The Spider-Man of Paris

On the night of 19-20 May 2010, on the Avenue du Président Wilson on the edge of the Trocadéro in Paris, a man named Vjeran Tomic spent about an hour working on a single window of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. He was a known figure to French police. A career thief. A climber. A man who had spent the previous decade and a half scaling the exteriors of Paris apartment buildings, museums, and private residences. The French press would soon call him the Spider-Man of Paris.

He had identified, in advance, a specific window on a specific corner of the museum. The window was secured by a removable iron grille bolted to the frame, and the bolts on this particular grille were loose. He had, in the days before, visited the museum as a paying visitor. He had measured. He had timed. He had decided that he would, on the night, come in for one specific painting — a Léger called Still Life with Candlestick — and that the entire operation would take under five minutes.

The grille

He brought a small toolkit. He removed the loose bolts and lifted off the grille. He pried out the window pane next to it. He climbed in. Inside, he was now in a gallery he had walked through, as a paying visitor, the previous week. He knew which paintings were where. He knew exactly where the Léger hung. He intended to take it, climb back out, and leave. By his original plan, the alarm would trigger as soon as he opened the case, and he had built the plan around having approximately ninety seconds inside the building before a security response was on the floor.

He smashed the case to take the Léger. The case shattered. Nothing happened. No alarm. No movement of guards. No response of any kind. The building was silent.

Eight weeks

The motion-detection alarm system, the inquiry would later establish, had been broken for approximately eight weeks. The contractor responsible for maintaining the system had submitted three separate written reports, in writing, identifying that the motion sensors in this part of the building were not communicating with the central security panel. The reports had been received. The reports had been filed. The repairs had been authorised. The repairs had not been carried out. There had been an internal communication problem.

Tomic had no way of knowing this when he climbed through the window. He discovered it within seconds, because he opened a glass case to take the Léger and the building did not respond. He stood, in the silent gallery, with one painting in his hand. He looked around. He understood that the building was, effectively, his to use. For some period of time. He could not know how long. He decided to extend the night.

Five paintings

He moved methodically from gallery to gallery. He cut each canvas, where necessary, from its frame. He rolled them. He placed them, one by one, in a black canvas bag he had originally brought only for the Léger. By the time he was finished, the bag held five works:

• Pablo Picasso, Le Pigeon aux petits pois — Pigeon with Peas, 1911
• Henri Matisse, La Pastorale — Pastoral, 1905
• Amedeo Modigliani, La Femme à l'éventail — Woman with a Fan, 1919
• Georges Braque, L'Olivier près de l'Estaque — The Olive Tree near l'Estaque, 1906
• Fernand Léger, Still Life with Candlestick, 1922

The total estimated value, at the time of theft, was approximately one hundred million euros. Total time inside the museum, by the security camera footage that was later reconstructed, was somewhere between five and ten minutes. He returned to the window, climbed out, bolted the grille loosely back into place, and walked to a car parked on a side street. He drove off.

The morning

At seven AM, the museum staff arrived to open the building. They saw the broken glass case. They saw the empty wall where the Picasso had been. They began calling out the names of paintings to each other, room to room, like a roll-call, as the absence became clear. By eight AM, the museum was sealed. By ten AM, French national press had the story. By noon, every museum in Paris had received an emergency review of its alarm system.

The intermediaries

Tomic was caught about a year later, through a network of intermediaries. The paintings, after the theft, had passed through the hands of two men in Paris whom Tomic had originally intended to fence them through. Those men had panicked at the scale of what Tomic had handed them. The paintings had become, almost immediately, unsellable: too famous, too photographed, too recognisable to every gallery and dealer and auction house in Europe. The intermediaries hid them. In one of their accounts, given later under interrogation, the paintings had been kept in a black bag in a flat in the eleventh arrondissement for over a year, then thrown into a rubbish container in eastern Paris.

The Tribunal Correctionnel de Paris later concluded that the rubbish-container claim was, on balance, probably false. The investigators believed the paintings had been hidden somewhere else, then moved several times, then possibly destroyed to remove evidence in advance of arrest. There is no firm answer. None of the five paintings has ever been recovered.

Tomic was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to eight years. The intermediaries received between six and seven years. He was a competent climber but not a supernatural one. The Picasso, the Matisse, the Modigliani, the Braque, and the Léger left the Musée d'Art Moderne not because of his brilliance but because of an unread email — the contractor's report on a faulty sensor that had sat in an inbox for eight weeks. The window was the entry. The unread email was the door.

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Listen to the full story on The Vault, Episode 12. Stream the episode here.