Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Robbery
Alrighty, we have a homegrown mystery on our hands. In 1972, 18 paintings were stolen from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in an event sometimes called The Skylight Caper. Sounds like an Agatha Christie tbh but I can’t give you the perfect ending that she would have. Definitely worth the read anyway.
Background
Of course, I’ll do a little mood-setting first. So, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was established in the 1860s but didn’t start exhibiting works until the 1870s and 1880s when wealthy Anglophones started to donate both cash and art to their collection. In 1913 the museum built its first building, now known as the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion on Sherbrooke St. However, in the 1950s and 1960s the Francophone population started to gain more control over the city and Quebec separatism became more popular, and as a result, many of these wealthy English patrons left Montreal in favour of other provinces.
This slowly deprived the museum of the financial support it had gotten used to and for the first time they started reaching out to the Francophone population for support. Even with donations from the French population, they weren’t making enough money, so the museum decided the solution to their problems was to renovate. They thought this would attract more funding and patrons but the renovations were what allowed this heist to take place. You’ll see in a little bit.
Other Thefts
Here’s a little bonus for you. There have been two other thefts/attempted thefts performed at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that I’ll tell you a little about to show you how they’ve handled things in the past.
The first robbery happened in 1933, so before their money problems started. The thief had managed to hide in the museum until after it closed (a true childhood dream) and then passed 14 paintings out a window to their accomplice on the other side (not part of the childhood dream). The museum later received a ransom note for the paintings asking for $10,000. They didn’t pay and eight months later English newspaper Montreal Star and French newspaper La Presse each received half of one of the paintings, they cut it in HALF to send to the papers. Along with these sad pieces of canvas the newspapers also received a note that said if a sum equal to 25% of the remaining paintings’ total value wasn’t provided to the thieves then they would cut up the remaining 13 works as well.
Thankfully it never came to this. A known petty criminal was caught by police performing a robbery on a train car, how 1930s of him, and when questioned admitted to stealing the paintings. He ended up leading the police to where he had wrapped them in a tarp and buried them near L'Épiphanie, north of Montreal. So the museum ended getting the remaining 13 paintings back safe and sound.
The criminal responsible was now facing a lot of jail time, he also shot a cop so I mean A LOT of jail time, and decided to end his life with a concealed dose of poison that he had on him while in custody. A very niche thing to carry around. So he never faced trial for his crimes.
The second robbery was only an attempt. Not a lot is known but we do know that in 1960 a gang of armed robbers came to the museum to try and steal a bunch of van Goghs from a special exhibition (why is it always van Gogh?!). They were foiled and didn’t succeed but they’ve never been publicly identified.
The Week of the Crime
Fast forward now to the last week of August 1972, the week before the crime. There were some interesting details that came to light about events that had occurred the Wednesday before the crime was committed. Another robbery had happened but it hadn’t made front-page news. On August 30 three armed, hooded (remember these details) men broke into the Oka summer residence of a successful trucking and storage business owner. The thieves made off with $50,000 worth of paintings, tied up the gardener (remember this too), climbed down a 600-foot cliff into a waiting motorboat on Lake of Two Mountains. Insane. Just keep this in mind as we move on.
The Case at Hand
Even though there had been this other large robbery, everything was going fine at the museum until after midnight in the early morning of Monday, September 4, 1972. One man wearing a ski mask and climbing spurs on his shoes scaled a big tree beside the museum. Once he was on the roof he lowered down a ladder for his two accomplices (three men, ski masks!!). They had planned this break-in perfectly and, maybe knew, that one of the skylights was being fixed so there was no glass at the moment and it was only covered by a tarp. Because of this, the alarm for this window had also been disabled. They slid down into the museum on 15m of rope. Very Mission Impossible.
Once inside they knew that there would be guards and they were prepared for this. They ran into one guard near the kitchen on the second floor and fired some warning shots from their shotguns into the ceiling when he didn’t immediately do what they told him. That brought two other guards running but the three thieves quickly tied up and gagged all three and left them in a lecture hall on the first floor of the museum.
From then on they had the place to themselves, they spend half an hour gathering paintings and other artefacts that, it is assumed, they planned to take. In the process they trashed the museum, display cases were shattered, old valuable frames were cracked into pieces and backings were torn off paintings. Unfortunately, or fortunately, an alarm was tripped on a side door and they had to run with whatever they could carry. This meant that there was a large pile of art, including a Picasso, an El Greco, two Goyas, a Renoir, and a Rembrandt, that had to be left behind. The then-Curator Ruth Jackson told the Gazette “it was just like they meant a general clear-out of the museum” (Hampton, 2019). Luckily these paintings were left behind but there were 18 paintings and 39 pieces of jewellery that weren’t so lucky and were removed from the museum that night.
Included in the paintings that were taken were works by Corot, Courbet, Delacroix, Brueghel the Elder, Rubens, and a Rembrandt (which was then valued at $1 million). The whole haul was estimated at $2 million. Though, I will say that now people acknowledge that these numbers were way too low and that the Rembrandt alone would have been worth closer to $2 million at the time of the theft.
Below you can see all the paintings that were stolen that night. I have included colour photographs wherever possible but some are only available in black and white and are a little hard to see, sorry in advance!
Of course, the museum was devastated. They had nothing to go on until a few days after the crime when they received a phone call. The caller told them to send someone to a phone booth at Sherbrooke and Metcalfe, near McGill University. The museum security director went to the location and, just like a mf movie, answered an incoming call to the phone booth telling him to pick up a cigarette package that was lying on the ground. Inside was a pendant, one of the missing pieces of jewellery. The museum was so excited and thought that maybe the thieves were going to return all the stolen items this way.
