On the quiet Monday morning of August 21st 1911, three men ran out of the Louvre museum heading to the Quai d'Orsay station for the first train out of Paris. With them they were carrying the Mona Lisa, stolen off the wall of the museum after spending the night hiding in a supply closet. The three men were Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, two brothers, and their partner in crime, Vincenzo Perugia, who worked in the Louvre installing protective glass over the paintings.
Before this heist, the Mona Lisa wasn’t well known by the general public. Painted in 1507 by renaissance painter and inventor Leonardo DaVinci, the Mona Lisa was not celebrated by the art world until the 1860s, more than two centuries after its creation. Still in 1911, the Mona Lisa was not considered sensational like it is today and it took the public more than a day to realize the piece was missing from the gallery. Once the public realized the piece was stolen, the media frenzy began and a national scandal was born, leading to droves of people visiting the louvre to see the empty spot where the painting once hung and from then on the masterpiece was known world-wide.
Twenty-eight months after the heist, Perugia attempted to sell the Mona Lisa to an art dealer in Florence, leading to authorities being alerted, his arrest, and the return of the painting to its place in the Louvre.
2: THE LARGEST UNSOLVED HEIST: THE GARDNER MUSEUM
In the early hours of March 18, 1990, a pair of thieves dressed in police uniforms arrived to the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston, claiming to be responding to a disturbance. The guard on duty, breaking protocol, let them in through the employee entrance. The security guard, along with another, were then handcuffed and tied up by the thieves and were left in the basement.
They made their way into multiple rooms of the museum but majority of what they took was from the Dutch room, including Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on The Sea of Galilee and A lady and Gentleman in black and Vermeer's The Concert.
They cut many of the works from their frames, leaving the empty frames behind in their wake and taking with them 13 stolen works, valued to be more than half a billion dollars in value. They were only in the museum for 81 minutes when they left at 2:45 AM. The police did not arrive at the scene until 8:15 AM.
What happened to the paintings remains unsolved and the FBI is still looking for them. However in 2013, Richard DesLauriers, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston office, revealed that the FBI has a good idea on what happened. In 2015, the FBI revealed their primary suspects: George Reissfelder and Leonard DiMuzio, two associates of the mobster Carmello Merlino. They both died within one year of the heist. The mystery continues as the FBI is still looking for the whereabouts of the missing works.
“The FBI believes with a high degree of confidence that in the years after the theft, the art was transported to Connecticut and the Philadelphia region, and some of the art was taken to Philadelphia, where it was offered for sale by those responsible for the theft. With that same confidence, we have identified the thieves, who are members of a criminal organization with a base in the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.”
