Heist #1: $10million Art Heist

HEIST #1: $10 Million Art Heist
LOCATION: Longleat House, England
HAUL: $10 Million Painting by Titian

Titian’s sixteenth-century masterpiece, “Rest on Thee Flight Into Egypt,” was small but beautifully painted and had been in Lord Bath’s family since 1878. It was displayed in all its glory in the state drawing room of his ancestral home, Longleat House – one of the world’s most beautiful and important examples of Elizabethan country architecture.

To steal one of Titian’s most famous masterpieces – valued at about $10 million – from the very heart of the British aristocracy is nothing short of amazing. To do it right under the nose of Lord Bath was unadulterated audacity.

Lord Bath was sitting in his mansion watching television on the evening of January 6, 1995, under the impression that his fine art collection was safely protected. Little did he know that a gang of art thieves were en route to Longleat. Crammed into a car, the gang drove through the 9,000-acre estate, which even contained a safari park and lion enclosure. It’s unclear what route the thieves took as they crossed the estate, but the free-roaming lions must have presented a fearsome, if unconventional, obstacle.

Once alongside the house, thieves used a ladder they had strapped to the top of the car to gain entry into the magnificent house. Propping the ladder up on a massive urn, the gang broke into a first-floor window, setting off a silent alarm system that was linked to the local police station. Undeterred, the gang headed straight for the opulent drawing room where the Titian was hung, and began to go about getting it off the wall and ready for transport.

The gang also stole two other small paintings from the same room: “A Personification of Justice,” by Veronese, and “Portrait of Eleanor of Austria,” by Joos Van Cleve.

When the police arrived, just eight minutes after the window had been broken, the gang had vanished into the night. The criminals’ modus operandi is still unknown, but it worked. No one knows even how the gang removed and transported the works, which were painted on a wooden panel and measured two feet wide. We do know that three masterpieces vanished in less than 480 seconds, which means the gang removed each painting in just 160 seconds. Or to put it another way, the gang were stealing $21,000 worth of art per second.

It took seven years for the stolen Titian to be recovered. A former Scotland Yard art and antiques unit detective, Charles Hill, was appointed by Lord Bath to recover the painting. After Hill made a radio appeal in April 2002, a middleman contacted him to say that he could arrange the painting’s return in exchange for the $150,000 reward. On August 22, 2002, Hill and that man drove around London until they stopped near a railway station. An elderly man handed over a red, white and blue plastic laundry bag that contained the painting.

According to newspaper reports, Hill believed that the gang sold the painting to a London criminal family for a relatively small sum. In turn, they gave it to a sports promoter in order to settle a feud. After enjoying it for a time, he then passed it on to another set of criminals based on the south coast of England, where it remained until its return.

The two lesser paintings have not been returned, and the thieves are still at large. Lord Bath has since spent $460,000 upgrading Longleat’s security.

[source article ; more info]

 

Heist #2: New York Rare Gem Heist

HEIST #2: New York Rare Gem Heist
LOCATION: American Museum of Natural History, New York
HAUL: World’s Largest Sapphire and Other Rare Gems

On the evening of October 29, 1964, Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy and his gang set out to rob one of the world’s most precious and valuable gem collections. Famous among the Miami crowd for his surfing, diving and extravagant partying, Murph was the personification of beachboy-burglar cool. But even by the extraordinary standards of Murph the Surf, described by one FBI agent as the world’s most charismatic thief, this was the ultimate heist.

Murphy and his accomplices Alan Kuhn and Roger Clark parked their Cadillac near the museum. Clark stayed in the car with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie to alert the other two if the police arrived. Murphy and Kuhn walked a couple of blocks to the museum parking lot and easily climbed the outer fence. They then scaled a 10-foot-high fence that had iron spikes on the top by looping a length of rope over a crossbar, creating a foothold on either side of the wall. After carefully negotiating their way over the spikes, they descended into one of the inner courtyards of the museum.

Murphy and Kuhn made their way through the canyon-like alleyways of the museum wings until they came to the one that housed the J P Morgan Hall of Gems. Forcing open a courtyard door, they scrambled up a fire escape to the fifth floor and crept out onto a thin stone ledge. They inched around the corner of the building, hugging the wall, until they were above the room containing the gems.

Securing ropes to a fifth-floor window, Murphy and Kuhn silently lowered themselves into the Morgan room. The thieves noticed that this window was left slightly open and unlocked by the museum to allow air to circulate. Going in through the window, they waited for the alarm to go off, but nothing happened: astonishingly, the alarm system had been switched off to save electricity.

Murphy and Kuhn went to work on the glass cases protecting the gems. They taped the glass to stop it from shattering when they cut large circles into it with their glass cutters, then dislodged the circles with a sharp knock from the butt of a squeegee. The pair only realized that the case surrounding the Star of India was alarmed when they began to cut through it, but luckily for them (again), the battery was dead.

