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New episode! We talk to Paul Turbo Hendry about the idea of a Dr. No, a
rich person who buys stolen artwork for their personal collection.
Do
they exist? Turbo has a few examples.
Subscribe at http://Stitcherpremium.com and get a free month with code FRAMES.
Dr No, Hans Heinrich "Heini" Thyssen-Bornemisz’s Stolen & Looted Art Collection
http://universe.byu.edu/index.php/2012/01/10/police-beat-9/ Jan.
5 – Somewhere between 1970-1985, a piece of art valued at $218,000 was
stolen from BYU campus. After being stolen the “Silver Chalice” was
sold between a number of different art dealers before finally landing in
Switzerland with Count Thyssen-Bornemisz’s collection. BYU negotiated
with Thyssen-Bornemisz’s estate and the piece of art was returned to
BYU.
The Camille Pissarro painting hanging in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Museum
The Camille Pissarro painting hanging in the Berlin apartment of Lilly Cassirer, circa 1930.
Miami lawyer leads legal charge against Spain to return Pissarro painting looted by Nazis
Cassirer’s great grandson is fighting a legal battle with the Spanish
museum to return the painting. - The Cassirer Family Trust, public domain
Gazing through the window of his
Paris hotel room in 1897, influential Impressionist artist Camille
Pissarro painted a dreamy street scene alive with suited men,
horse-drawn carriages and bustling shops. More than a century later, the
St. Honoré St., Afternoon, Effect of Rain now hangs as a signature piece in Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.
But the oil-on-canvas masterpiece
has a dark past: the Nazis strong-armed it away from Lilly Cassirer,
whose prominent Jewish family owned an art gallery in Germany in the
1930s.
After years of legal
battles, the Cassirer family — with help from prominent Miami lawyer
Steve Zack — next week will finally get a chance to convince a federal
judge to order Spain to return the priceless work of art. Monday’s trial
in a Los Angeles federal court will be closely watched in the art
world, and for those who have fought for decades to return art looted by
the Nazis during the Holocaust.
For Zack, a former American Bar
Association and Florida Bar president, the case has special resonance.
He is Jewish. And Zack and his family were forced to flee Cuba by the
island’s Communist authoritarian regime.
“This is important in different
ways to many communities,” Zack said of the case. “Jewish and Cuban
families suffered, from the Nazis and the Casto regime. When we took on
this case, it had a significant meaning far beyond just one case.”
Tracking down Nazi-looted art has been a priority for world leaders, who this month celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Washington Principles, a treaty aimed at returning the pieces to their rightful owners.
Miami lawyer Stephen Zack
- Boies Schiller Flexner law firm
The Nazi regime stole an
estimated 600,000 paintings before and during World War II, Stuart E.
Eizenstat, a U.S. State Department adviser who helped establish the
treaty, said at the conference earlier this month. He told the
conference that at least 100,000 paintings remain unrecovered, according to the New York Times, and singled out five countries, including Spain, for resisting efforts to return art stolen by Hitler’s henchmen.
As U.S. deputy secretary of the
Treasury under the Clinton administration, Eizenstat urged Spain to
return the Cassirer family’s painting to no avail.
The odyssey of the Pissarro
painting began in 1900, when his exclusive agent sold the work to the
Cassirers, who owned a prominent gallery in Berlin. Lilly Cassirer
inherited the piece in 1926, and displayed it her parlor. By 1939, as
the Nazis were systematically destroying Jewish society and preparing to
unleash their war machine on Europe, Cassirer was forced to sell them
the painting for a paltry sum in exchange for safe passage out of
Germany.
During the war, the Nazis sold
the painting to an anonymous buyer. For decades, the Cassirers believed
the painting was lost, until a family friend in 2000 spotted it at the
Thyssen-Bornemisza museum.
So what happened? The painting —
today valued at at least $40 million — wound up in the hands of (Dr No) Baron
Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a member of the famous German
industrialist family. Records show he had purchased the painting in 1976
from St. Louis collector Sydney Schoenberg through the Stephen Hahn
Gallery in New York.
Spain later bought
Thyssen-Bornemisza’s art collection for display at the government-run
museum that bears his name. The baron died in 2002. For years after the
painting was spotted, the Cassirer family repeatedly asked the museum to
return the painting.
It was not until 2005 that Claude
Cassirer, Lilly’s grandson, filed a federal lawsuit in Southern
California. A trial judge dismissed the case five years later, a
decision overturned in 2013 by a federal appeals court. Claude has since
died, but his son, David Cassirer, is now the plaintiff, along with the
United Jewish Federation of San Diego County.
“There is a widespread
recognition by civilized nations that is important to restore looted art
to the rightful owners. The Spanish government and the Spanish museum,
in this respect, is contrary to international norms. And frankly, it’s
reprehensible,” said lawyer David Boies , who also represents the
family..
Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Musuem
cortesía
Leonardo Boix
In an unusual court room
scenario, the Los Angeles federal judge must rule under Spanish legal
standards. Spain and the museum will argue that Thyssen-Bornemisza
bought the masterpiece in good faith — that the baron never knew the
painting was ripped off from the family by the Nazis.
“No evidence of bad faith can be
found in the Baron’s ownership of the painting – during which time the
painting was publicized and publicly exhibited in international tours
between 1979 and 1986, and in the 1988 magazine Architectural Digest,”
the museum’s legal team, headed by Thaddeus Stauber, wrote in court
documents.
Stauber declined to comment before the trial.
The Cassirer family’s legal team must prove that museum was an encubrador — in Spanish law, an accessory to the theft of the art decades earlier.
They point out that
Thyssen-Bornemisza was a sophisticated art buyer who employed a cadre of
experts to examine works. When he bought the painting in New York, it
still had a label identifying it as part of the Cassirer Gallery in
Berlin. Within the art world, it was widely knownthat the Cassirer painting had been targeted by the Nazis.
“It was easy to find out this was looted,” Boies said.
In the years after the purchase,
Thyssen-Bornemisza also fudged details of the purchase to try and hide
that he knew the Pissarro was a stolen work of art, according to the
lawyers.
The trial is before U.S. District Judge John Walter, and is expected to last at least three days.
David
Cassirer is suing Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum to recover a
valuable Pisarro painting that was stolen by the Nazis in 1939, and
later wound up hanging in the gallery.- Cassirer family.
When Pablo Picasso Was Suspected of Stealing the Mona Lisa
On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from Paris’s Louvre
Museum. It was a Monday—the museum was closed and security was
minimal—and the thief had reportedly spent the weekend plotting the
heist while hiding in one of the museum’s closets.
At the time, security at the Louvre was abysmal. There were less than
150 security personnel in charge of guarding 250,000 artifacts, and
none of the paintings were bolted to the walls. (The Mona Lisa, for example, hung from four measly hooks.) According to
Ian Shank at Artsy, “Months before the heist, one French reporter had
spent the night in a Louvre sarcophagus to expose the museum’s paltry
surveillance.”
After the painting's disappearance, France’s borders were effectively
closed, with officials examining every vehicle crossing the country's
eastern border. Media coverage of the heist spread across the globe,
turning the little-known painting into a household name. The Paris-Journal
offered 50,000 francs for the painting’s return. Soon, a tip from an
art thief would cause police to turn their attention toward one of the
country’s most promising young artists: Pablo Picasso.
