Tonight, the most famous painting in the world
stolen in a brazen heist.
Everyone wants to know
how a Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece
could simply disappear from the wall of the Louvre.
She's hanging on the wall at 7:00 AM
and by 8:30 she's just gone without a trace.
A renowned detective swings into action.
Louis Lépine is like the French Sherlock Holmes.
If there's anyone who can crack this case, it's him.
Sure enough, when they dust the glass for prints,
something turns up.
The hunt is on for this priceless portrait,
but more than one suspect seems to have a motive.
He and his fellow robber barons spend their fortunes
amassing the finest art of Europe's history.
Pablo Picasso was the perfect suspect.
The incriminating evidence was painted into his work.
Now we'll explore the top theories
in the two-year investigation for the missing masterpiece.
Police are on the search for a genius thief
from the higher echelons of society.
Nothing about this case played out
like the public expected.
Who stole the Mona Lisa?
On Tuesday, August 22, 1911, around 9:00 AM,
artist Louis Beroud arrives at the Louvre
and makes his way to one of the museum's most famous rooms,
the Salon Carré.
Beroud makes his living copying the old masters.
Today he's working on a painting
that features Leonardo da Vinci's
400-year-old masterpiece,
La Joconde, known to English speakers as the Mona Lisa.
The woman in the painting
most likely represents Lisa Gherardini.
She is the wife of a prosperous Florentine wool merchant
named Francesco del Giocondo.
Leonardo begins her portrait in approximately 1503.
Art historians believe
that it was da Vinci's favorite painting.
Leonardo da Vinci dies in 1519 in France,
and the king of France, Francis I,
buys it from da Vinci's estate.
And then a couple centuries later in 1797,
the Louvre, which had been a royal palace,
is converted into the world's largest museum at the time,
and that is where the Mona Lisa remains today.
By 1911, the Mona Lisa is not the most famous
or the most expensive painting in the Louvre,
but there's something unique
and mesmerizing about the smile of La Joconde.
It's what draws Beroud to be so excited
about including it in his latest work.
But when he gets to the Salon Carré on that Tuesday morning,
he's in for a huge surprise.
Instead of seeing that familiar face
looking back at him,
Beroud sees only a blank stretch of wall
and four empty pegs.
He expresses his concern with this missing painting,
but the guard reassures him
that there's nothing to worry about,
that the painting has undoubtedly been taken
by one of the museum curators to be photographed
and cataloged for the museum.
And so he checks in with the photography department
and makes a grave discovery.
Le Joconde was never taken off the wall for that purpose.
Turns out she's been stolen.
Panic ensues at the Louvre
and the museum reaches out to the chief
of the Paris Police for help.
His name is Louis Lépine.
Louis Lépine is like the French Sherlock Holmes,
a master of deduction.
If there's anyone who can crack this case,
it's Louis Lépine.
Lépine and his army of men arrive under two hours
after discovery that the painting is missing.
They shut the museum down
under the guise of a broken water pipe
and launch an investigation for any clues
as to what could have happened to the painting.
After an hour of searching,
police finally uncover some evidence:
Mona Lisa's heavy frame and protective glass casing
have been discarded in the dark corner
of a service stairwell.
What they deduce is that the thief
must have lifted it off the wall
and then kind of scurried away into one of these stairwells,
stripped off the covering and the frame
and discarded it and made off with it.
If you were stealing a painting that was on canvas,
for example, you could take it out of its frame
and roll it up, potentially hide it inside a cloak.
But the Mona Lisa is painted on a white poplar panel.
It has a heavy Renaissance-style frame.
It's 21 by 30 inches wide.
So with its protective frame,
the actual Mona Lisa weighs 90 pounds.
You can't stick it under your coat and walk out.
One of the police officers notices right away
that there is a doorknob missing
from this door in the stairwell.
They assume that this is the way
that the thief got out of the building with the Mona Lisa.
Unfortunately, Lépine soon discovers
that whoever stole the painting has quite a headstart.
The museum's maintenance supervisor says
the previous day on Monday, when the museum was closed,
he was walking through the Salon Carré
and saw the Mona Lisa hanging in her usual spot
around 7:00 AM.
