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https://historythings.com/march-18-2003-single-largest-bank-heist-history/

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The only thing worse than a bank heist around $1-billion (USD) is when the person in charge, not of the bank but of the country, commits that theft. Sad, but true; Saddam Hussein, working through his son, Qusay robbed the country's central bank of the most money ever stolen from any bank.

That was just one day before US troops rolled into Baghdad. It's like he knew the end was nigh.

The total aftermath of the Iraq war is beyond the scope of this blog, but what unfolded during and after the Central Bank robbery is a sad commentary on what was already sad situation.

The craziest thing about the story is that it all went down without a single bullet. They didn't even need guns to take the money, just the trucks to carry the loot.

Essential reading: The Bank Robbery In Albany Georgia That Never Was
Aftermath
In the years that followed the war, money turned up in many places. There was $650-million found in one of Saddam's palaces.

At the time, officials were unable to determine if that money was part of the billion stolen from the Central Bank. It turned out to be the stash of Saddam's other son, Uday.

Saddam was of course never going to admit to any theft, nor was he going to cough up any information to help officials trace the missing dough. We will never know, nor will we know exactly how much they took or where it went.

There is a reason to believe that some of it at least, found its way into the hands of US soldiers. Cash discovered in another of Saddam's palaces also vanished; looted by opportunistic soldiers. The United States convicted over 30 of our service members for theft.
The Bank
The Central Bank of Iraq looks like a fortress. When the Iraqis took full control of their national finances, after the British handed it over in 1931, they created the National Bank of Iraq to centralize the country's money.

In 1985 they built the central bank structure in Baghdad, a cube-shaped building made of concrete with almost no windows.

Management of the bank may have been questionable and corrupt, but the building where they kept the cash was impenetrable. The only way a robber could get in was through the front door.

That's exactly what the thieves did.
The Heist
They before US troops rolled into Baghdad, three large trucks pulled up in front of the bank. Qusay walked into the bank, then handed a note to the governor of the bank. The note was from daddy. It stated that they needed to relocate the money as a matter of national security.

It didn't matter. The note could have said, "give it to me." When the insane leader of a developing nation asks to empty the national vault, it's because he's having a good hair day.

Qusay and a friend loaded bag after bag into the three trucks. They left with one-quarter of the bank's reserves that day without lifting a gun or making a single threat.

Essential Reading: The 5 Most Lucrative Heists In US History

Like most bank thieves, they didn't get away with it. Qusay and Uday paid the most precious price for their roles in Iraq; their lives. So did Saddam. Of course, the heist didn't have to do with any of that, unless you believe in karma.

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March 18, 2003; The Single Largest Bank Heist In History

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The only thing worse than a bank heist around $1-billion (USD) is when the person in charge, not of the bank but of the country, commits that theft. Sad, but true; Saddam Hussein, working through his son, Qusay robbed the country's central bank of the most money ever stolen from any bank.

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/apr/23/caught-on-video-van-gogh-painting-stolen-in-sledgehammer-raid

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A Dutch crime show has aired security footage revealing how an art thief smashed his way through reinforced glass doors at a museum with a sledgehammer, raced into the building and ran out with a precious Vincent van Gogh painting tucked under his right arm.

The thief, who arrived on a motorcycle, stole Van Gogh's The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884 from the Singer Laren Museum in the early hours of 30 March.

Nobody has been arrested in the theft and the painting, which was on loan from another Dutch museum, the Groninger Museum, when it was stolen, is still missing.

Police withheld other footage from inside the museum in Laren, a town east of Amsterdam, to protect their investigation. They also did not air video from outside the museum of the thief leaving.

The Singer Laren managing director, Evert van Os, stressed the footage did not show all of the burglary. "The burglar broke through a number of doors and several layers of security that had been approved by security experts," Van Os said. "The footage released does not therefore allow any conclusions to be drawn as to the quality of security at Singer Laren."

Vincent van Gogh's painting The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring. Photograph: AP

Police said Wednesday that 56 tips streamed in from the public as a result of the show. They said it was not clear if the thief acted alone. Police are also seeking information about a white van filmed driving past the museum.

The 25cm by 57cm oil-on-paper painting shows a person standing in a garden surrounded by trees with a church tower in the background. "It looks like they very deliberately targeted this one Van Gogh painting," said police spokeswoman Maren Wonder.

The artwork dates to a time when the artist had moved back to his family in a rural area of the Netherlands and painted the life he saw there, including his famous work The Potato Eaters, in mostly sombre tones.

Wonder called for museum visitors to share with police any photos or video they took in the museum in the days before it closed down, to see if anyone was surveilling it beforehand. "People can help if they now realise that another visitor was behaving suspiciously," she said.

Van Os said the museum would draw lessons from the theft but "at the moment, however, the only thing that matters is that the footage should yield useful tips and that the painting should be returned undamaged to the Groninger Museum as soon as possible".

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Caught on video: how Van Gogh painting was stolen in sledgehammer raid

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A Dutch crime show has aired security footage revealing how an art thief smashed his way through reinforced glass doors at a museum with a sledgehammer, raced into the building and ran out with a precious Vincent van Gogh painting tucked under his right arm.

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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/aug/05/mona-lisa-theft-louvre-leonardo

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hundred years ago, on 21 August 1911, an Italian painter and decorator slipped from the cupboard in the Louvre where he had been hiding all night, stepped up to the , freed her from her frame and left the building apparently unseen. It was 24 hours before anyone noticed she was missing. The usual line is that the Louvre was closed for maintenance and everyone thought that somebody else must have removed the picture to be photographed, or cleaned. But museums are - or were - surprisingly blind to crime, even when it involves stealing the world's most famous painting. Or perhaps not the world's most famous painting - the Mona Lisa certainly wasn't universally known in 1911. You still had to travel to the Louvre to see her. There were prints, though Leonardo's cumulative portrait, gradually painted over several years, had long proved extremely hard to copy as an engraving. And photographs did exist - indeed the French police printed off 6,500 copies for distribution in the streets of Paris immediately after her disappearance, as if to jog someone's memory. These mug-shots were also for comparison with any forgery that might turn up purporting to be the original. For the Mona Lisa wears a fine veil of craquelure - that pattern of tiny cracks that can form in the surface of a painting when it's as old as she is - that is more or less impossible to fake. Wrinkles are her positive ID. But a century ago, the painting's fame was restricted to the west, where she had been buoyed up on clouds of romantic hype ever since Walter Pater wrote in 1869: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits, like the vampire she has been dead many times . . ." which although not exactly gallant, broadcast her strange allure to hundreds of thousands.

A picture that could still come as something of a surprise: unthinkable now, but in those days reproductions of the Mona Lisa had only fairly recently become popular. What really put a face to the name was the press coverage inspired by the theft. Every major newspaper in Europe covered the story, and every story was illustrated with a reproduction of the painting. One paper, France's l'Illustration, even produced a centrespread, peddling the story that Leonardo had been in love with his sitter, and promising to work towards a colour reproduction within a couple of weeks. Millions of people who might not have seen it, might never even have heard of it, soon became experts on Leonardo's stolen painting.

One of the first suspects was Pablo Picasso. The painter had nothing to do with the crime but immediately tried to dispose of some statues that turned out to have been stolen from the same museum. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was also brought in for questioning. No charges were brought, though suspicion followed Picasso for a while - surely a great painter would want a great painting, ran the theory. For almost two years the trail went cold.

The painting was in Switzerland or Argentina. Or it was in a cold-water flat in the Bronx or a secret room in the mansion of JP Morgan. In fact it never left Paris, or not until the thief, Vincenzo Perruggia, went to Florence in December 1913 after contacting a Florentine dealer called Alfred Geri, who he hoped would help him dispose of this unsaleable hostage for cash. Geri played along, even bringing the director of the Uffizi to the meeting at the Albergo Tripoli-Italian (needless to say swiftly renamed the Hotel La Gioconda). The painting was removed from its false-bottomed trunk. The craquelure was identified, and Geri promptly called the police.

What did Perruggia feel about the eerie, enigmatic, supercilious, exquisite, remote, satanic (call her what you will) Mona Lisa that he would have her more or less about his person for two long years?

To begin with he kept her in a cupboard, then under a stove in the kitchen, and finally in the false-bottomed trunk. For a while, he rather cockily propped her postcard on the mantelpiece, and in the letter to Geri he signs himself Leonardo Vincenzo. But fairly soon he seems to have found her hard to look at, impossible to live with; there is evidence of repeated attempts to sell her.

The object Perruggia stole is painted on a rectangle of poplar wood only 77cm high - "not even the size of the new TV screens!" was the notorious objection of Americans in the 1950s. I find that reaction strange, having the opposite feeling - that the actual painting is much bigger than I ever expect. Perhaps that's because the Mona Lisa is scaled in one's mind to the size of an infinite number of postcards and reproductions. In reality, set in concrete, behind triple layers of bulletproof glass, she seems as large as any incarcerated offender.

How the Mona Lisa looked in 1911 we shall never know. Nowadays, her photograph, her fame, precedes her so that every sighting is inflected: does she match up, does she look different, how does she compare with our expectations? The joy of seeing any painting in reality before seeing its pygmy reproductions - or worse, in the false glow of the computer - is long since over. But it is hardly controversial to suggest that Leonardo's portrait is a special case.

Her beauty, for instance. Mona Lisa - the person, not the painting - was the epitome of beauty for so many 19th-century writers and 20th-century singers. Yet to me she is anything but, with her chipmunk cheeks, close-set eyes and depilated face.

She is famous even in parts - the hunched silhouette, the complacently folded hands. But I find it hard to believe that her pole place in cultural life really has to do with intrinsic beauty - either hers or that of the painting.

The photographs of the crime scene a century ago show not a dramatically empty glass case, as one would nowadays see, or even a large expanse of bare wall, but a narrow gap between the Titians and Correggios - something more like a missing tooth. It is well known that thousands of people came to view this spot, this gap, this rumoured blank - more people, it is often pointed out, than used to visit when the painting was there. But there was something to see, not quite a blank. Four iron hooks and a dusty outline: the ghostly trace of the painting. The smile was missing, or was it hanging in the air like the proverbial Cheshire Cat? Some claimed to have felt it continuing to resonate, like a visitation. And it is, after all, the Mona Lisa's crowning glory, this artful vanishing act.

A smile is such a tricky thing to depict. It nearly always stiffens and dies on the canvas. The Mona Lisa's is only enigmatic because of Leonardo's sfumato technique - that smokey, smudgy blur where you can't see how the smile ends at each corner, so that it simply tails away, unresolved, literally open-ended.

Sfumato is not the only thing that makes her smile mysterious, of course. There are many contributory factors, but high on the list is the total absence of any visible context or event that could help to explain this peculiar smile. Vasari reduced it all to a sideshow: Leonardo had laid on musicians and jesters to keep his sitter from ennui. Some people think she was remembering lost love.

But if the Mona Lisa were handed a baby, her smile would become beatific and make her look even more like a secular Madonna. With a couple of jesters on site, she might come across as polite if disapproving. The art historian Edgar Wind once slotted her into two different scenes to illustrate this point and was able to show that the same expression could look like grief at the Crucifixion, or tipsy mirth in the context of a bacchanalian revel.

