True Crime Campfire - Thieves Like Us: The Greatest Art Heist of the 21st Century

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

Some people are born for a certain vocation. Mozart, for music. Shakespeare, for drama. Steven Hawking, for physics, and...let's say...Machine Gun Kelly? for rap music. Vjeran Tomic was born for the steal—as comfortable scaling the side of a tightly-guarded museum as a leopard is, stalking through the jungle. He says he’s in it for the love of art—a modern-day Robin Hood. But we seem to remember something about Robin Hood giving the money away…hmm. Sources:The New Yorker, Jake Halpern: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/14/the-french-burglar-who-pulled-off-his-generations-biggest-art-heistThe New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/arts/design/vjeran-tomic-paris-spiderman-sentenced-to-8-years-for-art-heist.htmlThe Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-spiderman-art-heist-and-the-five-missing-masterpiecesFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Some people are born for a certain vocation. Mozart for music. Shakespeare for drama. Stephen Hawking for physics, and, oh, machine gun Kelly for rap music. Veer and Tomic was born for the steel, as comfortable scaling the side of a tightly guarded

museum as a leopard is stalking through the jungle. He says he's in it for the love of art, a modern-day Robin Hood. But we seem to remember something about Robin Hood giving the money away? Hmm This is Thieves like us The Greatest Art Heist of the 21st Century So Campers, for this one, we're in Paris. That, by the way, is Paris France, City of Lights,

and not Paris, Kentucky City of Lightenburg. just so we're clear. In the crisp early hours of May 20th, 2010, a tall athletic man in a hoodie walked calmly along a beautiful tree-lined street beside the River Seine. We're right at the heart of Paris here, with the Eiffel Tower just a stones throw away

on the other side of the river and the Louvre within walking distance. But it was another museum in this city of cultural treasures that the man in the hoodie was heading for, the Musei d'Armodern de Paris, the Paris Museum of Modern Art. In the pre-dawn darkness, he approached a window and fixed two suction cups onto the glass. He pulled, and the whole window came silently free.

It came free because the man in the hoodie had been visiting this window for the previous six nights, using paint stripper to reveal the heads of the screws holding the window frame in place, then another solution to dissolve the rust around them. Once he had the screws out, he put modeling clay into the holes to match the color of the window frame. An observer wouldn't notice anything amiss about the frame, but there was now nothing holding it securely in place. There was a locked grate beyond the window. The man in the hoodie broke the lock with bolt cutters,

then slipped into the museum, but only for a few moments. Then he went right back out again and wandered down to the banks of the Sen. And then he waited, to see if he'd triggered a silent alarm. When 15 minutes went by without any hoopla of these sirens and flashing lights kind, he went back into the museum. He soon found what he was looking for, a painting called Still Life with Candlestick by Ferdinand Leger. He freed the painting from its frame. This was what he had come for.

His business was done. But standing alone in the dim museum, he became captivated by another painting, pastoral by Henri Matisse. So he took that one, too. Infused with a kind of rising, giddy mania, he started grabbing other paintings that caught his attention, a Modigliani. a Picasso, a Brock, and he almost took a sixth, another Modigliani, called Woman with Blue Eyes. But as he would later tell Jake Halpern of the New Yorker, from whose article a night at the museum most of our direct quotes come, when I touched it, to take it out of its frame, the feelings started instantly, a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.

He said he could almost hear the blue-eyed woman in the painting whispering to him, if you take me you'll regret it the rest of your life our thief as you'll see is a bit of an odd duck in two trips he took the stolen canvases to his car parked a couple of minutes away and then he sat behind the wheel for five minutes this was dumb he knew but that second modigliani was preying on his mind the strange terror he'd felt when he touched the frame had been real but if anything that just made him want the damn thing more he even got out of his car and started heading back to the museum, but after just a few moments,

he realized he was playing with fire. These particular Parisian streets were all but deserted this early in the morning. If any kind of police response arrived, or even if some early morning pedestrian just happened by, he'd stick out like a goth kid at Abercrombie. He hurried back to his car and hauled ass out of there. Still life with candlestick,