By 8:30 AM, when he returned,
the painting was not there anymore.
At the time, this didn't raise any alarms.
He also assumed that the painting
was probably being photographed.
So Lépine is pretty upset
because at this point the thief could be
at least 24 hours ahead of them.
Within hours of the theft's discovery,
the story breaks in the Paris press
and news services from around the world
begin converging on the Louvre.
Officers take to the streets in search of witnesses.
They're in luck.
The police begin questioning businesses
that are around the Louvre,
and a department store employee describes seeing
a man with a bulky package under his arm.
He also says he saw the man toss something
into the Louvre gardens.
So they send police to go look in the bushes.
Lo and behold, what did they find? The doorknob.
The first eye witness says
that he saw someone carrying a package under his arm.
This was a middle aged man of trim build and average height,
clean-shaven.
The second eye witness, however,
saw someone at the train station carrying a bulky package,
but this person is revealed as a tall, heavy-set gentleman
with a big mustache.
Two competing ideas of what the perpetrator looks like.
So Lépine sets up roadblocks
and starts investigating every car
and truck leaving the city,
all the way to the borders of France,
but nothing is coming up.
Lépine has done everything that he could.
One thing that he does know is
that the frame when discarded is not marked up.
So clearly the painting had been removed
by someone that knew what they were doing.
So Lépine realizes that whoever stole the Mona Lisa
has real experience handling fine art and working with it.
He begins to suspect that the theft of the Mona Lisa
is an inside job.
Lépine decides to set up an experiment.
He has a replica of the Mona Lisa made
and hung on the four pegs on the wall
where the original would've stood.
And first he has a couple of his police officers
try to remove the painting and exit the building.
As the police officers went in and began fumbling
and trying to remove the painting from the wall,
Lépine kept time
and it ended up taking about five minutes
for the two police officers to get the wires adjusted
and remove the painting and exit the building.
He then asks a museum employee to do the same thing.
That museum employee very skillfully removes the wires
and has it off the wall in seconds.
This experiment confirms to Lépine
that the thief isn't just knowledgeable about museum work.
They also know the Louvre intimately.
Though the Louvre is closed to the public on Monday,
it is still a workday for much of the staff.
Lépine, thorough as ever,
requests a full list of everybody
who had access to the museum on that day
and who came in and out.
Nobody is above suspicion.
As Lépine's investigators go through this cadre of people,
they come across the plumber by the name of Sauve.
Sauve happened to be in the very stairwell
where the painting frame was recovered on that morning.
Sauve says that he encountered somebody by this back door
who asked to be let out
because the doorknob had been removed from the door.
This person, whoever it was, was wearing the white smock
that all members of the Louvre staff wore.
So Sauve's impression was that this was a museum employee
who got locked inside.
So he said, "No big deal, I'll let you out."
Sauve says he didn't see the frame
or the glass on the floor or any large object,
but he does admit that it's possible
the man could have had it hidden under his smock.
The pressure on Lépine is already intense,
but fortunately,
the renowned detective has a cutting-edge technique
at his disposal.
Lépine was a forward-thinking police commander.
In fact, in Paris, he was one of the first
to start examining fingerprints.
Lépine brings in an expert
to analyze the frame and the glass looking
for any telltale sign of fingerprinting or smudging.
After examining the frame,
he finds a fingerprint halfway
up the left side of the glass.
He applies a fine graphite powder
and he's able to actually lift the fingerprint
off the frame.
Lépine and his men compare the fingerprint
that's found on the glass case
to the fingerprints of the Louvre staff.
256 staff members who were there
between Sunday evening and Tuesday morning.
That takes a long time.
Determined to uncover a lead,
Lépine also orders interrogations
of all the museum's employees, including Sauve, the plumber.
Sauve is asked to look at a couple hundred photographs
of Louvre staff, employees, contractors.
He doesn't recognize the man he saw in the service stairwell
among any of those photographs.
Meanwhile, news of the disappearance of the Mona Lisa
has reached the press and there is public fury over this.
Why hasn't this priceless painting been found?
