- 7 weeks ago
Documentary, The Man Who Stole The Mona Lisa
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00:00The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world, and at two and a half billion pounds, it's also the most valuable.
00:11She's so famous, even celebrities want a selfie with her.
00:17Mona Lisa is the most photographed, reproduced, and written about artwork in the world, and possibly the most photographed and reproduced female face ever.
00:26But why is she so famous? Some say it's her smile, others because she's painted by Leonardo da Vinci.
00:35But the real reason is far more shocking.
00:39This is something that is outrageous. It's not a theft. This is an affront.
00:44It's like kidnapping the Queen of England. It's impossible.
00:48Just over a hundred years ago, the Mona Lisa is snatched from the world's most famous museum.
00:56The crime sends shockwaves around the world and baffles the world's greatest living detective.
01:03Louis Lepine has a sterling and ironclad reputation for Sherlock Holmes of his day.
01:08Someone who is guaranteed to crack the case.
01:11But this case wound up making him look more like Inspector Clouseau.
01:15It's the heist that catapults her to global stardom.
01:19And this is probably the single greatest art heist in history, but also probably the single most famous theft of anything in history.
01:28And it starts a crime wave now worth over a staggering four billion pounds a year.
01:34Art theft is the third highest grossing criminal trade worldwide every year.
01:39But the truth about how this astonishing heist was pulled off still shocks to this day.
01:52This year alone, ten million people will visit the busiest museum in the world, Paris' Louvre.
01:59All of them hoping to catch a glimpse of the museum's star attraction.
02:04But it wasn't always this way.
02:09Over a hundred years ago, the Louvre isn't the bustling museum of today.
02:14Few people visit, so security is lax.
02:18The guards are pensioners and retired soldiers who have a reputation for falling asleep on the job.
02:24I'm not to disparage museum guards, because I'm sure they're a fine group of people.
02:29But we've all been to museums and we've seen the guards who guard them.
02:35These old men are the guardians of the greatest collection of art in the world.
02:40In 1911, the Louvre is a trophy case for the cream of the French royal collection of art,
02:49and also what Napoleon and his soldiers managed to steal during Napoleon's campaigns throughout Europe.
02:55All of the best works are on display there.
02:58You have works by Raphael Tintoretto, Correggio, Titian.
03:03And there's also works by Leonardo da Vinci,
03:06including one known as La Jaconde in French and the Mona Lisa in English.
03:13Everyone around the world knows the name of the Mona Lisa.
03:18But in 1911, the Mona Lisa is not the world's most famous painting.
03:23Far from it, it's just one of many great works by Italian Renaissance masters on display in the Louvre.
03:29She's certainly not the most valuable painting in their collection.
03:33There were paintings that were valued at more than twice the value of the Mona Lisa.
03:41But this is all about to change, because on a normal summer morning,
03:46the Mona Lisa becomes the victim of the greatest art heist ever.
03:51August 21st is a Monday, and that means that the Louvre is closed to the public.
04:00It also means that there's only a skeleton staff and a handful of security guards in the museum.
04:06When the museum's maintenance director makes his early morning rounds, all is as it should be.
04:12He came up from the ground floor of the museum, through the staircase, and passed through the Salon Carré,
04:18on the way to the Grand Gallery, and he noticed the Mona Lisa.
04:22And then he went on his way to start that day's work.
04:25But when he circles back at around 8.30, he notices it's not there.
04:30All the maintenance director sees is a blank space and four iron hooks.
04:37He didn't think anything of it because it wasn't uncommon at the time for paintings to be moved,
04:43to be taken to the photographer, repaired or just cleaned or fixed.
04:48So, seeing the painting wasn't there, he just went about his business.
04:53The picture's gone, vanished, and nobody is paying any attention.
05:01Incredibly, Da Vinci's masterpiece is missing for an entire day before anyone actually reports its disappearance.
05:10That particular day, a noted artist, Louis Beroud, came to the Salon Carré to do one of his famous paintings.
05:18Louis Beroud is an artist who made his name copying famous paintings for tourists.
05:24Well, this particular day, he's working on a painting of the Mona Lisa.