the painting our thief had actually broken into steel, was insured for four million euros. Although if it were ever actually auctioned, it would probably fetch a lot more. Even so, that was small potatoes compared to the other treasures our boy had taken. A Matisse, a Picasso, a Modigliani, a Brock. The total value of the five paintings stolen was estimated at 100 million euros, or about $125 million. Damn, son. Yeah, we are talking big money here. Enough millions to make Dr. Evil bite his pinky finger clean off. In fact, this was one of the most valuable art thefts in history, and it had been pulled off

by one guy in a hoodie. So who was this mysterious man? And how had he pulled off this audacious heist? Well, we know who he is. He's Spider-Man. Not Nerd King Peter Parker. Spider-Man was the nickname the French media gave to Viren Tomic, our museum thief and accomplished cat burglar. See, The man could climb. What else are they going to call him? The tree frog? The gecko is pretty cool, I guess, but you don't see many of those in Paris. And spider monkey lacks a certain gravitas.

So Spider-Man it was. Viren could climb. He always could, even as a little kid. Although he was born in Paris, when he was just one year old, his mom got sick. And his Bosnian parents sent him back to the old country to live with his grandma. So his early childhood was spent in the ancient town of Moster, where Viren almost instinctively started clambering up the old stone structures whenever the mood hit him. When he was six, while his cousins played on the riverbank down below, Viren would be scaling up the stone bridges across the river. When he got to the top, he'd jump off and splash into the water 70 feet below.

Man, that just stresses me out thinking about it. Ugh. Somehow, baby Johnny Knoxville managed to avoid drowning or smasging his brains out. And before long, his naturally mischievous nature started to evolve into outright criminality. He did his first burglary when he was only 10 years old, climbing through a high window in a local library and grabbing two old-looking books. Old, he thought, must mean valuable. But he never got to find out because his friend's brother found the book. books and took them back.

Viren's childhood crime seemed to be entirely of his own production. He wasn't hanging out with a bad crowd or anything. It was intuitive, he would later tell Jake Halpern, nobody ever taught me anything. I love that he's just bragging about this. Like, oh, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. So you're just a born criminal. Good, good for you. Right.

The next year, his parents brought him back to Paris. We don't know whether this was because he was starting to get himself in trouble back in Little Moster or whether he was getting to be too much of a handful for his poor grandma. But I suspect it was a little column A, a little column B. So at 11, Viren Tomich was back in Paris, speaking barely any French, living with parents who were almost strangers to him, and missing his friends and family back home. Unsurprisingly, he was miserable. And it didn't help that his parents were one of those couples who just bicker at each other all day long. Oh, my God. I used to live with a couple like that.

It should be in the Geneva Convention as a form of torture, making somebody watch that shit. Just shut up. You're both assholes. And they always want you to like take one side. Oh, my God. It's hell. It's like a constant drip, drip of personal sclobbles where no one is right and you just wish they'd end it already and put you out of their misery. So, Veron pretty much kept to himself, drawing a lot and wandering alone through the streets of Paris.

He did well at school, though, both academically and athletically, Viren would wind up at six feet two inches and always stay in shape. When he was 16 on one of his strolls around Paris, Viren came across a bunch of people lined up outside a strange building, all glass on one side and brick on the other. This was the Musei de la lingerie, a museum of impressionist and post-impressionist art. He wandered in, and it became one of those transcendent experiences, one of those moments you don't see coming, but hits you like a wrecking ball and becomes a defining point in your life.

He was totally hypnotized by the artwork, especially the impressionist stuff, and especially anything and everything by Renoir, which kind of makes sense if you think about it. I mean, most of Renoir's stuff is bright and summery and colorful, and there are lots of, like, happy moms and happy kids, so I guess you don't have to think too hard about why this would appeal to a dislocated kid with the shitty home life in the grameer streets of 1980s Paris. Varen would say that Renoir created a parallel universe. He told a reporter years later, he has a way of seeing life from a magical realm. Varen always felt things really strongly, and he didn't just like Renoir's art.