In the days following the Mona Lisa theft,
police interrogations of museum employees
lead to a dead end.
But Paris detective Louis Lépine
still believes it was an inside job
and continues questioning staff.
For many in the media, Lépine's process isn't fast enough.
The press is going crazy:
The Mona Lisa is a national treasure that has been stolen.
And Lépine, who is this world-famous detective,
doesn't seem to be able to solve this.
So the papers start really taking him to task for this.
On the one hand, you have the official investigation
happening within the Paris Police department,
but then you start seeing the media
start doing their own sleuthing.
A wire story coming out of the United States
turns the spotlight on a new suspect.
His name is Eddie Guerin,
a notorious thief with a huge rap sheet
on both sides of the Atlantic.
He is a guy who is known for committing big crimes
and for getting away with it.
He's been a huge critic of the French government
and according to one friend,
he's even confessed to the crime.
The theory was a little convoluted as reported,
but the idea was that Guerin had promised
this wealthy Philadelphia businessman
that for a million dollars he would sell him the Mona Lisa.
And such a claim would not be
out of character for Guerin,
who pulled off some daring heists
and became a career criminal at a young age.
Eddie Guerin is born in 1860 in London,
but his family moves to Chicago when he's at a young age
with the dream of striking it rich,
but his father dies and his mother is left to struggle.
So Eddie gets his first job delivering telegrams,
and he realizes that's a good way
to start picking up little items
that people maybe don't know are missing.
And he eventually builds up to bigger and bigger thefts.
And before long, he's already doing time.
By age 16, Guerin is in and out of detention centers.
This kid has become a thief in his own right,
but more importantly,
each time he goes to one of those prison settings,
he learns the craft from the experts.
Soon after Guerin
hones his thieving skills behind bars,
his crimes evolve
into high profile thefts around the world,
making him a prime candidate
in the case of the missing Mona Lisa.
By the time he's in his early 20s,
he's traveled all over the East Coast
and also throughout Europe,
pulling off bank robberies
with a bunch of criminal associates.
In 1888, in France, he had robbed the Credit Lyonnais bank
to the tune of $2 million in today's money.
And in 1901, he robbed the American Express office in Paris
to the tune of $8 million in today's money.
When he's finally caught and convicted,
French authorities sentence him to life on Devil's Island.
Devil's Island is a really treacherous penal colony
off the coast of French Guiana in South America,
and it's a place where conditions are so bad
that life sentences usually don't last that long.
Incredibly, in 1905, Eddie Guerin becomes the second
of only two people ever to escape from Devil's Island,
and he does so by carving out from a log a boat
which he paddles 200 miles from Devil's Island to the coast.
Once he gets to French Guiana,
he bribes a government agent
to help get him out of the country.
So Eddie Guerin becomes the stuff of legend
around the world.
After Guerin's escape from Devil's Island,
he fades out of the news for a while,
but after this audacious theft of the Mona Lisa,
his name suddenly bubbles back up to the surface.
On August 24th, 1911,
newspapers all over the United States run a story
that points the finger squarely at Guerin.
A rumor circulates that Guerin has had a forgery
of the Mona Lisa made that he plans to sell
to a wealthy Philadelphia businessman,
but when the businessman begins to suspect
that something fishy might be going on,
Guerin has no choice
but to break into the Louvre and steal the real thing.
In an interesting twist to this story,
that government agent
that helped Guerin escape Devil's Island
later reports that he actually received a letter from Guerin
days before the theft of the Mona Lisa,
in which Guerin says,
"I am going to take something from the French government
that they'll never get back,"
indicating that this would be an
incredibly satisfying moment for him
to punish the government that had punished him.
The French public is following this story of Eddie Guerin
and his purported connection to the theft of the Mona Lisa,
and each day it sells more and more newspapers
because everyone wants to know what happened next.
So an investigator tries to find Guerin,
and eventually does.
He's working in London, he's gone straight,
and he's working in a men's furnishing store.
His alibi seems pretty solid,
but Guerin's a sneaky character.
It's possible he could have spent all this time
building up an alibi so that he could sneak into France
and sneak back without anybody noticing.
