True Story Award 2021

Author:

Michael Finkel

Original Language:

English

First Published:

GQ Magazine, USA, 2019-02-28

Secrets of the World's Greatest Art Thief

“Don’t worry about parking the car,” says the art thief. “Anywhere near the museum is fine.” When it comes to stealing from museums, Stéphane Breitwieser is virtually peerless. He is one of the most prolific and successful art thieves who has ever lived. Done right, his technique – daytime, no violence, performed like a magic trick sometimes with guards in the room – never involves a dash to a getaway car. And done wrong, a parking spot is the least of his worries.

Just make sure to get there at lunchtime, Breitwieser stresses, when the visitors thin and the security staff rotates short-handed to eat. Dress sharply, shoes to shirt, topped by a blazer that’s tailored a little too roomy, with a Swiss army knife stashed in a pocket.

Be friendly at the front desk. Buy your ticket, say hello. Once inside, Breitwieser adds, it’s essential to focus. Note the flow of visitor traffic, and memorize the exits. Count the guards. Are they sitting or patrolling? Check for security cameras, and see if each has a wire – sometimes they’re fake.

With museum flooring, creaky old wood is ideal, because even with his back turned he can hear footsteps two rooms away. Carpeting is the worst. Here, at the Rubens House, in Antwerp, Belgium, it’s somewhere between: marble. For this theft, Breitwieser has arrived with his girlfriend and frequent accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, who positions herself near the only doorway to a ground-floor exhibition room, and coughs softly when anyone approaches.

The museum is the former home of Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish painter of the 1600s. Breitwieser is ambivalent about Rubens; there’s something too overtly religious about his style. It feels a bit earnest. What sets Breitwieser apart from nearly every other art thief – it’s the trait, he believes, that has facilitated his prowess – is that he will only steal pieces that stir him emotionally. And he never sells any. Stealing art for money, he says, is stupid. Money can be made with far less risk. But stealing for love, Breitwieser knows, is ecstatic.

And this piece, right in front of him, is a marvel. He had discovered it during a visit to the museum two weeks previous. He wasn’t able to take it then, but its image blazed in his mind every time he sought sleep. This is why he’s returned; this has happened before. There will be no good rest until the object is his.

It’s an ivory sculpture of Adam and Eve, carved in 1627 by Georg Petel, a friend of Reubens who gifted him the piece for his 50th birthday. The carving is a masterpiece, just ten inches tall but dazzlingly detailed, the first humans gazing at each other as they move to embrace, Eve’s hair scrolling down her back, the serpent coiled on a branch, and the unbitten apple, cheekily, in Adam’s hand, indicating his complicity in the fall of man, contrary to the book of Genesis. “It’s the most beautiful object I had ever seen,” says Breitwieser.

The ivory is sealed beneath a Plexiglas dome fastened to a thick base, resting on an antique dresser. It’s far too unwieldy to remove the whole display, even if it could be lifted, but just two screws connect the dome and the base. There’s no camera here, and only one guard is in motion, poking her head in every few minutes. The tourists, as usual, are the problem -- too many of them, lingering.

Patience is needed, but a moment soon comes when it’s just Kleinklaus and Breitwieser alone, and in an instant he unfolds the screwdriver from the Swiss army knife and sets upon the Plexiglas dome. Breitwieser is shorter than average, and tousle-haired, with piercing blue eyes that, for all his stealth, are often animate with expression. He is lithe and coordinated, and uses athleticism and theater in his work. Maybe five seconds pass before Kleinklaus coughs and he vaults away from the carving, reverting to casual art-gazing mode.

It’s a start. He has turned the screw twice around. Each job is different; improvisation is crucial -- rigid plans do not work during daytime thefts. Over the course of 10 minutes, progressing fitfully, Breitwieser removes the first screw and pockets it. He does not wear gloves, trading fingerprints for dexterity. The second screw takes equally as long.

Now he’s set. The security guard has already appeared three times, and at each check-in Breitwieser and Kleinklaus had stationed themselves in different spots. Still, the time elapsed in this room has reached his acceptable limit. There’s a group of visitors present, all using audio guides and studying a painting, and Breitwieser judges them appropriately distracted.

He nods to his girlfriend, who slips out of the room, then he lifts the Plexiglass dome and sets it carefully aside. He grasps the ivory and pushes it into the waistband of his pants, at the small of his back, adjusting his roomy jacket so the carving is covered. There’s a bit of a lump but you’d have to be exceptionally observant to notice.

Then he strides off, moving with calculation but no obvious haste. He knows that the theft will swiftly be seen. He’d left the Plexiglass bell to the side – no need to waste precious seconds replacing it – and the guard will surely initiate an emergency response. Though not, he’s betting, quickly enough.

