PARIS - Three people are being held in connection with the theft of paintings worth at least 140 million dollars from a Paris gallery last year, but the works are still missing, a legal official said Saturday.
Art Kabinett collectors first read about this stunning theft in our AK Files published at that time.
The three, a woman suspected of taking part in the theft and two people suspected of handling stolen goods, were arrested and charged over the robbery of the five paintings, by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, and placed in custody on September 16, the official said.
The artworks, stolen from Paris Museum of Modern Art 18-months ago after the alarm system failed to trigger, have still not been recovered, said an official from the Prosecutor's office.
A lone burglar sheared off a gate padlock and broke a window to get into the city-run Musee d'Art Moderne in the brazen operation during the night of May 19 last year. The paintings were found to be missing just as the museum, a major tourist attraction near the Eiffel Tower, was about to open.
Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe later said one of the museum's alarms had been "partly malfunctioning" since the end of March, and that it was still awaiting repair when the thieves struck.
The stolen Picasso alone -- the cubist "Dove with Green Peas," which the Spanish artist created in 1912 -- is worth over some 25 million euros, according to the mayor's deputy for culture, Christophe Girard.
The others were French contemporary Matisse's "Pastoral" from 1905, Braque's "Olive Tree near Estaque", Modigliani's "Woman with a Fan" and Leger's "Still Life with Candlestick".
City hall put the total value of the haul at 100 million euros ($140 million), but some experts said they were worth twice that, while admitting they were totally unsaleable openly.
Pablo Picasso's Cubist 'Dove with Green Peas', one of the snatched paintings, was worth $28 million, according to estimates given by the museum at the time of the heist.
Girard said the thief managed to slip past three nightwatchmen on duty. A special unit of the interior ministry, the BRB, is in charge of the investigation.
"To get into the museum so fast by disassembling a window, choose five specific works and then slip out unnoticed by the guards, that is quite impressive," he said.
Spectacular museum thefts of big-name art occasionally grab the headlines.
One former thief calls those stolen Picassos and Monets "headache art" because they're easy to steal but hard to sell. But most hot art gets no attention at all.
Despite being a multimillion-dollar business, the secretive, insular art market is the "least regulated and the least transparent activity in the commercial world," according to one of police sources. Many of the people involved aren't keen to change that. Theft is under-reported and acquisitions often proceed with no questions asked, meaning stolen art can move back into the legitimate market with just one transaction.