Mona Lisa smiles, but why? Nobody is talking, no jokes are being cracked, there are no letters to read, no dinners to eat, no babies to dandle or kittens to stroke: where is the probable cause? And all of the many interpretations of her smile - lonely, tragic, self-conscious, uncomfortable, superior, even sinister - depend on that lack of explanation. But what they also depend on, and did in 1911, is a much greater absence: her missing eyebrows. She has such a curious look - denuded, or as if chemotherapy had worked its bittersweet way, depriving her of not just eyebrows, in fact, but eyelashes too. Though the eyebrows are truly crucial, for they give definition not just to the eyes but to the whole face.

The Mona Lisa's eyebrows were there during Leonardo's lifetime. A visitor to his house in France - where the artist went to work for the French King François I in his final years - mentions them. Vasari, the great renaissance art historian, also gives a description of the painting: "The eyes were sparkling and moist as they always are in real life. Around them were reddish specks and hairs that could only be depicted with immense subtlety. The brows could not be more natural: the hair grows thickly in one place and lightly in another following the pores of the skin." With eyebrows, she would still look out from the deep, slow glazes of Leonardo's paint, but without the absolute enigma.

François is the reason that any of us can see this portrait. Leonardo began painting the Mona Lisa in Florence around 1503, and took it with him when he left for France 13 years later. After his death in 1519, the painting passed through several hands until François managed to buy it for today's equivalent of around £9m. When the aristocracy fell during the French revolution, the painting became part of the public collection of the Louvre. A small snag with Perruggia's patriotic defence during his trial - that his motive for stealing the Mona Lisa was not money but to return her to the motherland, avenging Napoleon's rapacious plundering of artworks from Italy - was that the Mona Lisa was never stolen from the Italians in the first place.

The Italian press may have been touched by his claim, but not the jury at his trial. Perruggia was sentenced to 12 months in 1914. Eventually he returned to France and opened a paint shop in Haute-Savoie; the Mona Lisa was given a triumphal tour of Italy before she too went back to France.

What was the true effect of this most famous of all art thefts? For one thing, immediate and intense repetition: it's the cinematic cliché of rolling presses, of tomorrow's newsprint rushing round the cylinders, carrying images of the Mona Lisa, her face becoming a global edition, and with each face a repetition of all the anecdotes about her smile, her supernatural powers and so on.

As early as the 1930s, French politicians were proposing that the Mona Lisa have her own separate gallery "because all the Cook's tours go to see it". "People came not to look at the painting," Robert Hughes has said, "but to say they that they'd seen it." From that moment, Hughes traces the pernicious rise of the hyperinflated art market. But its effect on museum culture has been devastating too. Visitors have to trek to her gallery at the Louvre and see if she's still casting her eerie spell.

If you believe in slow looking, the Mona Lisa is the last work on earth that you will ever experience in this way. You queue to see her behind a winding cordon like those at airport security, you get your brief moment, and are instantly sent on your way.

And though I cannot blame Perruggia entirely for this disaster, nor the fact that almost nobody looks at Veronese's stupendous Wedding at Cana in the same gallery, as vast as it is ignored, the theft of the Mona Lisa a century ago contributed exponentially to the painting's fame across the world, to this idea of a woman with a mysterious past, still here, haunting the present: a spectacle in a glass case.

The Picture Vanishes will be broadcast in Radio 3's Twenty Minutes series on 21 August at 7.50pm.

Read here how Goya's Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery 50 years earlier

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hundred years ago, on 21 August 1911, an Italian painter and decorator slipped from the cupboard in the Louvre where he had been hiding all night, stepped up to the , freed her from her frame and left the building apparently unseen. It was 24 hours before anyone noticed she was missing.

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http://eprints.uny.ac.id/21083/1/Agustina%20Tri%20Widayati%2008211144005.pdf

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https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwj10Of0k_f-AhUNdn0KHcdGCbkYABAAGgJzZg&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESauD2o93XVe5T9UFnGRK3awH9s5qJ5Wp8vzVN9TI_vylJdPtZ4OWFb-JKQGS_3nU9OfL7CNWkOirUI-kgFZpsTdeA-W4IJdBXhHNEjxgQo37cDS6POWTqkDO4WmXHv_pydN9GBo9b70sT3Ig&sig=AOD64_2UADnsGrej9CZtfuFpaghzbPYbgQ&q&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwiW4OD0k_f-AhVn4TgGHasMC1YQ0Qx6BAgGEAE

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2022/11/30/after-220-years-egypt-demands-the-return-of-the-rosetta-stone&ved=2ahUKEwir2Nuxk_f-AhX2zqACHXOjDVIQFnoECBwQBQ&usg=AOvVaw1jxrtCOAONoI2IHh44opxh

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What is the Rosetta Stone? All you need to know as British Museum faces claim from Egypt

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Discovery of ancient artefact in 1799 helped crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics

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𝙴𝚗𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚑 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚓𝚎𝚌𝚝 : 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚔 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚠𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍

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𝙴𝚗𝚐𝚕𝚒𝚜𝚑 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚓𝚎𝚌𝚝 : 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚔 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚠𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍

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https://www.npr.org/2011/07/30/138800110/the-theft-that-made-the-mona-lisa-a-masterpiece

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If you were standing outside the Louvre in Paris on the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, you might have noticed three men hurrying out of the museum.

They would have been pretty conspicuous on a quiet Monday morning, writer and historian James Zug tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. "Sunday night was a big social night in Paris," he says, "so a lot of people were hung over on Monday morning."

The men, three Italian handymen, were not hungover. But they might have been a little tired. They'd just spent the night in an art-supply closet.

And on that morning, with the Louvre still closed, they slipped out of the closet and lifted 200 pounds of painting, frame and protective glass case off the wall. Stripped of its frame and case, the wooden canvas was covered with a blanket and hustled off to the Quai d'Orsay station, where the trio boarded a 7:47 a.m. express train out of the city.

They'd stolen the "Mona Lisa."
Famous, Overnight

Before its theft, the "Mona Lisa" was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn't until the 1860s that critics began to hail it as a masterwork of Renaissance painting. And that judgment didn't filter outside a thin slice of French intelligentsia.

"The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre," Zug says.

Dorothy and Tom Hoobler wrote about the painting's heist in their book, The Crimes of Paris. It was 28 hours, they say, until anyone even noticed the four bare hooks.

The guy who noticed was a pushy still-life artist who set up his easel to paint that gallery in the Louvre.

"He felt he couldn't work as long as the 'Mona Lisa' wasn't there," Tom Hoobler says.

But the artist wasn't alarmed. At that time, there was a project under way to photograph the Louvre's many works. Each piece had to be taken to the roof, since cameras of the day did not work well inside.

"So finally he persuaded a guard to go see how long the photographers were going to have the painting," Tom Hoobler says. "He went off and came back, and said, 'You know what, the photographers say they don't have it!' "

All of a sudden, James Zug says, "the 'Mona Lisa' becomes this incredibly famous painting - literally overnight."

Mark of Shame

After the Louvre announced the theft, newspapers all over the world ran headlines about the missing masterpiece.

" 60 Detectives Seek Stolen 'Mona Lisa,' French Public Indignant," the New York Times declared. The heist had become something of a national scandal.

"In France, there was a great deal of concern that American millionaires were buying up the legacy of France - the best paintings," Dorothy Hoobler says. At one point, American tycoon and art lover J.P. Morgan was suspected of commissioning the theft. Pablo Picasso was also considered a suspect, and was questioned.

And as tensions were escalating between France and Germany ahead of World War I, "there were people who thought the Kaiser was behind it," Hoobler says.

After a weeklong shutdown, the Louvre re-opened to mobs of people, Franz Kafka among them, all rushing to see the empty spot that had become a "mark of shame" for Parisians.

Meanwhile, the thieves had made a clean getaway. They were three Italians: two brothers, Vincenzo and Michele Lancelotti, and the ringleader, Vincenzo Perugia. He was a handyman who had worked for the Louvre to install the very same protective glass cases he had ripped from the "Mona Lisa."

Perugia hoped to sell the painting. But the heist had received so much attention that the "Mona Lisa" became too hot to hock, Zug says.

"Within days, newspapers were offering rewards. [Perugia] could have brought it in, but I think the main reason he didn't do that is he was worried about being arrested - and that the story was so big that he probably didn't think he could get away with it."

So Perugia stashed it in the false bottom of a trunk in his Paris boardinghouse.

A Masterpiece Returned
Twenty-eight months after he snatched it from the Louvre, Perugia finally made a pass at selling the "Mona Lisa" to an art dealer in Florence.

But the dealer was suspicious. He had the head of an Italian art gallery come take a look at the painting.

A stamp on the back confirmed its authenticity.

"They said, 'OK, leave it with us, and we'll see that you get a reward,'" Tom Hoobler says. Perugia went back home. But half an hour later, to his surprise, the police were at his door.

"He said later that he was trying to return it to Italy - that he was a patriot and it was stolen by Napoleon - and he was trying to return it to the land of his birth," James Zug says.

And so, with much fanfare, the painting was returned to the Louvre. Perugia pleaded guilty to stealing it, and was sentenced to just eight months in prison.

But a few days after his trial, Dorothy Hoobler says, World War I broke out. Suddenly, the drama of an art heist was off the front pages.

"This seemed like a very small story," she says.
James Zug recently wrote about the Mona Lisa for the Smithsonian Magazine.

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The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece

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If you were standing outside the Louvre in Paris on the morning of Aug. 21, 1911, you might have noticed three men hurrying out of the museum. They would have been pretty conspicuous on a quiet Monday morning, writer and historian James Zug tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

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Dutch arrest over Van Gogh and Frans Hals museum thefts - BBC News

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Dutch arrest over Van Gogh and Frans Hals museum thefts

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The two paintings were stolen in separate raids on museums last year but have not yet been recovered.

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Van Gogh Painting Stolen From Dutch Museum : NPR

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A painting by Vincent van Gogh was stolen early Monday morning from a Dutch museum in what appeared to be a smash-and-grab from the institution's front entrance.

The painting, an 1884 work titled The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884, had been on loan to the Singer Laren museum near Amsterdam. It is part of the permanent collection of the Groninger Museum, in the northern part of the Netherlands.

Police say the break-in took place at about 3:15 a.m. local time, according to the Dutch news website NL Times. The thieves smashed through the glass door at the museum's entrance and only took the van Gogh.

According to CNN, museum director Jan Rudolph de Lorm said at a news conference Monday afternoon, "I am shocked and unbelievably pissed off,"continuing: "It is very bad for the Groninger Museum. It's also very bad for Singer."

The museum has been closed to the public since earlier this month because of the coronavirus pandemic, but it was initially unclear whether its overnight security staff or other measures had been reduced because of health concerns.

This is not the first time that van Gogh paintings have been stolen in the Netherlands in recent decades. In 1991, thieves managed to make off with 20 pieces from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum that were altogether worth some $500 million. One robber hid in the museum until after closing hours and then let an accomplice in. But their plan fell apart about half an hour after the robbery, when a second car that the robbers had planned to meet up with got a flat tire. The thieves abandoned their loot, and four men were later arrested and sentenced.

And in 2016, Italian police recovered two van Goghs - each reportedly valued at over $50 million - in a house south of Naples that allegedly belonged to a drug smuggler. Those works had been stolen in 2002, also from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Perhaps coincidentally, the painting taken Monday morning was stolen on van Gogh's birthday; he was born March 30, 1853.