Picasso, who had moved to Paris a decade earlier, lived with a gaggle of Bohemians dubbed la bande de Picasso.
Among this crew was the poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire, whose
former secretary was Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, a Belgian man of
questionable morals. Shortly after the Mona Lisa was stolen, Pieret—lured by the possibility of a cash reward—stepped into the Paris-Journal's office and claimed that he had lifted art from the Louvre before and had given the works to "friends."
Pieret was telling the truth. In 1907, he had stolen at least two
Iberian sculptures made in the 3rd or 4th century BCE and sold them to
Picasso, who paid him 50 francs per piece. (Picasso used these artifacts
to inspire his work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. [PDF]) That wasn't all. According to Nick Mafi at The Daily Beast, Pieret also stole a similar piece from the Louvre in 1911 and placed it on Apollinaire’s mantel.
The police read about Pieret's exploits with great interest. They
believed that the people who were in possession of these sculptures
might also have the Mona Lisa. And they didn’t have much trouble piecing together who, exactly, the thief's friends were.
Realizing that they were in deep trouble, Picasso and Apollinaire
packed the Iberian sculptures into a suitcase and ran off in the middle
of the night with plans of throwing the artworks into the river Seine.
But when the two artists reached the water, they could not will
themselves to dump the statues. Instead, Apollinaire visited the Paris-Journal
the next morning, deposited the statues, and demanded that the
newspaper give him anonymity. The newspaper agreed ... until the
authorities stepped in.
Within days of Apollinaire's visit to the newspaper, the police had
detained him. In early September, Picasso was ordered to appear before a
magistrate. When asked if he knew Apollinaire, the terrified painter
lied. “I have never seen this man,” he replied.
Recalling the events, Picasso said,
“I saw Guillaume’s expression changed. The blood ebbed from his face. I
am still ashamed.” As the proceedings continued, Picasso wept.
Although both men were indeed in possession of stolen art, the judge determined that the situation had nothing to do with the Mona Lisa’s
disappearance and decided to throw the case out. Two years later, both
men would be cleared of any possible connection to the crime when police
discovered the painting had been stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia, an
Italian artist who had been working at the Louvre.
With the Word ‘Stolen,’ the Uffizi’s Director Shames Germany for Not Returning a Painting Looted During World War II
The German-born director has displayed a
framed photograph of the Dutch still-life with a label declaring that
it is "stolen" as talks hit a stalemate.
Uffizi director Eike Schmidt poses with the black-and-white photo of the stolen work. Photo: Uffizi Galleries via Twitter.
The director of Florence’s
Uffizi Galleries, Eike Schmidt, has called on Germany to return a Dutch
still-life looted by Nazi troops during World War II. The painting was
plundered by retreating Nazi soldiers in 1943 and disappeared for
decades until 1991, when it was rediscovered in a private collection in
Germany.
Vase of Flowers by the Dutch
master Jan van Huysum (1682-1749) was originally brought to Florence by
Grande Duke Leopoldo II in 1824 and was on display at the historic Pitti
Palace until 1940, when it was moved to a nearby village for
safekeeping.
Schmidt, who is German-born, told Reuters:
“Germany has a moral duty to return this painting to our museum. This
story is preventing the wounds inflicted by World War II and the horrors
of Nazism from healing.”
The
black-and-white photograph that hangs in the original work’s place
at
the Pitti Palace in Florence.
Photo: Uffizi Galleries via Twitter.
Negotiations for the return of the
painting have stalled as intermediaries working on behalf of the family
that holds the work have demanded payment. The Uffizi cannot launch a
lawsuit in this case because under German law the statue of limitations,
set at 30 years, has expired.
“Germany should not apply the statute of limitations
to works of art stolen during the war,” Schmidt said. The director has
displayed a framed, black-and-white scale photograph of the missing work
in the place where it once hung at the Pitti Palace. It is emblazoned
with the word “stolen” written in Italian, English, and German for all
to see, in an effort to shame the owners into giving up the painting.
The Uffizi also published the image on its Twitter account to more than
29,000 followers.
A label explaining how the painting was looted during World War II.
Photo: Uffizi Galleries via Twitter.
But for now the struggle for the return
of the painting remains unresolved. If Schmidt is successful it could be
a great parting gift for the museum and Italy. He is due to leave in
2020 to become the director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
French antiquities dealers slam ‘shocking’ report on restituting African art
Dealers’
association seeks meeting with culture minister over fears report will
open the door to numerous restitution claims for a range of artefacts
France’s syndicate of
antique dealers has demanded a meeting with the country’s new culture
minister Franck Reister after the organisation was not consulted on the
recent Savoy-Sarr restitution report, which recommends the return of
African works to the continent.
In
a letter to Reister in December, Mathias Ary Jan, the president of the
Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA), called for the consequences of
the proposals in the report to be evaluated, stating that “the risks
of extensions to other geographical areas and periods of history do not
seem to have been anticipated”. He wrote: “This arduous and inefficient
arrangement risks putting the European art market at a disadvantage
while Brexit is fully under way, restricting Paris’s place and becoming
a mechanism that your administration will not be able to support [in
terms of export licences].” In a statement, the SNA also expressed
concern about how the report may affect objects from the Americas, Asia,
the Mediterranean and other European countries.
The
SNA, which has 20 tribal art dealer members, held a meeting in
December to discuss the report’s possible impact on the market. “We
decided to reunite the art market players in the hope of shedding light
on this situation,” Ary Jan says. “We’re all stupefied that we weren’t
consulted.” Following the meeting, members from the organisation were
received at France’s ministry of culture, though not by the minister
himself; another meeting is being planned for early this year.
“We’re
public players, it’s easy to find us, we’re all in the same area of
St-Germain-des-Prés,” says Julien Flak, the director of Galerie Flak.
“We’re shocked by how unbalanced the report is and the suggestion that
all the objects collected during scientific expeditions must be returned
without any investigation.”
Only two dealers consulted
The
Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational
Ethics by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, known as the Savoy-Sarr
report, was commissioned by the French president Emmanuel Macron in
March 2018. The document details an inventory of dozens of thousands of
works taken from African countries to be returned. Further, in
November, it prompted Macron to promise
Benin the restitution of 26 statues and regalia seized during France’s
sacking of Abomey in 1892 which are currently housed at the Musée du
Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris.
The
authors only consulted two dealers for their report: Robert Vallois in
Paris and Didier Claes in Brussels. But others in the trade felt this
number to be insufficient.
Many tribal art dealers
feel that their work in restoring and preserving pieces, documenting
information about them and helping to establish collections, has been
misrepresented and point to the lack of a legal framework around
restitution. “There’s no law in France to enable [the restitution of]
African heritage according to presidential desire, so for the moment
the market is not impacted because no laws have been passed,” the dealer
Bernard Dulon says.
Moreover,
many dealers are concerned that the report may discourage private
collectors from lending works of art for museum exhibitions, and deter
new collectors from entering the market. “People will be worried for a
while and private collectors will be more discreet and reticent,” the
Paris-based dealer Alain de Monbrison says. “I’d be astonished if a
private collector would loan a sculpture to a French museum now and it’s
uncertain that there’ll be any new collectors arriving.”
