The Rescue Artist

paintings on their behalf?

Consider the case of Stephane Breitwieser, a French waiter who made headlines around the world in the winter of 2003. Breitwieser was arrested for stealing perhaps $1.4 billion worth of paintings and other art objects for his own pleasure.^* Over the course of seven years, he robbed 179 museums in seven countries. He concentrated on small museums, which tended to be poorly guarded, and small objects, which he could tuck inside his coat.

Breitwieser operated in daylight, and his approach could hardly have been simpler. While his girlfriend kept watch or flirted with any guard who happened by, Breitwieser took out his knife, cut a painting from its frame, rolled it up, and walked off with it. The most valuable item in his collection was Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Sybille of Cleves, valued at $8 million.

Cranach’s painting showed her as a beauty, with red hair to her waist, in an elegant red gown. Sybille had two younger, unmarried sisters, Anne and Amelia. In 1539, in search of wife number four, Henry VIII sent Hans Holbein, his court painter, to paint the sisters’ portraits. Henry chose Anne; her portrait now hangs in the Louvre. Holbein may have done his work too well. When Anne arrived in England, Henry was horrified by the true appearance of this “Flanders mare.” Only moments before the wedding ceremony, he paused to bemoan his fate. “My lords, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do what I must do this day for any earthly thing.” Six months later Henry had the marriage annulled and pensioned Anne off, notably with a castle that had belonged to Anne Boleyn.

Breitwieser stole Cranach’s portrait on his twenty-fifth birthday, as a gift to himself. He never tried to sell it or anything else he stole. The art-loving thief stored his loot in his mother’s apartment. Often, before he brought his paintings to her, he took them to a local shop where the owner admired Breitwieser’s latest “purchases” and helped him choose new frames.

Breitwieser was finally caught when a museum guard in Lucerne, Switzerland, saw him trying to steal a bugle. To protect her son after his arrest (or, by some accounts, to keep authorities from revoking her work permit), Breitwieser’s mother set out to hide the evidence. She threw 100 objects into a canal and destroyed sixty oil paintings—including the Cranach—by chopping them into tiny pieces and throwing them out with her kitchen garbage, buried under coffee grounds and egg shells.

What about a low-rent Dr. No? Would the existence of a character who ordered up small-time thefts make it more likely that somewhere in the shadows lurks a full-fledged version?

Listen a minute to Jim Hill (no relation to Charley), one of the most respected art detectives in Britain. A soft-spoken Scot, Jim Hill has spent the last 20 years doggedly chasing stolen art. Most of it is good but not spectacular, perhaps in the $10,000 range, but his resume includes such coups as the recovery of a ?100,000 grandfather clock.

In a business full of men who love telling stories—and love most of all telling stories where they themselves play the starring role—Jim Hill is that rare character who shuns the spotlight. (“Jim doesn’t go in for any kind of self-aggrandizing bullshit,” Charley Hill once observed, in a tone of mingled admiration and puzzlement, as if he were describing a cop who drank nothing stronger than ginger ale.) In the old, swashbuckling movies that Charley likes so much, full of cavalry charges and doomed last stands, Jim Hill would be perfectly cast as a soldier in the ranks, true to his mates and steady at his post. He would have only a line or two of dialogue and would manage a tight smile as a medic fished in his shoulder for a bullet. The injury was, he might concede in his gentle burr, “a wee bit of bother.”

So when Jim Hill does venture on a story, no one disputes him. Twice in his career, he says, he has seen a collector with a private gallery of stolen art. “One gentleman had a secret room off a big workshop, and only he had access to it. Over the years he’d received a lot of stolen property—silver, bronzes, paintings—and he put them in glass cases all around the room, and he’d sit there, all alone, with nice, quiet music on, in a lovely armchair, and he would just sit amongst all this property, and enjoy having it in his presence. Never used it, never tried to find a buyer. He was quite a wealthy man, and he just enjoyed being in the company of valuable and lovely items.”

What about six Dr. No’s, all contemporaries, who were so far from smalltime that each one owned (or so he believed) the world’s best-known painting? Early on the morning of August 21, 1911, an Italian carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia crept out of a storage closet in the Louvre where he had hidden overnight. This was a Monday, the day the museum was closed to the public. Perugia had once been employed by the Louvre, and over his clothes he wore one of the floppy, nearly knee-length tunics issued to the hundreds of workmen who maintained the sprawling museum. The outfit rendered Perugia so innocuous as to be nearly invisible. He walked toward the Mona Lisa in the Salon Carre and checked to see that no one was nearby. Then he removed the painting from the wall, tucked it beneath his smock, and walked out of the museum.

That much is undisputed fact. The rest of the story, depending on the teller, is an illustration of either the perfect crime or perfect nonsense.

As recounted by Seymour Reit in The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa, Perugia was merely a hired hand. The mastermind behind the Mona Lisa theft was an Argentinean con man who called himself the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno. In tandem with a brilliant French forger named Yves Chaudron, the marques had made a nice living peddling fake old masters to foolish collectors.

In Buenos Aires, the two swindlers had moved beyond the simple selling of fakes and had cooked up an elaborate scheme to sell paintings “off the wall” of the national museum. The marques, who had bribed a guard to keep away, would lead the dupe to an especially fine painting and ask, in a whisper, if he would like it. He recognized, of course, the marques would go on, that he was dealing with a savvy businessman who knew a thing or two about how the world worked. And therefore, to make sure there was no funny business—here the marques drew a handsome pen from his pocket—the customer should take this pen and make some small marks or write some secret cipher on the back of the canvas so that later, when he received his painting, he would know that it was this very one.

One dupe waved the pen aside and instead took out a pocket knife and cut an oddly shaped scrap from the edge of the canvas, in the back, beyond the boundary of the painting proper. When the time came, the man explained, he would check to see if the newly delivered canvas was missing a piece that fit precisely with the one he had just removed. The marques was struck almost dumb with admiration. Never had he encountered such cunning.

The scam was that Chaudron had already painted his fake before the dupe ever showed up, and Valfierno had mounted the two paintings together, in the same frame. The real one was in front, where visitors to the museum could admire it, and the fake one behind, where gullible strangers could sign (or cut) it.

Out for bigger game, Valfierno and Chaudron had come to Paris. There Chaudron perfected fake Mona Lisas while Valfierno cultivated new clients. When he had six suckers with big enough bankrolls and small enough brainpans, Valfierno made his pitch: What would you think of owning the greatest painting in the world? It went without saying, the marques went on, that no one but you could ever see the masterpiece, but, on the other hand, you would know that you alone possessed what no one else could ever own. So the marques said, six times, to six customers.

Then Valfierno told Perugia, the carpenter, that it was time for him to do his bit. (The theft itself was so easy because the Louvre in 1911 was focused on vandals, not thieves. The Louvre was heavily guarded during visiting hours and virtually defenseless after hours.) Spooked by an attacker who had slashed an Ingres in 1907, the Louvre had decided to build a glass-fronted box to house the Mona Lisa. Perugia knew his way around the Louvre because he had been one of the workmen who built the box.

News of the theft stunned Paris, and then the world. The headline in Le Matin was a single word in giant letters: “INIMAGINABLE!” Soon after, Valfierno approached his six clients. Still game?

“Yes” came the answer, six times. Valfierno sold six fakes, each for $300,000, roughly $6 million a copy in today’s currency. Then, having perpetrated the perfect crime, he vanished. None of the buyers—supposedly six