From the room with the ivory, the museum layout encourages visitors to ascend to the second floor, but Breitwieser had spotted a door, reserved for guards, that opens into a central courtyard. It does not have an alarm. He pushes through this door without hesitation, crosses the courtyard toward the main entrance, and walks past the front desk onto the streets of Antwerp. Kleinklaus rejoins him before they reach the car, a little Opel Tigra, and Breitwieser sets the ivory in the trunk and they drive slowly away, pausing at traffic lights on the route out of town.

Crossing international borders is stressful but low-risk. They travel from Belgium to Luxembourg to Germany to France without incident, just another young, stylish couple, out for a jaunt. It’s the first weekend of February, 1997, and both are only 26 years old, though they’ve already been stealing together for a while.

The road trip ends at a modest, steep-roofed home built amid the sprawl of Mulhouse, an industrial city in eastern France. The ivory might be worth a million dollars, but Breitwieser is broke. He does not have a steady job. His girlfriend works in a hospital as a nurse’s aide, and the couple lives in his mother’s house. Their private space is on the top floor, an attic bedroom and small living area that Breitwieser always keeps locked.

They open the door now, cradling the ivory, and a wave of swirling colors seems to break over their heads as they step inside their fantasy world. The walls are lined with Renaissance paintings – portraits, landscapes, still lives, allegories. There’s a bustling peasant scene by Dutch master Adriaen van Ostade, an idyllic pastoral by French luminary François Boucher, a watercolor by German genius Albrecht Dürer. A resplendent 16th Century wedding portrait, the bride’s dress threaded with pearls, by Lucas Cranach the Younger, may be worth more than every house on Breitwieser’s block put together, times two.

In the center of the bedroom sits a grandiose canopy four-poster bed, draped with gold velour and red satin, surrounded by furniture stacked with riches. Silver goblets, silver platters, silver vases, silver bowls. A gold snuffbox once owned by Napoleon. A prayer book, lavishly illuminated, from the early 1400s. Ornate battle weapons and rare musical instruments. Bronze miniatures and gilded teacups. Masterworks in enamel and marble and copper and brass. The hideaway shimmers with stolen treasure. “My Ali Baba’s cave,” Breitwieser calls it.

Entering this place, every time, dizzies him with joy. He describes it as a sort of aesthetic rapture. “Sheer bliss,” he says. Breitwieser sprawls on the bed, examining his new showpiece. The Adam and Eve ivory, after a four-century journey to arrive in his lair, appears more stunning than ever. It goes on the corner table, the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes.

During the week, while his girlfriend is working at the hospital, he visits three different libraries. He learns everything he can about the ivory, the artist, his masters, his students. He takes detailed notes. He does this with nearly all of his pieces – he gets attached to them. Back home, he meticulously cleans the carving, with soapy water and lemon, his thumb passing over the sculpture’s every nubbin and ridge.

But this is not enough. His love for the ivory doesn’t fade, that’s not fair to say – he just has room in his heart for a little more love. So he consults his art magazines and auction catalogues. The Zurich art fair is about to begin. He plots a route into Switzerland, avoiding tolls to save money, and early the next Saturday morning they’re back on the road.

All his life, inanimate objects have had the power to seduce him. Before artwork, it was stamps and coins and old postcards, which he purchased with pocket money. Later it was Medieval pottery fragments he’d find near archeological sites. When he covets an object, says Breitwieser, speaking French, he feels the emotional wallop of a “coup de coeur” – literally, a blow to the heart. “I get smitten,” he says.

His interactions with the world of the living were far less fulfilling. He never really understood his peers, or almost anyone else for that matter. Popular pastimes like sports and video games baffled him. He’s never had any interest in drinking or drugs. He could happily spend all day alone at a museum or an archeological dig – his parents often dropped him off – but around others he was sometimes hot-headed and temperamental.

Breitwieser was born in 1971 in the Alsace region of northeastern France, where his family has deep roots. He speaks French and German and a little English. His father was a sales executive for a large company in Switzerland, just over the border, and his mother was a nurse. He’s an only child. The family, for most of his youth, was well off, living in a grand house filled with elegant furniture – Louis XV armchairs, from the 1700s; Empire dressers, from the 1800s. His parents hoped he’d become a lawyer, but he dropped out of university after a couple of years.

His first museum heist came shortly after a family crisis. When he was 20 years old, still living at home, his parents’ marriage ended explosively. His father left, and took all his possessions with him, and Breitwieser and his mother tumbled down the social ladder, resettling in a smaller place, the antiques replaced by Ikea.

Cushioning the trauma was a woman Breitwieser met through an acquaintance, a fellow archeology buff. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus was the same age as Breitwieser, and similarly introverted, with a kindred sense of curiosity and adventure. She had a sly smile and an irresistible pixie cut. They shared a passion for museums, thrilled to be immersed in beauty. Breitwieser finally experienced a coup de coeur for an actual person. “I loved her right away,” he says. Soon after Breitwieser’s father left the house, Kleinklaus moved in.