Hélène
Leloup, an art historian, collector and dealer who began acquiring
works from Africa in the 1950s and makes acquisitions from Malian,
Guinean and Ivorian dealers, says collectors are “disappointed” and
dealers are being treated “as if the works were stolen when some people
bought things in Africa”.
“A
lot of us are shell-shocked because this virulent, aggressive and
incomplete report opens the door to repatriation requests from any
culture in the world regarding any item in French museums.” says Anthony
Meyer, an SNA board member and dealer of Oceanic and Eskimo art who
belongs to a group of 25 experts who purchase pieces for the Musée du
Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. Suddenly confronted with the possibility of
returning these works is frustrating, he says: “If these pieces had
not become so expensive over the years, nobody would want them back.”
Laurent
Dodier, a tribal art dealer in Normandy and SNA member who
participates in Parcours des Mondes in Paris each September, identifies
another problematic possibility in the wake of the report’s restitution
suggestion: “If the pieces are returned to Africa and end up being
sold [under a regime change], they could come back onto the market in
ten years’ time, unfortunately.”
Market upset
Despite
the market’s upset after the release of the report, the Sotheby’s sale
of African and Oceanic art in Paris on 12 December went reasonably well,
generating €4.4m. The top lot, a Luba Shankadi neck rest from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, fetched €1.75m (with fees, est
€1.5-€2.5m); a Bamana head-dress from Mali soared to more than double
its estimate when it hammered for €693,000 (with fees) as did a Senufo
statue from Ivory Coast that went for €187,000 (with fees).
According
to Alexis Maggiar, the European head of African and Oceanic Art at
Sotheby’s, because the suggestions in the Savoy-Sarr report have not yet
been implemented, “it’s probably too early for collectors, or for any
of us, to say [more about its impact]”. He adds that a key determining
factor for serious collectors has always been provenance and “as long
as our research is diligent and thorough, and collectors feel confident
in the provenance we provide, we can only imagine that their desire for
great pieces will remain undimmed”.
A Luba Shankadi neck rest from the Democratic Republic of the Congo fetched €1.75m at Sotheby's Paris in December 2018. Sotheby’s/Art Digital Studio
Meanwhile, Christie’s
released a statement in light of the report that supports the aims of
its proposals: “The Savoy-Sarr report examines complex and
controversial issues surrounding cultural property. Maintaining a
responsible market for cultural property is a matter of central
importance to Christie’s and we value the role we have played in
handling great works of art from throughout the world over the
centuries.”
Yet the
auctioneer Alexandre Giquello of the Paris auction house Binoche et
Giquello, which had a sale of African and Oceanic Art on 14 December,
is less forgiving about the implications in Savoy-Sarr’s assessment. “According to the report, colonial France organised systematic plundering in Africa, but that’s historically false,” he says.
Arguing
that the French salvaged, purchased or received as bestowals many works
of art, and that the word “restitution” has been misapplied, Giquello
has written to the culture ministry to request a meeting, separately
from the SNA. “I’m looking to sensitise the authorities on a problem
far more complex than what’s in the report, which didn’t look into the
100 years of the African art market,” he says. “It’s highly disagreeable
to be seen as the villains and have to justify ourselves. There’s a
lot of love in all of this and the report is very far away from that.” Hollywood Celeb Burglar caught, Stash Recovered: https://abcnews.go.com/US/lapd-announces-arrest-recovery-items-worth-millions-series/story?id=60125383
Vjeran
Tomic, known in the French press as Spider-Man, was driven partly by
aesthetic desire. “Certain paintings can provoke me like an emotional
shock,” he said.
Illustration by Vincent Mahé
Long
before the burglar Vjeran Tomic became the talk of Paris, he honed his
skills in a graveyard. Père Lachaise, the city’s largest cemetery, is a
Gothic maze of tombstones, in the Twentieth Arrondissement, that covers
more than a hundred acres. Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, and Oscar
Wilde are among those buried there. Tomic recalled that in the
nineteen-eighties, when he was an adolescent, the cemetery attracted
hippie tourists, who flocked to the grave of Jim Morrison, and also drug
dealers and gang members. Tomic was drawn by the tombstones. In one of
twenty letters, written in careful cursive French, that he sent me
during the past year and a half, he told me, “Observing them gave me the
desire to touch them—to climb up to their peaks.” Tomic and his friends
turned the cemetery into a parkour playground, leaping from the roof of
one mausoleum to the next, daring one another to take ever-bolder
risks.
Tomic avoided his family’s apartment, which was a few
blocks south of the cemetery, because he had a tense relationship with
his parents, both of whom were Bosnian immigrants. He was born in Paris
in 1968, but the following year his mother became seriously ill, and his
father, a car mechanic, sent Vjeran to live with his grandmother, in
the Ottoman town of Mostar, in Bosnia. By the age of six, he told me, he
had developed what he calls “a devious tendency,” adding, “I was
showing some unhealthy intelligence.” He tormented his cousins by
putting thorns in their shoes. They often played along the banks of the
Neretva River, and Tomic became adept at scaling Mostar’s stone bridges;
on reaching the top, he would leap into the water below.
At the
age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in
Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street
level. He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred
years old. (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and
returned Tomic’s plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures,
“It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything.”
He returned to
Paris when he was eleven, speaking almost no French and barely knowing
his parents. He resented them for uprooting him from Bosnia. In his
words, his mother and father “lived in the apocalypse,” fighting
constantly.
Despite the turmoil at home, Tomic said, he did well
in school, and was a fine athlete. As a teen-ager, he developed a keen
interest in drawing, and in his spare time he walked, alone, through the
streets of Paris. One day, when he was sixteen, he was strolling
through the Jardin des Tuileries when he noticed people lining up
outside what appeared to be a greenhouse. It was the Musée de
l’Orangerie, a structure that was built, in 1852, to shelter orange
trees, and which now houses Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art.
Tomic went inside. The museum is best known for its Monet murals of
water lilies, but Tomic was enraptured by Renoir’s glowing renderings of
happy childhoods: kids playing with figurines, practicing the piano,
snuggling with mothers. As Tomic saw it, Renoir had used his paintbrush
to create a “parallel universe”—an enchanted version of the grim
Parisian life he had known. “Renoir has a way of seeing life from a
magical realm,” Tomic wrote to me. “It’s as if he even came from this place.” It thrilled him to be “within a hand’s reach” of such spellbinding images.
On
returning home, Tomic recalled, he told his mother about his
transporting experience at the museum, and said that he wanted to
paint—“that it was my passion, that other jobs weren’t worth anything,
that they were wastes of time.” Fearing his father’s opinion, he
entrusted her to “transmit the message” to him. His father soon
approached him and declared that painting was a hobby, not a real job.
He pressed Tomic to work at his garage, but Tomic resisted, and
eventually “thought about fleeing.”