Murphy and Kuhn had only opened three of the display cases when they were spooked by a sound out in the corridor. Figuring they’d had their fair share of luck already, they decided to call it a day and escape – after all, they’d pocketed 24 of the most valuable gems in the room. They slipped back out the window and clambered up the ropes, retracing their steps to the getaway car. They had stolen $410,000 worth of gems, including the Star of India sapphire (563 carats), the DeLong ruby (100 carats), the Eagle Diamond (14 carats), and the Midnight Sapphire, the largest black sapphire in the world.

Twelve hours after the raid, Murphy and Kuhn were on a plane to Miami with the gems in a briefcase unwittingly carried by Kuhn’s girlfriend. Within 24 hours, however, Murphy, Kuhn and Clark were in police custody, thanks to a tip from a bellhop who was suspicious of the crew’s sudden extravagant lifestyle. The DeLong ruby was recovered after being offered for ransom, and many of the gems have never been recovered, including the Eagle Diamond, which was probably cut into smaller stones.

[source article; The DeLong Ruby]

Heist #3: Millionaire Condo Heist

HEIST # 3: Millionaire Condo Heist
LOCATION: High Rise Condo Building, Fort Lauderdale, Florida
HAUL: $3 Million in Diamond and Gold Jewelry

On a dark, wet and stormy night in Florida, a lone figure dressed head-to-toe in black teetered on a thin ledge outside a luxury condominium building 15 stories above the ground. As high winds threatened to tear him from his perch, the world’s greatest cat burglar had one thing on his mind – pocketing millions of dollars worth of jewelry from industrialist Armand Hammer’s apartment.

Only one man would even contemplate such a feat — a man of deft criminal prowess, a cat burglar used to operating at dizzying heights, a thief who could spot loopholes in any security system faster than you can say, “Hey, where’s my Rolex?” His name is Bill Mason, and during his 30-year criminal career, he swiped over $35 million in bling from some of America’s richest and most famous people. Besides Hammer, his marks included Bob Hope, Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller, Phyllis Diller (twice) and even a Cleveland Mafia boss.

The Hammer heist was a textbook example of Mason’s work from his heyday in the 1970s – swift, smart and simple, with just a little bit of luck. After casing the joint, Mason decided to hit the apartment on a stormy night so there would be no witnesses on the busy streets nearby. However, the weather made the job a lot more dangerous. Timing his run perfectly, Mason slipped along the base of the building, unseen by cameras and the lobby security guard. He swung a grappling hook up into a open-air stairwell on the second floor and hauled himself up. Mason had to be light on his feet, so he only carried a minimal tool kit – a grappling hook and rope, glass cutter, lock picks and a few other small tools. Once inside, he silently climbed the service stairs to the Hammers’ fifteenth-floor residence. Mason picked open the door of the empty guest apartment adjacent to the Hammers’ and made his way out the window onto the ledge, one hundred and fifty feet above the sidewalk.

The rainwater had made the thin ledge Mason hoped to stand on treacherously slippery. Usually he preferred to perform his Spiderman antics facing away from the building, but conditions were so bad that that he had to turn around and hug it instead. Mason edged his way around the corner of the building before finally stepping on to the ledge of the Hammers’ balcony. Amazingly, Mason didn’t need any tools at all. Fooled by the apartment’s height and the security on the ground floor, the Hammers had left the sliding balcony doors unlocked and the alarm switched off. He didn’t even need to use the noise of thunder to mask the noise of him cutting through the glass doors.

Mason allowed himself only five minutes in the apartment, working in the dark. In the dim glow of his penlight, he filled a pillowcase full of diamond and gold jewelry that Frances Hammer kept in boxes on her dressing tables.

However, as Mason will tell you, getting the stash is only half the heist – the other half is getting away. He was already wearing cotton gloves, and he made sure not to touch or move anything he didn’t need to. Mason had planned to go out the same way he came in, but thanks to the Hammers, he found that the front door only used one of its three locks. Once he’d picked the lock from the inside, Mason could use the service stairway to get back down to the second floor and use the grappling iron to descend to terra firma.

The police had no idea who committed the robbery – they had no clues or leads. In fact, they never figured out how the thieves (they assumed there was more than one) had even gotten into the condo. It seemed as if the jewels had just vanished into thin air. Mason eventually ‘fessed up to this crime (and many others) when he wrote a tell-all memoir, “Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief.”

[source article]

 

Heist #4: World’s Biggest Diamond Heist

HEIST #4: World’s Biggest Diamond Heist
LOCATION: Antwerp Diamond Centre, Belgium
HAUL: $100 Million in Diamonds

Over the weekend of February 15-16, 2003, thieves cleared out 123 of the 160 safe-deposit boxes in the maximum-security vault of Antwerp’s Diamond Center, where dealers and cutters store their wares. Authorities called it the “heist of the century” and “a piece of genius in its simplicity.”

Distracted by the Diamond Games tennis tournament in the city, which most of the Center’s dealers were attending, the robbery wasn’t discovered until February 17. So many gems had been taken that police were still trying to quantify the loss weeks later.