05:28He arrives, but all he's got to paint is four iron hooks on the wall.
05:35So, Louis Beroud, this well-known artist, sees that the Mona Lisa isn't there,
05:40and it puts a crimp in his day. He wants to get started with his painting.
05:45The artist asks the snoozing security guard where his subject has gone.
05:51And it's only then that the guard goes to the photography studio,
05:53and the photographers have no idea what he's talking about.
05:56And that's when the alarms go off.
05:58The man they go to with the news is the Louvre's deputy director, Georges Benedict.
06:10The deputy director of the Louvre must be thinking that his worst nightmare has come.
06:15to be. He's in charge of the Louvre in a very elevated position, and the most unimaginable thing that could possibly happen has occurred.
06:23At this stage, there's still a chance the Mona Lisa might still be in the Louvre.
06:28It may have been taken and hidden. It may have been taken and just put on one side somewhere.
06:33So there's quite a lot of uncertainty.
06:35But a few hours later, the deputy director of the Louvre must be thinking that his worst nightmare has come to be.
06:41But a few hours later, the deputy director's worst nightmare is realised when he makes a shocking discovery.
06:58It's August the 22nd, 1911, and what is now the most famous and most expensive piece of art on the planet, the Mona Lisa,
07:13has been missing for more than 24 hours.
07:16The museum authorities are praying that she could still turn up unharmed
07:21when the Louvre's deputy director discovers something that will start a chain of events changing the face of art and crime forever.
07:29They found the frame and the glass protective casing of the Mona Lisa discarded in the service stairwell.
07:37And that's really when they say, oh my goodness, this must really have been stolen.
07:43The Mona Lisa is not in the gallery.
07:46Somehow, one of France's great art treasures has been taken.
07:52This is something that is outrageous.
07:55It's not a theft.
07:56This is an affront.
07:58It's like kidnapping the Queen of England.
08:01It's impossible.
08:02The Mona Lisa suddenly becomes this iconic figure.
08:08It's an affront to France that it's been taken.
08:11For a theft of this magnitude,
08:14there's only one person the museum can turn to.
08:20Louis Lapine.
08:23So who is Louis Lapine?
08:24He is the prefect of Paris police,
08:27the most important policeman in France,
08:29perhaps the greatest policeman in the world.
08:32Louis Lapine has a sterling and ironclad reputation,
08:35the Sherlock Holmes of his day,
08:37someone who is guaranteed to crack the case.
08:39Late afternoon on Tuesday, August the 22nd, 1911,
08:43the world's greatest living policeman is called to investigate the baffling disappearance of the Mona Lisa.
08:52Lapine was a man of action.
08:55When he came to the museum, he was with a team of 60 police detectives.
09:01This is absolutely enormous.
09:03Lapine was a man who wanted the facts.
09:06He wanted a dossier, a thick dossier of the criminal.
09:10He wanted the details.
09:11Lapine is well organised.
09:14He's systematic.
09:15He's very experienced.
09:16He knows what he's doing.
09:18But he's also concerned about the blow to national pride of a picture being stolen from the Louvre.
09:27And Lapine isn't the only one.
09:29A day after the theft, the story is already making the front pages.
09:38Headlines blazed around the world announcing the theft of the Mona Lisa
09:42and the very first one that ran red in French, unimaginable with an exclamation point.
09:48The early 20th century is the dawn of the information age.
09:52Telegrams and radio means that for the first time, news can travel around the world in just a few hours.
09:59There were headlines, famous picture taken from the Louvre.
10:03The Washington Post printed a picture of the stolen Mona Lisa.
10:08It was the wrong picture.
10:10How do you get that wrong?
10:12Well, back in 1911, I don't give you an idea of how well known the painting was.
10:19He's been on the case less than 24 hours, but Lapine knows that his investigation is going to be under the media microscope.
10:28In any criminal investigation, the first 24 hours are critical.
10:36That's when people's memories are clearest.
10:39It's when you're most likely to get reliable witness testimony.
10:44The great detective has a problem, though.
10:47He doesn't know when the Mona Lisa was actually taken.
