The Bührle Heist

On Sunday 10 February 2008, half an hour before closing time, three men in ski masks walked into the E.G. Bührle Foundation in Zurich. The foundation was a private museum housed in a converted villa in the Seefeld district. It held one of the most significant private collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art assembled in twentieth-century Europe. By the time the staff and visitors stood up, the three men had been gone for about three minutes, and four specific paintings had gone with them.

The total value of what they took was approximately one hundred and forty-one million euros.

The villa

The Bührle was not the Kunsthaus. It was not the Louvre. It was a private foundation in a residential street, with a small staff, with cameras and alarms, but with the kind of presence-based security that depends, at any given moment, on a small number of people being awake and looking in the right direction. Sunday afternoon was the institution's slowest period. There were three staff on duty and a handful of visitors when the men entered through the front door.

One had a pistol visible. The other two were, between them, carrying a duffel bag. They ordered the staff and the visitors to lie face-down on the floor. They walked into the main exhibition hall.

Three minutes

They knew exactly where they were going. They had clearly visited the museum before, in normal opening hours, as paying members of the public. They moved directly to the room containing Paul Cézanne's The Boy in the Red Waistcoat. They lifted the painting from its hooks. They placed it in the bag. They moved to the next room. They took Edgar Degas's Count Lepic and his Daughters. They moved to the next. They took Vincent van Gogh's Blossoming Chestnut Branches. They moved to the next. They took Claude Monet's Poppy Field at Vétheuil. Four paintings, from four different walls, in three different rooms, in less than three minutes.

They walked out the front door. They got into a white van waiting just outside. They drove off. The whole operation, from entry to van departure, was less than four minutes. Inside the villa, the staff stood up and triggered the alarm. Within fifteen minutes, the van had been spotted, abandoned, in a parking lot a few hundred metres away. With two of the four paintings still inside it.

The Van Gogh in the parking lot

The Van Gogh and the Degas had been left in the abandoned van. Investigators were initially baffled. The Van Gogh alone was worth approximately fifty million euros. To leave it in a van in an open parking lot, a kilometre from the scene of the theft, was, on its face, irrational. The leading hypothesis was that the men had been monitoring police radio in the van, that something had spooked them, and that they had transferred only the most valuable two paintings — the Cézanne and the Monet — to a second vehicle and abandoned everything else.

The Cézanne returned a week later. It was offered, at sharply reduced price, to a Belgrade-based dealer in stolen and grey-market art named Adrian Bachmann, who had recognised the painting and quietly notified Serbian police. The painting came back to Zurich.

The Monet — the Poppy Field at Vétheuil — took four years. It was recovered in 2012, in Belgrade, in a private apartment, through a Serbian organised-crime investigation that had been running parallel to the art investigation for several years.

Belgrade

The trail led, repeatedly, to Serbia. To a network of former Yugoslav intelligence operatives and organised crime figures who had, since the wars of the 1990s, treated stolen art as a high-value asset class — easier to move across borders than cash, easier to store than cocaine, holdable for years until prices were right. The Bührle paintings had entered, almost immediately, the Belgrade network.

In 2009, two men of Serbian background, both with prior convictions for organised theft, were arrested by Zurich police and convicted at Zurich District Court of the Bührle robbery. Sentences of seven to nine years. The third man, the leader, was identified, named, and indicted, but was at that time already deceased — having been killed in an unrelated organised crime incident in Belgrade.

Today

The Bührle collection is now part of the Kunsthaus Zurich. The foundation moved most of its holdings, in 2021, to a new wing of the city's main art museum. Behind upgraded security. Behind alarms. Behind motion sensors. Behind staff who do not lie face-down quickly. The Cézanne, the Monet, the Van Gogh, and the Degas — all four paintings — hang within metres of each other in the new wing. They have not been alone in a room with strangers since.

What stays with anyone reading the file is the speed. Three minutes. Four works. A hundred and forty-one million euros. They were in and out before any of the staff could reach a phone. They had not picked the lock. They had not disabled an alarm. They had walked through an open front door, on an open public Sunday, with a pistol and a duffel bag. The most expensive Sunday afternoon in the recent history of Zurich.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 10. Stream the episode here.