Monster heist at the Museum of Modern Art
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“It was a beautiful day, really a very beautiful morning”, remembers Fabrice Hergott. This May 20, 2010, like every morning, he leaves his apartment in the Place des Victoires, in the heart of the capital, and gets on his bike to join the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, which he has been running for almost two years. Funny weather for a drama, he ruminates while pedaling under a radiant sky, along the banks of the Seine. Several missed calls from the head of the museum’s surveillance alarmed him as soon as he woke up.
“Four paintings were stolen”, drops the agent on the phone. Barely time to hang up, dazed, we ring it again: not four, but five canvases have vanished. And not least: the Still life with candlestick, by Fernand Leger, the Woman with a fan, a typical Modigliani with his oval face and small pinched mouth, a cubist masterpiece by Picasso, the Pigeon with peasI’Olive tree near l’Estaque of Braque, and a Pastoral, by Matisse. The set is estimated at around 100 million euros. “I had a veil in front of my eyes, like after a car accident”, rewinds Fabrice Hergott. A few hours later, the French and foreign media assail him with questions.
The theft of the five paintings is the biggest heist ever perpetrated in a French museum. “One of the worst events for the City of Paris, of the same order as the Notre-Dame fire, an earthquake in France and in the world”, sums up today Gaspard Gantzer, then communications advisor to the Town Hall. Even the theft in 1985 of four Monets and two Renoirs from the Marmottan Museum did not produce such an explosion. At City Hall, it’s the commotion. We must inform the mayor as soon as possible, Bertrand Delanoë, on vacation for a few days in his house in Bizerte, Tunisia. The latter is known for his Homeric anger. “He didn’t have a blood stroke, protests Gaspard Gantzer. When it came to serious things, he displayed an Olympian calm. »
Christophe Girard, then elected in charge of cultural affairs for the City, is dispatched to the museum to manage the crisis. “Don’t come any closer! », ordered a policeman, moving him away from the security perimeter, where the frames of the paintings still lie. The banditry repression brigade (BRB) is on the edge. The same day, a municipal policewoman was killed in a shootout on the A4 motorway. The teams have to juggle between the two cases.
Obviously, the thief is a virtuoso. Face masked by a scarf, he patiently dismantled the 80 kg window of one of the windows overlooking the esplanade, quay of New York, before sneaking into the museum. He walked first to the Fernand Léger, just to the left of the window as he entered, then, in the complete absence of alarm, picked up the Picasso, the Matisse and the Braque and, finally, the Modigliani. A burglary lasts on average two to three minutes. Beyond that, thieves know they risk getting busted. That night, however, the robber wandered through the rooms for a good quarter of an hour. “He had the museum for him”summarizes one of the police officers.
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