10:52The day after the discovery, he conducts interviews with all the museum staff, hoping to find the last person to have seen her or anyone else with vital clues.
11:04In his testimony, the maintenance director of the Louvre, a man called Piquet, tells the investigators that he was in the Salon Carré at 7.30 in the morning, and he remembers seeing the picture in place.
11:21He also says that at about 8.35, and he noticed the picture was not there.
11:28Lapine now knows the hour and five-minute window when the painting went missing.
11:37Now the other person who came forward with some important information was a plumber named Jules Sauvé.
11:46He tells Lapine that he saw a man next to a locked exit in the stairwell close to where the Mona Lisa's frame was discovered.
11:54Now Sauvé says that he saw this workman sitting there in a white blouse next to the door.
12:04He goes up to the door and sees there's no doorknob, and he turns to the man and says, do you know what the doorknob is?
12:10The man goes, no, I have no idea. I just got here myself.
12:13So Sauvé happens to have the keys, and he opens the door, goes out and locks it behind him.
12:22Right away, Lapine and the French police have got a potential suspect.
12:26Now they just have to find him.
12:31Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
12:34Usually it has to be taken very shortly after the events.
12:39The problem, of course, for the police is that we're already a day and a half after the picture's been taken.
12:48Even the plumber who opened the door didn't really pay any attention.
12:55It was just another employee who couldn't get out of a door.
13:00So the police have very little to go on.
13:02They have the frame and they have the eyewitness reports from the plumber in the stairwell.
13:08Where do they look now?
13:12What is the thrust of their investigation?
13:15Louis Lapine has a trump card.
13:17He is a forward-thinking police officer.
13:20And he's interested in this new field of investigative forensics.
13:25In 1911, forensic science is in his infancy.
13:28But Louis Lapine is a pioneer of this new policing tool.
13:32In fact, he's one of the first policemen to use fingerprinting as a means of identification in the world.
13:41Louis Lapine is hoping that the thief was foolish enough to leave fingerprints at the crime scene.
13:47Because this is before it was common knowledge that if you steal something you wear gloves.
13:51Hoping that science can crack this case, Lapine calls on France's foremost fingerprint recovery and analysis expert, Alphonse Bertillon.
14:01First thing they looked at was the empty frame with its glass.
14:06And they noticed right away there were fingerprints. First clue.
14:10Using graphite powder, Bertillon uncovers a large number of smudges and one clear fingerprint.
14:17Just a few days after the theft, police have another potential clue.
14:23Now, from Lapine's perspective, this is the jackpot.
14:27All he has to do is match it to the database of criminals who were arrested and had their fingerprints taken.
14:33The only problem was the police have a database of 750,000 cards with fingerprints on them.
14:40The fingerprint that they had, they didn't know if it was a thumbprint.
14:45They didn't know if it was a fingerprint.
14:47In other words, they would have had to go through 750,000 cards times 10 prints to be able to match it.
14:54Manually checking the files would take French police months, if not years, to do.
15:01What's the next step? How do you limit your suspects from 750,000 people in the fingerprint database
15:07down to a manageable number that you could go out and question?
15:12Almost immediately, Louis Lapine shows why he is known as the world's greatest living detective
15:19when he makes an observation that helps him narrow the search considerably.
15:23And he immediately noticed that the painting had been taken off the frame in a very proper and very respectful way.
15:35So it was done by somebody who had been careful not to damage the painting.
15:40This observation allows Lapine to start compiling a profile of the potential thieves,
15:46and it highlights what could be his Achilles' heel.
15:51As far as Lapine is concerned, the Mona Lisa can only have been stolen by a highly skilled international team of art thieves.
16:01And that's what sets the inquiry in motion.
16:07Right from the start, Lapine's inquiry ignores the possibility that the theft could have been committed by criminals purely in the pursuit of profit.
16:15And it's a thought that's being echoed in the press.
16:18In the days following the theft of the Mona Lisa, there are no press conferences being given by the police.
16:24So what do the press do? Well, they speculate.
16:26And a lot of them are completely out there and wacky and entirely invented by these journalists.