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Van Gogh Painting Stolen After Thieves Apparently Smash Dutch Museum Entrance

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A painting by Vincent van Gogh was stolen early Monday morning from a Dutch museum in what appeared to be a smash-and-grab from the institution's front entrance. The painting, an 1884 work titled The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring 1884, had been on loan to the Singer Laren museum near Amsterdam.

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Van Gogh painting stolen from Dutch museum | Vincent van Gogh | The Guardian

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A painting by Vincent van Gogh with an estimated value of up to £5m has been stolen from a Dutch museum currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The thieves took Van Gogh's Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring after smashing through the front glass door of the Singer Laren museum, in Laren, at around 3.15am on Sunday morning. No other art is believed to be missing.

The burglar alarm had been triggered by the break-in but the thieves had fled by the time police officers arrived.

During a press conference broadcast on Youtube, the museum's director, Jan Rudolph de Lorm, said he was "incredibly pissed off" by the loss of the painting, which had been on loan from the Groninger Museum. The painting was stolen on the day Van Gogh was born 167 years ago.

The Singer Laren Museum outside Amsterdam, where the work of art by Vincent Van Gogh was stolen. It had been closed to the public because of the coronavirus outbreak. Photograph: Piroschka van de Wouw/Reuters

De Lorm said: "This is exactly what you don't want as a museum that has a painting on loan.

"A beautiful and moving painting by one of our greatest painters, stolen from the community ... This must come back as soon as possible, so that we can enjoy and be comforted by this beautiful art again.

"Art deserves to be seen and shared by us, the community."

Arthur Brandt, an art detective, told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper that the artwork could be worth up to €6m (£5m). However, another work from Van Gogh's Nuenen period sold recently for about £10m at a Dutch auction

The work was part of the exhibition Mirror of the Soul, an exhibition of more than 70 Dutch paintings, watercolours and drawings from the 19th century.

The museum was closed on 12 March in line with national measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

The Groninger Museum, located in the northern Dutch city of Groningen, said in a statement: "The work from 1884, oil on paper on panel is the only painting by Van Gogh in the collection of the Groninger Museum.

"We are very shocked by this news. The investigation is currently in full swing and no more can be said about it due to the police investigation."

The painting of a vicarage garden is one of a series of works by Van Gogh between 1883 and 1884 when he was with his parents in Nuenen, where the Dutch artist's father was a minister.

The Singer Laren's general manager Evert van Os said the museum's security measures had gone "entirely according to protocol".

In a statement, a police spokesman for the Gooi and Vecht region said art robbery experts from the national criminal investigation department would help in the investigation. The painting has been added to Interpol's international list of stolen works of art.

The Singer Laren museum showcases the original collection of American artist and collector William Singer and his wife Anna.

In 2007, thieves stole seven statues from the museum's garden worth an estimated€1.3m, including a cast of the statue The Thinker by the French artist Auguste Rodin.

The statue was later found in a damaged state. In 2010, the two thieves responsible were sentenced to prison for four and four and a half years, reduced on appeal to two and nearly three years imprisonment.

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Van Gogh painting stolen from Dutch museum

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A painting by Vincent van Gogh with an estimated value of up to £5m has been stolen from a Dutch museum currently closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The thieves took Van Gogh's Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring after smashing through the front glass door of the Singer Laren museum, in Laren, at around 3.15am on Sunday morning.

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https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/05/09/national/crime-legal/ginza-watch-story-robbery/

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Four teens arrested after robbery at luxury watch shop in Ginza

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The assailants forced their way into the shop and threatened the clerk with a knife before fleeing with merchandise.

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https://soranews24.com/2023/05/09/shocking-daylight-smash-and-grab-robbery-occurs-at-shop-in-tokyos-fanciest-neighborhood%E3%80%90vid%E3%80%91/amp/

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Shocking daylight smash-and-grab robbery occurs at shop in Tokyo’s fanciest neighborhood【Vid】

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Knife-wielding criminals hold employees hostage during robbery.

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https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/14903557

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Teens arrested after robbery in plain sight in Tokyo’s Ginza | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

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Four teenagers were arrested on May 8 after masked robbers at a luxury watch store in Tokyo’s Ginza district committed a heist so brazen that onlookers thought it was a movie shoot.

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Trio steals four Ferraris in wild heist in Nassau County (nypost.com)

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Three crooks smashed their way into a Ferrari service center on Long Island and made off with four of the luxury rides, authorities said.

The trio broke the glass door of the Ferrari of Long Island Service Center on South Service Road in Plainview just before 4 a.m. Saturday, cops said.

The stolen vehicles included convertibles and two-door Ferraris, cops said.

Instagram/new_englandcarspotter

Once inside, they snatched up "assorted merchandise" and "numerous vehicle key fobs," according to Nassau County Police.

They then hopped into two convertible Ferraris - a gray 2014 and a blue 2016 model - as well as two white two-door Ferraris, from 2018 and 2023, and drove off, cops said.

Police were unable to elaborate on how the trio managed to take four vehicles.

The trio also made off with "assorted merchandise" and "numerous vehicle key fobs," cops said.

Google Maps

No arrests had been made by Wednesday afternoon.

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Trio steals four Ferraris in wild heist at Nassau County service center

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Three crooks smashed their way into a Ferrari service center on Long Island and made off with four of the luxury rides, authorities said. The trio broke the glass door of the Ferrari of Long Island Service Center on South Service Road in Plainview just before 4 a.m. Saturday, cops said.

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Catch the Truth If You Can | Spielberg, Abagnale and OCR

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Welcome to the Steal!

"Catch Me If You Can" is the story of Frank Abagnale, who was widely recognized as the best con artist, check forger, impostor and escape artist in American history.

Scene 1 - 2:00

As his identity was unknown for a long period of time, the " unsub" (an "unknown subject" in F.B.I. speak, also called a " John Doe") was called the " Skywayman" by the law and the press, because of his posing as an airline pilot. (In scene 11, Abagnale meets a Pan Am P.R. guy. He's nervous, jumpy because there's another piece about the "Skywayman" in the New York Times...)

Scene 11 - 55:09

Abagnale himself puts it like this: "I had enjoyed a misguided and regrettable run as one of the most successful con artists the world has ever known. [...] The New York Times, in its coverage, referred to me as 'The Great Impostor'." (book "The Art of the Steal", page 6)

Frank W. Abagnale How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America's #1 Crime
"The Art of the Steal"

Broadway Books, 2001
ISBN 0767906845

In his book " Stealing Your Life", he calls his criminal career a "foolish teenage infatuation with perpetuating swindles" (page 12).

Or still: "My escape [from an Atlanta prison] made the front page of one New York paper, 'Frank Abagnale, known to police the world over [...] and who once flushed himself down an airline toilet to elude officers, is at large again...' the story commenced." (book "Catch Me If You Can", page 204)

Frank W. Abagnale (with Stan Redding) Mainstream Publishing, 2003
"Catch Me If You Can"

ISBN 1840187166

The former police chief of Houston once said of me: "Frank Abagnale could write a check on toilet paper, drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it 'U.R. Hooked' and cash it at any bank in town, using a Hong Kong driver's licence for identification." (book "Catch Me If You Can", page 91)

(Nowadays, some banks require all non-customers - people that don't have an account with them - that come in to cash a check to leave their fingerprints in ink on the check. When somebody objects, the teller does not accept the check. According to F.B.I. statistics, this single security measure reduces check fraud instantly by 50%!)

Some extra info is found in Abagnale's white paper "Check Fraud and Identity Theft, Volume III" (2004) (page 2): "I had 50 legitimate driver's licences."

In the interview included in the 2003 edition of the book, Abagnale claims about 80% of the movie is accurate (book "Catch Me If You Can", page 214). In his foreword to " Catch Me If You Can - The Complete Screenplay" (page 8), he goes even further: "[...] 90% of the film is accurate. [...] the movie really captures my essence of the story."

Notice the movie's tagline, "The true story of a real fake"!

Fast rewind

The Float

As a check forger, Frank Abagnale was an absolute master and a true innovator: he was the first forger to exploit the routing of checks as indicated through numbers on the codeline. This type of fraud is now called " the float ".

Scene 3 - 17:40

Says Abagnale: "What landed me in jail was my other habit, which was my enthusiasm for passing bad checks. The main reason I adopted those guises was to give me credibility when I cashed hot checks - and to satisfy my great taste for women. Hotel clerks and merchants didn't question pilots and doctors too closely. Through my various hustles, I passed something like $2.5 million worth of checks, a blizzard of paper that I scattered in earnest throughout all fifty states and twenty-six countries, all before I was legally allowed to drink. [The legal drinking age in the U.S. is 21.] I was proficient enough at cashing fraudulent checks that I earned the distinction of becoming one of the most hunted criminals by theF.B.I." (book "The Art of the Steal", page 6).

Scene 6 - 29:18

Abagnale used a number of aliases - he reportedly used 8 identities, basically variations such as Frank Adams, Dr. Frank Conners, Frank Williams, Robert Black, Robert Conrad and Robert Monjo. In the movie, he uses the aliases Frank Black, Frank Roberts and Frank Taylor. (Incidentally, Frank Taylor is also the name of the first pilot to get off the spaceship in " Close Encounters of the Third Kind"!) For instance, during Abagnale's aborted engagement party - he's known to the family as Dr. Conners -, he admits to his fiancée Brenda Strong that he uses the aliases Frank Black and Frank Taylor when he's traveling (scene 16, 1:36:12).

Scene 14 - 1:25:47

Fast rewind

The Basics: To Tell the Truth... on TV

In 1977, Abagnale appears on a TV show called "To Tell the Truth" to tell his amazing story. This TV quiz has a simple formula: three friends play the same character, people have to guess which of the three is for real.

Abagnale did appear on that program, here's the picture (signed by Abagnale!) that proves it. He's the pilot in the middle. Here, one "impostor" is dressed as doctor, the second as pilot and the third as inmate.)

Not only that, Abagnale decided to write up a book about his life after he'd gone on another TV show, the famous "Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson (later presented by Jay Leno and now by Jimmy Fallon). His segment was scheduled for six minutes, but went on for 20! The next day, hundreds of people called the broadcasting company to ask where they could buy the book. There wasn't any book to buy, but the many reactions gave Abagnale the idea to write one. (He could use the money because he was getting married at the time...)

The book came out in 1980 with help from ghost writer Stan Redding and turned out to be a real success. Redding interviewed Abagnale for 4 days, 8 hours a day, then wrote the book on his own. A Houston Chronicle journalist, he also covered the low-key burial of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald at the Rose Hill Cemetery in Forth Worth. Lacking pallbearers, seven reporters stepped in to carry Oswald's coffin. (The F.B.I. agent that caught Frank Abagnale - he's called Carl Hanratty in the movie but we reveal his true identity - spent a few days investigating the JFK murder in Chicago.)

Abagnale's autobiography is regularly reprinted and available in some 30 languages. The movie rights were sold instantly, but it's only some 20 years down the road that Spielberg got involved.

(After Spielberg's movie grossed $352 million world-wide in movie theatres, a TV series and an eponymous musical followed.)

Fast rewind

Frame Freeze: The Odyssey of a Movie

Abagnale has written the foreword of the book "Catch Me If You Can - the Complete Screenplay".

