The Vault

Ghent, Belgium, the night of 10-11 April 1934. One panel of twelve, cut out of a fifteenth-century altarpiece in Saint Bavo's Cathedral. Never recovered. The single most famous unsolved art theft in northern European history. The altarpiece is the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb — known as the Ghent Altarpiece — painted between 1426 and 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Twelve hinged oak panels. One of the foundational works of Northern Renaissance painting. By 1934 it had already been looted by Napoleonic France (1794) and would later be looted by Nazi Germany (1940). All those have been recovered. Except this one panel: the Just Judges, the lower-left of the open polyptych, depicting mounted figures in fifteenth-century Burgundian dress. For six months a series of typewritten ransom letters signed D.U.A. negotiated with the Bishop of Ghent. The companion John the Baptist panel was recovered as a sign of good faith from a luggage locker at Brussels North Station. The Just Judges was not surrendered. On 25 November 1934 a respected Belgian businessman named Arsène Goedertier had a heart attack at a public event, called for his lawyer, and confessed before he died that he was the only person who knew where the panel was hidden — and that the location was identified in his desk drawer. The drawer contained carbon copies of the ransom letters and a single line: "the Just Judges rest in a place where neither I nor anyone can fetch it without attracting public attention." That line has been studied for ninety years. The cathedral itself has been searched repeatedly with ground-penetrating radar. No retrieval. The panel is now replaced by a 1945 reproduction. Maren and Ellis on the deathbed and the desk drawer.

Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands, 4 AM on Friday 25 February 2005. Two men in KLM uniforms, in a stolen KLM cargo van, drive through a perimeter gate of the cargo terminal. The single guard with a clipboard waves them through — the uniforms are correct, the van logo is correct, it is a routine pre-dawn cargo movement. They drive across the tarmac to a holding bay where a sealed shipping container is waiting to be loaded onto a 6 AM KLM flight to Tel Aviv. The container holds approximately a hundred and eighteen million dollars in uncut industrial diamonds. They hold up the bay guard at gunpoint. They tell him to lie face-down and count to three hundred. They load the three-hundred-kilo container into the van. They drive back out the same gate. The same guard waves them through. He notices the van is riding lower on the way out. He does not regard the difference as significant. The guard at the bay reaches an emergency phone. Within an hour, the abandoned van is found in a wooded area near Halfweg. The diamonds have been transferred to a second vehicle. They have never been recovered. The two men in the van have never been publicly identified. Multiple KLM employees were investigated for the inside leak. None was successfully convicted. This is, in absolute monetary terms, one of the largest single thefts in modern Dutch history. Maren and Ellis on the heist that did not circumvent security at all — that walked through the front door, in the right uniform, in the right vehicle, past the right guard, at the right time.

London, Easter weekend 2015. A small group of British career criminals — average age 62, the eldest of them 76 — drilled their way into a safe-deposit vault below the central London jewellery district over a four-day Bank Holiday closure. They climbed through a lift shaft, assembled a 75-kilogram industrial diamond core drill in the basement, and cut three overlapping circular holes in 50 centimetres of reinforced concrete. They emptied 73 of the 195 boxes. Walked out the front door with the haul packed into wheelie bins, in daylight, on a London pavement. They returned for a second night. Estimated total take: between £14 million and £20 million in cash, gold and gems. They were caught because the Met placed audio surveillance on a Pentonville pub called The Castle, where the men met to divide the proceeds. The recordings ran for weeks. Brian Reader, the 76-year-old, had a previous gold-bullion conviction from 1983. Convictions came in March 2016. Most of the haul has never been recovered. The Hatton Garden Safe Deposit, which had operated continuously since the 1950s, never reopened. Maren and Ellis on the largest successful burglary in English legal history — a last commission, by retired specialists, in central London at Easter.

