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 lowe...

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...

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 a...

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...

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 Gr...

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 kin...

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...

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 m...

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...

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. C...

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...

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...

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 beco...

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 veh...

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.