They started communicating with the thieves by phone and mail. They received a brown envelope on October 26, 1972 with a photograph of all the stolen artwork laid out together. The envelope was marked “Port of Montreal” and the museum/police couldn’t figure out if this was a true clue or a bluff from the criminals who knew that the port is linked to the West End Gang, an Irish crime group.
The thieves asked for $500,000 for all of the stolen goods, and then they LOWERED their number to $250,000 (call the banker, I’m ready to make a deal). The then-Director David Giles Carter suggested that the group give them one of the paintings before they did the deal to prove that they actually still had them. He was given instructions to check a locker at Gare Central rail station where he found Landscape with Vehicles and Cattle by Brueghel. All good, right??
Wrong. Of course. Carter then arranged for a small amount of the total sum to be exchanged for another painting from the thieves. They had arranged it to be a setup with an undercover cop playing the middle man to do the ‘money hand-off’ but who would actually arrest whoever showed up. Unfortunately, a regular cop car drove by right before the meet was supposed to happen and scared the thieves away. They called Carter the next day to yell at him for setting a trap (which wasn’t a trap at all) and then there was radio silence for months.
Thankfully the museum got another chance. In the summer of 1973, a museum board member got a call from someone claiming to have information about the stolen paintings. The museum agreed to put up $10,000 to be delivered to this caller for information about the paintings’ location. They sent off their man to the meeting place, another phone booth. He left the museum at 2:00 pm and he was bounced around to 11 different phone booths across Montreal until 4:00 am. He finally left the money where he was told but never received the call telling him where the paintings were. The next morning he got a call at 8:00 am saying that the paintings had been left in a motel in Laval. Police searched the building from top to bottom but never found anything. They’re still not sure if this was a legit lead or a scam.
The Official Investigation
Right after the robbery the police immediately started searching for suspects. Initially they landed on a group of students from École des beaux-arts de Montréal who were known to museum staff. They actually surveilled this group of students for two weeks but eventually, they decided that this was going nowhere and deemed the students uninvolved. They also talked to the museum staff and the people who were working on the skylight repairs and ended up determining that it wasn’t an inside job, at least not directly. And that is where the official story ends. The police never released any names or details on suspects they were looking into and the rest of the missing paintings and artefacts have never been located.
Unofficial Investigations
Many people think that this case did not get the attention or investigation that it deserved so there are some vigilante detectives and journalists who have taken this case on as a passion project to try and get some new information or even find the stolen works.
One retired detective, Alain Lacoursière, who specialized in art crimes, is one such investigator and has a lot to say about this case. He has looked into this as a cold case and has a very compelling suspect of his own. He claims that in the beginning, the Montreal police didn’t spend enough time investigating this case and that after a year they simply closed the dossier with no leads, suspects, or clues. It’s worth noting that he also says that he doesn’t think the robbery the Wednesday before, in Oka, is related. But there are so many similarities I just had to include it.
Remember the art school students that police tailed for weeks? Well, Lacoursière says that there is one student, who hadn’t been included in the surveillance operation but who went to school with the group that was, that he can’t stop thinking about. He met this student at an art exhibit in 1988 and he refers to him as ‘Smith’. They got talking about art thefts and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts robbery came up. Smith seemed to know a lot about this robbery that police hadn’t released to the media so Lacoursière decided to lay a trap for him. He mentioned something about the ‘steel rope’ that was used to slide down into the museum from the skylight. Smith was quick to correct him and say “no, no, no, it was a nylon rope” (Hampton, 2019). Smith was right.
Lacoursière ended up staying in touch with Smith over the years and even visiting his house and talking for hours about art. He thought it was odd that Smith had the money to buy a house and a large woodshop, with no mortgage, straight out of art school. Smith simply told him that he came from a very wealthy family. After many years of knowing each other Lacoursière came to the conclusion that Smith did not have the paintings at his house, however, he could never shake the feeling that Smith knew too much about the crime and thinks that he was probably one of the three perpetrators but there was never any hard proof. Smith died in 2017 so we will likely never know.
As for other suspect possibilities, Lacoursière thinks that maybe the West End Gang or the Italian Mafia hired the three robbers. Or maybe even the Italian Mafia hired the West End Gang to do the job. Regardless, no one knows for sure and there are zero solid theories tbh.
Where Are They Now?
This is the part where I can’t give you a perfect Agatha Christie answer. No one knows where the paintings and jewellery are now. There has been no trace of any of them since 1972. Lacoursière thinks that many of them could be in South America where the police are controlled by powerful crime groups and therefore won’t investigate the leaders, whose houses are apparently decorated with millions of dollars in stolen art. Or they may be in Russia as part of a drugs deal. Apparently, when trading stolen artwork for drugs you have to take only a quarter of what the painting is worth in drugs. So a $10 million Picasso may only be worth $2.5 million in cocaine. Fun Fact!
The sad truth is that the police are no closer to finding these paintings and they may even be farther away because of the sloppy work done at the beginning of the investigation. We can just hope that somewhere down the line someone who has one of these paintings will take it to an auction or try to sell it through legitimate channels and then we might get somewhere.
Works Cited
Hampton, Chris. “The Skylight Caper”. Canadian Art. 2019. https://canadianart.ca/features/the-skylight-caper/
Steuter-Martin, Marilla. “Night at the Museum: Why the Great Skylight Caper at the MMFA Remains Unsolved, 45 Years Later”. CBC. 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/45-years-mmfa-heist-1.4273365