This was a moment of epiphany for him. He ran home and told his mother that he wanted to paint. and that any other job would be a waste of time. Okay, I'll make sure the neurosurgeons get that memo, Viren. Like, come on, great, go ahead and paint, but, like, you know, I've got to, like, throw shade on every other occupation on Earth. He was good at it, too, actually. He did have natural talent, which is part of what makes the story frustrating for me.

This is what he chose to do instead. He told his mom because he wanted her to soften up his father, but it didn't work. His car mechanic dad told him painting wasn't a real job and that Varen should just come and work at the garage. garage with him instead. Well, he didn't do that, but he didn't do much to pursue a career as a painter, either. Instead, he started hanging out with some spooky friends at Perlachez, a massive Parisian cemetery, cut through with a web of cobblestone streets, where memorials range from simple headstones to mausoleums the size of small houses, which, ooh, that's metal, I love it.

In Viren's teenage years in the 80s, Perlachez was home to gangs, drug dealers, tourists looking for Jim Morrison's grave, boy, and Varon and his friends, climbing all over the monuments and tombstones like a bunch of little goth spider monkeys racing each other as they jumped from one mausoleum to another and some kind of weird nerd parkour. Parcour! You got to yell at it. Parkour! Parkour! Soon these kids started squatting in a warehouse nearby, making money by petty theft at first and then by not so petty theft. They discovered that if you climb the high wall, around pair lachés, you could break into the upper windows of apartment buildings nearby. While his friends were burgling for cash and kicks, something about the experience just clicked

for Viren. He soon began breaking in alone to buildings in wealthier neighborhoods, and he got really good, really fast. He was a natural, climbing walls, jumping from roof to roof, parkour, picking locks. I guess if you're lucky, you find your perfect job early on in life, and although cat burglary was probably not something his school guidance counselor suggested. It did fit veer in like a glove. Yeah, something tells me that heisting isn't anywhere on a career aptitude test. He'd probably get like, I don't know, gymnast or P.E. teacher or something. I got botanist, which was just bizarre.

What? Yeah. Oh, and Firefighter, which was hilarious. Like, okay, I'm about the least athletic person on the planet. I love you, but I do not trust you to, yeah, throw me over your shoulder. I love you but no. Please don't. We would both die. Yeah. I never had to take one of those. No question about it. I was lucky. That was before my time. They were like, oh, it turns out that pigeonholing children at a young age isn't good for them. Well, it's probably my own fault for just filling in the bubbles with a picture of a skull. Which I saw on Beavis and Butthead. Anyway. Good. Excellent. So his methods for choosing his targets. were kind of weird, though. He would

wander around these tony neighborhoods just walking, and then maybe a week later, he would get like an image in his head of one particular place that just felt right, that felt good, and he would be sure that that place would reward him. Vives, man, he was picking up the vibes.

Or something. It's a weird sort of fatalism, surrendering his decision-making to whatever subconscious part of his brain was talking to him here, but it probably helped him stay one step ahead of the law, because being unpredictable avoiding a pattern is a big plus for a professional thief. Yeah, I'm pretty obsessed with his method, which was just essentially vibe checking. Like he just look at a building and

vibe check it. It's amazing. That's exactly what he did. Yeah. And Viren quickly became not only a professional thief, but a successful one. He learned to take jewelry mostly, which was easy to carry and easy to sell for good money. Sometimes he would come back again and again and again to the same apartment, which I think is just shitty. Like, come on, leave these poor people alone after the first time, right? But he'd come back again and back again, searching and scouting, and he would take nothing until he could get the best hall possible on the last night. He did this in French designer Philippe Stark's apartment coming in night after night and quietly sawing into Stark's safe while he and his daughter slept, which is how do you saw anything quietly? But somehow he managed to do it. It's got to be the long

game, right? He's got to do, like, one pass, wait, wait, wait, another pass. Like, that's got to be insane patience. Like just, yeah. Oh my gosh. And Stark, for his part, actually says he admires Viren Tomich's audacity and style, although his daughter's probably a lot less fond of him. All Viren ended up taking was her jewelry, which was all she had left of her dead mother. Yeah, that's an asshole move taking that. Plus, fucking creepy, like, just silently, like, moving around somebody's house in the dark while they're sleeping, coming back night after night. I would never get a good night sleeping again. No, that's what BTK did, and that's exactly why I have a dog. Yeah. Also, because he's cute and also because I love him. Aw. Anyway, these thefts from the wealthy were high risk, high reward kind of deal. One decent, score from a few hours of work, and Viren was set for six months' worth of easy living down

