The Vault

Paris, the night of 19-20 May 2010. Vjeran Tomic — a career thief and climber the French press would soon call the Spider-Man of Paris — works for an hour on a window of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris...

Stockholm, 22 December 2000. Fifteen minutes before the Nationalmuseum closes for the Christmas holiday, two car bombs go off in central Stockholm. Six hundred metres from the museum at one location, a kilometre away at...

Berlin, 27 March 2017. At 3:45 in the morning, three men cross a regional railway track at the rear of the Bode Museum on Museum Island. They place a ladder against the back wall. They climb to a second-floor window —...

Oslo. Edvard Munch's most reproduced work. Tempera on cardboard, 1893. One of four versions of The Scream. Taken twice, ten years apart, from two different museums in the same city. First theft: 12 February 1994. The...

Stéphane Breitwieser was a French waiter, working in Switzerland, who lived with his mother. Between 1995 and 2001, he stole over two hundred and thirty artworks from museums in seven European countries. Renaissance...

Zurich, Sunday 10 February 2008. Around 4:30 PM, half an hour before closing, three men in ski masks walk into the E.G. Bührle Foundation — a private museum in a converted villa in the Seefeld district, holding one of...

Dresden, 25 November 2019. At 4:47 in the morning, a fire is set in a street-side electrical distribution box on the Augustusbrücke side of the Residenzschloss — the royal palace of the Saxon kings. The fire is small...

Antwerp, Belgium. The weekend of 15-16 February 2003. The Antwerp Diamond Centre vault — sixty metres below ground, behind a steel door three feet thick, protected by ten distinct security systems including heat...

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. 14 September 2019. Five hours after Maurizio Cattelan's solid-gold artwork "America" — a fully functional eighteen-carat gold toilet, valued at £4.8 million — has opened to the public, a...

Two men smashed a display case in a Swedish cathedral during visiting hours, grabbed royal crown jewels dating from 1600, and escaped on a speedboat across a lake. While tourists watched.

An alarm technician used his professional skills to steal a 50 million euro Renaissance masterpiece from Vienna. He buried it in the woods for three years. Then he called the police himself.

In 2012, a Romanian gang stole seven paintings from Rotterdam in 108 seconds. Picasso. Monet. Matisse. Then the ringleaders mother burned them in her wood-burning stove to protect her son.

In 1911, a handyman hid overnight in the Louvre, tucked the Mona Lisa under his jacket, and walked out. He kept it under his bed for two years. The police questioned Picasso. The real thief was filing fingerprints away.

In the early hours of March 18, 1990, two men posing as Boston police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Over the next 81 minutes, they stole 13 works of art including a Vermeer and...