The couple was visiting a museum in the French village of Thann when Breitwieser spotted an antique pistol. His first thought, he recalls, was that he should already own something like this. Breitwieser’s father had collected old weapons but had taken them all when he’d quit the family, not bothering to leave a single piece for his son. The pistol, exhibited in a glass case on the museum’s second floor, was hand-carved around 1730, made of burled walnut inlaid with silver detailing. Far nicer than anything his father owned.

He felt an urge to possess it. The museum was small, no security guard nor alarm system, just a volunteer at the entrance booth. The display case itself, Breitwieser noted, was partially open. He was wearing a backpack and could just hide the pistol in there.

One must resist temptation, he knew. It even says so in the Bible, not that he was particularly religious. What our heart really wants we must often deny. Maybe this is why so many people seem conflicted and miserable – we are taught to be at constant war with ourselves. As if that was a virtue.

What would happen, he wondered, if he did not resist temptation? If, instead, he fed temptation, and freed himself from society’s repressive restraints? He had no desire to physically harm anyone, or so much as cause fright. He contemplated the flintlock pistol and whispered a few of these thoughts to his girlfriend. Her response, the way Breitwieser remembers it, proved to him that they were destined to be together.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Take it.” So he did.

From that moment on, he catered to his impulses in an unimaginable way. His only goal was to obey temptation. By the time he pilfers the Adam and Eve ivory, three years after stealing the pistol, he’s amassed some 100 objects, all on display in his hideout. He is ecstatic beyond measure, cossetted like a king. He feels as though he and his girlfriend have discovered the meaning of life.

A curious thing about temptation, at least in Breitwieser’s case, is that it never seems to abate. If anything, the more he feeds it the hungrier it gets. The weekend after the ivory theft in Belgium, Breitwieser and Kleinklaus drive through the snow-streaked Alps to the Zurich art fair. Behind a dealer’s back, quick as a cat, he steals a spectacular drinking goblet, filigreed with silver and gold, from the 16th Century.

Then they head to Holland for another fair, and at one booth, while the vendor is eating lunch and not keeping careful watch, he takes a 17th Century seascape painted on copper. At another booth, again with the dealer present, he removes a brilliant rendering of a lake bobbing with swans, dated 1620.

A few weeks later, it’s back to Belgium, to a village museum with a single security guard, where he takes a valuable still life, butterflies flitting around a bouquet of tulips, by Flemish master Jan van Kessel the Elder. This is followed by a trip to a Paris auction, where at the pre-sale show he steals an oil-on-wood from the school of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Younger, two polestars of Renaissance art. How nice this will look, he thinks, beside the oil he’s already stolen by Brueghel the Younger himself.

Once again, he returns to Belgium – a country whose museums, says Breitwieser, “attract me like a lover” – and filches a vivid tableau of a rural market, then over to Holland to snatch a droll 17th Century watercolor of housecats chasing hedgehogs, followed by a journey to the northern French city of Lille for another Renaissance oil, and finally, for good measure, one more raid in Belgium.

All this in a matter of months. These paintings alone represent a haul worth millions of dollars. And it’s not just paintings – he also steals a gold-plated hourglass, a stained-glass window pane, an iron alms box, a copper collection plate, a brass hunting bugle, a cavalry saber, a couple of daggers, a gilded ostrich egg, a wooden altarpiece, and a half-dozen pocket watches. Everything is crammed into the hideout, filling the walls top to bottom, overflowing the end tables, displayed in his closet’s shoe rack, leaning on chairs, stuffed under the bed.

The collection is not random. Virtually everything he steals was made before the start of the Industrial Revolution, in the late 1700s. Until then, all items were formed by hand; no machines stamped out parts. Everything finely crafted during this period, Breitwieser believes, from medical instruments to kitchenware, is its own little artwork, the hand of the master visible in each chiselmark and burr. This, to Breitwieser, was the height of human civilization.

Today the world is wed to mass production and efficiency, much to our benefit. But a side effect is that beauty for beauty’s sake seems increasingly quaint, and museums themselves, small ones especially, can have a whiff of the dying. Stocking pieces in his room, Breitwieser feels, is rescuing them, like pets from a shelter, giving them the love and attention they deserve.

The more he steals the better he gets. He learns, with precision, the limits of a security camera’s vision. He hones his timing and perfects his composure. “You have to control your gestures, your words, your reflexes,” Breitwieser says. “You need a predatory instinct.” He pounces the instant he senses everyone’s attention is diverted. “The pleasure of having,” says Breitwieser, “is stronger than the fear of stealing.”

