Lynn Thoman

Ep 312: The Wild True Stories Behind History’s Greatest Art Thefts

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Lynn Thoman: Ever wondered how someone could steal one of the most famous paintings in the world from the world's most famous museum? Or why some of history's greatest art thieves succeeded? Today, you'll hear the unbelievable true stories behind some of history's most audacious art thefts, and what they reveal about all of us.

Hi everyone, I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is 3 Takeaways. On 3 Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists.

Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world, and maybe even ourselves a little better.

Lynn Thoman: Today, I'm delighted to be with Noah Charney. Noah is one of the world's leading experts on art crime.

He's a best-selling author, professor, historian, and founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and he has advised museums, governments, and law enforcement agencies around the world.

Noah, welcome to 3 Takeaways.

Noah Charney: Thanks so much for having me, Lynn.

Lynn Thoman: It is my pleasure.

When people hear museum robbery, they picture lasers and Mission Impossible. But the Louvre was robbed last year with a cherry picker and power tools in broad daylight.

Walk us through what happened and how something so obvious worked.

Noah Charney: Well, if I'm allowed to say that I was impressed by a theft, this is one where the audacity of it was what made them get away with it, at least initially. So what happened earlier this fall was that a small team of thieves stole a cherry picker. They also stole some construction equipment and they wore high visibility vests.

So they're doing the opposite of what most people think of about stealing something. You think of being stealthy and avoiding detection as you enter and as you leave. They didn't worry about that.

They were so brazen that nobody thought that they were in the wrong place. So they drove right up to the side of the Louvre Museum. They used the cherry picker to access the first floor.

They opened a window and then they used some of the machinery like an angle grinder and a crowbar to pry open some vitrines to take a handful of very special jewels that were associated with the Napoleonic era. It was a very well considered crime. But if we look at some details, we're probably dealing with less than fully professional thieves or rather, I think they're probably career criminals, but they're not trained thieves.

So they were very clever in their way of breaching security. They didn't try to sneak past anything. The Louvre was obviously very well secured.

So they were able to access the jewels and leave the premises with them. But they rushed a bit and they tried to burn some of the evidence that would have had some of their DNA on it like gloves and a helmet. But they weren't able to do so.

They were rushed because security was upon them. They did get away with all but one of the jewels that they tried to steal and they disappeared into early morning Paris. That part went well and the jewels have not been found.

But they forgot about what's called touch DNA. So these days, if you sneeze at the wrong time, then the forensics folks can figure out who you are. So things like dead skin cells that were found inside a glove or flakes from your scalp or a hair that got stuck in the helmet, those can be traced.

So very quickly, the criminals were apprehended. But the jewels are still missing. The problem is that jewels have a high intrinsic value.

Most art doesn't. When we talk about art theft, we usually think about an object that's painted on canvas made of hemp and stretched on wood and made of pigment that's bound with egg yolk or linseed oil and that's it. If you break down the component parts and talk about the ingredients by themselves, they don't have any value.

It's how they're put together and the story behind them. But jewels are different. So the jewels had a very high intrinsic value, maybe as much as eight million dollars worth.

If you just break them up, melt down the gold and recut the gems so they no longer match the description of what was stolen. And that's almost certainly what happened, which compounds the crime because they're effectively destroying these cultural heritage objects. And unfortunately, I think we're not going to ever see those jewels again.

Lynn Thoman: The most famous art theft in history wasn't last year. It was, as you point out, in 1911 when the Mona Lisa disappeared. Before we get into the theft itself, was the Mona Lisa already the world's most famous painting?

Noah Charney: It was not. It was by perhaps the most famous artist in the anglophone world. So Leonardo da Vinci had a cult around him already in France and in England.

It started back in 1550 when Giorgio Vasari, who's the godfather of art history, wrote a book called The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects that was a group biography of famous artists, many of whom he knew. And this really launched the cult of admiring artists for anything they can produce. We think of that as obvious now, but it had a starting point and that was really it.

Also in the French world, Francois I, the king of France, was probably the first proactive collector of art by artists he admired, the first groupie. He wrote to these famous artists. He was a big Italianophile and he basically said, I'll buy anything by your hand.

He just wanted anything by Raphael, Cellini, Leonardo, Michelangelo. And he also tried to collect the artists themselves. So he invited them to become part of his court and Leonardo accepted at the end of his life and brought Mona Lisa with him, which was a painting that he never felt like he had finished.

And after he passed away, it passed to the hands of his pupil. And then it was bought by Francis I, the king of France, and became part of the French royal collection until it was stolen in 1911. So Leonardo was famous, but Mona Lisa was one among his great Renaissance portraits.

It has such a great story behind it. And the theft really launched it into becoming the most famous artwork in the world.

Lynn Thoman: And the collection of Francois I, the king of France, eventually became the Louvre, correct?

Noah Charney: That's right. So the Louvre was initially the Paris residence of the French royal family. So there was a castle called Fontainebleau, which is where Francois I was based.

Later on, Versailles, which is outside of Paris, became the focal point. And the Louvre was like the Paris residence for them. And then when Napoleon took over, he turned it into a semi-public space.