16:32Among the major speculation was the idea that maybe a millionaire, a mad collector, could have commissioned the theft.
16:44It has to be the work of an American so that he could keep it in his own little vault and privately go down with his cigar and his snifter of brandy and look at the Mona Lisa every day.
16:56A madman in love with the painting just to keep it at home and maybe destroy it.
17:06To sell more papers, the press put their own sensational spin on the Mona Lisa story.
17:12She became not just a painting that was stolen, but a person who was abducted, who was kidnapped, who was missing.
17:21Louis Lepine, the man investigating this kidnapping, may be a snob, but he's also a man of science.
17:30To catch his skilled and cultured thief, or thieves, he's going to use all the latest forensic techniques.
17:38Lepine runs a test. He has some of his officers try to remove a mock-up of the Mona Lisa painting from the wall.
17:47It took the policeman five minutes, because although it's not physically attached to the wall, the Mona Lisa is hung there on four iron pegs that you have to twist and turn a certain way to get it off.
17:57Lepine then had one of the Louvre workers, who was familiar with the painting, take it off the wall, and he just lifted it and took it off.
18:05It took a matter of five seconds.
18:08Lepine has a good idea that the thief was an employee or former employee of the Louvre.
18:15It's the third potential break of Louis Lepine's investigation.
18:20Now, all he has to do is fingerprint the 256 employees of the Louvre and check them for a match from the prints found on the frame.
18:30Everyone who had access to the picture, and who is familiar with how the paintings are hung, will be checked.
18:38No one matched the fingerprints that were on the glass. So they widened the net. They thought, all right, let's start looking at people who are outside the Louvre, perhaps worked there maybe months ago, maybe some of our subcontractors.
18:56One of these subcontractors is a Paris-based firm called Gobier.
19:03The Gobier firm was significant because the Louvre had commissioned them to make protective glass cases for some of the works in the museum,
19:11after an anarchist had successfully slashed an anchor painting with a knife as a political protest.
19:18Gobier confirms that during two stints between 1907 and 1909, five of its employees worked on the glazing project at the Louvre.
19:28The police request that all of the employees of the Gobier firm who had handled works of art from the Louvre come in for questioning.
19:37All of them do, but one. So the police are left wondering, why didn't this other person come in?
19:43This suspicious behavior is yet another break for the police.
19:47The missing person is a 29-year-old man called Vincenzo Perugia,
19:53and Lepin wastes no time in looking into his prime suspect's background.
20:00Vincenzo Perugia is an Italian migrant worker.
20:07He's not well educated. He was poor, very poor.
20:13And he probably drinks too much.
20:16What's most interesting for the investigation, though,
20:19is that he worked at the Louvre for Gobier, and crucially, he's already known to the police.
20:27He has a criminal record. He was arrested twice, and he served eight days in prison.
20:33Perugia's record includes theft and assaulting a prostitute with a knife.
20:40He was known to the authorities, but he certainly wasn't known as a master criminal.
20:46Master criminal or not, he's the only suspect police have.
20:51But for the snobbish, upper-middle-class Lepin, this crime could only have been committed by a certain type,
20:58and working-class immigrant Perugia isn't it.
21:02Louis Lepin is convinced that someone who steals a beautiful Renaissance painting
21:07must be someone who is sophisticated, cultured, worldly, of an elevated social standing.
21:14So the last person on his mind is a not-particularly-smart Italian immigrant
21:20with no educational background who may have a few minor convictions.
21:25Perugia might not fit this profile, but Lepin can't afford to leave any stone unturned
21:32in restoring France's honour by finding the missing Mona Lisa.
21:37So one week after the heist, a junior detective is reluctantly dispatched to Perugia's digs.
21:44He goes up three flights of stairs and knocks on the door.
21:49Open the door, it's the police!
21:53Open the door, please!
21:56And it's answered by this small, slight Italian with his big, thick, bushy mustache.
22:04He invites the detective in and they sit down at his table in this small 9x13 room.
22:12When questioned, Perugia denies any involvement in a theft and even has a watertight alibi.
22:19He was working all that day.
22:21Satisfied with the answers, the detective gives the apartment a cursory search
22:26and leaves disappointed but not surprised.