He tries to take only smaller pieces -- with paintings, no more than a foot by a foot, and if time allows, he prefers to remove the frame and hide it nearby, often in a bathroom, so the artwork disappears more completely beneath his jacket. He never slices a canvas from a frame nor rolls one up. That’s vandalism. Most of his spare money is spent reframing the works. Sometimes he steals weapons, but wouldn’t think of brandishing one. “To walk into a museum with a gun is disgusting,” he says.

The set of thefts he describes as the most exquisite of his career are a study in simplicity and sangfroid. They take place in Belgium, his beloved target, at the vast Art & History Museum in Brussels, which Breitwieser estimates employs 150 guards. There, he and Kleinklaus spot a partly empty display case, with a laminated card inside that reads OBJECTS REMOVED FOR STUDY. Nothing in the case interests them, but Breitwieser has an idea and steals the card.

Breitwieser understands how security guards think. At age 20, he was employed for a month as a guard at the Historical Museum of Mulhouse, near his home. Most guards, he realized, hardly notice the art on the walls -- they look only at people. Breitwieser’s brashest thefts, like the Adam and Eve ivory, are spotted in minutes, but when he’s furtive, hours often pass, and sometimes days, before anyone realizes.

In the Brussels Art & History Museum, he carries the OBJECTS REMOVED sign to a gallery with a display case of silver pieces from the 16th Century. To break into this case, Breitwieser uses the flat-head screwdriver tool on his Swiss army knife and levers the sliding door off its tracks. Other times, he carries a box cutter and slices open a silicone joint. For museums with antique display cabinets, he brings a ring of a dozen old skeleton keys he’s amassed –often, one of his keys is able to tumble the lock. Also handy is a telescoping antenna, to nudge a ceiling-mounted security camera in a different direction.

He and Kleinklaus select three silver items, a drinking stein and two figurines, then he sets the OBJECTS REMOVED card in the case and reattaches the sliding door, and they leave the museum. They’re already at the car before he realizes he’s forgotten the lid to the stein.

Breitwieser detests missing parts, or any sign of restoration. The items in his collection must be original and complete. Kleinklaus knows this, and abruptly removes one of her earrings and heads back to the museum, her boyfriend in tow. She marches up to a security guard and says she’s lost an earring, and has a feeling she knows where it is. The couple is permitted back inside. They return to the case and take the stein’s lid, and, why not, two additional goblets as well.

Two weeks later they’re back. Kleinklaus has dyed her hair, brown to blonde, and Breitwieser has grown out his beard and added a pair of glasses and a baseball cap. At the display case, the OBJECTS REMOVED card still there, they grab four more items, including a two-foot-tall chalice so breathtakingly gorgeous that Breitwieser suspends his size-limitation preference and, with nowhere else to put it, stuffs the chalice up the left sleeve of his jacket, forcing him to walk unnaturally, his arm swinging stiffly like a soldier’s.

On their way to the exit, they’re stopped by a guard. They feign calm, but Breitwieser has a terrible feeling that the end has come. The guard wants to see their entrance tickets. Breitwieser, unable to move his left arm, awkwardly reaches across his body with his right to fish the tickets from his left pocket. He wonders if the guard senses something amiss.

A guilty person would cower and try to leave, so Breitwieser boldly tells the guard that he’s heading to the museum café for lunch. The guard’s suspicion is diffused, and the couple actually eats at the museum, Breitwieser’s arm held rigid the entire time.

They rent a cheap highway hotel room and wait two days and return yet again, newly disguised, and steal four more pieces. That’s a total of 13, and such is their level of euphoria that on the drive home they can’t contain themselves, and stop at an antique gallery displaying an immense ancient urn, made of silver and gold, in the front window.

Breitwieser enters, and the dealer calls from atop a staircase that he’ll be right down, but by the time he descends no one is there. Nor is the urn. They return to France plunder-drunk and giddy, and for fun, Kleinklaus phones the gallery and asks how much the urn in the window costs. About $100,000, she’s told. “Madame,” says the dealer, “you really must see it.” He hasn’t yet noticed it’s gone.

Of course the police are after them. Investigations are opened after many of their thefts – witnesses questioned, sketches made. Yet no one’s ever quite sure what they saw. Breitwieser and Kleinklaus are videoed in action in a museum in France, but the images are grainy. The best the French authorities are able to conclude is that several times a year, in seemingly random places, a man and woman steal art together; they estimate that the criminals are between 50 and 60 years old, which is about twice their actual age.

The couple themselves keep tabs on their peril by reading newspaper coverage of their crimes. Some articles mention that law enforcement is sure a large network of international traffickers are systematically stealing. Others refer to the Italian Mafia, or a Russian gang.

The issue is that the authorities are trying to solve this case based on what’s rational. More than 99 percent of art thefts are motivated by money, and art crimes, if they are solved, are typically done so on the back end, when the thieves try and sell the work. With Breitwieser, law enforcement’s chief strategy – pouring through art-market data, waiting for the stolen items to be appear – is dead on arrival.