Tomic and his friends had
begun hanging out at Père Lachaise, and when they found an abandoned
warehouse nearby they began squatting there. Tomic went to school only
intermittently, and he and the other boys supported themselves by
stealing pieces of glassware from a local factory and then selling them
at a flea market by the Porte de Montreuil. They also began climbing the
high walls on the periphery of the cemetery, which allowed them to
break into adjoining apartment buildings.
In time, Tomic began
robbing apartments in more affluent neighborhoods. His climbing skills
continued to improve, and by the age of sixteen he could scale the
façade of a multistory building with relative ease. In his letters to
me, Tomic described his burglaries in oddly mystical terms, suggesting
that his actions were compelled by invisible forces. (He used the French
word tractent, which means “towed.”) He described
canvassing neighborhoods before choosing his target: “I have to be in
harmony with certain places, where I feel good. And then, at that
moment, I see—like images from a movie—the places where I have walked in
the past week, and some places attract me, and something is waiting for
me in the end.”
One night, he had a vivid dream in which he stole five paintings from a museum. He took it as a portent. As he wrote to me, “I knew that someday I would do something great.”
Tomic
generally worked alone, scaling walls, leaping between rooftops, and
picking locks. Once inside an apartment, he looked first for jewelry,
because it was valuable and easy to sell. A burglary that took less than
two hours often yielded enough cash to support him for six months on
the French Riviera. In his letters, he recounted robbing various
Parisian luminaries, including the French-Caribbean singer Henri
Salvador and the Egyptian royal family. (He boasted to me that he stole
“gold buttons” and some of “Lawrence of Arabia’s medals” from the
Egyptians.)
Tomic
often returned to an apartment many times without taking anything, in
order to find the most expensive-looking items. He adopted this strategy
when robbing the apartment of the designer Philippe Starck, in 2004.
Starck recently told me, “I never knew anything about my burglar, but
I’ve always had respect for his style—an admiration for his temerity—and
a sort of intimate affection for him after I discovered that he’d been
practically living with us in the apartment for a few days, spending his
time sawing into my poor, small safety box without even disturbing us.
It was very much a Gentleman Burglar situation, Arsène Lupin style.”
(Lupin, the quintessential debonair thief, was invented by the French
novelist Maurice Leblanc, in 1905.) Starck went on, “The only shadow was
that the only thing he stole was my daughter’s jewelry—her only
heritage from her deceased mother.”
Tomic’s confidence as a
burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and
invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of
Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building.
He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner
came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl,” Tomic
wrote. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom.
“I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The
couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited
until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many
risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones,” Tomic wrote to me.
“But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.”
Tomic
was exaggerating—his impulsiveness sometimes led him to make poor
choices. One day, he ran out of gas while driving through the suburbs of
Paris, and discovered that he’d left his wallet at home. “I had a toy
handgun on me,” he recalled, and so he held up a bakery for two hundred
francs. He filled his tank, but a witness at the bakery reported his
license-plate number to the police, and he was arrested. He spent a year
in jail.
Starck may be excessively romantic in calling Tomic a
Gentleman Burglar. Tomic, who is tall and blunt-featured, with
close-cropped dark hair, has been convicted of at least a dozen
crimes—among them selling drugs, aggravated robbery, theft with
violence, issuing a death threat, and illegal possession of a weapon. A
friend of Tomic’s described him as “brutal and a little wild.” At the
same time, she said, he had a charming range of passions: “He is into
aesthetics, classical music, nature, animals, epicurean pleasures—wine,
cheese. He is very out there in his style, even his clothing.” (Tomic
favors G-Star pants, New Balance sneakers, cashmere ski hats, and
Lacoste underwear.) She said that Tomic was “like a poet,” noting that
“he talks about the moon.” He had maintained his habit of wandering
around Paris on foot, modelling himself on Arthur Rimbaud.
Above
all, Tomic loved fine art. His friend told me that he appreciated
Matisse for “his joyful and dancing color palette,” Klimt for “his
sensuality,” and Renoir for “the sweetness that emerges from his
portraits of children.” She observed, “The Impressionist art feeds the
poetry that is in him.”
Many of the luxurious apartments that
Tomic broke into had valuable paintings, but he tried to resist taking
them, knowing that they would be difficult to unload. “To sell them was
dangerous, and I didn’t have reliable sources abroad in order to flog
them to collectors or receivers,” he told me. Occasionally, though, the
allure of the art proved overwhelming, and Tomic took what he
found—including, he says, works by Degas and Signac. “A decent amount
passed through my home,” he wrote. He hid some pieces in a cellar, “and
some stayed with me for a long time, on the wall, and it’s in these
cases that I fell in love.”
This might sound like braggadocio, but
Tomic did make off with some masterpieces. In the fall of 2000, in an
episode that subsequently made the papers in France, he used a crossbow
with ropes and carabiners to sneak into an apartment while its occupants
were asleep and stole two Renoirs, a Derain, an Utrillo, a Braque, and
various other works—a haul worth more than a million euros.
In
May, 2010, Tomic was walking near the Seine when he came upon a large
Art Deco building. Looking through a window, he noticed a Cubist
painting hanging on the wall. Tomic later learned that the building was
the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, known as the MAM. But it was the style of the
window, rather than the Cubist painting, that caught Tomic’s interest.
He glanced up: there were cameras on the roof. Tomic walked up to one of
the building’s other windows, which was blocked from the security
cameras by a parapet. Studying the window’s metal frame, he became
convinced that it was the same type that, years earlier, he had
disassembled, screw by screw, in a heist. He took out a pocket knife,
chipped away at the paint on the frame, and examined the screws that
were embedded in the metal. He could easily break in, he decided. It
astounded him that nobody had considered this vulnerability. “This made
me realize that luck and my past experience were at a rendezvous,” he
wrote. “I even asked myself if I was not in another dimension at that
time.”
A few days later, Tomic went to the MAM
as a visitor. It occupies the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, which
was built for the International Exposition of 1937. The museum started
amassing its collection in 1953, when the city of Paris donated more
than five hundred paintings once owned by a man named Maurice Girardin;
Janet Flanner, writing in this magazine, later described Girardin as “an
eccentric Paris dentist who had little money but such a gift for
scenting talent among still unappreciated important artists that he had
been able, starting in 1913, to buy their paintings at the low prices he
could afford.”
Tomic looked around the galleries with a mixture
of pleasure and unease. “Certain paintings can provoke me like an
emotional shock,” he told me. A friend of his compared him to a
“shaman,” and added, “A work of art emits a vibration, a palpable
energy, and Vjeran is able to connect to it.” When I asked Tomic about
this assessment, he agreed, observing, “I love to touch antique objects,
and I sense a great past—of generations and generations—that I think
are a part of the works.” He said that he avoided thinking about art in
scholarly terms, and noted, “Sincerely, I have never read a single work
about painting or art in my entire life.”
Inside the museum, Tomic
noticed that although the motion detectors were meant to flicker from
green to red whenever anyone passed by, several of them appeared to be
stuck on green. The discovery delighted Tomic, who has described robbery
as, ultimately, an act of imagination. He wrote to me, “I sometimes
think for a while, then as if by magic—but without the magic wand—I have
the formula to overcome an obstacle.”