On Tuesday, August 29th,
exactly one week after the Mona Lisa was declared missing,
the Louvre reopens to an enormous crowd.
Thousands of people swarmed the museum
and head to the Salon Carré to stare at the vacant wall
where the painting once hung.
They weep openly in front of it,
people bring flowers and letters.
It's a mob scene.
Up until the heist,
the Mona Lisa was best known among art critics
and kind of insiders in the museum world,
but this heist made her an international superstar.
People who in a million years
would've never visited a museum,
are there to see the site of the crime.
In the wake of the theft,
the floundering investigation
is becoming a public embarrassment
for the Paris Police,
and Detective Lépine is running out of suspects.
The newspaper, the "Paris-Journal,"
announces its own investigation
and says that it will give 50,000 francs,
which is nearly $2 million in today's money,
to whoever returns the Mona Lisa to their offices.
No questions asked.
The news of this reward
for the return of the Mona Lisa
brings a lot of people out of the woodwork
and suddenly the newspaper offices are flooded with tips
that might lead them to the Mona Lisa.
The same day that the museum reopens,
the Paris-Journal runs a shocking front page story
about a brazen thief who responded to their request
for the Mona Lisa's return.
This man described as "in his early 20s
and with a certain American chic."
Admits in an anonymous letter
that he has been stealing priceless artifacts
from the museum for the last four years,
including ancient busts.
Now, the letter writer doesn't say he has the Mona Lisa,
but he does say he's willing to return some of these busts.
So to exchange for what is about a thousand dollars a day,
the thief returns a small statue
and makes a full confession to the paper.
The paper publishes his confession verbatim:
It was March, 1907 that I entered the Louvre
for the first time,
a young man with time to kill and no money to spend.
A single guard was sitting motionless.
I suddenly realized how easy it would be
to pick up and take away almost any object of moderate size.
The thief goes on to detail
a number of other objects he's stolen over the years,
including a pair of Iberian busts
he sold to a friend in the art world.
This guy is bragging about lifting stuff from the Louvre
just like someone would collect shells from the beach.
Because this anonymous letter writer talks
so openly about how easy it is to steal things
from the Louvre,
the public begins to wonder if this person is the same one
who took the Mona Lisa.
The next day, on August 30th,
the paper reports on a second encounter with the thief
and he writes in a letter that he's not a career criminal.
He just wandered into this life
because of financial difficulties,
and he signs the letter Baron Ignace Dormeson.
That same day,
the bust he turned over is authenticated
and put on display in the "Paris-Journal's" front window.
Hundreds of people jammed the paper's office for a glimpse.
The Louvre confirms
that these small prehistoric carved bust
from the Iberian Peninsula are indeed missing
from their collection.
Now there's added pressure to have these new objects
returned to the Louvre as well.
So this so-called
becomes a public spectacle.
Could this be connected to the Mona Lisa as well?
And the paper runs with this.
People are eating it up,
and they are ridiculing the museum and the police
because the paper is doing more than the police
in their eyes.
Lépine and his men are not amused.
They're convinced the thief could now be
smuggling the Mona Lisa out of the country.
Officers from the Paris Police bust into the offices
of the "Paris-Journal"
and they tell them to reveal anything that they know
about the man who sent these letters,
but citing professional ethics,
the arts editor refuses to reveal their sources,
and this only further frustrates investigators.
The police carry out their own search
of the public records
to find any reference to a Baron Ignace Dormeson.
There's no one in France by that name,
but they find out that it is the name
of a fictional character
in an award-winning collection of stories in France.
As for the man who wrote those stories,
he is celebrated writer Guillaume Apollinaire.
Apollinaire is a true renaissance man.
He's a poet, a playwright, an art critic,
and he's even credited with coining the term surrealism.
He was born in Italy
and grew up speaking French, Italian and Polish,
and he emigrated to France as a teenager
where he took up the pen name Apollinaire.
The authorities start to look a lot more closely
at Apollinaire's background and his writing,
and they realized that just three days after the theft,
he had written about how beautiful the Mona Lisa was
and was condemning the Louvre.
