The Vault
The most valuable things in Europe keep disappearing.
Art theft, museum heists, and stolen treasures — from the Gardner Museum to Nazi looted art. The stories behind Europe's most dramatic cultural crimes.
Hosted by Maren Cole
All Episodes(19)
The Schiphol Diamond Heist
Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands, 4 AM on Friday 25 February 2005. Two men in KLM uniforms, in a stolen KLM cargo van, drive through a perimeter gate of the cargo terminal. The single guard with a clipboard waves them through — the uniforms are correct, the van logo is correct, it is a routine pre-dawn cargo movement. They drive across the tarmac to a holding bay where a sealed shipping container is waiting to be loaded onto a 6 AM KLM flight to Tel Aviv. The container holds approximately a hundred and eighteen million dollars in uncut industrial diamonds.
The Just Judges
Ghent, Belgium, the night of 10-11 April 1934. One panel of twelve, cut out of a fifteenth-century altarpiece in Saint Bavo's Cathedral. Never recovered. The single most famous unsolved art theft in northern European history.
The Singer Laren Van Gogh
The Netherlands, 30 March 2020. The third week of the first European COVID lockdown. The streets of the small wooded village of Laren, thirty kilometres east of Amsterdam, are emptier at three in the morning than they have been at any point in fifty years.
The Caravaggio
Palermo, Sicily, the night of 17-18 October 1969. A heavy rainstorm has emptied the streets. Two men force the front door of the Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a small Baroque oratory in the centre of the old city, walls entirely covered in Giacomo Serpotta's seventeenth-century white stucco. They walk past everything except a single painting hanging above the altar.
The Hatton Garden Heist
London, Easter weekend 2015. A small group of British career criminals — average age 62, the eldest of them 76 — drilled their way into a safe-deposit vault below the central London jewellery district over a four-day Bank Holiday closure. They climbed through a lift shaft, assembled a 75-kilogram industrial diamond core drill in the basement, and cut three overlapping circular holes in 50 centimetres of reinforced concrete.
The Boat Heist
Stockholm, 22 December 2000. Fifteen minutes before the Nationalmuseum closes for the Christmas holiday, two car bombs go off in central Stockholm. Six hundred metres from the museum at one location, a kilometre away at another. They are not large bombs. They cause significant property damage. There are no fatalities. They are, by the planners' subsequent admission, diversions.
The Big Maple Leaf
Berlin, 27 March 2017. At 3:45 in the morning, three men cross a regional railway track at the rear of the Bode Museum on Museum Island. They place a ladder against the back wall. They climb to a second-floor window — left ajar by staff for ventilation — and they climb in. They walk to a glass case in a numismatic gallery. They smash the case with an axe.
The Spider-Man of Paris
Paris, the night of 19-20 May 2010. Vjeran Tomic — a career thief and climber the French press would soon call the Spider-Man of Paris — works for an hour on a window of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Loose bolts on a removable iron grille. He climbs in. He has come for one painting: a Léger he had identified on previous visits as a paying tourist. He plans to be inside for under five minutes.
The Scream
Oslo. Edvard Munch's most reproduced work. Tempera on cardboard, 1893. One of four versions of The Scream. Taken twice, ten years apart, from two different museums in the same city.
The Bührle Heist
Zurich, Sunday 10 February 2008. Around 4:30 PM, half an hour before closing, three men in ski masks walk into the E.G. Bührle Foundation — a private museum in a converted villa in the Seefeld district, holding one of the most significant private Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections in twentieth-century Europe. One has a pistol. The staff and visitors are ordered to lie face-down. The thieves walk straight to four specific paintings: Cézanne's "The Boy in the Red Waistcoat", Degas's "Count Lepic and his Daughters", Van Gogh's "Blossoming Chestnut Branches", Monet's "Poppy Field at Vétheuil". They lift each one from its wall. They put them in a duffel bag. They walk out. They get into a white van.
The Art Thief
Stéphane Breitwieser was a French waiter, working in Switzerland, who lived with his mother. Between 1995 and 2001, he stole over two hundred and thirty artworks from museums in seven European countries. Renaissance panels. Brueghel. Watteau. Tapestries. Ivories. He never sold any of them. He hung them on the walls of his bedroom in his mother's house outside Mulhouse. Estimated value: over a billion euros. He, by his own account, loved them.
The Green Vault
Dresden, 25 November 2019. At 4:47 in the morning, a fire is set in a street-side electrical distribution box on the Augustusbrücke side of the Residenzschloss — the royal palace of the Saxon kings. The fire is small but specific. It disables the streetlights. It darkens the area around the palace. Inside the palace sits the Grünes Gewölbe, the Green Vault, established by Augustus the Strong in 1723 — one of the oldest treasure chambers in Europe.
The Antwerp Diamond Heist
Antwerp, Belgium. The weekend of 15-16 February 2003. The Antwerp Diamond Centre vault — sixty metres below ground, behind a steel door three feet thick, protected by ten distinct security systems including heat sensors, Doppler radar, magnetic field detectors, and a combination dial requiring both a key and a code — is opened over a single weekend. One hundred and nine of its one hundred and eighty-nine private safe-deposit boxes are emptied. Estimated take: at least one hundred million dollars.
The Golden Toilet
Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. 14 September 2019. Five hours after Maurizio Cattelan's solid-gold artwork "America" — a fully functional eighteen-carat gold toilet, valued at £4.8 million — has opened to the public, a small team breaks in, rips the piece from the wall with the water still running, and disappears into the dark.
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.
The Salt Cellar
Vienna, 10 May 2003. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is undergoing renovation. Scaffolding climbs the exterior. Overnight, a fifty-year-old alarm systems technician named Robert Mang — a man whose day job was installing and servicing museum security — climbs that scaffolding, removes a window, disables the alarm, and walks out with the Saliera.
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.
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