on the French Riviera. Like, one of those big-ass pythons that swallows a whole deer and then spend six months just laying around digesting it. Just, yeah. In this case, the pythons wearing a cashmere hat and lacost underpants. Don't, don't overthink it. If there was a dial measuring Viren's confidence in his work, it swung way over into the red section marked cocky.

One time, the police were chasing him across the rooftops of Paris, so he broke into an empty apartment to hide out. But why just hide out when you could rob the place, too? Two birds, one stone. Right. So he started grabbing jewelry, and then he heard the door opening. The owner of the apartment had come home, and he wasn't alone. Viren described them as, quote, an old man and a very sexy girl. Oh, oh, no. Yeah. Yep. He had to duck into a closet in the bathroom. But now he couldn't get out of the apartment without crossing through the bedroom. And of course, the bedroom was right where old guy and sexy girl were headed.

So while they got down to, you know, business, Viren lurked in the closet waiting for them to finish up and fall asleep. I mean, how long could this old geezer keep going anyway? pretty long apparently they they kept it up all damn night oh my god kept it up i digress i digress i'm sorry oh my lord there must have been some viagra involved is all i was going to say he popped his viagra but i thought it might have been too blue but you got there first it was almost dawn when they finally dropped off to sleep and veron was able to creep out of the closet and get the hell out of there. He is proud of stories like this, proud of how he reacted and how well he kept his cool.

But the truth was that Viren had an impulsive streak that could lead him into some truly spectacular displays of dumbassery. Like, one time he ran out of gas in the Paris suburbs and realized he'd left his wallet at home. An irritating problem, sure, but one with plenty of non-stupid solutions. Viren didn't choose one of those though he had a toy gun in his car and instead of I don't know calling a friend or walking to the nearest gas station or taking a fucking 1990s Uber home

a cab oh okay yeah whatever taking a fucking cab home or whatever he used this plastic gun to rob a bakery for 200 francs about 30 bucks he got his gas and drove home but one of the workers at the bakery took down his license plate number. Good for him. And in two shanks of a croissant, he was arrested and sentenced to a year in Leclinck. Because he's daring and has genuine appreciation of fine art, Vierin Tomic has been kind of romanticized, especially in Paris. The guy is good at spinning his own image, like he's some kind of folk hero, but the fact is this wasn't his first time in prison. He has almost a dozen convictions, including aggravated robbery, theft with violence, dealing drugs, and issuing a death threat. Pretty much a boilerplate

rap sheet for any scary criminal dude. Right. And as fun as it is to hear about him park hoaring it up around the Parisian rooftops, this is not a guy you'd want to get on the wrong side of. You know, I can work with you until you start doing violence, and at that point, you can heck right off. So, as much as Viren loved art, he hardly ever stole paintings from the apartments he broke into. They were hard to sell, and for most of his criminal career, he really didn't have the connections to move them. But then in 2004, a fellow thief introduced him to Jean-Michel Corvez. Corvez was in his 50s, a white-haired man with black-rimmed glasses who looked kind of like a stylish geography teacher. He was a businessman, an antique dealer, who owned a small gallery.

And he was also a fence, selling stolen fine art and jewelry to a collection of wealthy clients, all of whom deserve to be hit in the face with a pie. Corvez and Viren quickly developed a solid professional relationship, though Viren says it was never really a friendship. Because Viren was so often in rich people's apartments, you know, burgling them, Corviz knew there was a good chance of him coming across valuable art. He gave him a list of his client's favorite artists,

including Klimt, Modigliani, Warhol, Monet, and Lager. It was a productive relationship. Viren estimates he sold Corvez about 90,000 euros worth of loot over several years. And Corviz took a trainer's interest in Viren, scolding him for not eating well or exercising. It's kind of cute. He had to stay in shape for all the clambering and leaping about it. Parkour! I just can't get enough of it. Parkour.