In
the 1962 film “Dr. No,” James Bond, played by Sean Connery, passes
through the lair of a wealthy villain and notices a portrait of the Duke
of Wellington, by Goya, on the wall. The painting had been stolen, the
previous year, from the National Gallery in London. The scene helped to
cement a popular misconception that stolen masterpieces are often bought
and secretly held by wealthy, reclusive collectors. In fact, this
almost never happens. Unlike jewelry, which can be recut, or
antiquities, which may never have been photographed, famous paintings
are almost impossible to resell—even at ten per cent of their value, a
common rate on the black market. Some criminals try to collect ransom
for museum paintings based on their insurance value, but that’s a risky
proposition, particularly given that many publicly owned works aren’t
insured. Charles Hill, a former head of the art-and-antiques squad at
New Scotland Yard, told me that most museum thieves nevertheless “go for
the big-ticket items,” adding, “It’s foolhardy, it’s stupid, it’s
pig-shit ignorant.”
The typical art thief has no idea who will buy his loot. But, by the time Tomic began thinking about robbing the MAM,
he had established a steady business relationship with a sponsor: Jean
Michel Corvez, a white-haired man in his fifties who owned several
businesses in France, including a health-care-data company and a small
gallery in the Bastille neighborhood. Tomic told me that he met Corvez
in 2004, through another thief. “Our relationship was more than fine,
although it wasn’t quite a friendship,” he wrote to me. “We believed in
each other, and he wasn’t evil—but I later realized that he was
dangerous and that he was unable to predict danger.”
According to
Tomic, in the span of several years he sold Corvez roughly ninety
thousand euros’ worth of contraband, including jewelry, gold, and a
painting by Johan Jongkind, a Dutch seascape artist. Knowing that Tomic
frequently broke into rich people’s apartments, Corvez gave him a list
of artists favored by his clients, among them Basquiat, Chagall, Klimt,
Léger, Modigliani, Monet, Pissarro, and Warhol. Corvez gave Tomic the
nickname l’Araignée—the Spider—and urged him to remain in good shape. He
often chastised Tomic for eating poorly, Tomic recalled, adding,
“Corvez wanted me to work out, so that I could climb without any
problem.”
Soon after visiting the MAM,
Tomic went to see Corvez at his gallery. Corvez reminded him that he
would love to have a Léger, and one of the paintings at the museum was
Léger’s “Still Life with Candlestick,” a depiction of a domestic
interior, from 1922. When the painting had last been on loan to another
museum, it had been insured for four million euros, and its market price
was likely much higher than that. Corvez offered Tomic forty thousand
dollars. “I hesitated,” Tomic told me. “But my mouth spoke, and then I couldn’t help but act.” He spent the next several days making plans for the robbery.
On
May 14, 2010, in the early hours of the morning, Tomic walked up to a
window that faced an esplanade where skateboarders congregated during
the day. At around 3 A.M., he saw a guard briefly
patrol the galleries, then walk off. Tomic was carrying a piece of dark
cloth, and he hung it like a curtain on the outside of the window, to
give himself cover. Then he got to work on the window. It took him six
nights to finish the job. First, he dabbed the window frame with
paint-stripping acid, exposing the head of each screw. Then, after
applying another solution, to eliminate rust, he removed the screws and
filled the holes with brown modelling clay that matched the color of the
window frame. It was a painstaking process, and Tomic didn’t rush.
A
few hours before dawn on May 20th, Tomic returned to the site, in a
hooded sweatshirt, with two suction cups, and silently pulled out the
window. There was a lock holding a grate in place; using bolt cutters,
he broke the lock. He entered the museum briefly, avoiding the few
working motion detectors. Then he left and retreated to the banks of the
Seine, where he waited for fifteen minutes, to insure that he hadn’t
set off a silent alarm.
When Tomic went back inside, he spotted
the Léger painting, took it off the wall, and maneuvered it out of its
frame. He now had an object Corvez prized, but, standing in the museum
in the dim light and the silence, he began staring at Matisse’s
“Pastoral.” A Fauvist canvas from 1905, it depicts three pale nudes
resting while a fourth figure, rendered in bronze tones, plays a flute.
“I saw a deep, vivid landscape,” he recalled. “And the little devil
playing his flute out of nowhere, as if by magic, as if he were the
guardian of this environment.” He took it off the wall.
Then he
noticed Modigliani’s “Woman with a Fan,” a portrait of the artist’s muse
and obsession, Lunia Czechowska. Tomic fixated on the image, which
depicted Czechowska in a yellow dress, her eyes a cloudy white. “The
woman in the picture was worthy of a living being, ready to dance a
tango,” he wrote to me. “It could have almost been reality.” He stole
the Modigliani, too.
Hill
described Tomic’s state of mind in the gallery as a kind of mania. “The
paradox of great paintings is that they are inanimate objects that have
lives of their own,” he said. “And they tend to mesmerize those who
look at them. For some viewers, they then take leave of their senses.”
Tomic, he said, was in some ways little different from “the buyer at a
Sotheby’s auction who gets carried away and ends up bidding ten times
what he intended to pay.”
Tomic kept moving through the galleries,
taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near
l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a sixth: Modigliani’s “Woman with
Blue Eyes.” But, Tomic recalled, “when I went to get it off the wall,
it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I
will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I
touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started
instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that
made me run away.”
It took two trips for Tomic to carry the
canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes
away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for five
minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to
linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the
Modigliani that he hadn’t taken.
Tomic headed back, but within a
minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was
quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized
museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I
drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head,” Tomic told me.
Tomic
had planned to meet with Corvez later that morning, on the fourth level
of an underground parking garage in Bastille. He spent much of the
intervening hours gazing at the paintings in his car, especially the
Matisse. “I had fallen in love,” he recalled to me. When Corvez arrived
at the garage, in a rented Porsche Cayenne, and realized that Tomic had
not one but five stolen paintings, he was more unnerved than pleased.
“He was afraid of me,” Tomic recalled. Nevertheless, Corvez accepted the
Léger, as agreed, and also took the Modigliani, on consignment. Tomic
didn’t want to part with the three other paintings, and asked Corvez to
store them on his behalf, even though he worried about what might happen
to the Matisse. He recalled saying to Corvez, “You could get hit by a
car—whose door will I knock on to recover my goods?” The mood turned
tense. “We were not far from thinking that all could end badly,” Tomic
wrote.
By the end of the day, newspapers around the
world were reporting on the heist. The stolen works were estimated to
be worth more than seventy million dollars, making the theft the biggest
of its kind since 1990, when two thieves, disguised as police officers,
stole thirteen art works, collectively valued at roughly half a billion
dollars, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston. (They
have yet to be recovered.)
The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë,
declared, “I want everything to be done to recover these masterpieces.”
France’s élite armed-robbery unit, the Brigade de Répression du
Banditisme, launched an investigation and soon found a witness: Goran
Radosavuevic, a skateboarder. He told police that, a few days before the
robbery, he’d seen a suspicious character on the esplanade outside the
museum: a white man, six feet two, weighing about two hundred pounds,
with a muscular build, an oval face, and a square jaw. He observed, “I
really got the impression that he was at work. He was not there to look
at the skaters and seemed really to be observing the side of the wall
with the windows of the museum.” Police records noted that the removed
window screws had been laid out neatly in a corner of the museum,
underlining the “cold-bloodedness” of the operation. The five paintings
were among the most important in the museum’s collection, suggesting to
investigators that the thief had “a sophisticated knowledge of the
works”—or, at least, a good eye.
