The Kunsthal Rotterdam Heist
This is yet another case that made headlines around the world in 2012 when it happened. The main question on the surface is how did three guys manage to break into a museum and steal seven masterpieces in 2 minutes and 48 seconds, and leave before the police arrived? But there is so much more to this story than just that, strap in.
Let me just preface this by saying this one is a little long but just bear with me, I wouldn’t be writing about it if it wasn’t interesting.
The Plan
I’ll tell you more about the paintings involved a little later but we should really start with the heist itself. The main players in this story are Radu, Eugen, and Adrian who are all from small villages in Romania and who moved to Rotterdam to make money by breaking into homes around the city. Very career-oriented, these guys. They had been burgling houses for a while but they decided they wanted to step up their game by stealing something more valuable. One big risk and then one big reward that would make them rich. What they landed on was art (though they didn’t know how hard it is to sell stolen artwork if you don’t have a buyer already lined up, they should really read my blog). When searching for a target a flier for The Kunsthal Museum fell into their laps, which was coincidentally hosting a temporary exhibit of the Triton Foundation’s collection of contemporary artwork. They thought that contemporary meant valuable I guess and they decided this would be the perfect target.
Over the next few days, they solidified their plan. They each took their girlfriends there, at separate times, on “dates” to choose paintings to target, check out the security setup, and identify a weak spot in the system. Romantic. The fire escape door is soon spotted as the easiest place to enter the museum. They also take multiple drives and jogs past the building at night to see how busy it is and if there are guards at that time. Unfortunately, there are no security guards at night, while closed the museum relies solely on their cameras and alarm system.
In terms of the paintings, let me just say that I am confidant these these guys didn’t know anything about art. They knew that everything in this collection would be valuable (because it was in a museum), and therefore they choose pieces based on their portability and location. They wanted to be able to make one loop around the exhibit, collect everything in their bags, and leave making their time inside the museum as short as possible. Including their frames, none of the paintings selected were larger than 70cm x 70cm.
The Theft
With their preparation complete they wait for a dark night with bad weather to provide them with some cover. Finally, on Monday, October 15, 2012, the weather is cloudy and rainy, perfect. It’s decided that Radu and Adrian will carry out the burglary while Eugen waits for them and acts as the getaway driver.
So, it is still not clear how Radu and Adrian got past the electronic lock/panic system on the fire escape door. The police think that maybe they knew how to deactivate it by banging hard on the outside of the door because they had previous burglary experience (though why would this deactivate the alarm??). Regardless, they got past that hurdle and then because of their experience breaking into homes they were able to get in past the mechanical lock with no problem.
They entered The Kunsthal at 3:15 am and two minutes and 48 seconds later they are back outside with the door closed behind them. They had done their plan exactly as discussed and, surprisingly, the paintings were not alarmed or fixed firmly to the wall so they were each easy to remove. The only thing that didn’t go to plan was that the artworks were a lot heavier than Radu and Adrian expected but they were still able to collect all seven and get away safely, for now.
The Paintings
This is the sad part, all the paintings they stole are absolutely beautiful and all are masterpieces. They made off with a Picasso, a Matisse, a Gauguin, a Meijer de Haan, a Freud, and two Monets. Here they are below, just take a minute and appreciate them.
The Escape
What’s crazy is that the alarms did go off that night and the police and the private security company were alerted that a potential break-in was taking place. It took the private security guards eleven minutes to arrive and it took the police FIVE MINUTES to get to the museum. But by that time Radu and Adrian were gone. They contact The Kunsthal museum staff in the early hours of the morning and they race to the museum to assess the damage. When they arrive it’s clear that seven paintings are missing. Soon after they report this as a “successful break-in” and that morning the story breaks around the world.
As for the thieves, as I said before, they had zero plan for what to do now that they had these seven paintings. They moved them into Radu’s hall closet and then tried to figure things out. They thought that the only way to get money for these paintings would be to sell them to rich collectors but these types of people are actually pretty rare. A better option would have been for them to return the paintings to the museum in exchange for their insurance value (about $18.1 million euros) or even a smaller, but still substantial, finders fee. This would have ensured the paintings got home. But they didn’t even know this was an option.
Instead, Radu and Eugen go to Brussels the next morning to try to find a buyer. Their connection there, and I COULD NOT make this up, is called George the Thief. Incredible. But George isn’t able to find a buyer fast enough and the guys start to get freaked out by the robbery making international news. Eugen decides that the best plan now is to hurry back to Romania, taking the paintings with him, and try to find a buyer there. So he packs up all of his belongings including the paintings (cut out of their frames so they’re very small, tabloid paper size at most), and he and his girlfriend hit the road. The funniest/saddest thing is that he tells his girlfriend and other friends that he ran over a cyclist and that’s why he is getting out of town. Sure sure because attempted murder/maybe manslaughter is better than theft. He drives the full 2,500km in one go, almost two straight days because he’s in such a hurry to get out of there.
Radu flies out a few days later, on October 21, to try to help find a buyer in Romania.