It was an audacious robbery. The Diamond Center is the largest building in Antwerp’s historic gem district – the hub of the world’s gem trade – and is protected by 24-hour police patrols on its pedestrian streets and by dozens of surveillance cameras. Metal barricades prevent unauthorized vehicles from entering the district. The Center itself requires special passes to gain entry, and has round-the-clock guards, security bars and vault doors. Even the underground vault has cameras inside.

The raid is believed to have been carried out by a gang of veteran Italian robbers known as “The School of Turin.” It was such a professional job, relying on detailed knowledge of alarm systems and physical security barriers, that the gang did not need to resort to violence. Police were puzzled by the stealth of the gang — there was no sign of break-in at the entrance or at the cellar. They soon arrested an Italian man, Leonardo Notarbartolo, who rented a room at the Center. They didn’t arrest him for being directly involved with the robbery, however; instead, they charged him with using keys and documents under false pretenses and for “being part of a criminal gang.”

The criminals had done their homework. They knew how to circumvent the alarm system and copied master keys after posing as a legitimate company and renting an office in the Diamond Center three years earlier. With this knowledge, they could systemically dismantle the security systems one by one to gain access to the main underground vault, which contained the safety-deposit boxes.

At 7 p.m. on that Friday, the doors to the Diamond Center closed. Notarbartolo was one of the last people seen in the vault that night. At around midnight the following evening, according to police, at least three men took the elevator down to the vault. They or other members of the team had disabled a motion detector earlier, protected the area by spraying it with silicone, and had taped over a light detector. This meant that the thieves were able to walk around freely. They went to a door next to the vault, broke in, and reached for a small metal box, which they knew contained the key to the vault.

The thieves cracked the code to access the vault — the police are unsure how — and used their stolen key. At this point, there was only one obstacle to go: a last-resort alarm on the two-foot-thick metal vault door. Normally, when the door opens, two magnets are pulled apart, triggering an alarm that is forwarded to the police. But the thieves cut the bolts holding the two magnets in place and then taped them together. Next, they moved the magnets to the side and opened the door. Because the magnets were still touching, the alarm was never activated.

Standing inside the vault, the thieves assembled a special tool from common machine parts that allowed them to break the lock on each deposit box. For the next five hours, they opened the boxes and went through the loot, throwing what they didn’t want on the ground, including a heap of extremely valuable jewels, watches and money. They were so loaded down with the loot from the first 123 boxes they broke open that they had to leave the remaining 37 untouched.

To exit the scene, the gang used a homemade key, which gave them access to every door in the building. First they entered an office and stole the videotape recordings from the security cameras, replacing them with copies of the previous night’s footage. Then, using the special key, they gained access to the building’s underground garage, which had an exit opening onto a street outside the diamond district — just one block away from the metal barricades, the round-the-clock guards and the district’s police station.

As the gang watched Notarbartolo handcuffed and frog-marched into the Antwerp police station on TV, they must have thought they’d got away scot-free. However, this wasn’t the perfect heist, and the CSI team discovered a vital piece of evidence in the vault – the DNA of a man named Antoninio Finotto, who turned out to be the gang’s leader. However, Finotto had escaped the scene and was back in his native Turin. The Italian courts tried him for lesser offenses connected to the heist, but Italy has no extradition agreement with Belgium, and he remains unpunished for his crimes there. Notarbartolo is currently in prison awaiting trial. None of the missing diamonds have ever been recovered.

[source article; more info]

Heist #5: Picasso Yatch Heist

HEIST #5: Picasso Yacht Heist
LOCATION: ‘Coral Island’ Yacht Moored in Antibes, France
HAUL: $6 Million Painting by Picasso

In 1999, thieves pulled off an audacious, puzzling and intriguing robbery. When reclusive Saudi billionaire tycoon Al Sheik Modhassan disembarked from his yacht on March 6, he thought his Picasso was protected by a state-of-the-art security system. When he looked again on March 12, however, the painting was gone. To this day, no one knows exactly how the heist was pulled off.

The painting, known as “Bust de Femme” by Picasso, was discovered missing while Modhassan’s yacht was being refitted in the Mediterranean resort of Antibes. It was only one of an extensive collection on the 250-foot-long luxury yacht, including other works by Picasso and Matisse that were worth a total of $225 million. The paintings were stored in a locked room on the yacht. Only two people had the keys, and only two other people knew where the paintings were kept.

”Bust de Femme,” along with several other valuable paintings, had been specially packed for transport to England while the yacht underwent a refitting in Barcelona. Part of the work involved running cables in the walls and ceiling of the room where the paintings were hanging. The paintings were packed away to prevent them getting damaged during the refit.

French police suspected an inside job, so they interviewed the captain, Lars Van Dinther, and the yacht’s crew. A reward of 3.5 million francs (or $580,000) was offered for information leading to the painting’s recovery by the French insurers on behalf of Lloyd’s of London. The painting has not been recovered.