The Rescue Artist

Americans—knew Valfierno’s real name. Nor did Perugia. More than that, the marques had never confided a word to Perugia about the con he had dreamed up. All that Perugia knew was that a well-spoken stranger had hired him to steal the Mona Lisa—payment to be made later—and he had done so. But, then, not a word of instruction and not a penny in payment! For two years, Perugia fretted and waited. During all that time, the Mona Lisa lay hidden in a box under the stove in Perugia’s apartment.

Chaudron, the forger, had good reason to keep quiet. And the buyers could not go to the police without acknowledging that they had tried to purchase stolen goods. Nor did Valfierno have to worry about what would happen if the real Mona Lisa ever surfaced. His victims had no idea how to find him, but what if they did somehow track him down? “Now let’s just calm down for a minute and think, shall we?” Valfierno could say. “What would you expect the Louvre to do, after they lost their most valuable painting, except to announce that they had marvelous news and they’d found it again? But you and I know who has the real Mona Lisa, don’t we?”^*

Is the story of the six fakes true? No one knows. By definition, perfect crimes are beyond detection. The source of the story was a journalist named Karl Decker, a flamboyant and much-acclaimed Hearst reporter, who published the tale in the Saturday Evening Post in 1932. Decker claimed to have known the marques, who told him the story on condition that it not be published until after his death.

Half a century later, in 1981, Seymour Reit’s book filled in the picture that Decker’s magazine article had sketched. Reit was a well-regarded writer, and the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Art News, among others, praised his book. Robert Spiel, a 20-year FBI veteran who specializes in art crime and the author of Art Theft and Forgery Investigation: The Complete Field Manual, cited Reit’s book in his bibliography and wrote that “if you can read only one true story of art crime, read this.”

Decker and Reit died years ago, and neither left behind any hint that he had pulled off a hoax of his own. Even so, Reit’s credits are curious enough that a skeptic might raise an eyebrow. Though Reit published such straightforward, well-received works as a history of camouflage in World War II, he also wrote children’s books. He was, as well, the creator of Casper the friendly ghost. Donald Sassoon, a historian whose Becoming Mona Lisa tells the story of how the painting became an icon, dismisses Reit’s story as an urban legend.

In any case, Perugia was arrested in 1913, when he tried to sell the real Mona Lisa to a well-known art dealer in Florence. His motive was unclear. (Perhaps he had despaired of ever receiving any money from the marques.) The dealer contacted the head of the Uffizi, and the two men met Perugia at his shabby hotel in Florence. Perugia rummaged in a homemade wooden trunk, lifted out a bundle wrapped in red cloth, and handed over the Mona Lisa. Bowled over, the dealer and the curator stammered something about needing to take the painting to the Uffizi for a closer look. Perugia was to stay in his room and wait. As the two men rushed out the hotel door, the receptionist hollered at them to wait a minute. What was that they were carrying? They hadn’t stolen one of the hotel’s paintings, had they?

At his trial, Perugia defended himself on patriotic grounds. He had taken the Mona Lisa because it offended his Italian pride that France had possession of such a treasure. Perugia’s lawyer maintained that no harm had been done—no one had been hurt, and the painting was intact and even better-known than it had been. The public went along. Perugia was briefly a hero, lauded for his devotion to his native land. The court imposed a sentence of only twelve months, which was reduced to seven on appeal.

The Mona Lisa story comes with more than enough holes for a cynic like Charley Hill to dismiss it. But Hill has too much respect for history to ignore one story, this one indisputably true, from roughly the same era as the Mona Lisa theft.

Adam Worth was the greatest thief of Victorian England. He provides the single unimpeachable example we know of a thief who stole a beloved masterpiece and kept it locked away, for his eyes only. More than a century ago, Worth stole the world’s most expensive painting and kept it with him, without ever trying to sell it or telling a soul, for twenty-five years.

The story of Worth’s obsession, brilliantly told in Ben Macintyre’s Napoleon of Crime, began in 1876, when an American visitor to London bid a record-setting $600,000 (in today’s dollars) for Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Georgiana, an ancestor of Princess Diana, was sexy and scandalous, by reputation England’s greatest beauty. As notorious in eighteenth-century England as Princess Di would be two centuries later, Georgiana was a novelist, a compulsive gambler, the wife of the stunningly wealthy Duke of Devonshire (in a menage a trois that also included Lady Elizabeth Foster), and mistress to a future prime minister. Georgiana died young, though she outlived her days of glory. “Before you condemn me,” she wrote near the end, “remember that at seventeen I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess.”

A century after Georgiana’s death, her portrait came up for auction. To judge from the commotion, she might never have been away. Crowds of gawkers clutched their tickets and waited in line at the Thomas Agnew & Sons art gallery on Old Bond Street to glimpse the painting. The Earl of Dudley coveted it, as did Ferdinand de Rothschild. In the end, no one could compete with Junius Spencer Morgan, the American banker, whose winning bid secured the Gainsborough as a gift for his art-loving son, J. P. Morgan. One condition of the sale, which hardly seemed worth mentioning, was that Morgan leave his new acquisition on exhibit a short while before taking it away.

A few weeks later, on a May night in 1876, a small man pried open a window of the Agnew Gallery and climbed inside. He cut Georgiana from her gilt frame, rolled her up, tucked her beneath his coat, and retreated as he had come.

The thief was Adam Worth, an American-born crook of such elegance and elusiveness that he served Arthur Conan Doyle as the model for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Worth had a younger brother, John, who shared his lack of morals but not his savvy. At the time of the theft, John Worth was in Newgate Prison on a forgery charge. Adam’s scheme was to work a trade: the painting that all London was hunting in exchange for his brother’s freedom.

But the plan skidded off course. John Worth’s lawyer proved better than anyone had anticipated. Before Adam Worth had even opened negotiations for his brother’s release, John’s lawyer had him out on the street on a technicality, a free man.

That left Adam Worth in a most peculiar spot.

For the next quarter century, Worth kept Georgiana with him. Even when he desperately needed money and the police seemed to be closing in and various shady characters came whispering that they had heard rumors about a certain item that perhaps they might help him with, Worth refused to consider a deal. “He turned them all down, preferring to face disgrace, penury, and imprisonment rather than part with the Duchess,” Macintyre writes. “The painting became his permanent companion…. When he traveled, she came, too, in his false-bottomed trunk.” At home in London, Worth slept with the portrait under his mattress.

In his old age, when Pinkerton detectives finally had him cornered, Worth at last handed his mistress over. Penniless despite a lifetime’s illicit income, Worth bartered the Duchess away for a never-disclosed sum—one account put it at $25,000—and a promise of immunity. The painting, then in the United States, was turned over to the son of the art dealer it had been stolen from originally. The rightful owner took custody of the long-missing portrait and set off for home with it, on the steamer Etruria, bound from New York to London. Among the passengers was one small man with a sad air, no longer able to acknowledge his beloved but secretly accompanying her on one last voyage nonetheless.

Today, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is back where she belongs. In 1994, the present Duke of Devonshire bought the portrait and installed it in his ancestral home, Chatsworth. In the grand dining room where Georgiana held court in life, she presides triumphantly once again.

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Gangsters