Also, the sheer scale the thefts is inconceivable. In the annals of art crime, it’s hard to find someone who has stolen from 10 different places. By the time the calendar flips to 2000, and Breitwieser and Kleinklaus are entering the seventh year of their spree, they are nearing 200 separate thefts and 300 stolen objects. They pilfer from big museums and small ones, from galleries, churches, castles, auctions, and art fairs. They steal from a half-dozen countries.

Several times, he and Kleinklaus steal while on a guided tour, then casually continue with the tour while holding the item. At an art fair in Holland, he hears a shout of “Thief!” and sees security guards tackle a man. It’s another burglar. Breitwieser takes advantage of the commotion and slips a painting under his coat. They average one theft every two weeks. One year, they’re responsible for half of all paintings stolen in France.

If anyone is going to provide a tip that leads to their downfall, one could imagine it’d be Breitwieser’s mother, Mireille Stengel. The whole time he’s stealing he shares a house with her. Her son can’t hold down a job – when he does work, it’s mostly as a waiter – yet he brings home Renaissance artwork a few times a month. She must be aware that something’s amiss.

Breitwieser insists that his mother is unfamiliar with the art world. He tells her that he picks up trinkets a flea markets, if he mentions anything at all. He keeps his mother mostly shut out of his life and completely shut out of his room. She’s always doted on her only child, and for him, she conjures strong willful ignorance and blind love.

Still, a couple-hundred-million-dollar collection of stolen art concealed in an attic bedroom in a middle-class suburb seems too extraordinary to remain secret forever. If just one friend found out, it’s inevitable others would learn, and the game would be finished.

Breitwieser and Kleinklaus, though, have no friends. “I’ve always been a loner,” he says. “I don’t want any friends.” Kleinklaus, he claims, feels the same. They occasionally spend time with acquaintances but never invite anyone over. If repairs are needed in his room, he does them himself. Nobody is allowed to enter, ever, except he and his girlfriend. “We lived in a closed universe,” Breitwieser says.

They’re both nearing 30 years old, in 2001, when their universe starts to crumble. A notion had been building in Kleinklaus for a while – that perhaps there’s something more fulfilling than life as an outlaw and rooms filled with riches. She’d like to start a family. But not, she realizes, acutely, with the man she’s been dating for almost a decade. There is no option for a child in their conscribed existence. They could be arrested at any minute; they can’t even entertain visitors. She begins to feel suffocated.

Breitwieser, meanwhile, says he feels “invincible.” Tension between the couple intensifies, ugly fights erupt, and Breitwieser starts stealing alone. Any restraining influences Kleinklaus once provided are shed. From a village church not far from their house, he unbolts an enormous wooden carving of the Madonna and Child, weighing 150 pounds, and hauls it away, one strained step at a time, without the slightest attempt at stealth. If anyone had entered the church during the theft, he’d have been caught.

Soon after, at Gruyères Castle on a hilltop in Switzerland, he removes a monumental 17th Century tapestry, 10 feet by 10 feet, accepting ridiculous risk to steal it. There’s no room in their lair for a trophy this size -- it’s left rolled up on a dresser -- but Breitwieser tells his girlfriend they’ll display it as soon as they’re free of his mother and residing in a place of their own. By this point, Kleinklaus knows it’s a fantasy. Living amid a mountain of stolen art, no matter where, can never offer true freedom at all.

She’s sure that their fingerprints are filed in every police database. Even if she leaves him, she’ll be hunted forever. What will they ever do with all this stuff? What’s the endgame? She wants him to quit but he doesn’t even agree to abate. The best deal she can wrangle is a sworn promise that from now on he’ll always wear surgical gloves on a raid, which she’ll bring home from her job at the hospital. There is no endgame, Breitwieser says. He plans to keep going and going.

He returns from another trip to Switzerland with a little curled bugle, dated 1580, once used by hunters on horseback to communicate. It was a stylish theft, Breitwieser balancing atop a radiator to cut open a display case high on the wall, then delicately snipping the nylon cords holding the bugle in place. Kleinklaus is unimpressed. They already have one like it.

“Did you wear gloves?” she asks, suspicious.

“I’m really sorry,” he says.

The one thing she’d been promised. They argue bitterly, and in the morning Breitwieser says he’ll go back to Switzerland and erase the prints.

No, Kleinklaus says. She will go to the museum and clean the prints herself. It’s too risky for him. Breitwieser says that at least he should drive, and she consents.

They’re frosty to one another on the trip, but as they pull into the Richard Wagner Museum, housed in a country manor where the composer once lived, their spirits are buoyed. The one thing that can stir Breitwieser as much a magnificent artwork is a sublime sweep of nature, and this museum is on a lake cupped amid the spiked mountains of Switzerland. He feels for a moment, as Kleinklaus opens her door, a handkerchief and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in her bag, that maybe they can again find their love.