As he'd aged, Viren's habits hadn't changed much. He still spent hours wandering Paris on foot, and it was on one of these strolls in May 2010 that he happened to pass by the Musei Day Dar Modern in Paris. The striking art deco style of the building got his attention, and he looked through a window. There was a cubist painting on the opposite wall, but it was the window frame that got his attention. It looked familiar. He looked around discreetly and saw security cameras on the roof, so he kind of casually wandered around the building until he found a window that happened to be blocked from observation by the cameras.

Now he could get close and take a good look at the metal window frame. It looked just like one he'd seen years before during a robbery. He had taken that one apart screw by screw and was immediately convinced that he could do the same thing here. Viren was both shocked and excited. This was arguably the second most significant museum in France after the Louvre, and the security seemed amazingly lax. A couple days later, Viren toured the museum as a visitor.

He walked all around the galleries, drinking in the reactions the art created in him, and he really does seem to be unusually sensitive to visual art. He would tell Jake Halpern, quote, certain paintings can provoke me like an emotional shock. I guess he might almost be an artist's perfect viewer, just getting hit with the full force of the work with very little filter. And he must have been a sight to see.

By this time, Bearin was 42 with buzz cut hair, and I don't know if you have a preconceived image of like large aging French Bosnian street tough, but that's pretty much where he was at. And so just get your head around that. And there he was, staring in wide-eyed wonder at the Modigliani's and Monet's. He was also working, though. There were motion detectors in the museum. They turned from green to red whenever someone passed.

But Viren noticed, completely delighted, that some of them were just stuck on green, meaning they were faulty. He memorized where they were and continued around the museum. Shortly after his visit, Viren went to Corvez's gallery and told him what he'd learned, that the Musei d'Armodern could be taken. Corvez reminded him that there was still a client interested in owning a liegeer, and that the museum had one on display, still life with candlestick. He said he'd pay Viren $40,000 for it, less than a hundredth of its actual value, but that was kind of the nature of art theft.

Viren agreed to steal the lager, and that pretty much brings us up to where where we started from, with Viren meticulously undoing the window frame into the museum over the course of a week, then sneaking in, avoiding the active motion detectors and stealing the Legerre. And then, on impulse, taking four far more valuable works, a Picasso, a Matisse, a Brock, and a Modigliani. He and Corvez had agreed to meet later that day in an underground parking garage so Corvaz could claim the Lager. Viren, unable to sleep, had waited in his car until the meeting, staring at the stolen paintings. He was completely transported by them, especially pastoral, the Matisse. I'd fallen in love, he told a New Yorker.

When Corvez arrived, Viren filled him in on the job. Was his partner pleased that Viren had escalated a one painting, four million euro job to five paintings and one hundred million euros? No. No, he was not. He was scared. Scared. Scared. the possible consequences, and scared of Viren Tomich, who Corvez knew perfectly well could be dangerous, and getting on his bad side was a lot more likely with the stakes this high. Still, he took the Leger and the Modigliani, the first as agreed and the second on consignment. Viren would get paid when Corviz managed to sell it. Viren didn't want to sell the other paintings, at least not yet.

He asked Corviz to store them, so Corviz, full of reservations, left with all five of the paintings, and Viren Tomich rose from the underground garage into the sunny streets of Paris, just as news of the heist began to break. The news was huge, and global. This was the biggest art theft of the 21st century. The mayor of Paris demanded that the paintings be recovered, calling the crime an intolerable attack on Paris' universal cultural heritage.

The case went to the elite, Brigade de Represcient de Bandeemes, which is just a fantastic name for a police department. It really is. The banditry repression brigade. Like, catch me naming my next D&D party. The banditory repression brigade. Absolutely. The BRB.