He turned it into a museum, but it was a museum open only a few days a week. And it was meant not for the general public, but sort of an elite public. It began as the French royal collection and then was expanded through Napoleonic looting.

Lynn Thoman: How does someone walk into the Louvre and steal the Mona Lisa?

Noah Charney: We know exactly how it happened because the thief eventually turned himself in and was put on trial. And thankfully, court records have a habit of surviving better than other records do.

Prior to 1911, an Italian by the name of Vincenzo Perugia, who was an amateur painter and mandolin enthusiast with a fantastic mustache, moved to Paris because Paris was where you go if you wanted to make a career as an artist.

But he couldn't make a go of it. And so he earned money by being a handyman. And he worked for a company that was contracted by the Louvre to make protective glass cases to protect some of the works that they felt were in danger of being attacked by anarchists or protesters.

And so he had access to the Louvre. He had a Louvre workers overall. And it seems to have been a crime of opportunity when he realized the access that he had.

But he was under a misconception. He thought that the Mona Lisa had been looted by Napoleon and brought to France. And this wasn't a bad guess because Napoleon had looted tens of thousands of objects, some of which are still in the Louvre today.

But this wasn't one of them. This had been legitimately bought from Leonardo's pupil after his death by the French king. So the Louvre was closed on a Monday.

And on a Sunday night, after he had been working through the weekend there, he locked himself into what's effectively a janitor's closet. And he waited until he saw the sun come up on the following morning. And he waited to hear the footfalls of the security guards disappear down the corridor.

And then he opened the door to the closet. And he went to the Salon Cafe, which is where the was displayed. He lifted it off of the wall in its frame.

And he did this silently, which should have been a clue because it was hung in such a way that if you didn't know how it was hung, you might clonk it around to try to lift it off of the wall. And with the frame, he brought it to a service stairwell. And while he was there, he popped it out of its frame.

And he left that behind. It was unwieldy. The painting itself is relatively small.

He wrapped it in a white sheet, tucked it under his arm and headed down the spiral staircase. And he was supposed to let himself out and then disappear into the early Paris morning. But when he got to the bottom of the staircase, he reached out and he grabbed the handle to the door and he twisted it, but it was locked.

And he first seems to have tried to remove the door from its hinges, but realized that that would make too much noise. Then he thought, maybe if I unscrew the doorknob, it's going to pop open. So he unscrewed the doorknob, put it in his pocket, but the door still wouldn't open.

And then he hears footsteps coming down the stairs towards him. And it turns out that it's a night custodian, one of the guys who would have used the closet he hid in. And we don't know about this interaction, unfortunately, but the night custodian apparently didn't think it was unusual for a loofer worker to be accidentally locked in at night.

He didn't seem to ask what was inside the white sheet package that was under his arm, or why the doorknob was missing, but he unlocked the door and let him out. And he crossed what's called the court of the Sphinx and he disappeared into early morning Paris. And the only record we have is a shopkeeper across the street was setting up shop and thought it was funny that someone in a Louvre workers uniform threw something over his shoulder as he walked away.

And police would later find that that was the doorknob.

Lynn Thoman: That is such an amazing story. And the Louvre staff actually helped him escape. The Louvre didn't even realize that the Mona Lisa was missing.

How does the world's most famous museum lose track of what became the world's most famous painting?

Noah Charney: Well, he chose well, because he chose to steal it on a day when it wasn't open to the public. There were staff members there. But for the first about half a day, people assumed that there was nothing amiss and that someone had taken the Mona Lisa either for conservation or to be photographed.

And so there wasn't a panic about this until much later. And they called in the French police. It was an infamous debacle, because there was a guy named Louis Lepine, who was the commissioner, and he was infamous for being successful.

This was his big failure. And he wound up interviewing Louvre staff members, including Perugia twice, and never suspected that he was involved.

Lynn Thoman: So fascinating. For centuries, taking art was treated as one of the spoils of victory. If you had to point to a moment when the world started to see the taking of art, not as conquest, but as theft, what point would that be?

Noah Charney: If we're talking about large scale and with a European focus for Catholics, it was the Treaty of Talentine. The Treaty of Talentine is when the Papal States surrendered to Napoleon, and there were huge quantities of cultural heritage objects that had to be surrendered to him. And it was effectively stripping the Vatican of its assets.

So that's probably a good point where people really sat up, particularly if Catholics who were upset with the idea that this conqueror, who is himself Catholic, is stripping the Vatican of all of its wealth.

The next step would be World War II, particularly with the Degenerate Art Exhibition. The idea that certain works of art are morally corrosive and should be destroyed or captured and put in a sort of circus tent to be mocked, to show what the Nazis had saved the world from.

And then this forcible sale of collections from not only Jewish families, but also German families as well. We tend to forget about that, but Aryan German nationals also had their art collections seized from them, and it was part of the fuel of the Nazi war machine. And then, of course, at the end of World War II, we had so many objects that were lost, destroyed, or forcibly sold that it became a bigger international issue that really resonated for the contemporary world in the internet era.