Jeff Nathanson the complete screenplay with an introduction by Frank W. Abagnale
"Catch Me If You Can"

Newmarket Press, 2003
ISBN 1557045534

He provides lots of details in it on the tumultuous journey of the movie rights (page 7-13). Quoting pages and pages from a book exceeds "fair use" of source material, but let me summarize the journey of the movie:

Soon after his TV appearance, Hollywood showed interest in his story. He entered into a agreement - an option contract - with Bud Yorkin in 1978. After two years, Bud Yorkin told him he was no longer interested.

The next years, Columbia TV and Grosso-Jacobson optioned the movie rights.

Hall Bartlett optioned the movie rights in 1986 for four years. Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy and David Hasselhoff were considered for the part.

After four years, Abagnale hoped to see the movie rights returned to him, but Bartlett paid the full purchase price ($250,000) for the movie rights. At this point, Abagnale lost all control and rights over the movie.

In 1990, an independant producer Michel Shane, bought the rights from Bartlett for $300,000. He optioned the movie to Hollywood Pictures, a division of Disney, who returned the rights to Shane after two years.

During the 1980s, the Coen brothers considered the project.

In 1994, Sony Tri-Star optioned the rights for one year.

In 1996, Barry Kemp and Bungalow 78 optioned the rights for two years.

It was Barry Kemp and his associate Devorah Moos-Hankin that took the project to Walter Parkes andLaurie McDonald, Spielberg's producers atSKG Dreamworks, then still a starting film studio. Halleluyah! (Moos-Hankin is credited as co-producer, Kemp as executive producer.)

Fast rewind

Michael Sabo : A Sidetrack

One element isn't mentioned in this summary: according to some sources, Spielberg also considered another fraudster turned legitimate, Michael Sabo, to base the movie on his life. Which certainly was an option: Sabo was a check, bond and stock forger, he impersonated airline pilots with 6 carriers - Allegheny Airlines (later acquired by US Airways), American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, TWA (now part of American Airlines), United Airlines andUS Airways) (now merged with American Airlines), - but, unlike Abagnale, took control of an Boeing 727 in flight.

He impersonated a doctor but, unlike Abagnale, took the risk of performing medical acts, handling the delivery of a baby. He posed as a Ph.D. and had over 100 different identities in total. To answer the next question: did he go on TV? He impersonated a doctor on a national TV program, "Unsolved Mysteries".

Sounds familiar already? He escaped from federal prison and stole over $10 million! And he blames... his parents for his criminal career: he feels his father's rejection caused him to take a wrong turn. (On his web site, he claims he went criminal in desparation to cover the medical bills of a girlfriend with breast cancer but without health insurance.) After 12 years in jail, he became the founder and executive director of Prison Consultants of America, a consultancy firm for white-collar crime.

Sabo lecures and consults on identity theft, fraud etc. - same thing as Abagnale - but he mainly assists (first-time) white-collar, drugs and sex offenders to "navigate the complex prision system" as he puts it on his web site. And I don't see Abagnale doing that ever!

Elsewhere on his web site, you get the unvarnished truth: "Without understanding prison life, you could risk a 25-30% chance of getting killed, a 10-15% change of getting raped, a 30-40% chance of getting stabbed, a 80-90% chance of getting beaten." If we can avoid the knee-jerk reaction that they all deserve it anyway, this says a lot about the American prison system - The Shawshank Redemption, anyone? - and - once more - Frank Abagnale this is not.

Spielberg saw the score and quickly made the right choice. As for Michael Sabo, he was scamming from the 60s well into the 90s. (Abagnale's criminal career was over at the age of 21.) Sabo was a fugitive on the run when he should have seen the error of his ways and been available to sign a movie contract...

Fast rewind

Truth or Fiction?

Scene 1 gives this info on Frank Abagnale.

Committed financial crimes from from '64 to '67. There's a
continuity error in the movie: according toscene 20, he was arrested on March 3, 1970.
All these dates are wrong, actually!

Impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor (chief resident pediatrician) and an assistant Abagnale summed it up succintly in his foreword to "The Art of the Con", the book of another fraud expert, R. Paul Wilson (Lyons Press, 2014): "D.A. As a pilot, he flew over two million miles for free.
For five years, I lived as an impostor. I pretended to be a pilot, adoctor, ateacher, alawyer, and apeace officer."

Cashed bouncing checks in all 50 U.S. states and 26 foreign countries.

Stole "almost" $4 million with fraudulent checks. The real figure was $2.5 million. (According to Abagnale's own estimate, he wrote some 17,000 bad checks!) Note that we're talking about greenbacks from the
60s here, not the inflated dollar of today!
We have a second continuity error here: whenF.B.I. agentHanratty and Abagnale speak over the phone on Christmas Eve in scene 15, the figure of "almost" $4 million is repeated. The problem is that Abagnale only gets caught on Christmas Eve... of a later year! How can the end total be "almost $4 million" (scene 1, 3:47) when the intermediate score with Abagnale in Louisiana - at least 1 year before hisarrest in France - already reaches the same amount (scene 20, 1:33:05)? And during that extra year, he tours around the world and gets caught in France... printing "real" fake checks on aHeidelberg. Here's what Carl Hanratty has to say about this period:"The kid's gone completely out of control [...]" (scene 18, 1:45:25) with checks from South America, Australia, Singapore, Egypt and Spain.
(Just don't blame the actors for the mix-up! The mistake is right there in thescreenplay (on page 20 and 112).)

Did it all before his 19th birthday.
More poetic liberty here: he did it from the age 16 to 21. Abagnale was born on April 27 1948.

None of which makes Abagnale a modern Robin Hood, as some naively think. Abagnale did not rob the rich - he stole from large companies, mainly banks, not the same thing! - and he certainly never distributed his loot among the poor. This is true: he did not steal from mom and pop stores and he never committed violence, it was all guile and cunning from a gentleman criminal!

He could do this because, as a kid, he looked 10 years older than he was. Says Abagnale: "It had always surprised people, especially women, to learn that I was still a teenager." (book "Catch Me If You Can", page 24) Here he is at the age of 16...

(Let me talk some more about film technique in passing: when agent Hanratty recognizes Frank Abagnale in a school yearbook (scene 12), Spielberg and his editor Michael Kahn make use of multiple jump cuts - a favorite style figure of Spielberg!)

Scene 12 - 1:06:39

His fourth career was left out of the movie because of time constraints and because it didn't add any new elements. Indeed, Abagnale also handled a summer course as a sociology professor at the Brigham Young University in Utah. He was very well liked by his students, although he just read one chapter ahead of them every week. Having read in a local paper that Brigham Young was looking for sociology instructors, he forged a transcript (diploma) from the Columbia University (New York) for his interview with the dean. (book "Catch Me If You Can", page 86)

Fast rewind

When the truth becomes fiction, the con is a con...

OK. That's the Frank Abagnale story as we know it from the movie, his autobiography, his interviews and public talks etc. But things took a dramatic turn when the Irish historian Alan C. Logan 's had a close look at Abagnale's life and published his findings in 2020, 18 years after the film's première. A very close look.

Alan C. Logan Alan C. Logan, 2020
"The Greatest Hoax on Earth - Catching Truth, While We Can"

ISBN 1736197401

Drumrolls: Abagnale is not who he claims to be. As a youth, he was a criminal alright... but a small-time crook at best. Take away the glamour, the pilot mileage, the high-profile F.B.I. team that chased him. Logan speaks of " all foam, no beer, all icing, no cake. " (The Greatest Hoax on Earth, page 319)

He was arrested several times - by local police! Nor was he an "ethical thief", a Robin Hood figure who only stole from large corporations, mainly banks. This book contains testimonies of small shop owners and private families that got ripped off. His former booking agent, Mark Zinder, the man who ultimately got Abagnale a spot on Johnny Carson's show and who took the photos of Abagnale in professional attire (with facial hair from the late 70s, not from the 60s), wrote a foreword.

" The real events [...] mean that between the ages of sixteen and twenty, Abagnhale had virtually no opportunity to do laps around the globe with Pan Am, or any other airline, and become a millionaire writing badchecks. TheF.B.I. was not chasing him. He wasn't working for nearly three years as adoctor,lawyer andprofessor. [...] Essentially, Frank W. Abagnale was, for the most part, behind bars." (The Greatest Hoax on Earth, page 289)

Logan's book was meticulously researched; he provides plenty of police reports, mug shots etc. to debunk the stylish master criminal. Then again, Abagnale locked up the spiffy fraudster franchise conclusively, and you shouldn't expect him to respond to Logan's book ever. Way too much is at stake for him.

More importantly, Spielberg's movie was released in December 2002 and is therefore based on information available then. That also applies to this web site. It showcases how a book gets turned into a movie. Which material (available then) was dropped and altered to compress the con man story into a 2 h 21 m film? Which creative decisions turned that story, now proven false, into a fine Spielberg movie with John Williams music and Janusz Kaminski photography?

Fast rewind
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Frank Abagnale - The True Story of a Real Fake | Spielberg, Abagnale and OCR

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"Catch Me If You Can" is the story of Frank Abagnale, who was widely recognized as the best con artist, check forger, impostor and escape artist in American history. Scene 1 - 2:00 As his identity was unknown for a long period of time, the " unsub" (an "unknown subject" in F.B.I.

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https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/famous-prisons-incarceration/frank-abagnale/#:~:text=Frank%20Abagnale%20was%20a%20famous,US%20prison%20in%20Atlanta%2C%20Georgia.

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https://www.actionnews5.com/2023/05/09/police-report-reveals-events-leading-baptist-memorial-crime-scene/?outputType=amp

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Police report reveals events leading to Baptist Memorial crime scene

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A police report has shined a light on the events leading up to the Baptist Memorial crime scene on Monday night.

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The Link we found

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The Dutch Museum Robbed By Thieves for 11 Rare Artworks (thecollector.com)

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The Dutch museum (The Princessehof Ceramics Museum) lost its eleven valuable pieces in a robbery. The robbery took place on February 13th in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden. Everything occurred in the early morning hours. The burglars forced their way into the museum. Overall, the Princessehof is one of the most valuable ceramics-arts museums in the country.

Failed Robbery and Successful One: Are There Any Connections?

Evidently, there were signs of a forced entry into the museum. The burglars used the museum's roof to get inside. After that, they walked into the first floor of the museum. There they could see an ongoing Chinese ceramics exhibition. The name of the exhibition is " Party! ". The burglars stole 11 and broke seven pieces.

Two weeks before this theft, another break-in occurred. But, it was not successful. After that, the museum increased security. We can see they were not very lucky. This action did not stop the burglars from breaking in. The museum also spoke about this event. "The perpetrators seemed to have specific knowledge and to have struck in a targeted manner. The objects were part of an installation with Chinese ceramics ".

The museum also said these artworks are very valuable and rare. The museum doesn't think they will go on sale, but that this was a targeted assignment. Because of this, speculation is that thieves had specific knowledge and wanted specifically those pieces. But, one question remains. Is there a connection between those two robberies? Were thieves feeling the ground in the first one? At this time, nobody has the answers to these questions.

There Are More Identical Crimes

The whereabouts of the four remaining pieces is not known. Immediately after the heist, the police started their investigation. The police is working on collecting security footage from an area around the museum. Also, authorities are asking prospective witnesses to come forward with any fresh evidence they may have.

The Dutch museum made a decision to remain closed for a week, and to reopen on February 21. The museum also made a decision to again straighten their security. Authorities said they obtained an immediate complaint of a break-in at around 3.45am. They also sent a substantial reply in the intention of apprehending the criminals.

