It’s a hot summer’s evening in Paris in the year 1911. For weeks, a record breaking heat wave has been cooking the city, leaving the streets empty and the Louvre quieter than ever. No one dares to go outside – but for one man, it’s time to strike.
Throughout the night, he pulls off the heist of the century, plucking the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and disappearing into the city. This set off a worldwide investigation, leading French police down a 2 year rabbit hole of false leads, famous arrests before a mysterious letter eventually gave the thief away.
In this article, we’ll tell the story of how a single man stole the Mona Lisa, how he almost got away with it, and the elaborate plan behind the heist that was eventually revealed decades later.
The Mona Lisa heist
As the Sun went down that Sunday evening, the last few tourists were trickling out of the Louvre. But just before it closed, a man entered the museum dressed in the Louvre’s official white uniform.
Blending in as an employee, he quickly found his way to a small storage closet, squeezed his way in and waited out the entire night.
The Louvre was closed the next day, so very few employees were going to be patrolling the museum. At precisely 7:15 the next morning, the thief emerged into an almost empty Louvre. With no one in sight, he quickly made his way into the Salon Carre, and there it was. At the time, the Mona Lisa didn’t have its own room and it hung modestly in a room full of other masterpieces. It wasn’t nearly as famous as it is today – but the thief was about to change that.
With no one in sight, he pulled the painting off its metal pins and carried it to a nearby stairwell.
Using a screwdriver, he managed to remove the painting from its protective frame before covering it in a white sheet and heading straight for the nearest exit. It all seemed to be going so well – but as he reached for the door, it was locked!
At that exact moment, a plumber working for the Louvre appeared out of nowhere. He assumed the man was a Louvre employee, and so instead of questioning him, he helped him open the door. And just like that, the thief disappeared into the city, with the Mona Lisa under his arms.
The investigation
The whole heist was over in just a matter of minutes, but it would take another 28 hours before anyone realized the painting was really gone. That week, photographers had been going through the museum and taking the paintings to be officially photographed – so blank spaces on the wall were completely normal.
But when the photographers showed up the next morning without the Mona Lisa, it became clear that something was extremely wrong – the Mona Lisa was officially missing. The police were called and a team of detectives descended on the museum.
When the Louvre announced that one of its prized possessions had disappeared, it sent shockwaves all around the world – and the question was, where did it go? All the police had found was the wooden picture frame and a fingerprint left behind by the thief.
To get the investigation going, local newspapers started offering a reward of $250,000 for any information that would lead them to the painting. The response was overwhelming. Thousands of people sent letters and showed up to police stations with all kinds of information, placing the Mona Lisa all over the world.
False leads
Two separate witnesses recalled seeing a man leaving the Louvre with a bulky object, but the descriptions of the man were completely different. One person claimed that the Mona Lisa was on a freight train heading through Belgium, and another claimed that the painting was on a ship, which had already set sail for America. But perhaps the most promising suspect was the famous artist Pablo Picasso.
A secretary that knew Picasso wrote to the police and admitted that he had stolen several Iberian statues from the Louvre. He claimed to have sold these statues to Picasso, who went on to use them in one of his paintings. It seemed unlikely, but after checking the serial number on the statues, the Louvre confirmed that they really were from the museum. Picasso was arrested, and taken in for questioning.
Meanwhile, the police turned their attention to another famous suspect, American banker and art collector J.P Morgan.
At the time, art forgery was a big business, and paintings were often being forged and sold to naive millionaires in America. According to the claim, Morgan had commissioned the heist, and the painting was now on its way to him. Police in America stopped and searched a boat pulling into New York, but there was no Mona Lisa onboard.
Theories kept coming in from all over the world, but after two years of searching, the location of the Mona Lisa was still a complete mystery. As it turned out, the Mona Lisa hadn’t gone far at all, and it was sitting in an apartment just 2 miles from the Louvre.
The Mona Lisa’s thief
This was the apartment of Vincenzo Peruggia, a 29 year old Italian who used to work at the Louvre as a handyman. He knew every weakness of the Louvre, he knew that it was closed on Mondays, he knew about the photographers and most importantly, it was him that made the Mona Lisa’s protective case, which he dismantled so easily during the heist. After leaving the Louvre, he hid the painting in a trunk with a false floor, which he had made himself. But how did he get away with it for so long?
Amazingly, Peruggia already had a criminal record and his fingerprints were already in the system. But only his right hand fingerprints were in the system, and the one on the picture frame was a left hand print, and so a match was never found. During the investigation, police had visited Peruggia’s apartment twice, but never found anything. Little did they know that the Mona Lisa was hiding right under their noses.
Peruggia had pulled off a stupidly simple heist, and it seemed like he would get away with it. But after two years holding the painting hostage, he started to get impatient.
Arresting the thief
He wrote an anonymous letter to an art dealer in Florence, the city where Da Vinci painted the masterpiece. In the letter, he claimed to have the Mona Lisa in his possession and said he wanted to return the painting back to its home. He signed the letter with the name Leonardo, and took the next train to Florence.
The art dealer and his associate agreed to meet Peruggia in his hotel room to authenticate the painting. With the doors locked, Peruggia opened up the trunk, and to their surprise, it really was the Mona Lisa. In order to further authenticate the painting, the art dealers took it back to their studio, assuring Peruggia that he would be rewarded for bringing it back to Italy. But just an hour later, the police showed up at his door and arrested him.
Peruggia ended up spending just 7 months in prison, and died just 10 years later. Although the search for the Mona Lisa was over, the truth behind what really happened seemed to have gone to the grave.
The elaborate plan
But in 1932, a book was published that revealed a much more elaborate plan behind the heist. Written by Karl Decker, he claimed to know the man that was really behind the heist, a man named Eduardo de Valfierno, an expert in art forgery. He had come up with a grand plan to sell not one but six perfect copies of the Mona Lisa to six unsuspecting millionaires lined up in America.
He commissioned a talented French painter to make the copies, and shipped them off to America and put them into storage. In order for them to believe they were really getting their hands on the Mona Lisa, the real one had to go missing. And so he contracted Peruggia to pull off the heist. When news spread that the Mona Lisa had gone missing, the paintings were sold to their buyers and the 3 involved ran off with the equivalent of 90 million dollars.
