The Mona Lisa was stolen by that horrible
tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte! Well, it wouldn’t be in the hands of those French bullies for
long. Vincenzo Peruggia was going to commit the greatest theft of the 20th century and
the French could kiss his “culo”. He didn’t even much like that grinning damsel. The girl
who perpetually looks askance at all the fawning fans that sit at her altar, but it would be
his, and one day it would be returned to its rightful owners. Mr. Peruggia was an audacious
thief, he was a celebrated patriot, and he almost pulled it off…almost. He would have,
if it weren’t for those pesky, back-stabbing weasels.
Ok, so we guess some of you aren’t so familiar with the Mona Lisa. Not everyone’s an art
critic, eh, and when you’ve grown up on a strict diet of ‘Grand theft Auto’ and
‘Days of Our Lives’ there’s not much time for classical art.
The Mona Lisa is a big deal. It’s the most visited, best known, most parodied artwork
in the world. It’s also expensive. It holds the record for the insurance value of an artwork.
That was $100 million back in 1962, which is around $858 million in today’s money.
Why so expensive? What’s so special about it?
Well, we’re talking about the art world. A topsy-turvy world that doesn’t make much
sense. You can scribble with paint like a child and the painting might fetch over $46
million or just paint something that looks like you might paint a bedroom wall and you
might get over $84 million So, while there’s no doubt that the Mona
Lisa took a bit more effort and skill to paint than some atrocious, implausibly expensive
modern art, it’s not really any better than many paintings created by people living out
of trailers and surviving on rations of Hostess twinkies. The art world deems the Mona Lisa
valuable and that’s that, it is valuable. For this reason, thousands of people go to
see it every day at the Louvre in France and that’s why it’s kept behind bulletproof
glass. We should also say, the amazing story you
are about to hear added a lot to its value. Who is the woman?
She looks pretty drab and unprepossessing to be honest, albeit she’s a shifty-looking
gal that looks quite pleased with herself. Maybe that’s because under those dark robes
she’s hiding the cheese she just stole. That, or she just let one rip.
Ok, enough of the childishness. She was painted by Leonardo da Vinci at the beginning of the
1500s. She was the wife of a fairly well-off merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, a man
that liked younger women, namely, Lisa del Giocondo, who married him at the young age
of 15. Hey, her dowry was 170 florins, so her family was content with the deal. Mona,
or Monna, likely relates to the word Madonna, or just “Lady”.
In short, people in the past liked this painting a lot. Some people thought Lisa was quite
the hottie. She ended up with kings of France and she once adorned the bedroom wall of Napoleon.
People said she was enchanting, captivating, mysterious . One 19th century art critic went
as far as to call her a vampire. When the 20th century rolled around she was dubbed
one of the greatest artworks of all time, and then she went missing...for a long time. Now we welcome to this story one Vincenzo
Peruggia, the man that would become a national and to some extent an international hero. We won’t bore you with all that early life
stuff, well, we couldn’t if we tried because we don’t know much about young Peruggia.
We do know that he was fond of art. We also know that he had a job at the Louvre. One
of his tasks in that job was to protect the paintings.
You see, some folks back then were a bit peeved that artworks could be so expensive, with
them subsisting on bread and butter and all. At times, they’d go into the museum and
spit at paintings. Sometimes they’d attack works of art with a razor blade. For this
reason, some really valuable paintings were protected by glass cages. Guess who was one
of the guys responsible for making and fitting those cages? None other than Mr. Peruggia.
Making cages wasn’t exactly a money spinner, and as the story goes, Peruggia lived hand
to mouth. He disliked aspects of France as much as he disliked hunger, but he also loved
art. Ok, so you’re broke and you love art, what do you do? You steal paintings, of course.
He also hated the fact that Napoleon had looted the Mona Lisa from Italy. He was actually
laboring under a misapprehension there, because Napoleon didn’t plunder the painting at
all. Leonardo died when he was living in the court of King Francois I. The king kept the
painting. So, one day workers at the museum were a little
shocked to see their most treasured painting gone. The cops turned up and said, ok, this
must have been done by some kind of criminal mastermind. He must have broken into the museum
and hid. Then when the place was closed, he must have come out of hiding, taken the painting,
and left through the back door. Not true.
While Peruggia was no longer working at the Louvre, he did have a white smock, the same
as other museum workers had. So, when he walked in the front door with them on a Monday morning
no one thought much about it. He was one of them.
He knew that the Mona Lisa was hung in the part of the museum called the Salon Carré.
