The Boat Heist

On the afternoon of 22 December 2000, the day before Christmas Eve, in the centre of Stockholm, two car bombs went off about a kilometre apart. The first detonated in front of a hotel approximately six hundred metres from the Nationalmuseum. The second detonated on a major access road approximately a kilometre away. They were not large bombs. They caused significant property damage. There were no fatalities. They had been timed to detonate, by the planners' subsequent admission, at the exact moment the operation at the museum began. They were diversions.

While the diversions burned, three men in masks walked through the front entrance of the Nationalmuseum, carried out an armed heist that lasted three minutes, and escaped by motorboat across central Stockholm harbour.

The Nationalmuseum

The Nationalmuseum sits on a peninsula in the centre of Stockholm, with water on three sides. The museum was open until five PM on the afternoon of 22 December, after which it would close for the holiday. At approximately 4:45 PM, fifteen minutes before closing — when the museum was nearly empty and the staff were already preparing to lock up — the two bombs detonated. Within minutes, approximately fifty Stockholm officers had been diverted across the city in response. The road blockages caused additional units to take longer routes. The general response capability available to a museum at the centre of the city had, in those first crucial minutes, almost entirely been pointed somewhere else.

That was when the masked men entered.

Three minutes

They had handguns visible. They ordered the staff and the small number of remaining visitors to lie face-down. They walked up the marble staircase to the second floor. They went directly to a small gallery. They knew exactly which paintings they wanted, and the three paintings hung close together. They lifted them from their walls. They cut, where necessary, the canvases from their mounts. They placed them in a duffel bag.

The three works were:

• Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Conversation with the Gardener, 1892
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Young Parisian, 1873
• Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1630 — painted by Rembrandt, of Rembrandt, when he was twenty-four years old

Total time inside the gallery, by the museum's security camera footage: approximately three minutes.

The motorboat

They walked back down the marble staircase. They did not exit through the front. They left through a service door at the rear of the building, which opened onto a small dock on the water — the harbour-side service entrance to a museum on a peninsula. At the dock, a small motorboat was waiting. With a fourth man at the wheel. The engine was running.

They climbed in. The boat pulled away from the dock. They headed across the harbour. Within ninety seconds of leaving the museum, they were on open water. Stockholm police, still occupied with the two car bombs, were unable to get a marine unit on the water before the boat had disappeared. The boat was abandoned at a dock about three kilometres away. The four men split up. They disappeared into Stockholm. The total operation — both bombs, the museum entry, the painting removal, and the boat — had taken approximately twenty minutes.

Convictions and recovery

The case unwound over years. Stockholm police identified, within weeks, three of the suspects as career criminals from southern Stockholm with previous convictions for armed robbery. They were arrested and tried. In 2001, the Stockholm District Court convicted three men of the museum theft, with sentences of six to eight years. None of the convicted men, however, would say where the paintings were. The convictions were on the entry, the threats, and the boat — there was direct evidence for all of those. There was no direct evidence for the location of the paintings.

Recovery took five years and two FBI sting operations on two continents.

The first Renoir, Conversation with the Gardener, was recovered in 2001 in Stockholm itself, during a separate police operation against an organised crime group. The painting was undamaged. It went home.

The Rembrandt — Self-Portrait, 1630 — was recovered in 2005 by an FBI sting operation in a Copenhagen hotel room. An FBI agent posing as a buyer paid two hundred and fifty thousand US dollars for what he was told was a small piece of the Rembrandt-Renoir set. The painting was authentic. The buyer was an FBI undercover. The men with the painting were arrested in the room. The Rembrandt went back to Stockholm.

The second Renoir, Young Parisian, was recovered in 2005 in Los Angeles, through a separate sting that an FBI office had been running for several months on a Bulgarian organised-crime operation. By the end of 2005, all three paintings were back in the Nationalmuseum.

The boat

What stays with anyone reading the case file is the boat. Of all the methods to leave a museum — vehicles, vans, fire exits, ladders, scaffolding, train tracks, every variant possible — the Nationalmuseum thieves chose the only method available, in a city built on water, that nobody had thought to plan against. The dock at the rear of the museum has, since 2001, been substantially reinforced. The service door has new locks. The harbour is patrolled. None of which would have helped, in 2000, because the moment the second car bomb detonated on Strömgatan every patrol unit that mattered was already pointing in the wrong direction.

Three minutes inside, twenty seconds at the dock, ninety seconds on the water. It is one of the cleanest exit strategies in the recorded history of European art theft.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 14. Stream the episode here.