Because for the first time in the internet era, people who had objects taken from their families could find where they were. So all of the big lawsuits for repatriation or restoration of looted works during the Nazi era came only when the internet let us see from our living rooms where these objects were, and basically who to bring a lawsuit against to try to retrieve them.

Lynn Thoman: So interesting that the internet led to that. The thief didn't just take the Mona Lisa off the wall. The theft turned it into a global celebrity.

Why did the missing painting become more fascinating than the painting itself?

Noah Charney: It's something that I've called an invisible icon. It's the kind of thing that everybody recognizes. They probably know the name and who painted it and nothing more.

But I have to say that there's less to the painting than some people want there to be. Everyone is interested in true crime. A smaller percentage of the world is interested in art.

True crime grabs people's interest, especially unsolved crimes. And we have this perfect storm. So people are fascinated with the prices for which art sells, especially people who are not among the wealthy who are buying it, who think it's just so absurd.

And yet it's kind of like staring at a train wreck. They can't look away. So the value of art is one thing.

A true crime story that the liberal media was using as a sort of whip to chastise the right wing conservative French government institution that was supposed to protect the work. We're in an era with lots of newspapers looking for things to write about and an ongoing story which kept on having twists to it. People were writing in with clues, most of them false leads.

And it made international news because it was such an iconic artist involved. It was an iconic museum. It was the museum.

If people have heard of a museum, it was the Louvre and the unsolved element of it. And then the kicker where the thief actually returns it on purpose. It was a perfect storm during maybe a quiet period in world news before the Titanic sank.

Lynn Thoman: Hollywood has taught us to imagine art thieves as elegant masterminds. What are real art thieves actually like?

Noah Charney: There's basically no such thing as a real art thief. There are criminals who have stolen art on more than one occasion. But the concept among the general public and criminals is that art theft is sleek and elegant and a classy thing to be involved in.

And the issue is the criminals are learning about art crime from the same sources the general public are, which is fiction and film. And so the concept of an art thief as being kind of a cool sort of criminal to be comes from a best-selling novelist named Maurice Leblanc and a character he invented named Arsène Lupin. And for the francophone world, this was as popular as Sherlock Holmes was for the anglophone world.

So this was a really big deal. Arsène Lupin is a cat burglar who's elegant and aristocratic in bearing and is non-violent and is acrobatic and clever and witty and all the cliches that we have about an art thief. And people have aspired to be like this.

And there's a couple of people who have stolen art on multiple occasions, but there really isn't any such thing we know of as a full-time professional art thief. The people who steal art tend to be members of an organized crime group, either a large syndicate or a smaller local one, who recognize that art has a high value, is easily portable, and in many cases, is under-protected. And they don't know anything about art.

They have no training in art theft per se. And they rarely know what to do with the object once they've stolen it. And if thieves knew how hard it was to extract any value from it, they probably wouldn't bother stealing it in the first place.

Lynn Thoman: Noah, after all these years studying art crime, what do you think people are really trying to possess when they steal art?

Noah Charney: I think it's about raising your social status among other criminals, if we're talking about the criminal world. And it's the same reason people collect art legitimately among the sort of wealthy elite in the non-criminal world. If we go back to the Victorian era, this was a period where there was a hierarchy of what criminals thought was cool to be involved in.

And people would try to work their way up from being a pickpocket or doing some sort of basic confidence trick street crimes up to higher level things. Theft from banks at a time when a safecracker could listen to tumblers clicking into place and open combination locks that way. Theft of jewelry, theft of art, because jewelry and art were collectibles of the elite and criminals who could access them were sort of stealing their way into being elite as well.

And then the last one was theft from a moving train, which was absolutely the coolest thing you could do in the Victorian period. If something is associated with high class social class today, criminals still think of it as associated with high social class among criminals. And the problem from the criminal perspective is they just can't wait to brag about it to other criminals.

And that's how most stolen identifiable artists recovered. As you probably know, all police around the world pay criminals to inform on other criminals. And so you hear through the grapevine that, you know, Joe Schmagegi is boasting that he stole a Picasso painting.

And that information is passed on the police. The criminal informs is paid. And then the police know where the object is and launch an investigation.

And so if a criminal was self-confident enough to not brag about it and just be happy with the Picasso on their wall, we would probably not recover it. But that's not the nature of the psychology of collecting.

Lynn Thoman: Fortunately for museums and others.

Noah, what are the three takeaways on art crime that you would like to leave the audience with today?

Noah Charney: One is it's unfortunately very easy to steal art, but it is almost impossible to extract any financial value out of it. And if criminals knew how difficult it was, they probably wouldn't bother.

Number two is the media tends to inadvertently assist art criminals by giving them a sense of the value of an object.

And they have no idea what the value is at all.

And then the third takeaway is that fiction and film provide the knowledge base for all of us in the general public and criminals. And if police know that there is a finite amount of information that criminals know about art crime, they can take advantage of it and use that to try to recover those objects.

Lynn Thoman: Noah, this has been fascinating. Thank you.

Noah Charney: Thank you. I'd love to come back anytime.

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This transcript was auto-generated. Please forgive any errors.