When that was empty, he lifted the painting along with the case off the wall. After that,
he crept to a staircase and started to take the painting out of the case – he’d built
it after all. The funny thing was, only minutes before all this happened the Louvre’s maintenance
director, a guy named Picquet, had looked at the painting and remarked to a co-worker,
“They say it is worth a million and a half.” Some folks said that he must have hidden the
painting, painted on wood, under his smock, but the fact is he was just too short to get
away with that. What really happened is he took off his smock, wrapped it around the
painting, put the bundle under his arm, and headed for a back door.
Now there was a small problem. Peruggia had somehow gotten a key for that door, but when
he arrived there the key wouldn’t work. He used the same screwdriver he’d used to
get the painting out of the frame to take off the door handle. That didn’t help much.
Then the only man ever to see Peruggia, a plumber named Sauvet, turned up. The thief
told him he couldn’t get through the door, so Sauvet produced a pair of pliers and managed
to open it. Merci beaucoup. The plumber said it was best they leave the door open so others
might get through, to which Peruggia nodded his head. He was seen out in the street carrying
an object, but no one thought anything of it. One person saw a man throw something to
the side. That turned out to be the doorknob. Ok, so that’s not quite the crime of the
century in terms of technical brilliance, but he still managed to walk out of a place
with one of the most valuable paintings in the world. It was massive news. A British
newspaper headline read, “Paris Has Been Startled.” In the US The Washington Post
wrote, “The art world was thrown into consternation.” The New York Times wrote that the theft, “has
caused such a sensation that Parisians for the time being have forgotten the rumors of
war.” War was about three years away at this point by the way.
The masterful Peruggia kept the Mona Lisa in his apartment in Paris for a couple of
years, meanwhile the museum didn’t fill the space on the wall. What’s funny is the
fact that people flocked to see the empty space anyways. The crime became as popular
as the painting and the newspapers couldn’t stop writing about it. This only served to
make the Mona Lisa even more famous. Investigators grew desperate and France was
very embarrassed by the ordeal. For a time, the country even sealed its borders. People
carrying cases were stopped in the street. Checkpoints were set up all around Paris and
cars, trucks and wagons were stopped and searched. The authorities feared that someone would
try and take it out of the country, so people’s luggage on trains and ships was rooted through.
When the German ocean liner “Kaiser Wilhelm II” turned up in New York City all its luggage
was searched. What did they discover? Nothing. One of the enduring rumors was that some rich
American art collector had committed the crime, or at least commissioned it. Folks whispered
that it was the incredibly wealthy, art-loving banking magnate J. P. Morgan Jr., who was
behind the theft. He denied the accusations and even said, “A million dollars and no
questions asked” if someone just handed it in. That would have netted Peruggia about
$26 million in today’s money, but he was having none of it. The Brits were also blamed,
of course. They’d only been fighting the French for the good part of a thousand years,
but no, it wasn’t them. Then when a man named Joseph Géry Pieret
walked into the Paris Journal and told the reporters he was an art thief and he knew
where the Mona Lisa was, the authorities suddenly started grinning like the woman in the painting.
One thing led to another, and the gendarmes were knocking at the door of a young Pablo
Picasso. He actually was a thief, but he hadn’t taken the painting. The cops found two statues
that both had stamps on them saying, “PROPERTY OF THE MUSÉE DU LOUVRE.”
Weeks passed, months passed, and still the French authorities thought that the Spanish
rat Picasso had taken the painting. They had no idea that it was sitting in a trunk that
belonged to some poor Italian handyman and decorator. A man that would shock the world,
shock the courts, and win the hearts of his countrymen.
Down on his luck and without much cash, Peruggia finally decided that he would get rid of the
painting. He got in touch with Alfredo Geri, the owner of an art gallery in Florence. We’ll
call him Geri the traitor. At this point in time the French authorities
had pretty much accepted that they wouldn’t be getting the painting back. Investigators
had no leads and could only stare with frustration at an old door knob. They’d done everything,
literally searched the bags of France and beyond. They’d shown hundreds of photos
of past and present museum employees to that plumber, but he picked none of them out. They’d
worked with law enforcement in the US, Japan, the UK, Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, Brazil,
Argentina, and Peru. Nothing. November, 1913, Alfredo Geri wakes up in the
morning and collects his mail. There’s a letter signed off by someone named Leonard.
The letter states that he is in possession of the great Mona Lisa. It says that he wants
to return the painting to its native country, Italy, and while he won’t ask for a specific
payment, being poor and all, he would be grateful if he were compensated for bringing the Mona
Lisa home. The return address was a post-office box in Paris.
Geri didn’t believe a word of it, of course, but he still went to the director of Florence’s
Uffizi Gallery and told him about the letter. His name was Giovanni Poggi. Poggi had a collection
of photos of the Mona Lisa and some of them showed markings on the back of the panel.
If the writer of the letter was telling the truth, the painting he had would have those
markings. Geri always thought he was being led on a
merry dance, trolled by some dude with too much time on his hands, but then some months
later he received another letter. In that, the writer said he was in Italy and would
Geri like to see the world’s most famous painting.
