Crushed - $134m's worth of Picasso, Matisse, Braque etc.
October 10 2011
Picture: Paris Museum of Modern Art, Matisse's 'Pastoral'.
Bad news - the criminals behind the daring theft of five pictures from the Paris Museum of Modern Art last year have claimed the works are now destoyed. From the LA Times:
Picasso, Braque, Modigliani, Matisse and Leger paintings stolen in May 2010, and worth about $134 million, may have been dumped in a garbage bin on a Paris street and destroyed with the rest of that day's trash, according to testimony by one of three suspects connected to the theft. The suspect, a 34-year-old watch repairman, was identified only as Jonathan B. by the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.
Of course, if I was one of the small time crooks who stole the pictures on the orders of a Mr Big, then I too would say the pictures were destroyed, to make the trail go cold. I suspect Mr Big (or Mr Bigovich, as these characters usually are) is looking at the pictures now, and dreaming of the day in a few years time when he can extract a ransom for the pictures' safe return.
It also turns out that the thief who got into the museum, a Serb known as 'Spiderman', only intended to take one painting, Fernand Leger's Still Life with Candlestick. But security at the museum was so hopeless he helped himself to four more:
...the museum's alarm didn't sound when the art was removed from the wall, so he wandered around the national museum for more than an hour, helping himself to four more masterpieces, before driving away in a car parked nearby. Despite several security cameras, three night watchmen didn't notice the masked intruder.
I find it hard to believe this wasn't an inside job...