Palermo, Sicily, the night of 17-18 October 1969. A heavy rainstorm has emptied the streets. Two men force the front door of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a small Baroque oratory in the centre of the old city, walls entirely covered in Giacomo Serpotta's seventeenth-century white stucco. They walk past everything except a single painting hanging above the altar. It is Caravaggio's Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Painted in 1609, in the last year of his life. Fourteen square metres of canvas, dramatic chiaroscuro, the holy family attended by two saints, the Madonna's red robe in the lit centre. It has hung in the oratory continuously for 360 years. They do not remove the heavy gilded frame. They cut the canvas out of the frame with a sharp blade, along the inner edge of the moulding. They roll it. They walk out into the rain. By morning the frame is empty. The painting has not been seen since. Multiple Mafia informants over the decades have offered conflicting accounts — that it was kept in barns, damaged by rats and pigs, kept rolled in carpets, cut into pieces, eventually burned around 1980. The Italian Carabinieri's art-theft division has investigated for over 55 years. The case is still officially open. A high-quality reproduction now hangs in the original frame. Maren and Ellis on the most famous unsolved art theft in southern European history, and the empty frame that waited 32 years for an answer.

The Netherlands, 30 March 2020. The third week of the first European COVID lockdown. The streets of the small wooded village of Laren, thirty kilometres east of Amsterdam, are emptier at three in the morning than they have been at any point in fifty years. A single man approaches the locked front door of the Singer Laren Museum with a sledgehammer. The doors give. He walks through the entrance hall, turns left at a specific corridor, walks past three other paintings without pausing, and arrives at the wall where Van Gogh's "Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" — on long-term loan from the Groninger Museum — is hanging. He lifts it from its hooks. He turns around. He walks back out. Total time inside the museum: three minutes and twenty seconds. The date is Vincent van Gogh's birthday. For three years the painting is missing. In April 2023 it is delivered, anonymously, in a small package, to the Amsterdam art detective Arthur Brand — who has spent a long career recovering high-profile stolen artworks through informal negotiation. The painting is intact. It is returned to the Groninger Museum within hours. The convicted defendant, Nils M., had been in custody on a separate Frans Hals theft since 2021 and was tied to the Singer Laren by DNA from the door frames. Whoever returned the painting has never been publicly identified. Maren and Ellis on a Van Gogh stolen on Van Gogh's birthday from a country that, that night, was as quiet as it has ever been.

Paris, the night of 19-20 May 2010. Vjeran Tomic — a career thief and climber the French press would soon call the Spider-Man of Paris — works for an hour on a window of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Loose bolts on a removable iron grille. He climbs in. He has come for one painting: a Léger he had identified on previous visits as a paying tourist. He plans to be inside for under five minutes. He smashes a glass case to take the Léger. Nothing happens. No alarm. No movement of guards. No response of any kind. The motion-detection system, the inquiry would later establish, had been broken for eight weeks. The contractor responsible had filed three written reports identifying the fault. The reports had been received and filed. The repairs had been authorised. The repairs had not been carried out. Tomic stands in the silent gallery. He moves, room to room. Picasso, "Le Pigeon aux petits pois". Matisse, "La Pastorale". Modigliani, "La Femme à l'éventail". Braque, "L'Olivier près de l'Estaque". He cuts each canvas from its frame. He rolls them. He climbs back out. Total time inside: between five and ten minutes. Total estimated value: a hundred million euros. Not one of the five paintings has ever been recovered. Tomic was convicted in 2017. He was a competent climber, not a supernatural one. The paintings left the Musée d'Art Moderne not because of his brilliance, but because of an unread email. Maren and Ellis on the night that Paris lost five masterpieces because somebody had not followed up on a contractor's report.

