In a stunning turn of events, two valuable paintings, L’homme en prière by Marc Chagall and a version of Tête by Pablo Picasso, stolen from a Tel Aviv villa in February 2010, have been recovered after a decade-long investigation. The breakthrough came on January 10, 2024, when police in Namur, Belgium, executed searches at the residence of a 68-year-old Israeli luxury watch dealer, known only as "Daniel Z."

The heist, which took place in February 2010 at a villa owned by the Herzikovich family of art collectors, saw the thieves make off with the Chagall and Picasso masterpieces valued at $900,000 (£710,000). In addition to the paintings, jewelry worth $680,000 was stolen from a safe, with the burglars showing a selective focus by bypassing other artworks displayed in the home.

The stolen paintings eventually made their way to Europe, specifically an Antwerp neighborhood, where they remained hidden for several years.

The breakthrough in the investigation occurred at the end of 2022 when law enforcement officers in Namur received a tip-off about an individual attempting to sell the stolen Chagall and Picasso works. A thorough investigation led to the identification of a suspect, prompting months of surveillance and intelligence gathering.

By 2023, Belgian law enforcement confirmed that the suspect was indeed in possession of the stolen paintings and likely stored them at his residence or with an associate. Subsequent checks and resources implemented in 2023 pointed to the suspect's potential possession of the artworks.

On January 10, 2024, police executed a search at the home of "Daniel Z" at the public prosecutor's request. While a significant amount of money was discovered, the two stolen paintings were not found. The suspect confessed to possessing the artworks but refused to disclose their location.

Continuing with leads in the investigation, authorities in Antwerp, conducted a search of a building purportedly linked to past cases of stolen paintings which resulted in the recovery of the Chagall and Picasso masterpieces. Stored in wooden boxes with screwed lids, the artworks were found undamaged and still in their original frames.

According to The Times, Alexander Besedin, the building's caretaker, revealed, "Those wooden boxes were untouched for four or five years, without me really paying attention to them. It was a favor to someone I considered a friend. When I asked him at the time what was in it, he said it was family paintings. They were nailed shut, so I couldn’t see into them."

The main suspect, described as a 68-year-old Israeli luxury watch dealer, has been charged with receiving the two stolen paintings and has been placed under arrest. 

The thief that burgled Greece’s National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum in Athens eleven years ago has been sentenced.  

Citing that the Court recognised the thief's good behaviour after his arrest for the heist, the Single-Member Court of Criminal Appeals of Athens handed down a six-year suspended probationary sentence with limited electronic monitoring, which will allow Giorgos Sarmantzopoulos, a circulating distance of three kilometres from his residence so that he can hold down a job and care of his elderly and sick parents. Previously, during the trial phase, he had been on complete house arrest.

On 9 January 2012, George S set off the security alarm at the Greek museum by opening a door 6 or 7 times, until the guard believed that the alarm system was malfunctioning and disabled the system. Then, at 4:30 a.m., he entered the museum through an separate unlocked balcony door and swiftly stripped four artworks from their frames, knocking others off the wall in doing so. 

Originally he selected: 

Head of a Woman, 1934 by Pablo Picasso

Stammer Windmill with Summer House, 1905 by Piet Mondrian 

Landscape with a Farm by Piet Mondrian 

St Diego de Alcala in Ecstasy with the Holy Trinity and the Symbols of Passion by Guglielmo Caccia, who was known as il Moncalvo.

The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (Little, Brown and Company, 2009) professes to tell the real inside story of the theft of the Mona Lisa and begins by mis-spelling the name of the thief. Vincenzo Peruggia spells his name with two “gs,” as may be seen in the widely-published mug shot taken of him by Italian police, after his arrest as he tried to return the Mona Lisa to Italy, after having stolen it from the Louvre. It is rather baffling, then, that the authors of this new work of non-fiction chose to spell the thief’s name with only one “g.” The odd choices do not stop there.

It is perhaps surprising that the complete story of the theft of the Mona Lisa, certainly the most famous art theft in history, has never been the subject of a book of non-fiction. It is mentioned in a number of works, but an in-depth monograph is still wanting. The Crimes of Paris professes to fill that lacuna, and its publishers were optimistic—an excerpt was featured in the May 2009 issue of Vanity Fair. (Another new book of 2009, Vanished Smile by R. A. Scotti, also hopes to tell the story—we’ll see if the author can do better). While the account of the theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa is accurate and reasonably well-written, the supposed true crime conspiracy that the authors have uncovered and present in their work, regarding forgeries of the Mona Lisa and a mastermind called the Marquis de Valfierno who was behind the whole plot, is a load of hooey. The sole source of this conspiracy, a 1932 article in The Saturday Evening Post by American journalist Karl Decker, was dismissed decades ago by all scholars worthy of the name as a wholesale invention—and one so outrageous that it is difficult to understand how anyone could believe it to be true.

Decker claimed to have met a con man named Eduardo while in Casablanca. Eduardo proceeded to tell Decker about his forgery ring in Buenos Aires and Paris, selling American millionaires copies of paintings that he told them were stolen originals. This Eduardo, who also went under the alias the Marquis de Valfierno, claimed that he had hired Peruggia to steal the original Mona Lisa in order to convince six separate American millionaires that the forged Mona Lisa that they were buying from Valfierno was the stolen original.

The Valfierno story was long ago rejected as one of two things: either a wholesale invention by Karl Decker to sell his story, or a wholesale invention by a con man in Casablanca that pulled the wool down over Mr Decker’s eyes. It is a shame, then, that a work of non-fiction professing to tell the true story behind a famous true crime, should so mislead its readers. Without the addition of myth, the story of the theft of the Mona Lisa is rich and enthralling, with a fabulous cast of characters (including Picasso, Apollinaire, and a fascinating French detective), the backdrop of pre-war Paris and Florence, and ripples felt to this day. For not only was the theft of the Mona Lisa the most famous theft of any object in history, but it also inspired other thefts, altered the concept of what makes a work valuable, and proved to be a turning point in the history of art, of collecting, and of art crime.

The book is worth reading for its solid if stolid account of the theft and recovery of the world’s most famous painting. It also covers the backdrop of Paris in the ‘teens, with a variety of characters sketched into what is more a pastiche of a period in time than a thorough exploration of one crime. In terms of setting the scene, painting the atmosphere of a time and place, the book succeeds nicely.

But it is, of course, the art crime that is of greatest interest to this review. The Hooblers’ tale of the Mona Lisa theft would have done well to have ended without the addition of Valfierno—and it would have been nice to have spelled the name of the protagonist correctly. Trying to shoe-horn a myth into one of history’s great true stories poisons the portions that are true, and cultivates the misconceptions about art crime that already abound.