After
the robbery, Tomic went to meet Corvez at the gallery to collect his
payment. Tomic was deeply worried, even paranoid, that police officers
were following him. “I knew that a great hunt was going to start,” he
wrote me. Corvez gave him a shoebox stuffed with forty thousand euros,
in small bills. Tomic left and hailed a taxi. He told me that he didn’t
dare take the Métro, because he feared the security cameras. As the taxi
navigated the twisting streets of Bastille, the radio buzzed with news
of the heist. Tomic eventually arrived at the apartment of a woman he
trusted. He taped his stash to the underside of a chair. Fearing that he
would be discovered at his own apartment, he asked to spend the night.
Tomic
initially characterized this woman to me as an “acquaintance,” but in a
subsequent letter he explained that she was a sex worker who gave him
“free passes” from time to time. She was not his “concubine,” he assured
me; they were confidants who helped each other out. The woman, an
immigrant, had experienced “problems with other girls” working the same
territory and, according to Tomic, had spent time in jail. Tomic had
agreed to keep an eye on her as she reclaimed a spot on her old corner,
on Avenue Foch. One evening, she brought him home, fed him, and let him
stay overnight. It became an occasional ritual.
Tomic, by his own
admission, is not suited to intimacy: “I am a thief. I roam in beautiful
neighborhoods. I see what I have to do, but I stay out of people’s
private lives.” This woman, however, grew close to him, he said, adding,
“She asked me to do her favors a few times, like to fix her car, change
a tire.” Tomic never fully let his guard down, though. Most of his
arrests occurred when someone betrayed him, and Tomic sometimes wondered
if she was a police informant.
Six months after the MAM
robbery, the police had only a few leads in the case, but they were
conducting a separate investigation, based on an anonymous tip about a
thief and his fence, and the informant provided Tomic’s name. On October
1, 2010, they eavesdropped on a phone conversation in which Tomic
ranted, “The cops! The fucking cops think it was me who did the museum, I
swear! . . . They’re assholes, it’s crazy! They can’t understand that
the paintings were sold and that they’re pissing me off!”
The
police compared a photograph of Tomic with the description given by the
skateboarder, and concluded that they had a likely match. On December
7th, they followed Tomic to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses
one of the largest modern-art museums in Europe, and observed him
studying the emergency exits. A day later, they surveilled him as he
bought two suction cups, glue, and a pair of construction gloves. In a
letter, Tomic told me that he had indeed been intending to rob the
Pompidou but had intuited that the authorities were on his trail. “It
was definitely a project that would need to wait its turn,” he told me.
On
December 10th, detectives phoned Tomic and the call was sent to voice
mail. His greeting was astonishingly brazen, as if he were in a manic
state. “If you want to buy paintings or works of art, or exceptional
jewelry, do not hesitate to contact me,” he said. “Among the many
paintings, there are five that are extremely expensive.”
It’s not
clear why Tomic wasn’t immediately arrested. Charles Hill told me that
he found it hard to contain his frustration at the inaction of the
French police, which he attributed to smug complacency—a feeling, common
to those investigating art thefts, that the work will ultimately be
recovered. (In fact, several experts told me, only about ten per cent of
stolen art ever resurfaces.) But Derek Fincham, a professor at South
Texas College of Law, who specializes in
the illicit trade in cultural property, suggested a potential
justification for the delay: the French police might not have wanted to
spook Tomic and “inadvertently push the paintings further underground.”
Fincham explained, “A painting that is cut from its frame and rolled up
is easy to move. It could be put in a bank vault or buried in a field,
or even destroyed.” Such fears are warranted. In 2001, when the police
arrested Stéphane Breitwieser—a French thief who stole two hundred and
thirty-nine works of art from more than a hundred museums and
galleries—his mother shredded many of the paintings and ground them up
in a garbage disposal.
On the wiretap, Tomic had promised to get
revenge on anyone who followed him too closely. He said, “I’m gonna dig
up the guns and, on my mother’s head, you’ll see—the first one who comes
near me will get a bullet in the head.”
As
the months passed, Tomic grew increasingly suspicious of Corvez. He
tried calling him, but discovered that his number was no longer in
service. One day, they ran into each other at the Gare de Lyon. Corvez
looked “totally white” and “freaky,” Tomic recalled, as if he were
“going to pass out,” and stalled when Tomic asked him about the status
of the paintings. “He gave me no guarantees,” Tomic told me. “It was
fishy, fishy, fishy.”
Tomic surreptitiously taped a subsequent
conversation with Corvez, in order to have proof of his involvement in
the crime. On the recording, Tomic asks him about the Léger, and Corvez
tells him that it has already been sold, and that the police
investigation “prevents me from sleeping at night.” In fact, as Tomic
eventually learned, Corvez still had the Léger. A client had paid him
eighty thousand euros for it and taken it home. Two days later,
apparently rattled by the media attention surrounding the theft, he
returned the painting to Corvez, without asking for his money back.
Corvez
did find a buyer for the Modigliani: Yonathan Birn, a
thirty-three-year-old watchmaker with an art-history degree from the
Sorbonne. Birn had a small shop in the Marais. Several months after the
theft, Corvez showed Birn the Modigliani, which he described as
“extraordinary” but “of dubious origin.” Birn was delighted by the
portrait, and eventually agreed to buy it from Corvez. It is unclear if
Birn understood that the Modigliani had been stolen from the MAM,
but he handled the painting with great secrecy, persuading an employee
at a Crédit du Nord bank to let him place it, off the books, in a
safety-deposit vault.
Corvez eventually made arrangements to store
the four other paintings at the shop where Birn sold and repaired his
watches, which had a sophisticated alarm system. Birn and Corvez hid the
canvases behind an armoire.
Selling
the four paintings would not be easy, but Corvez and Birn seem to have
been aware of at least one promising possibility. Historically,
resellers had taken advantage of a legal concept, dating back to
medieval England, known as “market overt.” The idea is that, if an
object is sold during daylight hours, in a venue of open commerce, then
its provenance cannot be questioned—the rationale being that, if the
object had been stolen, its rightful owner could claim it before
sundown. Derek Fincham, the law professor, told me that “the law is
based on the need for market expediency,” because “courts don’t want to
be tasked with examining and undoing all of these deals.” The law
remained in effect in England until fairly recently. In 1990, thieves
stole two paintings, one by Joshua Reynolds and one by Thomas
Gainsborough, from Lincoln’s Inn, a barristers’ chambers in London. The
paintings, worth millions of dollars, turned up at a flea market, where
they were sold, to unsuspecting buyers, for the equivalent of a few
hundred dollars. Afterward, there was a public outcry, and the Council
for the Prevention of Art Theft, a British organization, led a
successful effort to abolish market overt.
