines and orchids? Was she a chef, or someone with connections in catering?
What happened to her face between the thefts and the arrest? (Some wags online suggested the langoustines had fought back.) And, more seriously, why was she frequenting a flat in Lucan Place, Knightsbridge, in which a murder took place this month?
So we did a bit of digging and it turns out that Ekaterina Frolova, or ‘Katia’ and sometimes ‘Katie’, as her glamorous friends know her, is neither your average opportunistic thief, nor an ex chef.
Richard Wilkins, owner of 104 Restaurant in Notting Hill, which saw two boxes of langoustines – worth £400 – go missing during last year’s bizarre crime-wave
The owner of Petals at Bibendum, Max Cansdale, recognised the suspect in online footage as the thief who’d been reaching through his security gates to help herself to white orchids
The photo released by the Metropolitan Police, presumably taken at her arrest in December, showed a very different-looking woman to the one in the CCTV footage
She’s a former ‘It Girl’ of Russian extraction who lives with her mother in a £4million flat in Ennismore Gardens – where former residents include Hollywood stars Ava Gardner and Sir Michael Caine, and a house can set you back £33million.
In fact, everything about Katia’s set-up screams wealth, privilege and opportunity.
Her education at the £43,000-a-year Taunton School in Somerset, where she boarded from 1994, came soon after she is thought to have arrived in the country from Moscow.
Her mother’s impeccable Russian connections – back in the day she was an attendee at London’s ridiculously lavish War and Peace Ball (celebrating the heady days of Imperial Russia) and in 2006 was in the place d’honneur between Count Andrei Tolstoy Miloslavsky, the organiser, and Elena Fedotava, wife of the then Russian Ambassador, Yury Fedotov.
And, of course, Katia’s glamorous social media posts on multiple Facebook accounts. Trips to Harrods. Pictures of Moet & Chandon champagne foils. Shots of her horse-riding with her (then) glossy blonde hair flying. Glamorous South African connections. A photo of her leather Louis Vuitton boots next to an impossibly cute long-haired dachshund. All generating loving messages from her pals – ‘Love you!’
‘Life is sweet as chocolate’ she wrote, on August 6, 2018.
On March 6, 2019 she posted a last gorgeous selfie in a denim jacket. And then nothing.
To try to piece together where it all went wrong, I head to Ennismore Gardens and Katia and her mother’s two-bedroom flat with a roof terrace boasting fantastic views of Brompton Oratory (which she used to post on her socials).
No one answers the brass buzzer, but the Portuguese caretaker from the block and the Polish caretaker next door – where Ava Gardner used to live – pop out to fill me in on the details.
To tell me that, over recent years, her life has spiralled into crime, drug abuse, violence, mental health problems and mixing with the very, very wrong set. And what a total nightmare it’s been for everyone living there.
‘The shouting, the screaming in Russian. The yelling. Two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning. This is a very expensive place to live,’ says the Portuguese caretaker, gesturing at the towering stucco buildings and the supercars parked along the street.
‘But it does not feel like it with her here. She gets very angry. Walking and screaming.’
Katia lived in Ennismore Gardens in Knightsbridge, one of London’s most salubrious addresses
For Max Cansdale, the owner of Petals at Bibendum, the stolen orchids were just the beginning of a sustained attack
‘The neighbours are always calling the police,’ adds the Pole. ‘She’s like a crazy woman, she’s very aggressive.’
And not just over recent months. He first met her when he started working here. ‘She was in the park behind Brompton Oratory and she was smoking crack. That was three years ago. It is all the bad drugs and that never ends well, however much money you have. She is not well. It is very sad – particularly for her mum.’
While Katia doesn’t appear to have ever had a job, it seems there has never been any shortage of money. Her mother’s late husband Inge was a Swede who made his fortune through a travel company he ran in Moscow during Russia’s boom years of the early 90s, before selling a chunk and moving to Britain, presumably with Katia and her mother in 1994.