22:31Perugia isn't the man the police are looking for.
22:34He's too low class.
22:37That person could not have stolen the Mona Lisa.
22:41And Lepin is back to square one.
22:49It's two weeks after the greatest ever art heist.
22:53The theft of the Mona Lisa has captured the world's imagination
22:56and will elevate this well regarded but little known painting into the stratosphere of superstardom.
23:02Making it the most expensive piece of art on the planet.
23:07France's honor is in tatters.
23:09And two weeks into the investigation,
23:11the French police led by the world's greatest living detective Louis Lepin
23:15don't have a clue who did it or how it was done.
23:18The press loved it.
23:20Look at the ingredients that you have.
23:22You've got a world famous woman who's kidnapped.
23:28You've got Leonardo's greatest work of art that disappears.
23:32You've got government officials who aren't doing their jobs.
23:35There's a lot of finger pointing.
23:39With the world's media hungry for anything on the case,
23:42lead detective Louis Lepin isn't even talking to them.
23:46It all creates this notion that the authorities are powerless, the authorities are hopeless,
23:55and that this affront to national pride is being allowed to go on without anybody seemingly doing anything about it.
24:05A few weeks after the theft, some newspapers decide they can succeed where the government and police have failed.
24:13Paris newspapers start to offer their own reward for the recovery of the Mona Lisa.
24:21Two newspapers offered a reward for the man who would give information and bring the painting back to them.
24:28Paris Journal offered 50,000 francs. Enormous.
24:35Worth over a million pounds today, the publication of this huge reward immediately gets results.
24:42Somebody came forward and said,
24:44Well, it's not that hard to steal stuff from the Louvre, because I've done it.
24:48I've stolen stuff from the Louvre. I've stolen some statues.
24:53The author of this letter is a Belgian called Jerry Piret.
25:00Now, Piret, after the theft of the Mona Lisa, says,
25:04You know, they stole the Mona Lisa? I can see how they got away with that.
25:08I stole things. To me, it's like a supermarket.
25:13I go in, I say, I'm going down to the Louvre. Would you like anything from the Louvre?
25:18And people thought he was kidding, but he would come home with objects from the Louvre.
25:23Among these objects are some Iberian statuettes, which he claims to have sold to an individual of some note.
25:30The offer of a reward from Parisian newspapers teases out a lot of information and leads.
25:36But one of them actually led to an arrest.
25:39And the person who was arrested on suspicion of having stolen the Mona Lisa was none other than Pablo Picasso.
25:45In 1911, Pablo Picasso was well on his way to becoming a famous artist.
25:54Pablo Picasso was the exact profile of what Lupin thought he was looking for.
26:01He was erudite, international. Even better, he was a foreigner.
26:05Finally, it looks like Lupin and the French police could have their man.
26:1017 days after the Mona Lisa disappeared, Lupin's men searched Picasso's studio, hoping to find items stolen from the Louvre.
26:22The police go to Picasso. Who's sweating? Who's terrified? Who's afraid that he's going to be, you know, at best deported, at worst, you know, sent to Devil's Island?
26:35Immediately, they find the statuettes.
26:38So he's in possession of goods stolen from the Louvre he has in the cabinet back home.
26:44It turns out Picasso hadn't just kept the stolen statuettes to decorate his home.
26:49Those Iberian statue heads were painted by Picasso into the very famous painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, painted in 1907 and considered the very first work of modern art.
27:00Unable to deny it, Picasso confesses to his part in the statuettes' affair, but it's the Mona Lisa police are really after.
27:09It's ironic that Picasso should have been implicated in this theft because one of his very famous quotes is,
27:15Bad artists copy, good artists steal. So he fulfilled his own definition.
27:22After a few days in custody, police are unable to build a case against him for the theft of the Mona Lisa, and Picasso is released.
27:31It's another blow to Lapine and the French police.
27:36In September 1911, the Picasso affair, as sensational as it is, is just a distraction from the real story.
27:44Months after she disappeared, it's becoming obvious that the greatest detective in the world hasn't got a clue where the Mona Lisa is.