Soon the mysterious Leonard was in his gallery office. He wore a fastidiously groomed mustache,
a smart suit, and he described the Mona Lisa and those markings on the back. The man said
he only wanted a reward, not the millions that the painting was worth. “500,000 lire,”
said Leonard. That’s about $2.6 million in today’s cash, but let’s remember that
the painting was actually worth closer to $130 million in today’s money. Geri held
out his hand and said, “That’s fine. That’s not too high.”
The next day, Mr. Peruggia, masquerading as Leonard, took Geri and Poggi to the Hotel
Tripoli-Italia in Florence. He took them to a room on the third floor, closed the curtains,
and pulled a white, wooden trunk from under the bed. It was time. It was what the world
was waiting for. Fake Leonard opened the trunk. Geri was aghast, shocked, when what he saw
were, in his own words, “wretched objects: broken shoes, a mangled hat, a pair of pliers,
plastering tools, a smock, some paint brushes, and even a mandolin.” Damn.
Leonard wasn’t done, though. He emptied the trunk and then opened a secret compartment.
Geri’s eyes sparkled; he almost wept. In front of him was the Mona Lisa, marvelously
preserved. He and Poggi meticulously checked it for its authenticity. It was the real deal,
no doubt about it. The three men almost didn’t make it out
of the hotel when the concierge pulled them up and asked them what they were carrying.
Were they stealing artwork from the hotel? They were ok, they showed him credentials
stating that they were art gallery directors. The painting was kept at Poggi’s gallery
and Peruggia (still pretending to be Leaonard) was told that he’d have to contact the Italian
government to get his reward. He believed that the two guys were honest and trustworthy.
They shook his hand and told him he was a true patriot. An hour or two later when Peruggia
was lying on his hotel bed and wondering how he’d spend his windfall there was a knock
on the door. It was the cops, or as they say in Italy, the Carabinieri.
The Louvre was informed, but the tale didn’t ring true. Some wretch had just walked out
with the Mona Lisa. No way. The next day they issued a statement to the media, “The curators
of the Louvre … wish to say nothing until they have seen the painting.”
After some diplomatic chit-chat on the phone, it was agreed that the Mona Lisa would be
returned to the Louvre. “Although the masterpiece is dear to all Italians as one of the best
productions of the genius of their race, we will willingly return it to its foster country,”
announced the Italian government. On January 4, 1914, it was back in the Salon
Carré. The poor patriot was behind bars, miserable
and angry. He received another metaphorical kick in the teeth when he heard that Geri
collected thousands of dollars in reward money and was bestowed with France’s “Legion
of Honor.” How could this have happened to him? Prison guards reported that he sat
all day in a state of deep depression, occasionally weeping at the cold stone walls.
Little did he know that he was a hero, not just in Italy, but around the world. He might
have been a villain of sorts, but oh boy, did he inspire people, especially the poor.
Age 32, standing in court, he told all in attendance, including the journalists from
all over the world, how he had done it. The judge then asked, but why, why did you
do such a thing, to which Perrugia replied, all those Italian paintings in the Louvre,
they’re all stolen. He was merely bringing one home. National museums, what are they
really, they’re just the loot stashes of criminal enterprises. He said that he’d
considered taking paintings by Raphael, Correggio, Giorgione, but the Mona Lisa, it was small
enough to hide under a smock. It wasn’t about the value, he said, and added, “I
never acted with that in mind. I only desired that this masterpiece would be put in its
place of honor here in Florence.” The judge fired back, “But didn’t you
try and sell it to the English!?” Perrugia denied it, but the fact is, he had
earlier said in a statement that he’d tried to fence it to an Englishman. Whether he did
or didn’t remains a mystery. A lot of what he said is confusing, because he contradicted
himself a bunch of times. Did he act alone in the theft? Was he part
of a global conspiracy of thieves and scammers who intended to steal the Mona Lisa so they
could make and sell forgeries and sell them to wealthy art collectors? Who knows?
Perrugia was sentenced to one year and fifteen days. When asked by a reporter how he felt
about that he replied, “It could have been worse.”
He was out in seven months. Crowds of cheering people were there to greet him. He was front
page news... for a while anyway. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had just been assassinated.
World War One was just around the corner. Human blood would cover the canvas of a continent.
Old, present and budding empires, thieves of land and life, would relegate Perrugia’s
small crime to the annals of forgotten history. He died in France, heart attack, age 44.
No one talked about it. Now you need to watch, “How The Biggest
Diamond Vault Heist Of The Century Happened.” Or, “Airplane Heist - Thief Who Hijacked
A Plane and Stole A Million Dollars.”
