The Speedboat
Strängnäs, Sweden. 31 July 2018. A Tuesday morning. Eight AM. Strängnäs Cathedral — a working thirteenth-century church about a hundred kilometres west of Stockholm — is open to visitors. Two men walk in during visiting hours, smash a display case open in front of tourists, and run out with two funeral crowns and an orb from the Swedish royal collection. Four hundred years of heritage, in their hands.
They run four hundred metres through the city in broad daylight, reach the waterfront at Lake Mälaren, board a waiting speedboat, and disappear across open water before police can get to the cathedral. It is the most cinematic theft Maren has ever researched.
The boat is found abandoned. The thieves are not. The break in the case comes months later, in Denmark, from a routine traffic stop that connects a man named Stjepan Filipovic to a Romanian network trading in stolen Scandinavian art. The crowns come home — one from a duffel bag in a Stockholm suburb, the others from a coordinated European arrest operation.
Maren and Ellis on the heist that looked like an action film, and the very ordinary traffic stop that ended it.
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The Empty Frames
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 Vermeer's The Concert, Rembrandt's only seascape, and five Degas sketches. Total value: over half a billion dollars.
The Man Who Stole a Smile
Paris, 21 August 1911. A Monday. The Louvre is closed to the public, but staff are inside doing the usual Monday routine. A handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia — a man who had installed protective glass cases in the museum months earlier — walks into the Salon Carré, lifts the Mona Lisa off its four iron pegs, tucks it under his work smock, and walks out a side door.
The Mother Who Burned the Monets
Rotterdam, October 2012. At 3:07 in the morning, a Romanian crew breaks through a side entrance of the Kunsthal museum. They know the layout. They know which walls. They know exactly what to take. In a hundred and eight seconds — under two minutes — they lift seven paintings off the walls and disappear: a Picasso, two Monets, a Matisse, a Gauguin, a Lucian Freud, and a Meyer de Haan. An estimated one hundred to two hundred million euros.
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