The Mona Lisa was so beautiful
that her perfection has come to be taken for granted:
But what shall we say of the guard
that watches the gates of the Louvre?
Apollinaire comments on the lax security of the Louvre.
The paintings aren't padlocked to the walls
the way they are at most other museums.
Anybody could just go and take the thing off the wall.
He refers to the situation as careless,
indifferent, even negligent.
Apollinaire once signed a manifesto
condemning the old institutions of the arts,
saying they should be abolished.
While Apollinaire's writings
are largely symbolic,
they sound alarm bells for the detectives
on the Mona Lisa case.
Police quickly realize that he is part
of a whole community of artists
who are trying to turn French artistic tradition
on its head.
As Lépine begins to learn more about the artists
who move about in Apollinaire's circle,
he starts to suspect that maybe Apollinaire
didn't act alone.
Exactly two weeks after the Mona Lisa was stolen,
the case has taken a new turn with investigators,
who now wonder if the theft was a political act
carried out by modern artists
with a grudge against traditional institutions.
Detective Louis Lépine theorizes that the thief
who triggered the affaires des statuettes
could be part of a larger gang
that's holding the painting hostage.
The heat is on to identify the thief
who wrote to the "Paris-Journal"
and his entire band of associates.
On September 6th,
the Paris-Journal publishes a shocking story.
The two Iberian busts
that had been purchased from the baron
were returned to the newspaper the day before.
This leads the police
to go to Apollinaire's apartment
and they bring him in for questioning.
They are determined that they're gonna find out
what's happened to these statuettes.
And they say that an anonymous source
has linked Apollinaire with the fictional baron
who has admitted to stealing all of these artifacts
from the Louvre.
So Lépine is convinced that there is a direct connection
between the theft of Iberian busts
and the theft of Mona Lisa,
and that Apollinaire is the ringleader
behind the gang that made both of these thefts happen.
The police begin to wonder if perhaps
they're dealing not with one thief,
but a whole network of organized criminals.
Lépine and his men spend hours
grilling Apollinaire.
They tell him,
"If you don't reveal to us the identity of the baron,
we are going to charge you with harboring a criminal,
with possession of stolen goods,
and with interfering with a police investigation."
Apollinaire finally cracks
and identifies the thief as Gery-Pieret,
a struggling Belgian artist
who'd been living in Apollinaire's apartment
and working as his secretary.
Having come clean,
Apollinaire assumes now he'll be free.
Not so fast.
Instead, he's taken to prison and interrogated once again.
Lépine is relentless. He is pushing him.
I want the names. I want your associates.
Who else was involved in the theft
and who purchased these statues?
Apollinaire is just digging himself deeper and deeper
as the investigation goes on.
He admits that on the day of the heist,
he had actually bought Pieret a train ticket to Marseille
and urged him to get out of town as quickly as possible.
A day after the papers published the news
of Apollinaire's arrest,
the "Paris-Journal" gets another letter from the baron,
who's now identified as Pieret.
He's in Brussels far out of the reach of the Paris Police,
but he insists that his old boss
had nothing to do with the thefts of the busts.
Apollinaire swears up and down
he has nothing to do with the theft of the Mona Lisa,
but Apollinaire as a foreigner
makes a convenient scapegoat.
Lépine doesn't believe Apollinaire's story.
He tells him that if he doesn't reveal the name
of others who have bought these statuettes,
that they will go after all of his friends
in this community of artists.
Eventually Apollinaire breaks
and identifies the man who bought the bust from Pieret
as an up-and-coming artist named Pablo Picasso.
Like Apollinaire,
the young Spanish painter is a foreigner
who's called for the destruction of the Louvre.
Both men are part of a group of artistic firebrands
known around town as the Wild Men of Paris.
Lépine now believes that this group of artists
is a gang sophisticated and motivated enough
to steal the Mona Lisa.
Two days after Apollinaire is arrested,
police show up at Picasso's apartment
and arrest him as well.
Inside the apartment,
Picasso was working on a new painting
with large scale female nudes all painted
in a very abstract manner.