“Stay in the car,” she pleads.

“I’m just going to take a little walk,” he says. “Don’t worry.” And he too gets out, handing her the car keys to hold in her purse.

She enters the museum, pays the entry fee, and walks up to the second floor. Breitwieser, circling around the outside of the building, watches her progress as she appears in one window, then another. There’s only one other person around, an older man walking a dog, who seems to stare curiously at Breitwieser before moving away.

A few minutes later, Kleinklaus exits the museum. She walks quickly toward him, nearly jogging, which is odd. They never wanted to appear as if they were fleeing. He has the impression that she’s attempting to tell him something, but she is too far away to hear. He’s trying to decipher the anxious expression her face as the police car pulls to a stop behind him. Two officers approach, handcuff Breitwieser, who is startled but doesn’t resist, and place him in the back seat of the squad car and drive off.

He spends that night, November 20, 2001, in jail, and the next morning the interrogation begins. He starts by denying everything. After all, he didn’t have any stolen items on him when he was arrested. But both the cashier at the museum and the dog walker who’d been on the grounds have provided formal statements to the police.

The dog walker, a retired journalist, had read in that morning’s paper about the Wagner Museum theft, and when he saw a man there acting oddly, he went inside and mentioned it to the cashier. She looked out the window. The day the bugle was stolen a total of three visitors had come to the museum, and this, she was certain, was one of them. He was wearing the same jacket. So she called the police. No one realized that Kleinklaus, who had overheard the conversation and was trying to warn him, had travelled with Breitwieser, and she was able to drive off in her car unnoticed.

As far as the Swiss police know, Breitwieser is nothing more than a small-time thief who had stolen one item and come back to steal another, hoping to make an easy profit from the lightly guarded museum. Breitwieser, realizing this, feels his panic subside. He’s confident he’ll find a way to wriggle free. All he must do is ensure the authorities do not find out who he really is, or send anyone to search his home.

He tells the police that he’d come to Switzerland by train, alone, and admits to stealing the bugle. He explains, sorrowfully, that he’s short of money and just wanted a nice Christmas gift for his mother. He had no idea, he adds, that the bugle was valuable; he was only attracted to how shiny it was.

He’d returned to the museum, he says, only to wipe down his fingerprints, and the officers inform him that they’d never even considered dusting for prints. Breitwieser tries to hide the pain of this realization – that he’s been caught the one time he hasn’t been stealing, on a trip that was wholly unnecessary.

He appears before a judge and receives good news. If he returns the bugle undamaged, the punishment will be minor. Christmas is a month away, and he’s told he’ll be home by then. In jail, though, communication is cumbersome. He’s not permitted to make phone calls, so he mails letters to both Kleinklaus and his mother, begging them to bring back the bugle.

Days drip by, then weeks, with no response. He waits alone in his cell, worry mounting, enraged that he’d ever agreed to such a foolish mission. He has the impression, he says, that the entire world has abandoned him. No one will give him any news.

Swiss authorities, meanwhile, pursue an international search warrant for Breitwieser’s residence in France. It takes a while to complete the warrant, but three weeks after his arrest, it’s ready. A group of French and Swiss officers arrive at the house. Breitwieser’s mother is there, and says she has no idea what they’re talking about, that her son never brought any art objects home.

The officers enter the house, climb the stairs to the hidden lair, and open the door. And there, inside, they see no hunting bugle, no silver objects, no Renaissance paintings, no musical instruments. Not so much as the trace of a picture hook. Nothing but clean, empty walls surrounding a lovely four-poster bed.

Breitwieser remains in jail, knowing nothing. No one visits or writes. Christmas comes and goes without even a holiday card. He feels sick, he cries frequently. He has admitted only to the theft of the bugle, but he knows that he’s close to breaking.

Soon after New Year’s Day, 2002, he is escorted from his cell and seated in an interrogation room across a desk from a Swiss police lieutenant named Roland Meier. The officer opens a drawer and removes a single photo, and places it in front of Breitwieser. It’s of a large commemorative medal that he had stolen from a different Swiss museum a week before he took the bugle. He’d had the impression it could serve as a good-luck charm. The medal appears a little rusty and worn, and Breitwieser wonders what happened to it.

“We know you also stole this,” says Lieutenant Meier. “Tell us, and after that everything will be okay. We’ll let you go home.”

Breitwieser swiftly confesses.

Just one more thing, says Lieutenant Meier, opening the drawer again and placing another photo before Breitwieser. This one is of a golden snuffbox, also slightly oxidized.

Breitwieser confesses to taking it as well.

And then the officer pulls out a huge stack of photos, and Breitwieser realizes it’s checkmate. There are pictures of an ivory flute from Denmark, an enameled goblet from Germany, silver pieces from Belgium, and even the very first item he stole, nearly eight years before – the flint-lock pistol from France.