27:53And the story is eventually pushed off the front pages.
27:58As the months pass, the amount of print shrinks.
28:03Other things then take precedent and knock it out of the headline.
28:07For the first time ever, a gang of bank robbers have used the getaway car.
28:12And in April 1912, the Titanic sinks.
28:19So the failed investigation to find the Mona Lisa disappears much like the masterpiece itself.
28:26Lapine is stuck. He doesn't have any idea where to turn.
28:30And at this point, it's become a cold case.
28:35Louis Lapine, the supposed greatest detective in the world, has failed.
28:40And Lapine had a wonderfully distinguished long career.
28:44And this is the one, I guess you could say, it's the one blot on his reputation.
28:49He retired from the police force in March of 1913.
28:53So he never solved the case.
28:57The story of the missing Mona Lisa is far from over though.
29:01Because 28 months after she sensationally disappeared, the Mona Lisa is about to be back in the headlines.
29:10In December 1913, a Florence-based art dealer named Alfredo Geri gets a letter.
29:17And he looks at it and it's written in Italian, but it comes from Paris.
29:22The author of the letter says, I have the Mona Lisa in my possession.
29:27And I'd like to sell it to you at a 25% discount because you're Italian.
29:36And it's signed, Leonard V.
29:39Leonard being French for Leonardo and V, perhaps Da Vinci.
29:45It's been over two years since the theft and the world had given up on ever finding her.
29:50So naturally the art dealer is interested.
29:53And he starts to think, you know, the Mona Lisa's been missing since August of 1911.
30:00Here it is almost December of 1913.
30:05Maybe it's genuine.
30:07Jerry arranges to meet with this mysterious Leonard.
30:14To authenticate the painting, he drafts in Giovanni Porgi, the director of Italy's version of the Louvre, the Uffizi Museum.
30:23If they can confirm that Leonard does indeed have the real Mona Lisa, Jerry agrees to pay a finder's fee of 500,000 lira, the equivalent of about half a million pounds today.
30:39On the 17th of December, 1913, the Italians rendezvous with the mysterious man called Leonard in a hotel in Florence.
30:48They go to the hotel and they see someone who doesn't look the part.
30:52He looks like an unkempt, down on his luck, relatively young and relatively unintelligent Italian worker, which is what he is.
31:01But he pulls a case out from underneath his bed in the hotel.
31:07Inside the chest is a collection of what Jerry describes as a bunch of wretched objects.
31:12So he's got paint brushes, he's got shoes, he's got a mandolin, and he takes all this out, throws it on the floor.
31:20And there is a false bottom, which he removes, and he brings out this object wrapped in red velvet.
31:29Which he then unwraps.
31:33Porgi looks at it, Jerry looks at it, it's the Mona Lisa.
31:36Or at least, it looks like it.
31:41To check, Porgi examines the back of the painting.
31:46Why the back of the painting?
31:48Well, it's a piece of wood that's been in the Louvre, that's been in Versailles.
31:53It's got markings on it, it's got Louvre numbers, it's got a couple of stickers, it's been places, this is the trail of where it's been.
32:00Porgi has seen photographs of it, he knows what the back of a painting like this would look like.
32:08He looks at it, and it's enough for him to think, this may be the real thing.
32:16Even the man from the Uffizi Museum can't be 100% sure though.
32:20You can forge a painting like the Mona Lisa, you can make something look like it's 400 years old.
32:30But you're not going to be able to duplicate the cracks in the varnish of the paint.
32:35These minute cracks in the varnished surface of any artwork are the equivalent of a painting's fingerprint.
32:44And the art expert knows they're only visible under a magnifying glass.
32:48He tells Leonhard, we have to go back to the Uffizi, I've got some photographs there, and I need to compare it more closely.
32:57That he lets them take his only bargaining chip, the Mona Lisa, he lets them take it away.
33:06Shows the naivety, the fact that he is not in any way an international art thief.
33:12The Italians tell the man, Leonhard, that if the painting checks out, they'll send him his reward.
33:23It did match all of their archival photographs, so they couldn't believe their luck, the Mona Lisa has been returned.