Officers cordoned off the area and searched the premises for the intruders, but they were unable to locate them. But, they did find seven broken ceramics in a close street. This street is also under an investigation for potential proof.

As previously said, this museum has the most valuable ceramics collection. Among them are rare Chinese Ming vases from 2800 BC. Also, there are additional ceramic works by artists such Dutch painter Armando, Pablo Picasso, and Lucebert. Three identical crimes occurred in a six-month period between 2019 and 2020, stealing priceless art items. The targets were smaller galleries with less advanced security.

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The Dutch Museum Robbed By Thieves for 11 Rare Artworks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Dutch museum (The Princessehof Ceramics Museum) lost its eleven valuable pieces in a robbery. The robbery took place on February 13th in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden. Everything occurred in the early morning hours. The burglars forced their way into the museum. Overall, the Princessehof is one of the most valuable ceramics-arts museums in the country.

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3 injured in Lampung Armed Bank Robbery - News En.tempo.co

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TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Arta Kedaton Bank located in the city of Bandar Lampung in the Lampung Province unexpectedly became witness to an armed robbery on Friday, March 17, 2023. The robbery was committed by a lone gunman armed with a homemade firearm and an airsoft gun.

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https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/everyone-knows-who-stole-the-picasso-but-no-one-agrees-on-who-it-was-20211214-p59hdl.html

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Marc Fennell really knows how to satisfy his curiosity. A year ago, the media polymath - he's a co-anchor on The Feed, award-winning podcaster, and host of Mastermind, among various gigs - learnt through Twitter of an infamous crime he'd never known about: in 1986 Pablo Picasso's painting The Weeping Woman was stolen from Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria, with ransom demands left by a group calling itself Australian Cultural Terrorists.

"I remember just going, 'why isn't this an incredibly talked about chapter in Australian history?'" Fennell says. "Some people remembered it well, but for others, fact had become fiction and rumour had overtaken the story."

Marc Fennell presents the four-part documentary Framed on SBS.

Just 12 months later and Fennell knows much more about the theft, which was then a media sensation in Melbourne and the subject of headlines worldwide. The result, in close collaboration with two colleagues from The Feed, writer and director Corrin Grant and producer Ninah Kopel, is Framed, a four-part true-crime documentary which in 100 minutes takes viewers through variously a cultural crossfire, true crime farce, and lingering tragedy.

"There are a million stories that can be told around the theft of The Weeping Woman. I think we've probably put together the most comprehensive version of it," Fennell says. "Anybody who was aware of it was like, 'Oh yeah, this person did it!' But as we say, everybody knows who did it - but no-one can agree who that was!"

Told initially through the testimony of then NGV staff, The Age journalists, arts scene insiders, and the lead police investigator, Framed is a documentary of two parts. The initial two episodes are huge fun, complete with mocking letters, eccentric then-gallery director Patrick McCaughey, and truly ludicrous missteps. At one point a handwriting expert examined an envelope addressed by the Australian Cultural Terrorists and concluded that the subject was, "perhaps artistic, possible homosexual". That didn't exactly narrow the list of suspects.

The latter episodes are awash with unexpected tragedy, more in tune with the bitter green colour and deep anguish of Picasso's 1937 oil on canvas. Recriminations and opportunism that occurred in the years after the theft had tragic consequences; bemusement at McCaughey's blaring bow ties ceases to be an option.

"This thing started something that couldn't be controlled. Genuinely innocent people got caught up in this thing and the consequences were devastating," Fennell says. "How much can you gorge on that, while setting up the goalposts for the unintended consequences?"

Fennell, Kopel, and Grant took over an office at SBS's Sydney headquarters to map the show and their approach (no, they didn't have a corkboard with photos and string). They plotted out hooks, characters, acts, and cliffhangers. The underlying idea was to dispel rumours so that fact emerged. That might mean querying Nick Cave via email about a joke connecting him to the theft, or spending months in preparatory conversations with crucial figures.

A relieved NGV director Patrick McCaughey following the return of Picasso's Weeping Woman. Credit: Len Lamb

"A lot of that is Corrin," Fennell says. "He's dogged, has an incredible memory, and understands that when you make a documentary like this there's a tendency for it to be quite an extractive process. It's important, especially when someone is sharing a terrible moment from their life, that you not only take something but also produce a thing that returns some measure of justice."

Some people involved chose not to participate, such as McCaughey, while others, including then Victorian minister for the arts Race Mathews (who was also police minister, doubling his involvement), were too elderly and infirm to take part. The NGV did not co-operate. Dogged research also helped: Victoria Police had lost the main file on the case, but the Framed team could retrieve a copy from the partner of someone investigated who had gotten it many years prior under Freedom of Information laws.

As briskly thoughtful as the narrative is - with the approximately 25-minute episode length suggesting the now-familiar podcast structure - the story keeps shape-shifting so that absurdism and loss are mixed, while knowledge and responsibility overlap. At one point Fennell pointedly asks cultural critic Ashley Crawford, until then a drolly entertaining commentator on the saga, whether he actually knows more than he's letting on.

"It was always obvious that Ashley was willing to give something, but not other things," Fennell says. "Which is a normal part of the negotiations for any interviews, but at the same time if it goes unacknowledged then it's disingenuous. If I know that he knows more and I let it slide it's a disservice to the audience. If he doesn't want to answer it doesn't mean I can't ask."

Fennell was barely one year old when the robbery occurred. He grew up in Sydney without knowledge of the story, so throughout he plays his preferred role as a storyteller: the outsider simply seeking context, information, and an explanation. "I listen better when I don't feel like I belong," is how he explains it, and that was one of several factors that contributed to Framed choosing not to go full true crime and advance its own theories as to who stole Weeping Woman.

"We have suspicions for sure, but there are two things: one, Australia's defamation laws are not journo-friendly, but two, if I have doubts I don't want to point the finger at anyone," Fennell says. "We're conservative, because we start by debunking the rumours. We don't want to follow up with our own rumour that we can't quite confirm. We have strong suspicions, but I don't believe you should go to air with them if you can't prove them."
Framed is on SBS On Demand, from Sunday, December 26. Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

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Everyone knows who stole the Picasso, but no one agrees on who it was

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Save Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Marc Fennell really knows how to satisfy his curiosity.

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Curi Kawasaki Ninja 250 FI, Tiga Spesialis Curanmor Dibekuk di Tangerang

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Polisi bergerak menangkap pelaku setelah mendapat laporan dari Tjong Hon, korban curanmor pada 20 Oktober 2021. Petugas menyebut, tersangka AM alias A dan HR alias B mencuri sepeda motor sport Kawasaki Ninja 250 FI di Jalan HOS Cokroaminoto Kelurahan Larangan, Kecamatan Ciledug, Kota Tangerang

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Indonesia

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The National Museum of Indonesia ( Indonesian: Museum Nasional) is an archeological, historical, ethnological, and geographical museum located in Jalan Medan Merdeka Barat, Central Jakarta, right on the west side of Merdeka Square. Popularly known as the Elephant Museum ( Indonesian: Museum Gajah) after the elephant statue in its forecourt, its broad collections cover all of Indonesia's territory and almost all of its history. The museum has endeavoured to preserve Indonesia's heritage for two centuries.

The museum is regarded as one of the most complete and the best in Indonesia, as well as one of the finest museum in Southeast Asia. The museum has preserved about 141,000 objects, ranging from prehistoric artifacts to archeology, numismatics, ceramics, ethnography, history and geography collections. It has comprehensive collections of stone statues of the classical Hindu-Buddhist period of ancient Java and Sumatra as well as quite extensive collections of Asian ceramics.

On April 24, 1778, a group of Dutch intellectuals established a scientific institution under the name Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen, ( Royal Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences). This private body aimed to promote research in the field of arts and sciences, especially in history, archaeology, ethnography and physics, and publishing various research findings. The main objective of Bataviaasch Genootschap was to analyze the cultural and scientific aspects of the East Indies, including its society and natural environment, through facilitating research conducted by experts.

One of the founders of the institution - JCM Radermacher - donated a building at De Groote Rivier street in the Old Batavia area and a collection of cultural objects and books, which were of great value to start off a museum and library for the society. The other founders of the institution were Jacob de Meijer, Josua van Inperen, Johannes Hooijman, Sirardus Bartlo, Willem van Hogendorp, Hendrik Nicolaas Lacle, Jacobus van der Steeg, Egbert Blomhert, Paulus Gevers and Frederik Baron van Wurmb.

Owing to the institution's growing collections, Governor Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles built new premises behind the Societeit de Harmonie (today Jalan Majapahit No. 3) at the beginning of the 19th century and named it the Literary Society. In 1862 the Dutch East Indies government decided to build a new museum that would not only serve as an office but also could be used to house, preserve and display the collections.

The museum was officially opened in 1868 and popularly known as Gedung Gajah (Elephant Building) or sometimes called Gedung Arca (The House of Statues). It was called Gedung Gajah on account of the bronze elephant statue in the front yard - a gift to Batavia from King Chulalongkorn of Siam in 1871. It was also called Gedung Arca because a great variety of statues from different periods were on display in the house.

In 1931, the museum's collections were exhibited at the World Colonial Exposition in Paris. Unfortunately, a fire in the exhibition hall demolished the Dutch East Indies' exhibition pavilion and destroyed most of the objects. The museum received some insurance money as compensation and the following year these funds were used to build the old ceramics room, the bronze room and both treasure rooms on the second floor.

Following Indonesian independence, in February 1950, the institution was renamed the Lembaga Kebudayaan Indonesia (Indonesian Cultural Institute). On September 17, 1962, it was handed over to the Indonesian government and became known as Museum Pusat (Central Museum). By decree of the Minister of Education and Culture No. 092/0/1979 May 28, 1979, it was renamed the Museum Nasional.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, the museum's manuscripts and literature collections were handed over to the National Library of Indonesia, while its fine arts collection, including paintings, were relocated to the National Gallery.

In 1977, an agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands led the repatriation of some cultural treasures to Indonesia. Among the prized treasures were the treasures of Lombok, the Nagarakretagama manuscript, and an exquisite Prajnaparamita of Java statue. These are now kept in the National Museum of Indonesia.

In the 1980s there was a government policy to establish a museum negeri or state museum in every province of Indonesia. This idea came to reality in 1995 when all provinces of Indonesia had their own state museums. Since then, all archaeological findings discovered in each provinces were not necessarily taken to the National Museum in Jakarta, but are kept and displayed in the state museums located in provincial capitals instead. Exceptions however, applied for some highly important archaeological findings, such as the 10th-century Wonoboyo Hoard and bronze Shiva statue.

In 2007, a new building to the north side of the existing building was opened, featuring many artifacts from prehistoric times to modern times. This new building, called Gedung Arca (Statue Building), provides a new exhibition wing. The old building is named Gedung Gajah (Elephant Building).

On September 11, 2013, four precious golden artifacts from the 10th-century Eastern Mataram kingdom period were stolen from the museum. The items were first discovered in the ruins of the Jalatunda ancient royal bathing place and in the temples on the slopes of Mount Penanggungan in Mojokerto Regency, East Java. The four missing artifacts were a dragon-shaped gold plaque, a scripted crescent-shaped gold plaque and one golden-silver Harihara plaque, as well as a small golden box. All the missing items were displayed together in a glass showcase located inside the archaeology gold artifact and treasure room on the second floor of the Gedung Gajah (old wing).