The BRB. They handle armed robberies and other serious thefts in France. And they live for this shit. They jumped on this heist like a dog on a snobber. Nossage. Viren had often been lucky in his work, but that luck failed him here. The esplanade outside the Museum of Modern Art attracts a lot of skateboarders. And when the Bandit Brigade asked if they'd seen anything suspicious recently,

one dude remembered a tall, muscular man studying the wall in the windows of the museum. And this kid got a good look at the guy, six feet two, short hair, an oval face, a square jaw. Not a bad description to be working with, but after that promising start, the investigation stalled and wouldn't make much forward progress for months. That said, aware that the BRB were hot on his trail, Viren was not doing so great. You know, at the end of Goodfellas where Ray Leota's all coked out and paranoid? It was kind of like that, minus the drugs. He worried constantly that the police were tailing him and started getting paranoid, suspecting a double cross from everyone he knew. He picked up his money for the Legerre from Corvez, a shoebox filled with

40,000 euros worth of small bills, and took a taxi to a female friend's apartment. He didn't take the metro anymore because of the security cameras, and he worried the police would find him at his own place. Now, we don't know the name of this female friend, but it seems that she was as close as Viren ever got to an intimate relationship. She was a sex worker who'd been worried about other women encroaching on her territory, and Varen agreed to hang out with her while she scared him off. After a few nights of this, she brought him home for dinner and asked him to spend the night, something they soon started doing every now and then.

He would do favors for her sometimes, and she would give him what he called free passes. But Varen was always a loner to the core, as wary of close contact as a feral cat, and this was as much of himself as he was ever willing to give. He fell in love with paintings, not people. Even with this woman, he never entirely let his guard down. He worried she might be a police informant. Still, though, he took his shoebox of loot to her apartment and taped it inside the bottom of one of her chairs.

He trusted her more than he trusted anyone, which is to say, not very much, but not nothing. And after about six months of spinning their wheels, the Parisian police got lucky. An informant in a separate investigation dropped Viren's name in connection with the museum heist, And this was pretty much all of Ehrin's own fault because he'd been bragging about it at full volume at a party. Now, campers, we're not saying go to an art museum and steal $100 million worth of art, but if you do, you know, shut up about it.

Now, this may be my natural misanthropy shining through, but shut up about it is just generally good advice for everybody in every situation. I am aware that I'm saying this on a podcast that I willingly participate in and produce, but, you know, just shut up about it. Except for us when we want to talk about this stuff. Yeah, exactly. After Viren's frequent brushes with the law, the police had his picture and details on file, and he looked like a pretty good match to the skater's description of the suspicious dude outside the museum. Even worse for our boy, a close look at Viren's self. phone data put him right in the area of the museum on the night of the heist. So they turned Viren's paranoia into reality, started tailing him. Viren was already working on his next job.

Police followed him to the Saint-Rompidou, home to another huge modern art museum, and watched him carefully studying the emergency exits. The next day, they watched him buy gloves, glue, and suction cups, and thought if they kept up the surveillance, they might just catch him in the act of another heist. But Viren ditched his plan to rob the Pompidou, suspecting the police were watching him. He thought that a lot over the past few months, but this time he was actually right. It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you, right? On December 10th, investigators called Viren on the phone and got his voicemail message, which made their jaws hit the floor. Sounding manic, Viren's recorded voice said, if you want to buy paintings or works of art or

exceptional jewelry, do not hesitate to contact me. Among the many paintings, there are five that are extremely expensive. What the hell, man? Just what he was thinking with this recording, which was just a nudge and a wink away from a full confession, is impossible to say, but its effect was to fully convince the police that they had their man.

Voice mail message, nearly confession, is a new one. Like almost confessions. I think that's truly maybe the most boneheaded thing I've ever heard, a criminal do. And that says a lot. I've heard criminals do some really fucking bow-headed shit. Yeah, I guess he just wasn't expecting that the cops would call him on his own phone. Or if they called him, he'd pick up.

It's just bananas. It sounds like he's like doing an ad. Like, we're crazy. We're slashing prices here at Viren's House of Fine Arts. It's just bizarre. Crazy Bearin's House of Fine Art. That was. Bananas.