33:29Instead of sending the reward to the waiting Leonhard, the Italians send the police.
33:36You would think that he might realize he's made a terrible mistake and he might immediately check out of the hotel and vanish.
33:46But he doesn't.
33:47A knock on the door comes of his hotel, and he goes, aha, my reward is here.
33:56And he opens the door and there are the Caribbean area.
33:59He's under arrest for the theft of the Mona Lisa.
34:02It's been over two years, but finally the Mona Lisa has reappeared out of thin air.
34:08Now the focus turns on the man who was found with it.
34:12This is like the unbelievable part of the story.
34:15Because he's Vincenzo Perugia.
34:19He was one of the workmen who helped put the Mona Lisa under glass and the police had spoken to him.
34:26Not only that, the police detective had come to his room in Paris and talked to him with the Mona Lisa just merely feet away.
34:37It's one of the biggest policing mistakes in the world.
34:40Can you imagine the scene? You're in a very tiny room, playing table, one chair, one of the masterpieces of the world lies on the table just hidden under a piece of red velvet.
34:55What's even more remarkable is that French police didn't even bother to fingerprint Perugia, refusing to believe that this lowly Italian immigrant could be capable of such a crime.
35:06So this is where the great faux pas of the French police, they could have cracked the case right then and there.
35:14They didn't think that Perugia was capable of committing a crime.
35:19They let it slide. It fell in the cracks.
35:22The question the entire world is now asking, just how did this nobody pull off the crime that flummoxed even the greatest police detective of the age?
35:32And the answer defies belief.
35:40Just over two years after the Mona Lisa miraculously disappeared from the Louvre in Paris, lowly Italian painter and decorator Vincenzo Perugia is sensationally unmasked as a thief.
35:51And the masterpiece is returned. When the authorities discover how he did it, they're astonished.
35:58At seven in the morning, Vincenzo Perugia enters the Louvre and climbs the grand staircase.
36:05He doesn't meet anyone on the way. And then he goes into the Salon Carré.
36:10He sees on the wall the Mona Lisa, which is hanging there.
36:13He pauses for a moment, looks around, listens. He doesn't see anyone, doesn't hear anyone coming.
36:21He grabs it, tucks it under his arm and he walks out of the Salon Carré where he knows there's a service staircase.
36:28And goes down several flights of stairs, then stops, turns the painting around and begins to remove it from its frame.
36:43He takes it out, goes down several flights to a door that opens on a courtyard.
36:52He turns the doorknob, but the doorknob is locked.
37:00Not having a key, not knowing what to do, afraid to go back up through the museum, he decides, let me see if I can get this door open.
37:09He has a screwdriver with him, and he begins to undo the lock, taking off the doorknob, and then he begins to work on the lock itself.
37:19When suddenly he hears someone coming down the steps.
37:23It's the plumber that Lapine interviewed just two days after the painting's disappearance, who'd admitted running into an unknown man by a locked exit door.
37:32He goes up to the door and sees there's no doorknob, and he turns to Perugy and says, do you know what the doorknob is?
37:39And Perugy goes, no, I have no idea, I just got here myself.
37:43So Sauvé happens to have the keys, and he opens the door.
37:47The plumber exits the door, locking it behind him.
37:51So Perugy decides to go back the way he came. He grabs a Mona Lisa and goes up the staircase.
38:04And he leaves the museum the same way that he came in.
38:07The utter simplicity of the heist is truly incredible, taking just 20 minutes from start to finish.
38:15It's amazing to think that what is the most famous heist of anything in history was accomplished by a single individual walking up to a painting on the wall, removing it, sticking it under their arm, and heading out the door.
38:29What most people couldn't wrap their head around was that this crime had been committed by Vincenzo Perugia.
38:45Basically, who?
38:46Unbelievably, this downtrodden Italian immigrant had pulled the wool over the eyes of the greatest police mines in France, and kept the Mona Lisa hidden, undetected, for all that time.
39:02The surprise was immense, of course. Nobody had the idea that such a nobody could do the job.
39:10It was absolutely impossible to understand why this little man had done it.
39:17Police had the who and the how. All they're missing is the why.