One of the countries
that still adhere to the principle of market overt is Israel. “I would
be very shocked if an Israeli court upheld the purchase of art clearly
stolen from a museum,” Fincham said. “Still, the possibility
might have been enough to tempt a buyer to test the court on this
matter.” In late December, 2010, as the French police were closing in on
Tomic, Birn flew to Tel Aviv. He called Corvez. Police officers
monitoring Corvez’s phone line recorded an exchange suggesting that he
and Birn were arranging a sale.
“I had the first meeting,” Birn can be heard saying. “I believe ninety-nine per cent we’re gonna pass through this.”
“Better than before!” Corvez responds.
Corvez
shared little information with Tomic. At one point, he told him that
he’d lined up a Saudi buyer, but later said that the Saudi had backed
out, and that the solution to their problem lay in Israel. Tomic
recalled Corvez saying, cryptically, “There’s a Russian Jew who is
capable of taking the paintings.”
By
the spring of 2011, the French police still hadn’t made any arrests.
That May, an anonymous source told investigators that Corvez was still
in possession of the missing paintings. The source warned that Corvez
was interested only in making money, and might destroy the paintings if
he came under extreme pressure.
In
conversations with Tomic, Corvez grew increasingly agitated. Tomic
recorded one of them, and in it Corvez declared, “I would have preferred
that you didn’t bring me these things, because I don’t know what to do
with them anymore. I am sick of it!” He also said that, if anything
serious happened to him, a third party would call Tomic and help him
“recover the paintings.” This hardly reassured Tomic, who suspected that
the third party was no more than a “ghost.”
Tomic was now in dire
need of money. He had been holding on to a small diamond, and he pawned
it to Corvez for four hundred euros. The inevitable next step was
another robbery. One night, while climbing the façade of an apartment
building, Tomic noticed what he thought might be a valuable oil painting
near a window, but he couldn’t entice Corvez to commission a theft. So
he kept looking for new targets.
Another evening, when he was
walking down Avenue Montaigne, near the Canadian Embassy, he noticed a
stylish duplex in which the lights remained on all night. Tomic
suspected that its occupants were away. Using a fire escape, he climbed
to the top of a building three addresses down. He crossed from roof to
roof, and then, with a rope, lowered himself to the illuminated
apartment.
Once inside, he closed the window, to eliminate traffic
noise. “You have to go into listening mode,” he explained to me. “It is
very important, in order to avoid an encounter.” The duplex was quiet;
nobody was home. He searched until he found a collection of watches and
several valuable works of art, including a Pissarro. The painting,
depicting a man harvesting wheat in a field, was “very beautiful,” Tomic
told me, but he “didn’t feel any connection to the work.” He was more
tantalized by a crocodile briefcase with a false bottom and, next to it,
a holster for a gun. “The holster protected a weapon and the weapon
protected the briefcase,” Tomic recalled. “One had to think about it: on
this playground, a treasure hunt was about to start. But that night I
did not have much time left. I had to come back another time.”
Tomic
felt certain that great prizes were hidden somewhere in the apartment.
He scoured the rooms over and over, but found nothing. He estimated to
me that he made fifteen clandestine trips to the apartment.
On the
night of May 12, 2011, he visited the duplex yet again, this time
searching an armoire. He noticed an odd-looking gray screw embedded in
the woodwork: there was a removable panel. Behind it, he found a safe.
He opened it, and found only several empty bags. The repeated break-ins
had been for nothing. That night, he left the apartment with the
collection of watches and the Pissarro, which, he claims, Corvez had
agreed to buy.
Police officers had been tracking Tomic’s every
move. They soon arrested him and raided his apartment, where they found
the loot from the duplex and an array of incriminating equipment,
including a climbing harness and a grappling hook. During a subsequent
interrogation, Tomic confessed not just to the duplex burglary but also
to the MAM heist. There is no public transcript
of Tomic’s interrogation. His lawyer, David-Olivier Kaminski, who was
not present, told me, “As clever as Vjeran is, he couldn’t ignore the
fact that, if he didn’t confess, he would have to lie for a very long
time and with very great skill.” A quick confession, Kaminski added,
“could reasonably sound like repentance.”
Anaïs Trubuilt, the
prosecutor in the case, told me that Tomic’s confession seemed driven by
a different impulse. “He is very proud of his work, which he is
excellent at,” she told me. A court-appointed psychologist came to a
similar conclusion, noting that Tomic had described himself as a
“visionary.”
Around the same time that the police arrested Tomic,
they raided Corvez’s gallery and Birn’s watch shop, but they did not
find the five paintings from the MAM. Birn later
claimed that, during the watch-shop raid, four of the paintings remained
hidden behind the armoire, and that the police failed to notice them.
The Modigliani, he said, was still in storage at Crédit du Nord.
According
to Birn, shortly after the raid he retrieved the Modigliani and then,
in a panic, destroyed all five paintings, leaving their remains in a
trash bin outside the watch shop.
Birn and Corvez were soon
arrested. Desperate to learn more about the paintings’ fate, Tomic tried
to talk with Birn, who was being detained at the same facility. But, as
Tomic later told a judge, Birn “did not want any contact with me.” Birn
had even instructed a guard to place a mattress against his cell door,
which was made with reinforced glass, so that Tomic couldn’t peer inside
and see him.
Tomic,
Corvez, and Birn were tried together. The trial, which was attended by
dozens of French journalists, began on January 30, 2017, at the High
Court of Paris. Corvez arrived in a black velvet suit, his white hair
slicked back; a reporter from Libération wrote that he resembled “a Disney villain.” Birn, whom Le Figaro
described as “a watchmaker who looks like a student,” seemed
embarrassed to be in court. Tomic, the unflappable cat burglar, showed
almost no signs of concern.
Journalists
began referring to Tomic as Spider-Man. Despite the fact that he had
stolen art “from all of humanity,” as the prosecutor put it, the public
fell for him. “French people are very fond of thieves’ stories when
there is no blood,” Stéphane Durand-Souffland, who covered the story for
Le Figaro, told me. “For us, Tomic is a perfect
thief,” because he “acted without weapons, did not strike anyone, robbed
not an individual but a poorly supervised museum, fooled the guards
without any difficulty, and chose the works he took with taste.” Tomic
was also “polite to the judges,” Durand-Souffland added.
In
court, Tomic dropped the pretense of remorse. “These paintings, they
are my property, these are my works,” he declared. Olivier Bouchara, who
covered the trial for the French edition of Vanity Fair,
explained to me, “By saying this, Tomic was telling us, ‘This heist was
my masterpiece. I can put my name on it.’ ” Tomic boasted about the
ease with which he had entered the museum, and compared himself to
Arsène Lupin. Franck Johannès, of Le Monde, told me
that Tomic’s story had all the elements of a Lupin story: “a spectacular
robbery, perfectly organized, without violence, by a sort of artist.”
Among the French, Johannès said, “there remains a certain sympathy for
those who disrupt the established order.” He cited, as evidence, “the
rebellions of 1789, 1792, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1936, and 1968.”
When
Corvez spoke in the courtroom, he chose his words carefully. “I did not
ask him to steal,” he said. “I told him, ‘If you happen to stumble
across a Fernand Léger, I know someone who would be willing to buy
it.’ ” When Corvez was pressed to identify the buyer, he demurred. “It
could threaten my safety,” he said.