Perhaps her mother cut off the cash flow, knowing it would be spent on drugs. Maybe Katia did it for kicks. Who knows. But it seems around 2024, she took up shoplifting. And on the rough rule of thumb that, for every crime a shoplifter is caught for, he or she commits at least 25 more, she was prolific. And also picky. Not for her a bottle of cheap gin here, or a stolen sandwich there. Katia’s tastes were more expensive.
In 2024 she was prosecuted for stealing a £78 bottle of wine from Jeroboams, an upmarket wine shop on Walton Street in Knightsbridge, plus a £400 cashmere jumper and £1,700 shearling coat from Zadig & Voltaire boutique.
Which were all madly extravagant, but at least she could use them. Why she wanted all those langoustines and steaks – unless she was selling them at a dodgy pub – we’ll probably never know.
With the drugs came an increasingly violent and unpredictable lifestyle. She’d show up at Ennismore Gardens with black eyes and say someone had hit her. She broke the door at least three times and smashed windows. She threatened and swore and punched and spat at people.
Last year she attacked her 69-year-old mother – on September 17 she was given a three month prison sentence suspended for six months by Wimbledon Magistrates court for assault.
‘She can be very scary,’ says the Polish caretaker. ‘You don’t know what’s coming next, but it keeps coming.’
Sadly, he’s right. As Max Cansdale discovered. Because for him, the stolen orchids were just the beginning of a sustained attack.
Two weeks later she was back. This time in a bomber jacket and, unable to reach the flowers through the rails, she ripped a branch from a 100-year old olive tree imported from Spain and used it to hook the flowers closer, smashing vases in the process.
She made a few more visits. Once, in a luxurious camel coat, she walked in, bold as brass, chatted charmingly to the Russian security guard and apologised for stealing. The next day she returned, dishevelled and threatening to burn the shop. ‘It was really scary and we never knew why she targeted us,’ says Max.
Katia would reach through the rails to reach flowers, later using a branch to hook the flowers closer and smashing a vase in the process
Until finally, on the morning of December 3, it all came to a head.
Katia had tried to steal more flowers, the guard followed her round the corner and watched her go into Flat 10 Curran House, in Lucan Place, understood by locals to be a drugs den, and called the police.
Officers smashed the door in to find the flat empty, but retrieved Katia and a man, bruised and scratched from the bushes behind, into which they’d jumped from the first floor window. Which at least explains why she looked so battered in the police photo.
For several weeks everyone had a welcome rest, because she was held on remand until sentencing. This week, that came as a bit of a surprise to residents in Ennismore Gardens.
‘We thought she’d gone to stay with a friend! That’s what her mother said,’ said one. ‘It was odd because when she got back she seemed to have put quite a bit of weight on, but it was lovely and calm with her gone.’
Not that Katia seemed any calmer. The minute she was released – with a fine of just £350 – it started again. The screaming at night, the threats.
‘She was straight back over to us saying “you put me in prison, now I’m going to burn your business down,”’ says Max Cansdale. ‘Which would have been a nightmare at any time, but was particularly hard in the run up to Valentines, so we got round-the-clock security, which cost a fortune.’
And then, in a final murky twist, a murder took place at 10 Curran Place on February 12. The victim was a 57-year-old woman called Julia Taylor. Two men were arrested. There is no suggestion Katia was involved, but this is the flat where she was arrested in December.
Meanwhile, back at Ennismore Gardens this week, her mother was too afraid to answer the door. She is recovering, she tells me over the phone, from three broken ribs and some nasty bruising, but is still fiercely protective of her troubled daughter.
‘Lovely lady,’ says the Polish caretaker. ‘Really lovely. She says she tripped, but we don’t believe her for second.’
Later he calls to tell me one of the neighbours heard Katia had been apprehended in a local fish shop last week, trying to steal a lobster. It would almost be comical if it wasn’t so sad and desperate and dangerous.
And, perhaps more importantly, because nobody can give a good reason why this troubled woman is still smoking crack in a public park, attacking her mother, threatening her rich neighbours and terrorising hard-working local businesses.