Picasso was actually using
these prehistoric Iberian statuettes
as an inspiration for the faces of the women
in this monumental painting.
If the police had taken the time
to really examine Picasso's new work in progress,
they would've realized that the evidence
was staring at them in plain sight.
Picasso is literally shaking with fear
as he's brought to the police station
and brought before the magistrate.
There he sees a Apollinaire similarly disheveled and broken.
Picasso denies that he's ever had anything to do
with the theft of the statuettes or anything else.
Beyond that, he says,
"I have never even seen this man, Apollinaire, in my life."
Both men endure several more days
of intense interrogation
before finally appearing before a judge.
Apollinaire and Picasso are both said to have cried
and apologized profusely for stealing any of the artifacts
from the Louvre.
But they both insist that they had nothing to do
with the theft of the Mona Lisa.
As much as Lépine thought he had cracked the case,
judges failed to find any evidence
that links definitively Apollinaire, Picasso,
or Gery-Pieret to the theft of the Mona Lisa.
Eventually they're released
and the trail once again goes cold,
and the Paris Police have to come up with some new ideas.
As days turn to weeks,
investigators looking into the Mona Lisa heist
are chasing leads that go nowhere.
Eventually, the Paris Police are forced
to look deeper at Louvre insiders.
They continue to fingerprint the Louvre employees
and contractors,
but they've come up empty-handed,
and the French public is getting impatient
with their methods.
After Lépine had exhausted
all of the traditional forms of evidence,
he still was at ground zero.
And so he decided that he would look
into the newest form of behavioral evidence, profiling.
And as he did that, he started to recognize again
and reevaluate and then re-theorize
based on the things that he knows about,
that the person had intimate knowledge
about the painting.
Lépine and his forces ascertained
that this criminal must be educated,
must be in the know, must be wealthy.
This clearly had to be someone either as a buyer
that was a lover of art,
or the thief themselves was stealing this painting
to keep in their own personal collection.
Although Leonardo da Vinci left behind
thousands of drawings,
he only left behind fewer than 20 paintings.
And the Mona Lisa is so emblematic
of the Italian Renaissance,
a painting like this would be the crown jewel
of any art collection.
Even Napoleon was enamored by the woman in the painting
and he took the painting from the Louvre
and hung it in his private bed chambers from 1800 to 1804,
A little over 100 years later,
investigators wonder if another powerful man
took the portrait for himself.
Around the time of the Mona Lisa theft,
American entrepreneurs are traveling around Europe
and buying art at a frenzied pace throughout the continent.
And among those collectors is John Pierpont Morgan,
J.P. Morgan.
This is a former railroad tycoon
who works in the upper echelons of not just industry,
but also politics.
J.P. Morgan is responsible for the formation
of major multinational corporations,
like General Electric and U.S. Steel.
He also has a hand as a major investor in companies
like Western Union and Aetna.
He's also one of the most active art collectors
in America at that time.
He has an absolutely incredible collection
of more than 20,000 items.
He has Raphael's Colonna Altarpiece.
He has several rare paintings by Vermeer.
So he is someone who might have the wherewithal
to pull off something as bold as the theft
of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.
No one else had that kind of money,
and appreciation for European art,
and that level of unchecked greed.
When the search for the stolen Mona Lisa
peters out in France in the fall of 1911,
many observers speculate that she could already be hanging
in one of Morgan's mansions, or could be headed there soon.
Suspicion only grows when it's discovered
that Morgan was on vacation in Italy
at the time of the Mona Lisa theft.
The thought is that he actually had the painting
delivered to him while he was there.
There's a growing belief amongst the French populace
that only an American millionaire
could have pulled off this heist
and had so much money to enlist the help
of professional thieves
to acquire this national masterpiece
for their own private enjoyment.
It wouldn't be the first time J.P. Morgan
had been caught with a stolen art treasure.
J.P. Morgan actually did have a stolen item
in his collection.
He had one of the vestments of Pope Nicholas IV,
but upon realizing that this was a stolen work,
he returned it to Italy.
Months into the case,
the investigation is unsuccessful,
but the speculation over J.P. Morgan's involvement
is very much alive.