So there was that, but it wasn't yet habeas-gravis time. The police really wanted to recover the stolen paintings, and in art theft cases, they tended to disappear whenever things started heating up. In fact, only about 10% of stolen art is ever recovered, so they needed to handle this investigation carefully. The pressure was not doing great things for the relationship between Viren Tomic and Jean-Michel Corvez. When Viren tried calling Corviz, he found out the number of

wasn't in service anymore. When he ran into Corvez in the street, Corvez went white as a sheet and didn't give Viren any guarantees about the status of the paintings. To Viren, already short on trust, Corviz's twitchy affect was en drapeau rouge, a red flag. Next time they got together, Viren brought along a hidden audio recorder and got Corviz talking about his part in the heist. In the recording, Corviz tells Viren how nervous he is about the police investigation and that the only progress he made with the paintings was selling the Legerre. This just kills me. It's like they

didn't expect any reaction whatsoever to the theft of these like insanely valuable paintings. Like the police were just going to be like, oh, so that happened anyway, let's all go to the wine bar. What did you expect? They're surprised apparently that the cops are investigating this. The Frencher are notoriously apathetic about art. Right, exactly. I couldn't care less. was telling the truth, but not the whole truth. A client had paid Corvez 80,000 euros for still life with candlestick. But then, freaked out by all the whole blue, about the heist, they'd returned it two days later. They hadn't even asked for their money back. So at this point, Corvez still had all five paintings, but then he found someone who wanted the Bodigliani, woman with a fan. This

was Corvarez's friend, Jonathan Byrne, a 33-year-old watchmaker with his own little shop. Given that he had an interest in fine art and all the news stories about the heist, there's no way Byrne didn't know this Modigliani was stolen. But it didn't seem to bother him. He still bought it for 80,000 euros. And not only that, he also agreed to let Corvez hide the four other paintings in his shop, which had a high-grade security system. And before long, he was working with Corvez on trying to figure out a way to sell them.

This was proving pretty tough to accomplish. A potential Saudi buyer had backed out, but Byrne was working on a possible client in Tel Aviv. Corvez just wanted the paintings gone as soon as possible. In fact, an anonymous caller warned police that Corvez might just destroy the paintings if he felt too much heat. Viren was more likely to cut off his own foot than destroy art he loved, but Corvaz was in this entirely for the money, and the risk of him destroying the evidence to save his own ass was very real. And it's happened before. In 2001, a prolific art thief named Stefan Breitweiser was arrested.

He'd stashed most of his stolen artwork at his mom's house, and when he got hauled in, his mom freaked out in epic fashion. She ripped dozens of paintings out of their frames and cut them to shreds with scissors and shoved the pieces through a garbage disposal. So... Oh, shit. Yeah. Investigators had good reason to go carefully. here. By the spring of 2011, Viren Tomic was hard up for cash, and he had only one solution. He

needed to pull another job. His paranoia might have eased up a little by now, but it really shouldn't have. The police were still watching his every move, and Viren gave them a hell of a show. On one of his nighttime strolls through Paris, Viren had spotted a duplex on the Ritzie Avenue Montaania, where the lights were on all night. This, he thought, probably meant the owners were away. Three buildings down from his target, he climbed up to the roof using a fire escape, then jumped from roof to roof. He secured a rope and lowered himself down to an upper window, which he opened and slipped inside.

He waited, listening. No one was home. Searching the house, he found a watch collection and a few nice pieces of art, none of which really did much for him. He also found an empty gunholster. sitting beside a crocodile-skin briefcase. The briefcase, he discovered, had a false bottom. Now this, both the gun and the briefcase, got his full attention.

They both suggested something valuable and secret hidden somewhere in the house. Inverin was determined to find it. He came back to the duplex night after night, searching for this hidden treasure. Eventually, he found a safe behind a secret panel in an armoire. But inside it, there was only some evidence. empty bags. Frustrated, he took the watches and one of the paintings and went home, where, in short order, the police arrested him and tossed his apartment. Under interrogation, Viren quickly confessed, not only to the duplex robbery, but to the museum heist. He might have calculated here