He confesses to every one of them, providing detail and dates. When the stack of photos is exhausted, he’s admitted to stealing 140 objects. The lieutenant is staggered – he’d doubted this kid had stolen a single one of the items, let alone all.

Only now does Breitwieser see the police report that accompanied the photos. At the top it says, “Objects found in the Rhone-Rhine Canal.” He’s confused. The canal, part of the system built under Napoleon to connect the rivers of France, is a murky, slow moving waterway not far from his home.

Then he realizes why the pieces seemed discolored – they must have been rescued from water. One more thing dawns on him as well. There were no photos of any paintings he stole. “What about the paintings?” he asks the lieutenant. And it’s only then that he starts to find out.

What happened exactly will likely never be known. The two people who are aware of most of the details – Breitwieser’s mother and girlfriend – will not talk about it, nor any other aspect of their lives. Breitwieser himself, though, has learned all he can, and combining his insights with police investigations and interviews, it’s possible to piece together the events as they may have occurred. Some specifics are lacking and the precise timeline is hazy, but not the result. The end, Breitwieser says, is always the same.

He envisions his girlfriend driving back from Switzerland, alone in the car, terrified. She’d just witnessed his arrest, and somehow had not been caught herself. At least not yet. When she gets home, Breitwieser suspects, she tells his mother at least some part of the truth about the extent of their crimes. The fact that Breitwieser is in custody means the authorities will surely soon arrive, and probably arrest both of them as well.

It’s now, Breitwieser assumes, that his girlfriend takes his mother to their hideout. When Breitwieser visualizes his treasures through his mother’s eyes, they look different. She’s not spellbound by color or swept up in beauty. His mother works full-time to house and feed her 30-year-old unemployed son and his girlfriend, and he’s repaid her by breaking the law in a way that will likely ruin her life.

To her, his treasure is poison. She’s always had a temper, and his mother’s reaction, he’s sure, is a boiling rage. Once she decides something, there’s no bending her will. “She’s like a wall,” Breitwieser says. And she makes a decision now, one of finality and force.

It probably began that very evening. If not, it was a day or two after. First, Breitwieser thinks, his mother and probably his girlfriend cleared off the furniture, emptied the closet, and collected everything under the bed – all piled in bags and boxes, then carried downstairs and crammed into his mother’s car.

They drive to the canal, the water dark, and toss piece after piece away. Even in these panicked, angry actions, Breitwieser sees a filament of love – his mother, in some way, was trying to protect him, to hide what he’d done.

Some pieces weren’t thrown far enough from shore, and a couple of days later a passerby notices an intriguing shimmer in the water. He returns with a rake and finds a silver chalice. Then he rakes out three more pieces of silver and a jewel-handled dagger. He informs the police, and they eventually drain a section of the canal, and find a collection of objects worth an estimated $50 million.

Back at the house, likely the same night as the canal dump, Breitwieser’s mother and girlfriend again load the car, possibly this time with the bigger items, including the heavy Madonna and Child, the tapestry, and three paintings on copper panels. The Madonna and Child is left in front of a church – his mother is observant – while the tapestry is discarded aside a road and the coppers are tossed in the trees.

All these items are eventually recovered. A passing motorist spots the tapestry and turns it in to the local police, who are not aware of its significance, and put it in their break room and play foosball on it for a while. The three 17th Century coppers are found by a logger, who brings them home and hammers them onto the roof of his henhouse, which had been leaking. They remain there until Breitwieser’s story makes the news.

The paintings, Breitwieser believes, were the final step. His Renaissance paintings formed the heart of his collection, and represented the majority of its value. As the pictures are pulled from the walls, Breitwieser is sure that Kleinklaus is in shock – all they’d wanted to do was protect them from an uncaring planet – but his mother, he knows, is unstoppable. Later they’ll get spackle and wall paint to cover the holes, and his mother will also throw away everything else in the rooms, including his clothing and books. But for now they drive all the paintings to a remote patch of forest.

They create a big pile, Breitwieser imagines, the portraits and still lifes and landscapes all jumbled, the luminaries of Renaissance art -- Cranach, Brueghel, Teniers, Dürer, Kessel, Dou – gathered as one. Every piece has survived some 300 years, through Europe’s bloody centuries, carrying its singular image to the world. Sixty-nine paintings in total. In a heap in the forest.

A lighter is sparked and the flames rise, slowly at first and then wildly, oil paint bubbling, picture frames crackling, the great mass burning and burning until there’s almost nothing left but ash.

After that, what does anything matter?

Breitwieser is so shattered that he’s medicated and paced on suicide watch in the jail. Later he’s just numb. He goes to trial twice, in Switzerland and France, and serves a total of four years in prison, the punishment modest because no one had been physically injured, and the value of his loot, which some sources placed at over two billion dollars, didn’t affect the penalty – in the eyes of the law, there’s no difference between mass-produced baubles and Renaissance masterworks.

