The Rescue Artist (25 page)

Adam Worth, the renowned Victorian thief, provided the model for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Worth stole one of the most famous paintings of his day, Gainsborough’s
Portrait of Georgiana
, and kept it with him, secretly, for twenty-five years. Worth is the only undisputed example of a thief who stole a masterpiece and clung to it not for profit but for his own delectation.

Thomas Gainsborough,
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
, 1787 oil on canvas, 74 × 102 cm
© The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

Perugia was arrested in Florence. Though convicted, he was sentenced to only twelve months, reduced on appeal to seven. Perugia, an Italian, argued successfully that he had been motivated by patriotism, not greed, and wanted only to see the
Mona Lisa
in its homeland. Here officials at the Uffizi examine the painting before returning it to France.

On a Monday morning in August, 1911, a day when the Louvre was closed to the public, a carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia sneaked out of a closet where he had hidden overnight. He hurried to the
Mona Lisa
, took the painting off the wall, tucked it inside his coat, and walked out the door. Two years later, when he tried to sell the world-famous work, he was arrested. (Police misspelled his name in this mug shot.)

David and Mary Duddin. A major-league fence, or seller of stolen goods, Duddin was dubbed “Mr. Big” by an English judge. Duddin once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt. He wasn’t much impressed by the painting. “I wouldn’t hang it on me wall,” he scoffed.

Kempton Bunton, who was Mary Dud-din’s uncle, was in the art line himself. In 1961 he stole Goya’s
Portrait of the Duke of Wellington
from London’s National Gallery. (See photo insert p. 5.)

Rose Dugdale, an ex-debutante turned political radical, stole a Vermeer, a Goya, a Velasquez, and sixteen other paintings from Russborough House, a stately home outside Dublin. The theft was inept and all the paintings were quickly recovered. At her trial in 1974, Dugdale proclaimed herself “proudly and incorruptibly guilty.” She was sentenced to nine years in prison.

In 1986, a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill robbed Russborough House yet again, pulling off what was then the biggest art theft ever. “The General,” as Cahill was known, was a vicious thug—he once took hammer and nails to the hands of a gang member he suspected of betrayal—who had a strange sense of showmanship. Here Cahill is led to jail; the gangster, who made a fetish of hiding his face, nonetheless flaunts a pair of boxer shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Art thieves have attacked Russborough House four times so far.

Niall Mulvihill, a Cahill associate. Charley Hill, who recovered the two most valuable paintings stolen by Martin Cahill, negotiated their return with Mulvihill. (See photo insert p. 3.) In 2003 Mulvihill was shot to death by a gunman in Dublin.

One of the very few thieves who stole art for his own collection, Stéphane Breitwieser was a French waiter arrested in the winter of 2003 for stealing perhaps $1.4 billion worth of paintings and other objects. When the police closed in, his mother sliced many of the paintings in tiny pieces and threw them away in the trash and tossed others into a canal near her home. Here police search the partly drained canal.