39:27The Italians were the largest single foreign population in Paris.
39:34The Italians were the workmen. They were the craftsmen. They were the painters. They were the decorators.
39:39They were basically doing the job that the French no longer wanted to do.
39:47Italians are the lowest of the low for the French in this period. They're referred to as macaroni eaters derogatively and openly.
39:56This was the supreme insult for Italian people, macaroni.
40:02And that was actually one of the reasons he gave for stealing the painting.
40:06He wanted a kind of revenge as an immigrant.
40:10Perugia was bullied. He was bullied, probably bullied by strangers who just looked at him as an Italian.
40:16And they threatened to beat him up. They stole his tools. They put, you know, salt and pepper in his wine. They played tricks on him.
40:25This French attitude towards Italian workers is viewed as hypocrisy of the worst kind.
40:32I'm sure there was a disconnect with Perugia, that he would go to the Louvre, see these works of art that everyone would revere.
40:39But yet the Italians who created them were looked down on. How can you revere great Italian work, but look down and make fun of the Italians who created them?
40:52Years of discrimination by the French might be the motive the world is searching for. But Perugia could also have other reasons for committing his crime.
41:06I genuinely believe that Perugia thought the Italian works of art in the Louvre had been stolen from Italy by the French.
41:15And to him, it wasn't a crime to steal something that was stolen.
41:19Perugia assumed that the Mona Lisa had been stolen by Napoleon. But he was wrong.
41:26It's true that Bonaparte, during the Italian campaign, had taken thousands of works of art out of Italy to bring them to the Louvre Museum.
41:38But Mona Lisa, of course, was not part of them.
41:41He may be misguided, but claiming to steal the masterpiece for patriotic reasons strikes a chord.
41:49So, in Italy, Perugia isn't seen as a thief, but a patriot. And his countrymen refused to extradite him to France.
42:00He's tried in an Italian court, where he pleads guilty and is sentenced to twelve months, of which he serves only seven.
42:09It may be surprising that Vincenzo Perugia would steal the Mona Lisa successfully and keep it kidnapped for years and get a very small prison sentence.
42:24Only seven months. So, it was essentially a slap on the wrist.
42:27Vincenzo Perugia, the man who stole the Mona Lisa, may have got off lightly, but the impact of what he did lasts much longer.
42:38When Vincenzo Perugia took the Mona Lisa off the wall in the Louvre, he started a chain of events which must have been totally unimaginable.
42:50Vincenzo Perugia, the man who stole the Mona Lisa off the wall in the Louvre.
42:54Vincenzo Perugia, the man who stole the Mona Lisa off the wall in the Louvre.
42:55Criminologically speaking, it's not doing anything particularly distinctive or interesting.
43:00But its impact internationally, thanks to the dissemination of its story in the international news media,
43:07catapults the Mona Lisa from being a very good painting by a reasonably well-known Italian Renaissance painter
43:14into being an international icon, recognizable to anyone whether or not they had an interest in art before.
43:21But the Mona Lisa isn't just the most famous image in the world. It's also the most reproduced.
43:28You can find her on jigsaw puzzles, keychains, t-shirts.
43:32Anytime someone needs a stand-in for a great work of art, the Mona Lisa is the go-to.
43:39As a direct result of the theft, the painting has become the most expensive piece of art in the world.
43:45In 1953, it was insured for $100 million. Today, it comes out to about $2.5 billion.
43:52That's, you know, the gross national product of major countries.
43:55By stealing her, Vincenzo Perugia unwittingly created an international icon.
44:04The theft also changed the face of crime across the globe forever.
44:09It created the notion that there might be people who were willing to pay lots of money for these pictures.
44:16Art theft is the third highest grossing criminal trade worldwide every year, behind only the drug and arms trades.
44:26It's a trade that the FBI reckons is worth over ÂŁ4 billion a year.
44:32In that sense, it was a momentous crime.
44:36Thankfully, policing has got a lot better in the last hundred years.
44:49But that doesn't stop the criminals trying their luck.
44:52Vinnie Jones unleashes the police interceptors right after the break.
44:55After the break.
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