The Potential Buyer
Once the guys are back in Romania they try to reach out to potential buyers but since they’re notorious criminals people aren’t super interested in what they’re offering. Finally, Radu reaches out to his friend Petre. Petre has made a bunch of money and knows other rich guys who maybe wouldn’t mind having a stolen piece of art as long as it’s famous, valuable, and real. So they have to get the paintings valued and authenticated. They call on an acquaintance named Mariana Dragu who works as a curator at the Muzeul National de Arte al Romanei, Romania’s leading art museum, and who values art on the side. When she first sees the works she thinks that they’re fake because no paintings of this value and fame could possibly be in the hands of these criminals. But when she starts to look closer and sees a sticker on the back of one from a famous art transportation company she begins to doubt her first thought, then she looks at the paint and signatures under UV light and finally concludes that they’re real. Mariana tells them to hand them over to the police and the guys basically say “yeah no, never doing that”.
When Mariana gets home she reads the news about the robbery and she feels incredibly guilty like she should have come up with a plan to save the paintings. This guilt leads her to go to the police and tell them everything, even giving them the photo she took of the back of the Matisse. Ultimately she’s the one who got the ball rolling on catching these guys.
In the meantime, the guys get nervous again that the paintings will never sell and they store them at Radu’s aunt’s house for safekeeping.
The Investigation
On the police’s side, there isn’t much to go on at the beginning. In the museum, they have a very bad quality video of the break-in and small signs of forced entry along with finger and footprints in the hall. They also started receiving tips from the public but ultimately all of this leads nowhere. Weeks go by and the police still have nothing, they’re starting to worry that they’ll never solve the case.
Once Mariana tells her story to the cops in Romania, they at least have something to go on and they start to get closer to the thieves. In early January 2013, they have a little breakthrough. Through looking into Petre they find Radu and Eugen and they tap both of their phones. They start listening to all their conversations about their attempts to sell the paintings and come up with a plan. The police want to partner with a real potential buyer who turned the guys down to cooperate with the investigation.
Their guy is Serghei Cozma who initially had passed on the paintings (the asking price was $50,000 euros, honestly a steal). The police get him to reach back out to Radu and Eugen to say that he is actually interested after all and to set up a meeting. It’s set for January 20, 2013, and Cozma says he will bring an art expert (read: undercover cop) to assess the paintings before he purchases them. The guys are suspicious but they agree anyways. Very smart guys. All seems to be going very well for the cops at this point.
But this is where things go seriously wrong. The day before the meeting with Cozma, Petre calls Radu saying that he thinks the police are onto them and are potentially tapping their phones. The police, who are of course listening to all of this, hear Radu say “what should we do? Should we burn them?” (Boon, 2013). At this point, the cops know their cover is blown and a few hours later they just go in and arrest Radu and Eugen without the paintings. Adrien is still on the run somewhere. (The reason they didn’t just arrest them from the beginning is that they were hoping that this plan would lead them to the paintings. They wanted to recover them first and then arrest Radu and Eugen).
The Destruction?
This is the saddest part of the whole story, brace yourself. After the arrests, Radu’s mother, Olga’s house was absolutely turned upside down by the police and she knew that it was only a matter of time before they searched her sister’s house and found the paintings there. She thought that hiding the paintings was the best way of protecting her son, she thought that without the paintings the police couldn’t prove that Radu had stolen them. Of course, she was wrong about this but that’s beside the point. So, in order to better hide the evidence, she retrieved the suitcase containing all the canvasses from her sister’s house and buried them in the cemetery across the street from her house.
When the Romanian police find no trace of the paintings at Olga’s house they keep searching houses in the village, including Olga’s sister’s house twice. People are getting more and more freaked out and Olga comes to a decision. She goes to the cemetery in the middle of the night and digs up the suitcase, opens it and brings the paintings inside. She lights the heating stove in her bathroom, one at a time feeds these priceless old masterpieces into it, and watches them burn to ash.
She later claims that she knew she had made a mistake and was just trying to protect her son.
The Trial
The reason why I put a question mark in the title of the last section is because, come the trial, Olga takes back her statement about burning the artworks. She said that she was pressured by the Romanian police to say that in the first place because they had never found the canvasses. However, the test results from the ashes in her stove were showed some paint residue, canvas remains, and tacks from the right time period to be remnants of three to four canvasses. This doesn’t mean that the other works are safe, they were panted on board or paper which wouldn’t leave any traces once burned so we can’t know for sure what happened to them but if Olga burned a few why would she leave any behind?
In the end, Radu and Eugen both pled guilty to the crime. Radu got six years, Eugen got five and a half years and later on when Adrien was caught, he got five years. Olga was also sentenced, though only for transporting and hiding stolen property, since they couldn’t conclusively prove she had burned the paintings, and received two years.
In my opinion, this is not nearly enough especially in light of the fact that these paintings are more than likely destroyed. Makes me sad that we will never know for sure.
Works Cited
Boon, Lex. “The Art of Stealing: The Tragic Fate of the Masterpieces Stolen from Rotterdam”. NRC. 2013. https://www.nrc.nl/kunsthal-en/
Charnes, Lance. “The Romanian Connection: The Kunsthal Rotterdam Heist”. Criminal Element. 2017. https://www.criminalelement.com/the-romanian-connection-the-kunsthal-rotterdam-heist/