The Buhrle Heist

Zurich, Sunday 10 February 2008. Around 4:30 PM, half an hour before closing, three men in ski masks walk into the E.G. Bührle Foundation — a private museum in a converted villa in the Seefeld district, holding one of the most significant private Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections in twentieth-century Europe. One has a pistol. The staff and visitors are ordered to lie face-down. The thieves walk straight to four specific paintings: Cézanne's "The Boy in the Red Waistcoat", Degas's "Count Lepic and his Daughters", Van Gogh's "Blossoming Chestnut Branches", Monet's "Poppy Field at Vétheuil". They lift each one from its wall. They put them in a duffel bag. They walk out. They get into a white van. Total time inside: under three minutes. Total value: a hundred and forty-one million euros. The van is found abandoned a few hundred metres away within fifteen minutes. The Van Gogh and the Degas are still inside it. The Cézanne and the Monet — the most valuable two — are gone, almost certainly transferred to a second vehicle. The trail leads to Belgrade, to a network of former Yugoslav intelligence operatives turned organised-crime art handlers. The Cézanne is recovered within a week. The Monet takes four years. Maren and Ellis on three minutes, four canvases, two arrests, one death in Belgrade, and the Cézanne boy who, as far as anyone can tell from the painting, was not bothered by any of it.