In prison, he meets with several psychologists. Some say he will immediately return to stealing upon his release; others think he’s finished forever. He’s described in reports as an “arrogant” and “hypersensitive” man who believes he is “indispensable to humankind,” but is never given a diagnosis, and was not was not considered mentally ill at his trials. Because he specifically selected his loot, rather than randomly grabbing at anything available, and never displayed guilt about his actions, he doesn’t fit the criteria of a kleptomaniac.

“I’m just a medical experiment to them,” says Breitwieser, and as soon as can, he stops therapy entirely. His fellow prisoners, he says, are the ones who make him feel better – he’s regarded as a master thief, and is popular with inmates seeking trade secrets.

Breitwieser’s mother serves three-and-a-half months in jail, followed by a lengthy probation. She never expresses regret about destroying the artworks. In court, she says that she thought it was “just a bunch of junk,” and that until her son’s arrest she had no clue he’d been stealing. Breitwieser supports these dubious claims, testifying that he continually lied to his mother and made sure she stayed ignorant.

Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, incredibly, spends just a single night in jail. The story she tells the court is pure fantasy. She had no idea, she says, that her boyfriend was a thief. “I never played the role of the lookout,” she adds. “There were paintings and objects in his room but nothing struck me as unusual.” Breitwieser plays along with the charade, gallantly trying to protect her. If he can spare her some punishment, he will.

The ruse works, their final scheme a success, at least for her. Breitwieser realizes he’s still in love, and writes her repeatedly from jail. She’s his last hope that something worthwhile will remain in his life. But there’s never a reply to his letters, and eventually he finds out why. Shortly after his arrest, Kleinklaus had started another relationship, and six months later she was pregnant. By the time Breitwieser learns this, she’s the mother of a baby boy, and he vows never to see her again.

He’s released from prison in 2005, and at the age of 34 he feels defeated. He had lived a hundred lifetimes while stealing and now everything is colorless and dumb. He cuts trees for a while, he drives a delivery truck, he mops floors. The relationship with his mother is mended, though he rents a cheap apartment of his own.

Under his probation, he’s not permitted to enter a museum, or any other place showing art. He muddles away a couple of years, the bare walls of his apartment a kind of slow-drip torture, until, as it must with a mania like his, the deep-seated desire breaks through.

He goes to Belgium, of course, and at an antique fair, he sees a landscape that slays him, three people strolling through a wintery forest, by one of his favorites, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. He doesn’t even try to stop himself, and finds that his skills are still sharp.

With the painting hanging in his apartment, suddenly there’s joy in his life. “One beautiful piece,” he says, “makes everything different.” A relationship blooms with a woman he’s met, and he admits to her what he’s done. She seems to accept the one theft – and, he insists, it’s just this one theft – but when the romance ends with a venomous split, she informs the police, and Breitwieser is put in prison again.

By the time he gets out, he’s 41 years old, creases at his eyes and a hairline in retreat. He has an idea he’ll launch a career as a museum-security consultant, but he’s the only one who doesn’t find this a joke. To hell with everyone, he thinks. “I can live on an island like Robinson Crusoe and it wouldn’t bother me,” he says. He eats lunch most days with his mother, and then wanders alone in the woods.

The problem is that he knows exactly what he wants. Just one more sensual blast like the thump he felt every time he unlocked the door to his lair. But when he closes his eyes and tries to conjure the scene, all he can see is a fire.

Then one day in early 2018, he comes across a brochure for the Reubens House museum. And there it is, like a slap in the face – a photo of the Adam and Eve ivory, the first thing he’d once regarded every morning. It had been thrown in the canal, but ivory is sturdy and it hadn’t been damaged. Now the piece is evidently back on display, and he soon decides to go see it.

He drives into Belgium, enters the museum, and heads to the rear gallery. And here it sits, in the same spot, in a reinforced case. Twenty-one years have elapsed since he’d stolen it, but the ivory’s power to enchant is unlimited. There’s a quake in his chest, and a wave of emotions immediately begins building in his bones.

He doesn’t want to make a scene in the gallery, so he hurries out to the museum’s courtyard. The air is warm, spring is coming. The last time he’d been here, the ivory was under his jacket. This time, he stands with no loot at all, mourning the lost years of his life – not when he was stealing, but since he’s stopped.

He aches for what he once was – “a master of the world,” as he puts it – and he weeps for what will never be again. The paintings especially. But also the sheer thrill of it. “Art has punished me,” he says through tears.

Then he heads to the exit, through the giftshop, where the museum catalogue is sold, with a photo of the ivory and a story of its theft. He has no cash – just to get here he’d borrowed gas money from his mother – and out of habit he notes the positions of the cashier, the security guard, the customers. And he picks up a copy of the catalogue and walks discreetly out the door.

-- end --