Birn’s lawyer said that his
client was manipulated into the scheme by Corvez. When Birn took the
stand, he recalled his decision to destroy the art: “I am paranoid, and
this paranoia is reaching its peak. I lose all discernment and I decide
to get rid of the paintings. . . . I do not know why I do this. I
thought I was being followed by the police. I was convinced that I was
being filmed or spied on. I thought to myself that I could not leave the
building with the paintings, and so I committed the irredeemable.”
Shaking with sobs, Birn repeated three times, “I put them in the trash! ”
Many
people suspected that Birn’s story was a ruse. He would not have been
the first person to invent such a lie. After a Romanian named Radu
Dogaru was arrested for helping to steal seven paintings from the
Kunsthal, in Rotterdam, in 2012, his mother claimed to have burned them
in her stove. Dogaru subsequently disavowed his mother’s claim, saying,
“The paintings were certainly not destroyed. I don’t know where they
are, but I believe they have been sold.”
Even Birn’s wife, a
fashion executive, doubted whether he had thrown the paintings into the
trash. Corvez shared her view, testifying that Birn was simply “too
smart” to have done this. Trubuilt, the prosecutor, said of Birn,
Corvez, and Tomic, “They know very well that the day they get out of
prison the paintings will not have lost value and they will be able to
resell them.”
The judge found all three men guilty. Corvez was
given seven years, Birn six. As Birn was being taken off to jail, he was
hysterical—and yet, Durand-Souffland observed, “Birn didn’t forget to
give his car keys to his lawyer.” (Birn did not respond to my requests
for an interview. Corvez wrote to me, “I am not opposed to the idea of
an interview on this subject, nevertheless, I would like to know what
would be my interest in this eventuality—would I be paid, and how much?”
When I said that I couldn’t offer money, he stopped communicating with
me.)
Tomic, who was sentenced to eight years, was far more
collected as he left the courtroom. Many observers felt certain that he
knew exactly where the paintings were. Franck Johannès, of Le Monde,
told me, “Legally, nothing can be done, even if Tomic knows the truth.
It is up to the prosecution to prove that he lied. In France, one has
the right to lie at one’s trial. There is no offense of perjury.”
Tomic may be a skilled climber and thief, but the MAM
heist required him only to crawl through a ground-floor window and then
navigate around the few motion detectors that were actually working.
Nevertheless, in the press Tomic’s robbery became known as “the heist of
the century.” Charles Hill, the former Scotland Yard detective, is
irritated by descriptions of Tomic’s heist as “spectacular” and
“perfect.” He told me, “Stealing an art work is actually a rather easy
thing to do. In the National Gallery in Washington, the Smithsonian has
armed guards, but elsewhere it’s mostly just a few older people staring
at a wall.”
Even if Tomic doesn’t quite deserve his aura of
glamour, his notoriety will likely only add to the art’s value, if and
when it is ever returned. In 1911, a relatively uncelebrated painting by
Leonardo da Vinci, the “Mona Lisa,” was stolen from the Louvre. It took
twenty-eight hours before anyone even noticed that it was gone. The
painting was missing for two years
and, during that time, a great many people went looking for it, and the
media attention helped turn the “Mona Lisa” into the most famous
painting in the world.
I wondered if Tomic might rightly claim credit for a similar alchemy, should the MAM
paintings resurface. Aline Le Visage, a consultant who specializes in
stolen art, told me that this was unlikely. “The theft at the Louvre in
1911, one of the most beautiful museums in the world, was like an
earthquake,” she said. The investigation was aggressive and, for a
while, implicated well-known people. The police arrested—and then
released—the poet Guillaume Apollinaire; Pablo Picasso was also
interrogated. The story stayed in the papers until the actual culprit,
an Italian thief named Vincenzo Peruggia, was finally arrested.
Nowadays, Le Visage said, robberies of great museums have become
commonplace, and the news cycle is blindingly fast—too fast, it seems,
for any single image, even one as beautiful as Matisse’s “Pastoral,” to
become an enduring icon.
Tomic
is imprisoned at the Centre de Détention de Val-de-Reuil, northwest of
Paris. One of his regular visitors is his girlfriend, Korine Opiola, a
feng-shui consultant. During the police investigation, officers referred
to the sex worker who let Tomic sleep over as his “partner,” but this
was incorrect. His feeling for her appears to have been more pity than
love. (“All I know is that she is a very kind person who does not
deserve what she does,” he wrote to me.) His relationship with Opiola is
more serious. Tomic, who was released on bail after his arrest, met
Opiola in Paris in the months before his trial, at a bar across the
street from l’Église de la Madeleine. She was reading a magazine about
U.F.O.s, and he asked her if he could have a look at it. “He was not
someone who was entertaining me just to pick me up,” she recalled. “You
felt like he was really present. I felt his authenticity.” Later, they
communicated on Facebook and spoke on the phone. Opiola had no idea that
Tomic was about to go on trial for the greatest art heist in a
generation.
After his conviction, she began writing to him, and
later began visiting him in prison. In his letters to her, she told me,
he often laments the fact that his parents brought him back from Bosnia.
Opiola told me, “Each time, he writes, ‘They stole my life from me. I
would have been a good person. I was obliged to be a thief.’ ”
Opiola
believes that Tomic’s current predicament is the result not just of his
neglectful parents but also of his fateful visit to the Musée de
l’Orangerie. “Vjeran, when he loves a work, he wants to possess
it,” she said. I asked her why he couldn’t simply enjoy looking at
beautiful paintings. “He does not have that distance,” she said. “It’s
an uncontrollable impulse. He wants, he takes.”
Tomic expressed
few regrets to me, though he occasionally made hints about the fate of
the stolen paintings. In one letter, he wrote, cryptically, that “there
is no better place for such art works than where I took them.” He never
gave me a sense of where this secret place was, or why it was such an
ideal home. In his furtive visits to wealthy apartments, he told me, he
had seen many lovely paintings that he hadn’t taken, “because I don’t
have the apartment or the manor of those rich people who allow
themselves to have private collections.” He went on, “If I had this
privilege, I would have acquired a museum by today—I can assure you
that.”
In one of our final exchanges, I asked Tomic again if the
paintings had been destroyed. No, he replied, adding, “Birn loves the
paintings more than anything, and he would have protected them
somewhere.” Then, as if unable to help himself, Tomic noted, “One day or
another, he will be forced to give them to the person to whom they
belong—that is to say, to me.”
In the meantime, Tomic spends his
days writing letters and trying his hand as an illustrator. He draws
images of ceramics, and hopes one day to sculpt the designs in a studio
in Paris that Opiola owns. His black-and-white drawings, which are
starkly beautiful, depict oval-shaped sugar pots and goblet-like
teacups. The images are accompanied by notations with precise
measurements (“3 cm long, 1.5 cm wide”), specific colors (“Red Brick”),
and personal observations (“It will be more beautiful without any drawn
pattern”). He knows that he is not the next Renoir, but he is gratified
to be finally making art. “I do little sketch drawings,” he wrote to me.
“I don’t imagine becoming a great master.” ♦
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article222261510.html#storylink=cpy