Currently there are two main buildings in the museum, Gedung A (Gedung Gajah or old wing) in the south, and Gedung B (Gedung Arca or the new wing) in the north. The third building, Gedung C, is planned as an extension to house and preserve the museum's extensive collection. By 2017, the old wing or Gedung Gajah was under major renovation, while Gedung C is under construction.

During his state visit to Indonesia in March 2020, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands returned the kris of Prince Diponegoro of Yogyakarta to Indonesia, which was received by President Joko Widodo. Diponegoro was the charismatic leader of a mass rebellion against Dutch colonial rule in Central Java. He was defeated and taken prisoner after the conclusion of the Java War in 1830. His kris was long considered lost but was located after being identified by the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. The extraordinary gold-inlaid Javanese dagger was previously held as part of the Dutch State Collection and is now part of the collection of the Indonesian National Museum.

The museum has a collection of 61,600 prehistoric and anthropological artifacts and 5,000 archeological artifacts from all over Indonesia and Asia. The museum collections is among the richest, the most complete, and the best of its kind in Indonesia and one of the finest in Southeast Asia.

The museum acquired its collection by various means, including scientific expeditions, excavations of archaeological sites, acquisition of private collections, gifts from distinguished patrons, objects donated by religious missions - such as ethnological artifacts acquired by Christian Zending and Catholic missions - and treasures acquired from a number of Dutch East Indies military campaigns against indigenous kingdoms and polities in the archipelago. Treasures, among others from Java, Aceh, Lombok and Bali acquired through Dutch colonial military expeditions, also made it to the collection of the Batavian Society and Leiden Museum, and today inherited by the National Museum.

The museum has comprehensive collections of stone statues of classical Hindu-Buddhist period of ancient Java and Sumatra, a kaleidoscope of highly diverse collection of Indonesian ethnography artefacts, as well as extensive collections of Asian ceramics. The museum's pottery and ceramics collections in particular is quite remarkable, with a Chinese ceramics collection that includes pieces dating from the time of the Han (2nd century BC) to that of the Qing (18th century), complemented with ceramics from neighbouring Southeast Asian countries as well as local Indonesian pottery. It is the largest ceramic collection in Southeast Asia.

Gedung Gajah (Old Wing)

The Gedung Gajah located in the south side, or left from the entrance, is the old wing and the original museum structure which was built during the colonial Dutch East Indies era. The building is popularly named as gedung gajah (Indonesian for elephant building) in reference to the bronze elephant statue in front of the building, which was the gift of Siamese King Chulalongkorn. The museum collections are grouped and arranged by subjects:

Stone Sculpture Collection (Hindu-Buddhist Art of Ancient Indonesia)

The National Museum of Indonesia has the richest and the largest collection of Hindu-Buddhist art of ancient Indonesia. The Hindu-Buddhist sculptures, relics and inscriptions was collected from Java, Bali, Sumatra, and Borneo, all are in display in the lobby, the central hall and the central atrium of the museum. The Buddha statues from Borobudur in various mudras are displayed in the lobby. The centerpiece collection also the largest artifact of the museum is the statue of Adityavarman depicted as Bhairava. This statue is more than 4 meters tall and discovered from Rambahan, Padangroco, West Sumatra.

Notable collections including the well-preserved 9th-century statues of Hindu deities taken from Banon Temple, which consists of Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva and Agastya. Several statues of Durga Mahisasuramardini discovered in Java, the Tarumanagaran Vishnu statue of Cibuaya, the Srivijayan Avalokiteshvara statue of Bingin Jungut, the Avalokiteshvara head of Aceh, the head statues from Bima temple of Dieng. The statue of Harihara, dated from Majapahit period taken from Simping temple, and the statue of Parvati taken from Rimbi temple are among important Majapahit relics. Numbers of inscriptions are also stored and displayed in this section, including Telaga Batu, Amoghapasa and Anjuk Ladang inscription.

Treasure Rooms (Archaeology and Ethnography Collection)

The second floor of the museum features treasures, gold, and precious artifacts arranged in two rooms: archaeological treasure and ethnological treasure.

The archaeological treasure room features ancient gold and precious relics acquired from archaeological findings, mostly originating from ancient Java. One of the most prized collection of the museum is a statue of Prajnaparamita. Dubbed as the most beautiful sculpture of ancient Java, the goddess of transcendental wisdom is displayed in the entrance of the archaeology treasure room to show how gold jewelries and precious ornaments were worn on the body. Such ancient gold adornments were in display; such as crown, ear adornment, earrings, rings, bracelets, kelat bahu (arm bracelet), leg bracelet, waist band, belt, upawita or tali kasta (golden chain worn across the chest).

One of the most valuable treasure of ancient Java was the famous Wonoboyo hoard, which originate from the 9th century Hindu Mataram Kingdom discovered in Wonoboyo, Klaten, Central Java, near Prambanan. The hoard, consisting of a bowl with a scene from the Ramayana, purse, water dipper, umbrella finial, and a spoon or ladle, all were made of gold. Also discovered were ancient Javanese gold coins shaped similarly to a corn seed.

Golden, silver and bronze Hindu-Buddhist relics are also in display, such as the Hindu gods images made from gold leaf, bronze statue of Shiva Mahadeva with gold applied on his lips and third eye, the bronze statue of Avalokiteshvara and also the silver statue of youthful Manjusri. This 9th-century silver statue of Manjusri was discovered in Ngemplak, Simongan, Semarang, demonstrating Pala art influence in Java as well as a fine example of silver art in ancient Java.

The ethnology treasure room features treasures acquired from royal houses of Indonesia, such as regalias from various , and puri of Indonesian archipelago. Most of these pusaka royal regalias and treasures, were acquired or looted, during Dutch East Indies military campaigns against the archipelago's regional kingdoms, that took place between the 19th to early 20th century; including the royal houses of Banten, Banjarmasin, Bali and Lombok.

The royal regalia and treasures are arranged in several island zones: Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo, Sulawesi, and Eastern Indonesia (Nusa Tenggara, Maluku and Papua). The ethnology treasure room display various royal precious objects such as golden jewelries, ceremonial containers and weapons. The jewelries are bracelets and rings embedded with rubies, diamond, precious and semi precious stones. The collections are gilded Balinese kris weapon embedded with precious and semi precious stones and various spear heads. Golden royal crowns, gilded throne, golden royal regalia, golden tobacco container, golden cup, Pekinangan (silver betel-nut set), sword and golden shield is among the collection of the treasure room.

The collection of ceramics ranges from prehistoric Buni culture, Majapahit terracota, to the ceramics of China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar. Majapahit terracota water vessels, statues, roof tiles to piggy bank are on display. The museum houses a large and complete collection of ancient Chinese ceramics. It has one of the best and the most complete collections of Chinese ceramics discovered outside China, which date from the Han, Tang, Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. This collection gives a good insight into Indonesia's maritime trade over the centuries. Research indicates that the Chinese sailed to India via Indonesia as early as Western Han period (205 BC to 220 AD) as part of maritime silk road and that firm trade relations were subsequently established.

The ceramics collection gathered since 1932 is mainly from the collection of E.W. van Orsoy de Flines, who was also the first curator of this collection until he was repatriated to the Netherlands in 1957. Because he was so fond of this extensive ceramics collection - which reached more than 5 thousands pieces in quantity - he refused to divide them up, so he left all the collection intact in the National Museum's custody. This collection that dates back from Han (2nd century BC) to the time of Qing (18th century) is the largest ceramic collection in Southeast Asia.

After 2000, the ceramics collection increased significantly from the addition of ceramics retrieved from shipwrecks in Indonesian waters. The latest collection was the ceramics taken from the Cirebon shipwreck discovered in 2003.

The ethnography collection comprises a wide variety of objects that are part of Indonesian daily life as well as exhibits that are used in ceremonies and rituals. The collection is arranged according to geographic locations of each region and island within the Indonesian archipelago: from Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Bali, Lesser Sunda Islands (Nusa Tenggara), to Sulawesi, Maluku, and Papua.

Examples of ancient cultures include Nias and Batak in Sumatra, the Badui in Java, Balinese, the Dayak of Kalimantan, the Toraja in Sulawesi, and the Asmat and Dani in Papua. The lifestyles of these people remain unchanged after centuries and follow the same patterns as that of their ancestors. They still use some traditional laws ( adat) to determine their daily activities and ceremonies.

The museum stores some Stone Age artifacts such as fossiled skull and skeleton of Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens, stone tools, menhir, beads, stone axe, bronze ceremonial axe and Nekara (bronze drum), also ancient weapons from Indonesia.

Historical Relics Collection (Colonial Era Collection)

The front room of the museum features old relics of colonial Indonesia, from the era of Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) to Dutch East Indies. Most of the collections are antique colonial furnitures. However most of the collections has been moved to Jakarta History Museum that mostly features the history of Jakarta especially the colonial history of Batavia (old Jakarta).

Bronze Collection

Textile Collection

Numismatics Collection

Gedung Arca (New Wing)

The new wing called Gedung Arca, located immediately north of the old wing, was inaugurated by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono on 20 June 2007. The National Museum expansion and the construction new wing was commenced since 1994, under the initiative of the Minister of Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro. The four-story building is a combination of colonial and modern styles, with the Greek neoclassical facade mirroring the old wing.

Unlike the exhibition layout of the older building, the new building's permanent exhibit is based on the frameworks of cultural elements, which Prof. Koentjaraningrat classified into seven substances of culture:

1. Religious system and religious ceremony

2. Societal systems and organization

3. Knowledge systems

4. Language

5. Arts

6. Livelihood systems

7. Technology and tool systems

The new north wing consists of a basement and seven levels (floors), four of which host permanent exhibitions, while other levels function as the Museum office. The layout of the four levels is as follows:

1. Level 1: Man and Environment

2. Level 2: Knowledge, Technology and Economy

3. Level 3: Social Organization and Settlement Patterns

4. Level 4: Treasures and Ceramics

The old building and the new wing are connected via the old ethnography room through a glass walled bridge gallery. The bridge gallery is located over the outdoor amphitheatre. Temporary exhibitions often take place in this connecting gallery. A cafeteria and souvenir stall are located in the ground floor. The basement floor hosts the ASEAN room that features a photo exhibition and artifacts from 10 ASEAN countries.

The Gedung Arca also houses two temporary exhibition halls, one in the ground floor and another is in the basement floor. This temporary exhibition is usually held for several weeks to a month, with specific focus of interest. For example, the specific exhibitions of Indonesian ancient empires; the Majapahit Exhibition in 2007 and the Srivijaya Exhibition in 2017.

The Majapahit Exhibition in 2007 was meant to revisit the archaeological aspect, cultural and historic legacy of Majapahit as the center of a great civilization in the archipelago. The artefacts displayed in this exhibition included the Negarakretagama manuscript, the statue of Raden Wijaya depicted as Harihara from Candi Simping, pottery, ceramics, temple bas-reliefs and building foundations dating from the Majapahit period. The Kedatuan Sriwijaya exhibition held in November 2017 focussed on the Srivijaya maritime empire in its relation to global spice trade.

