The Art Thief

Stéphane Breitwieser was a French waiter, working in Switzerland, who lived with his mother. Between 1995 and 2001, he stole over two hundred and thirty artworks from museums in seven European countries. Renaissance panels. Brueghel. Watteau. Tapestries. Ivories. He never sold any of them. He hung them on the walls of his bedroom in his mother's house outside Mulhouse. Estimated value: over a billion euros. He, by his own account, loved them. He was caught in November 2001, in Lucerne, walking out of a museum with a nineteenth-century bugle in his jacket. He confessed within hours. He gave police his mother's address. Coordinating a search across the French border took days. Mireille Stengel had time. Her son's girlfriend phoned in a panic. To protect him, she destroyed almost everything. Smaller works went into the kitchen sink waste-disposal unit. Larger ones were cut up with kitchen scissors and burned in the wood stove for two days. Oil paintings were rolled and thrown into a section of the Rhone-Rhine canal. When French police finally arrived, the bedroom walls were pale rectangles where pictures had hung. Maren and Ellis on a son who could not stop, a mother who could not say no, and a kitchen sink in eastern France that processed five centuries of European art over a long weekend.