Stockholm, 22 December 2000. Fifteen minutes before the Nationalmuseum closes for the Christmas holiday, two car bombs go off in central Stockholm. Six hundred metres from the museum at one location, a kilometre away at another. They are not large bombs. They cause significant property damage. There are no fatalities. They are, by the planners' subsequent admission, diversions. While fifty Stockholm officers are diverted across central Stockholm to respond, three men in masks walk into the Nationalmuseum through the front entrance with handguns visible. They order staff and visitors to lie face-down. They walk up the marble staircase. They go directly to a small gallery on the second floor. They take three paintings. Renoir, "Conversation with the Gardener". Renoir, "Young Parisian". Rembrandt, "Self-Portrait", 1630. Total time inside the gallery: three minutes. They leave through a service door at the rear. Onto a small dock on the harbour. A motorboat is waiting with the engine running. They climb in. The boat pulls away. By the time the Stockholm marine unit can get on the water, they are gone. The convictions came in 2001. The paintings did not. Recovery took five years and two FBI sting operations on two continents. The Renoir came back in 2001. The Rembrandt was recovered in a Copenhagen hotel room in 2005. The second Renoir in Los Angeles, also 2005. All three are home. Maren and Ellis on the cleanest exit strategy in the history of European art theft — a small boat at a back dock, on a harbour, in a city built on water.

Berlin, 27 March 2017. At 3:45 in the morning, three men cross a regional railway track at the rear of the Bode Museum on Museum Island. They place a ladder against the back wall. They climb to a second-floor window — left ajar by staff for ventilation — and they climb in. They walk to a glass case in a numismatic gallery. They smash the case with an axe. Inside the case is a single coin. The Big Maple Leaf. Issued in 2007 by the Royal Canadian Mint. Fifty centimetres in diameter. Three centimetres thick. One hundred kilograms of pure four-nines gold. Worth approximately 3.8 million euros at melt value, considerably more as a numismatic object. They have brought a hand-trolley. They wheel the coin to the window. They lower it eight metres on ropes. Onto a wheelbarrow waiting on the railway track below. They climb down. They wheel the coin three hundred metres along the track to a vehicle. They drive off. Total time: under twenty minutes. The Bode Museum thieves were members of the Remmo clan — the same Berlin-based extended family that, two years and eight months later, would walk into Dresden's Green Vault with axes. The Bode Museum theft was the rehearsal. The coin was almost certainly broken up and melted within days. Of the five Big Maple Leafs ever issued worldwide, by the end of 2017 there were four. Maren and Ellis on the wheelbarrow at the rear of one of Europe's largest numismatic collections — and the family who, in 2017, were learning.

Oslo. Edvard Munch's most reproduced work. Tempera on cardboard, 1893. One of four versions of The Scream. Taken twice, ten years apart, from two different museums in the same city. First theft: 12 February 1994. The morning of the Lillehammer Olympics opening ceremony. Every camera in Norway is pointed at a small Olympic village three hours north. Two men set a ladder against the National Gallery. Smash a second-floor window. Walk in. Lift The Scream from its hooks. Walk back out. Drive off. Total time: under fifty seconds. They leave a postcard on the gallery floor. Hand-written. "Thanks for the poor security." Recovered three months later by a Scotland Yard officer running a sting from a hotel in Åsgårdstrand. Second theft: 22 August 2004. A different version of the painting, in the Munch Museum on the eastern side of the city. Sunday morning. Visitors inside. Two armed men walk in with handguns visible. Take The Scream. Take Madonna from the next wall. Walk out a fire exit. Drive off in an Audi. Total time: ninety seconds. Recovered two years later, damaged. The restoration team worked on it for two years before it returned to public display. Maren and Ellis on the painting that depicts panic and, in a way nobody quite knows what to do with, generates it.

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.

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.

Dresden, 25 November 2019. At 4:47 in the morning, a fire is set in a street-side electrical distribution box on the Augustusbrücke side of the Residenzschloss — the royal palace of the Saxon kings. The fire is small but specific. It disables the streetlights. It darkens the area around the palace. Inside the palace sits the Grünes Gewölbe, the Green Vault, established by Augustus the Strong in 1723 — one of the oldest treasure chambers in Europe. Four men climb to a lower-floor window. Saw through the original iron grilles. Smash the reinforced glass with an axe. Enter the Pretiosensaal — the room of precious objects. Smash the display cases. Take twenty-one pieces of eighteenth-century Saxon royal jewellery — diamonds, emeralds, rubies, the Diamond Rose Order — by the handful. They are inside the building for less than five minutes. They leave through the same window, drop into a stolen Audi A6, drive to an underground car park miles away, and set the car on fire to destroy the forensic evidence inside. The trial at Dresden Regional Court closes on 16 May 2023. Five members of the Berlin-based Remmo clan are convicted; one is acquitted. Most — but not all — of the jewellery has been returned through a plea-deal recovery in December 2022. Some pieces remain unaccounted for. The museum's restoration team has been working continuously since. Maren and Ellis on the difference between a heist and a demolition. The Saxon kings spent three centuries assembling pieces of staggering fineness. Four men, in five minutes, removed twenty-one of them with axes.