The Indonesian Heritage Society is a non-profit organization which promotes interest in and knowledge of Indonesia's cultural heritage. Formed by and for members of the multinational community of Jakarta in 1970, it is involved in projects supporting the National Museum. Activities include:

2 series of six lectures each year

Study groups

Library

Publishing of books, a quarterly newsletter, calendars etc.

Sales

Activities related to the museum include:

Museum tours (in English, French, Japanese and Korean)

Volunteer translation of museum documents

School programs - presentations at English and Japanese international schools

Similarly, the IHS supports the Jakarta History Museum, Textile Museum and Maritime Museum.

1. ^ Endang Sri Hardiati; Nunus Supardi; Trigangga; Ekowati Sundari; Nusi Lisabilla; Ary Indrajanto; Wahyu Ernawati; Budiman; Rini (2014). Trigangga (ed.). Potret Museum Nasional Indonesia, Dulu, Kini dan Akan Datang - Pameran "Potret Museum Nasional Indonesia, Dulu, Kini dan Akan Datang", Museum Nasional Indonesia, 17-24 Mei 2014. Jakarta: National Museum of Indonesia, Directorate General of Culture, Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia.

2. ^ https://munas.kemdikbud.go.id/mw/index.php Encyclopedia National Museum of Indonesia

3. ^ Sri Handari, Dedah Rufaedah (2007). Katalog "Gedung Arca" Museum Nasional. Jakarta: Museum Nasional. p. 2.

4. ^ "About Us". Indonesian Heritage Society. September 21, 2016.

5. ^ "Indonesian Heritage Society - Jakarta, Indonesia". Living in Indonesia. July 11, 2016.

Lenzi, Iola (2004). Museums of Southeast Asia. Singapore: Archipelago Press. p. 200. ISBN 981-4068-96-9.

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National Museum of Indonesia - Wikipedia

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The National Museum of Indonesia ( Indonesian: Museum Nasional ) is an archeological, historical, ethnological, and geographical museum located in Jalan Medan Merdeka Barat, Central Jakarta, right on the west side of Merdeka Square. Popularly known as the Elephant Museum ( Indonesian: Museum Gajah ) after the elephant statue in its forecourt, its broad collections cover all of Indonesia's territory and almost all of its history.

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11 gems and some gold stolen from Elephant Museum Indonesia by Kusni Kasdut

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11 gems and some gold stolen from Elephant Museum Indonesia by Kusni Kasdut

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https://www-merdeka-com.translate.goog/peristiwa/kisah-museum-gajah-pernah-dirampok-kusni-kasdut-11-permata-raib.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

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Kisah Museum Gajah pernah dirampok Kusni Kasdut, 11 permata raib | merdeka.com

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Saat menjalankan aksinya, Kusni Kasdut menggunakan jeep dan mengenakan pakaian seragam polisi.

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https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/grave-robbers-steal-charlie-chaplins-body

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In one of history's most famous cases of body-snatching, two men steal the corpse of the revered film actor Sir Charles Chaplin from a cemetery in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey, located in the hills above Lake Geneva, near Lausanne, Switzerland, on March 2, 1978.

A comic actor who was perhaps most famous for his alter ego, the Little Tramp, Chaplin was also a respected filmmaker whose career spanned Hollywood's silent film era and the momentous transition to "talkies" in the late 1920s. Chaplin died on Christmas Day in 1977, at the age of 88. Two months later, his body was stolen from the Swiss cemetery, sparking a police investigation and a hunt for the culprits.

After Chaplin's widow, Oona, received a ransom demand of some $600,000, police began monitoring her phone and watching 200 phone kiosks in the region. Oona had refused to pay the ransom, saying that her husband would have thought the demand "ridiculous." The callers later made threats against her two youngest children. Oona Chaplin was Charlie's fourth wife (after Mildred Harris, Lita Grey and Paulette Goddard) and the daughter of the playwright Eugene O'Neill. She and Chaplin were married in 1943, when she was 18 and he was 54; they had eight children together. The family had settled in Switzerland in 1952 after the controversial Chaplin-whom his enemies accused of being a Communist sympathizer-learned he would be denied a reentry visa to the United States en route to the London premiere of his film Limelight.

After a five-week investigation, police arrested two auto mechanics-Roman Wardas, of Poland, and Gantscho Ganev, of Bulgaria-who on May 17 led them to Chaplin's body, which they had buried in a cornfield about one mile from the Chaplin family's home in Corsier. That December, Wardas and Ganev were convicted of grave robbing and attempted extortion. Political refugees from Eastern Europe, Wardas and Ganev apparently stole Chaplin's body in an attempt to solve their financial difficulties. Wardas, identified as the mastermind of the plot, was sentenced to four-and-a-half years of hard labor. As he told it, he was inspired by a similar crime that he had read about in an Italian newspaper. Ganev was given an 18-month suspended sentence, as he was believed to have limited responsibility for the crime. As for Chaplin, his family reburied his body in a concrete grave to prevent future theft attempts.

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Grave robbers steal Charlie Chaplin's body

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In one of history's most famous cases of body-snatching, two men steal the corpse of the revered film actor Sir Charles Chaplin from a cemetery in the Swiss village of Corsier-sur-Vevey, located in the hills above Lake Geneva, near Lausanne, Switzerland, on March 2, 1978.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/voi.id/en/amp/125624

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JAKARTA - Kusni Kasdut was once listed as a freedom fighter. He played an active role against the Dutch. His guts are high. Prisons and bullets did not make him afraid. Unfortunately, the revolution does not promise prosperity. His services have not been used since Indonesia's independence. The injustice was strengthened until poverty hit him. Shortcuts were taken. Kusni began to try the world of shadow. His criminal career was stellar. Especially when Kusni led a phenomenal robbery to the Elephant Museum.

The proclamation of independence means so much to all Indonesian people. This momentum is seen as a sign that Indonesia is free from the shackles of colonialism. In fact, the facts on the ground are different. The proclamation of independence is just the beginning of the story.

The insistence of the Dutch in reclaiming Indonesia made the Indonesian people again forced to take up arms. Maintaining independence is his teaching. This struggle is known as the period of revolution. There is no youth who does not burn his enthusiasm for defending the Red and White banner. Including Kusni Kasdut.

Kusni then gave his whole life to the war of independence (1945-1949). He joined the guerrilla against the Dutch. Kusni joined the people's movement from the East Java Front. Kusni Kasdut's job is not only to carry weapons. He is also required to use his brain to find funds for the revolution. Either way, including robbing the landlord's property.

His persistence in seeking funds for the revolution earned him the nickname Si Kancil. It is said that in his act of seeking funds, Kusni is like "Robin Hood." The wealth obtained was not entirely given to the revolution, but also to help the poor.

"This is the story. During the war for independence, this man from Blitar was guerrilla with the people's movement in his own area. Some time later he, who during the Japanese era had studied until the second grade of the Technical School, joined the Student Army led by Mas Isman (now Major General) the figure of the Multipurpose Gotong Royong Organization (Kosgoro). At one time the government rationalized the armed forces. Bad luck confronts Kusni. He was one of 500 ex-TPs who had to stop," wrote a Tempo Magazine report entitled For Sale: Furniture Made by Kusni Kasdut (1977).

"The reason is not being told, the main thing is that it makes me difficult," he explained. Several times Kusni went back and forth to Jakarta to contact the agency whose job it was to channel ex-combatants. But the result is empty. There were only promises, even though at that time I was already married. have one child. Out of his mind, together with some of his friends to extort in Surabaya. A few times it was lucky."

Unfortunately, it must be accepted. He was refused entry into the Indonesian National Army (TNI). The reason is because Kusni is not officially registered in a unit. What's more, the Dutch soldier's shot in his leg was another reason for refusal. Therefore, in the case of Kusni Kasdut, the national revolution could not guarantee the welfare of many parties.

There is no decent job that he can afford. Kusni Kasdut also fell into poverty. The black world then went through. From stealing to kidnapping. In order to save his dignity as the head of the family. Even that was perpetuated when he tried the fate of Jakarta.

In Jakarta, he intends to rob and kidnap a wealthy Arab descendant, Ali Badjened to get money. But the plan didn't go smoothly. Ali Badjened fought back until he was hit by a Kusni Kasdut bullet. Such a murder crime immediately shocked the entire capital. Kusni Kasdut's name suddenly became famous for the second time. Not as a freedom fighter, but as a big-time criminal.

Illustration (Photo: Unsplash)

"It was in Kebon Sirih that Kusni Kasdut, before committing the gold robbery at the National Museum, killed a wealthy Arab named Ali Badjened in the 1960s. Kusni Kasdut in the action was accompanied by Bir Ali, son of Cikini," wrote Alwi Shahab in his book Batavia City of Flood (2009).

"Ali Badjened was robbed in the afternoon when he just came out of his residence in the Awab Alhajiri area. He died right then and there as a result of a bullet fired from a jeep by this criminal. The incident was very shocking at that time because the problem of robbery by killing victims has not happened as much as it is now."

Robbing the Elephant Museum

The failure of Kusni Kasdut's plan to rob Ali Badjened made him think of another big and phenomenal robbery plan. The National Museum is the next target. For Kusni Museum, which is better known as the Elephant Museum, has a lot of wealth. In fact, it's priceless.

Kusni Kasdut knows this because he has been doing research on the contents of the museum for a long time. All heirlooms made of gold, diamonds, to gems tantalize him. The robbery plan was finalized by him. The goal is none other than to learn from past mistakes.

"Under the hot sun of Jakarta, which is being intoxicated by revolution, Kusni shuffled from Harmoni to Merdeka Barat, and saw the crowds in front of the building with the elephant statue on it. He reads: a museum, and idly comes in just to unwind, he thought."

"He looked at the statues without the slightest interest. But when he reached the Heirloom Room, his blood stirred and excitement filled him. Around the walls, on display lie priceless treasures; swords, kris, rings, brooches, bracelets, necklaces, all made of gold, diamonds, or gems," said Parakitri T. Simbolon in the book Kusni Kasdut (1979).

Illustration (Photo: Unsplash)

The robbery took place on May 31, 1961. Kusni Kasdut and his colleagues - Herman, Budi, Sumali - carried out the action from a house in the Slipi area, West Jakarta. Their strategy is to try to disguise themselves as police.

To support the action, they prepared a stolen jeep with a forged number plate. Do not forget, each of them equip themselves with weapons of fire and daggers.

Kasdut and his friends then visited the Elephant Museum in the morning. The museum officer gave way to the police officer, although surprised by the police arrival to the museum. They also tried to act like ordinary visitors. He observed all kinds of historical objects carefully. Finally arrived. The careless guard by the museum staff became an opportunity for the Kusni Kasdut group to act and take various collections from the Library Room.

The plan almost fell apart because in the Library Room there were two officers who were suspicious of their activities. Weapons were pointed. After that, Kusni Kasdut swiftly broke into the gold and diamond display cabinet. That said, historical items from rings, diamonds, and earring reached IDR 2.5 billion.

The two guards did not remain silent. They scream when the opportunity arises. As a result, an officer was shot by Kusni Kasdut's gang. After that, they managed to escape before the police arrived at the Elephant Museum. The news of the robbery at the Elephant Museum became a hot topic in various media. As well as being the most phenomenal robbery of its time.

"Kusni Kasdut's name is getting more and more popular and is known to steal art objects. On May 31, 1961 Kusni Kasdut robbed the National Museum which is familiarly called the Elephant Museum. In carrying out his actions, Kusni Kasdut disguised himself by wearing a police uniform and then entered the museum."

