Displaying items by tag: Art Theft

The thieves allegedly behind one of the most brazen art thefts in American history, perpetrated 25 years ago on Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, have been revealed as two members of a local organized crime syndicate. The controversial right-wing website Breitbart News first reported their names Sunday as George Reissfelder, then 49, and Lenny DiMuzio, then 42, citing sources within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Breitbart story appears to follow-up on a segment produced by WCVB TV of Boston, which states that the FBI has known the suspects’ names for some time, but has not released them publicly.

Both suspects died within a year of their purported March 18, 1990 break-in at the museum, frustrating investigators who have searched in vain for the 13 works since — including drawings and paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Degas, and others, worth some $500 million today.

An East Hampton man stands accused this week of selling over 60 forged paintings, which he claimed to be by Jackson Pollock, to private collectors and on eBay, netting him nearly $1.9 million.

A special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in seeking a warrant for the arrest of John D. Re, 54, said he had engaged in the scheme since March 2005 and at least until this past January. According to the complaint by the agent, Meredith Savona of the bureau’s art theft and art fraud division, Mr. Re falsely told collectors he had come across a trove of Pollock paintings in 1999, when he was hired to clean out the basement of an East Hampton woman, Barbara Schulte, three years after the death of her husband, George Schulte, a woodworker and antiques restorer.

Three people are being held in connection with the theft of paintings worth at least 100 million dollars from a Paris gallery last year, but the works are still missing, a legal official said Saturday.

The three, a woman suspected of taking part in the theft and two people suspected of handling stolen goods, were arrested and charged over the robbery of the five paintings, by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Ferdinand Leger and Amedeo Modigliani, and placed in custody on September 16, the official said.

A lone burglar sheared off a gate padlock and broke a window to get into the city-run Musee d'Art Moderne in the brazen operation during the night of May 19 last year.

The paintings were found to be missing just as the museum, a major tourist attraction near the Eiffel Tower, was about to open.

Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe later said one of the museum's alarms had been "partly malfunctioning" since the end of March, and that it was still awaiting repair when the thieves struck.

The stolen Picasso alone -- the cubist "Dove with Green Peas," which the Spanish artist created in 1912 -- is worth some 25 million euros, according to the mayor's deputy for culture, Christophe Girard.