Antwerp, Belgium. The weekend of 15-16 February 2003. The Antwerp Diamond Centre vault — sixty metres below ground, behind a steel door three feet thick, protected by ten distinct security systems including heat sensors, Doppler radar, magnetic field detectors, and a combination dial requiring both a key and a code — is opened over a single weekend. One hundred and nine of its one hundred and eighty-nine private safe-deposit boxes are emptied. Estimated take: at least one hundred million dollars. The man behind it is Leonardo Notarbartolo. A jeweller from Turin. He had rented an office above the vault three years earlier and become, in every functional sense, a member of the building. He greeted the security guards by name. He brought them coffee. While he was visiting his own deposit box every week, he was studying the system from inside it. The team — known to Belgian investigators as the School of Turin — defeated all ten security layers. The polystyrene shield for the heat sensor. The hairspray for the motion detector. The duplicated keys. The watched combination. They walked out without triggering a single alarm. And then they drove an hour outside Antwerp and dumped their planning materials in plastic bags by the side of a forest road. A man walking his dog found the bags. Inside: surveillance plans, equipment, Notarbartolo's name on a receipt, and a half-eaten salami sandwich. The DNA on the sandwich became the prosecution's case. Maren and Ellis on two and a half years of patient infiltration, undone by five minutes of laziness in a forest.

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. 14 September 2019. Five hours after Maurizio Cattelan's solid-gold artwork "America" — a fully functional eighteen-carat gold toilet, valued at £4.8 million — has opened to the public, a small team breaks in, rips the piece from the wall with the water still running, and disappears into the dark. The artwork was Cattelan's satire on excess: a working luxury toilet that any visitor could use. It had been plumbed into Blenheim's water supply two days earlier as part of a curated exhibition. The thieves spent under five minutes inside the building. The piece weighed over a hundred kilograms. They got it into a vehicle and drove off the grounds. They flooded a UNESCO world heritage site to do it. Thames Valley Police's investigation lasted nearly five years. The trial concluded at Oxford Crown Court in March 2024: James Sheen pleaded guilty to burglary and conspiracy; Michael Jones convicted of burglary; Fred Doe convicted of conspiracy; Bora Guccuk acquitted. The court accepted that the toilet had been melted down within days of the theft and the gold sold across multiple transactions. None of it has been traced. Maren and Ellis on a piece of conceptual art whose thieves, by destroying it, performed exactly what the artwork was about.

Two men smashed a display case in a Swedish cathedral during visiting hours, grabbed royal crown jewels dating from 1600, and escaped on a speedboat across a lake. While tourists watched.

An alarm technician used his professional skills to steal a 50 million euro Renaissance masterpiece from Vienna. He buried it in the woods for three years. Then he called the police himself.

In 2012, a Romanian gang stole seven paintings from Rotterdam in 108 seconds. Picasso. Monet. Matisse. Then the ringleaders mother burned them in her wood-burning stove to protect her son.

In 1911, a handyman hid overnight in the Louvre, tucked the Mona Lisa under his jacket, and walked out. He kept it under his bed for two years. The police questioned Picasso. The real thief was filing fingerprints away.

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men posing as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Over the next 81 minutes, they stole 13 works of art including a Vermeer and Rembrandts only seascape. Total value: over half a billion dollars. Thirty-six years later, not a single work has been recovered. The empty frames still hang on the walls.