"Then they took visitors hostage and shot and killed a museum officer. He then took away the 11 Gems of the museum collection. Kusni was later arrested while selling the loot in Semarang," concluded Hukman Reni in the book Heboh Bali Nine: Execution of the Australian Drug Syndicate (2015).

*Read other information about HISTORY or read other interesting articles from Detha Arya Tifada.

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The Story Of Kusni Kasdut, From A Freedom Fighter To An Elephant Museum Robber

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Share: JAKARTA - Kusni Kasdut was once listed as a freedom fighter. He played an active role against the Dutch. His guts are high. Prisons and bullets did not make him afraid. Unfortunately, the revolution does not promise prosperity. His services have not been used since Indonesia's independence.

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https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/644167/picasso-weeping-woman-stolen-art-terrorists

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When Picasso’s Weeping Woman Was Stolen By Art Terrorists

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To this day, the theft of the ‘Weeping Woman’ has not been solved. The case remains lodged in popular imagination in Australia.

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https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/06/09/the-shocking-story-of-a-picasso-painting-that-was-brazenly-stolen-and-held-at-ransom-by-the-australian-cultural-terrorists

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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A Pablo Picasso painting, stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, and accompanied by a ransom note calling the arts minister a "pompous fathead" and "a tiresome old bag of swamp gas", will appear in a landmark new exhibition.

The show Picasso Century was developed by the Centre Pompidou and the Musée national Picasso-Paris as a special exhibition for the NGV, where it opens tomorrow.

The exhibition's curator Didier Ottinger, the deputy director of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, has sought to place the master's art within the context of his interactions with about 60 other creatives, from the Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam to Spanish sculptor and painter Julio González and cultural catalysts such as Gertrude Stein, Serge Diaghilev and Jean Cocteau.

One of the paintings on view is Picasso's Weeping Woman (1937). The oil painting, often described as a "postscript" to Picasso's Spanish Civil War painting of the same year, Guernica, was bought by the gallery in 1985 for A$1.6m (£920,000)-the highest price an Australian public institution had paid for an artwork at the time.

The painting depicts a woman in the throes of grief and anguish. It was revealed to the media by then NGV director Patrick McCaughey who said it was "one of the most important paintings of Modern art".

"This face is going to haunt Melbourne for the next 100 years," McCaughey said.

They were prophetic words.

The following year, the painting was unscrewed from the walls of the NGV on the weekend of 2-3 August, and a ransom note was sent to the then arts minister in Victoria, Race Mathews.

Purporting to be from a group calling itself the Australian Cultural Terrorists (ACT), the note said Weeping Woman would be destroyed unless Mathews increased arts funding and set up a new prize for young artists to be called the Picasso Ransom.

"We have stolen the Picasso from the National Gallery as a protest against the niggardly funding of the fine arts in this hick State," the ransom note read.

Race Mathews refused to be intimidated, and Patrick McCaughey said the ACT's demands were "out of all proportion to the value and importance of this particular painting". Police drained the moat outside the building and crawled through the air conditioning ducts. All they found was the picture's abandoned frame, stashed in an alcove.

Feeling resentful of the large sum spent on the Picasso while their own work was neglected, local artists knocked up copies of Weeping Woman and left them about for police to find. The well-known Australian artist Juan Davila copied Weeping Woman and offered it to the NGV as a replacement for the real thing. Davila's work went on view in the Tin Sheds gallery at Sydney University, from where it was promptly stolen.

Meanwhile, as the ransom deadline approached, McCaughey waited by the phone. "We collected all the usual callers-screwballs, heavy breathers, gigglers and drunks," he said to the media. "But there have been no calls from the so-called terrorists."

Then came a second ransom note that said taking the Picasso had been less risky than stealing "cotton hankies [handkerchiefs] from David Jones [a department store]". The note contained a used match, and warned Race Mathews he would "smell of kerosene" unless the original demands were met.

None of this fazed the minister. "No one worries about abuse from these amateurs when you cop it all week from the professionals in parliament," he retorted. Mathews posted a $50,000 reward for the return of the painting, and warned that the thief could spend 10 years in jail-longer, if the painting were damaged.

Adding to the gallery's woes, the guards walked off the job when their chairs were removed as part of initiatives to tighten the gallery's security arrangements following the theft. Another headache was the fact that Weeping Woman was uninsured, because Mathews had judged the cost of insurance too high.

Luckily for all, Weeping Woman was recovered 16 days after its theft. A tip-off led police and McCaughey to the lockers at Spencer Street railway station where the painting was found wrapped in paper and unharmed.

* The Picasso Century, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 10 June to 9 October, 2022

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The shocking story of a Picasso painting that was brazenly stolen and held at ransom by the 'Australian Cultural Terrorists'

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A Pablo Picasso painting, stolen from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, and accompanied by a ransom note calling the arts minister a "pompous fathead" and "a tiresome old bag of swamp gas", will appear in a landmark new exhibition.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-14/retrofocus-picasso-weeping-woman-famous-unsolved-art-heist/11498936?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

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"We have stolen the Picasso from the National Gallery," read the ransom note, addressed to Victoria's then arts minister Race Mathews.

The year was 1986 and the Weeping Woman painting, purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria for some $1.6 million just one year prior, was nowhere to be seen.

But this was no normal theft, declared the thieves, known only as the Australian Cultural Terrorists.

This was a crime of passion - a protest against the "niggardly funding of the fine arts in this hick state and against the clumsy, unimaginative stupidity of the administration and distribution of that funding".

Authorities had seven days to meet the thieves' demands, the letter said, or the painting would be destroyed.

A $1.6m price tag - and no insurance

"We'd be terribly lucky if it [the exhibition of the painting]went without any brouhaha," remarked then director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Patrick McCaughey, in what would become somewhat of a droll prediction.

It was December 1985 - eight months prior to the painting's disappearance - and Mr McCaughey was marking the launch of the gallery's new purchase.

The Weeping Woman, painted by Picasso in 1937 during the same period as his famed Guernica, and modelled on his mistress Dora Maar - his own "weeping woman" - was the most important 20th century work the gallery had acquired.

But with a $1.6 million price tag, it was not without controversy.

Nor was it insured, with those in power considering the cost of insurance for major works of art "prohibitive".

"This face is going to haunt Melbourne for the next 100 years," Mr McCaughey beamed at the launch.

Indeed, the Weeping Woman would haunt the city - but not in the way he had planned.

The great art heist

It was a crime so simple it was almost inconceivable.

The painting was unscrewed from the wall and carried out of the gallery unnoticed sometime after closing on Saturday August 2, 1986.

The thieves even left a calling card indicating the painting had been removed for routine maintenance, signing it with the initials ACT (Australian Cultural Terrorists).

So preposterous was the heist, it was not reported for three days.

"Confronting the bare wall and the fake label, I was aghast," Mr McCaughey wrote in his book, The Bright Shapes and the True Names.

"I excused myself from the committee meeting and began a search of the gallery, desperately hoping that it was a prank and that the painting had been hidden in the building."

Authorities were at a loss. Could it be an inside job?

After all, the thieves clearly knew their art history - some suspected the heist was an ironic homage to the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre, in which Picasso himself was a suspect.

Others, including Mr Mathews, questioned if the vigilante group was but a red herring, a cover for a "more serious criminal operation designed to smuggle the painting out of the state".

Then the ransom letters arrived.

'The smell of kerosene and burning canvas'

The letter was typewritten and the authors hardly minced their words.

Addressed to Mr Mathews via a local newspaper, the letter warned the painting would be destroyed if the Victorian government failed to meet the thieves' demands.

The group stipulated the minister must agree to a 10 per cent increase in funding for the arts, and create an annual art prize - worth $25,000 - named The Picasso Ransom.

"There will be no negotiation," the letter, dated August 5, 1986, said.

"At the end of seven days if our demands have not been met, the painting will be destroyed."

However the letter was met with a swift rebuke from Mr Mathews, who remarked he would not be "budgeting by blackmail".

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And so, at least it would seem, they found themselves at a stalemate.

Authorities launched an investigation, but no-one - including the art world - appeared any closer to unearthing the identity of the self-styled Australian Cultural Terrorists.

Then, after another four days of silence, the second letter arrived.

"Good luck with your huffing and puffing, Minister, you pompous fathead," read the note addressed to Mr Mathews and dated August 9 - one week after the heist.

"If our demands are not met, you will begin the long process of carrying about you the smell of kerosene and burning canvas."

A third letter containing a burnt match arrived at the minister's office two days later.

"Thank you for your support. Phase two begins shortly," was all it said.

The luggage locker on Spencer Street

With the thieves' seven-day deadline having well and truly passed, authorities' hopes of finding the Weeping Woman were fading.

Subsequent searches of the gallery and sketches of potential suspects seen nearby had failed to yield any signs of the painting, or the Picasso poachers, who had fallen silent since delivering their third letter.

That was until police and the press received an anonymous phone call almost three weeks after the artwork's disappearance.

Go to Spencer Street railway station, the tipster said, there you will find the Weeping Woman hidden in locker 227.

"The police beckoned me to look inside and there was a brown paper package exactly the dimensions of Picasso's [painting]," Mr McCaughey recalls in his memoir.

"The gallery's chief conservator, who was now on hand, whipped the package into a waiting police car with journalists running after us.

"We were whisked up to the forensic laboratory where the painting was unpacked and Weeping Woman emerged unharmed."

In their final letter, delivered in the days after the find, the Australian Cultural Terrorists would concede they "never looked to have our demands met".

The great Picasso caper had come to an anti-climactic end as the Weeping Woman found her way back on the walls of the National Gallery of Victoria.

Who were the Australian Cultural Terrorists?

Despite exhaustive inquiries - including raids of private galleries and a $50,000 reward - more than three decades later, authorities are no closer to uncovering the true identity of the art vigilantes.

According to police, it is likely the Australian Cultural Terrorists comprised "three and perhaps more" people who were "in the art world or on the fringe of the art world".

At least two women were sighted with a parcel near locker 227, they said, while the anonymous phone call was believed to have been placed by a man.

But, pending "any solid evidence rather than innuendo and speculation", the case will remain closed, the major crimes squad declared in 1989.

Mr McCaughey has his own theories about the theft.

In his memoir, he recalls receiving a call from a Melbourne art dealer - just days before the painting was recovered - who said a young artist may have information about the theft.

He visited the artist's studio near the Victoria Market where he discovered photos and newspaper clippings about the theft pinned to the walls.

"I said deliberately, at least twice, that the people who had taken the work could deposit it in a luggage locker at Spencer Street railway station or at Tullamarine airport," Mr McCaughey wrote.

"I always found it notable ... that within 48 hours of that visit, with the explicit advice about placing the work in a locker ... the painting reappeared.

"Did the Australian Cultural Terrorists hear of this and think we might be getting close?"

At least for now, it would seem, we will never know.

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'There will be no negotiation': The unsolved Picasso art heist that gripped Melbourne

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"We have stolen the Picasso from the National Gallery," read the ransom note, addressed to Victoria's then arts minister Race Mathews. The year was 1986 and the Weeping Woman painting, purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria for some $1.6 million just one year prior, was nowhere to be seen.

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https://www.military.com/off-duty/2021/08/11/story-behind-saddam-husseins-massive-1-billion-bank-robbery.html

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