that the police had him cold on both cases, which they did, and that confessing would help him during trial. His lawyer noted that a confession could reasonably sound like repentance, but both the prosecutor and the court-appointed psychologist ascribed a different motivation to Viren's confession. He was proud of his work and his skills, and he wanted credit for him. And that tracks for me, because we've seen it with a certain type of serial killer, too. Once they realize that you've got them dead to rights, they just can't shut up about their crimes, so want everybody else to be as impressed with them as they are with themselves. At the same time, the police were arresting Viren, they were also raiding Corvez's gallery

and Byrne's shop. They didn't find the missing paintings. Byrne would later claim that they were stashed behind an armwark. and that the police had just missed him. He and Corvez were picked up shortly after. Byrne also claimed that after the raid but before his arrest, he was so shaken that he destroyed all five paintings, kicking and tearing them apart and put the remains in a trash can on the street.

But everyone else in the case, the prosecutor, Tomic, Corvez, even Byrne's wife, very much doubts that this is true. Byrne was too smart to destroy pieces so valuable. And whenever he got out of prison, the paintings would be no less valuable. So far, though, they've never been recovered. The three of them, Vera and Tomic, Corvez, and Byrne,

were tried together in 2017, and all three were found guilty. This, despite Jean-Michel Corvez's attempt at a smart-ass excuse, I did not ask him to steal. I told him, if you should happen to stumble across the Ferdinand Liger, I know someone who would be willing to buy it, and yes, I did read that in the voice of Fat Tony from the Simpsons,

because it just works better that way. one of the reasons people think Yonathan Byrne was lying when he claimed to have destroyed the paintings was that he just hammed it up so much during trial when they asked him about it on the stand he started sobbing I put them in the trash I put them in the trash I put them in the trash

Jesus dial it back a click dude did he put them in the trash he put them in the trash he absolutely didn't I think he's got him stashed somewhere just waiting to sell him when he gets out of prison. Viren Tomich, on the other hand, was calm, polite, and proud of his work.

Unlike the other two, of course, this was not his first time in front of a judge. The three men received a neat array of sentences. Eight years for Viren Tomic, seven for Jean-Michel Corvez, and six for Jonathan Byrne. Byrne, apparently still in drama queen mode, had hysterics as they led him out of the courtroom. But he still remembered to hand his car keys to his lawyer, so yeah. Drama Queen. The three co-defendants were also ordered to collectively pay the city of Paris 104 million euros, the estimated value of the five paintings. And while that's a nice symbolic gesture, I'm sorry, Paris, you're never seen a dime of that. So, Vering got eight

years, but he also got a girlfriend, Corrine Opiola, a feng shui consultant, he met, while out on bail just before his trial. I shit you not. That's what it says, that she's a feng shui consultant. And in his letters to her, he placed the blame for how his life turned out squarely on his parents and their decision to bring him back to Paris from Bosnia. He wrote, they stole my life from me. I would have been a good person. I was obliged to become a thief. Okay. I'm sure his tough adolescent years on the streets of Paris didn't help, but it's worth remembering that Viren's career as a burglar actually began before that in Moster.

Yeah. If he'd stayed there, of course, his life. Life would have been very different, but Viren might just be fantasizing about how different he would have been. One of the judges presiding at the trial said the crimes of Viren, Corviz, and Byrne were a theft of cultural goods belonging to humankind's artistic heritage, which is hard to argue with, and is the reason art thefts like this really get on my nerves? Yeah, exactly.

Viren Tomic stole these paintings because they touched him. You know, they moved him deeply, and now nobody else gets to feel that. Nobody else gets to experience that same sense of wonder, that feeling of touching something just for a second that's beyond the mundane world. In other words, art is supposed to be for everybody, Dickweed, not just you. Tomic tried to sell himself as a Robin Hood figure, but I haven't noticed him, you know, giving any of these paintings away or donating any of that money that he got from them to charity. he ain't like making it rain out in the streets, you know, for the poor people. And, you know, millions of people have visited the Musei Darmodern since the 2010 heist. What he stole were millions of special moments never had, millions of memories never made.

It's an act of unbelievable selfishness, and we can only hope that those five paintings are still out there somewhere, not shredded in somebody's garbage disposal, and will one day be returned to us all. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And as always, we also want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Flynn, Samantha, Madison, Claire, Lily, Valerie L. and Lee.

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