In 1912, Morgan goes to France for a spa vacation
and the tabloids go berserk.
They're like, "That's it, he's here to get the Mona Lisa.
He's here to meet mysterious men
who he is gonna get this piece smuggled to him
for $1 million."
It's a wild theory
that doesn't actually have any basis in fact.
But Morgan at this time is just catnip
for conspiracy theorists who are going after him harder
than police have gone after any actual suspect.
Morgan denies any connection to this heist
and says, "I actually wish I was somehow involved,
'cause I would buy it and give it back to the Louvre."
Not everyone believes this,
but in the absence of any evidence,
the police and the French public
are forced to turn their attention elsewhere.
Mona Lisa remains a top international headline
until April 14, 1912,
when the sinking of the Titanic
actually knocks it off the front pages.
By this time, many people accept that the Mona Lisa
is never coming back to the Louvre,
and in fact, the Louvre itself removes the painting
from its official catalog.
Many people believe that the Mona Lisa
is now far away from Paris and may never be seen again.
It's 1913.
Nearly two years have passed since the Mona Lisa was stolen.
The case has gone stone cold,
but that changes
when a prominent art and antiques dealer
receives a mysterious letter.
An art dealer by the name of Alfredo Geri
is running advertisements in Italian newspapers
stating that he's willing to pay top price
for high quality works of art.
Early in December, he gets a letter
with a Paris postmark from a guy named Leonard
who says that he has stolen the Mona Lisa.
The letter goes on to say that in exchange for 500,000 lira,
approximately 3 million US dollars today,
he will bring the painting back to Italy,
where it rightfully belongs.
The letter is actually pretty articulate
in its love of Italy.
It says that,
" The stolen work of Leonardo da Vinci is in my possession.
It seems to belong to Italy since it's painter was Italian.
My dream is to give back this masterpiece
to the land from which it came
and the country that inspired it."
Whoever this Leonard is,
he's operating under the impression
that Napoleon stole the Mona Lisa from its native Italy
and brought it to France,
but that's actually not the case.
Initially, Geri suspects the letter is a hoax
and holds off on notifying the authorities.
In the ensuing two years, Europe has been wracked
with Mona Lisa fever.
Countless claims of its whereabouts
or fakes being issued and being immediately dismissed
are rampant.
And Geri doesn't want to be taken for a fool,
but something in this letter piques his interest.
In the letter, Leonard talks about
some of the details on the backside of the wooden panel
of the Mona Lisa,
and Geri worries that it actually might
have some truth to it.
Geri invites the man to his gallery
for a clandestine meeting on December 10, 1913.
Geri is waiting, and in walks a thin younger man
who insists that he has the real Mona Lisa.
And the reason he knows this is
because he stole the painting himself.
Geri isn't convinced,
but he does agree to meet the letter writer
with the director of Florence's famed Uffizi Museum.
He's there to authenticate maybe the Mona Lisa.
The man pulls a trunk
from under the hotel room's bed.
This looks like just an ordinary trunk,
and when he opens it, Geri is immediately disappointed.
It's just discarded items, but it has a secret.
It has a false bottom.
So he pulls the false bottom from the trunk,
and there is a solid plank of wood,
And the Mona Lisa smile emerges.
The painting is real.
Geri immediately alerts the authorities.
Leonard is arrested,
and name is discovered to be Vincenzo Peruggia.
Peruggia is an Italian national
who had moved to France hoping to become an artist,
but instead he became a laborer
working in the Louvre from October, 1910 to January, 1911.
So as Lépine had suspected,
he had worked at the Louvre as a subcontractor,
manufacturing the protective glass boxes
that held artwork like the Mona Lisa.
Interestingly, the Paris Police
had already interviewed Peruggia more than once,
but he was so calm and cooperative-seeming
that they had neglected to even fingerprint him.
The whole time the French police
were inside his dingy apartment,
the Mona Lisa was hiding right there under his bed.
At trial,
Peruggia's simple but effective plot is revealed.
He enters with the crowds on a Sunday afternoon.
He hides in a closet.
When it opens Monday, the closed day,
he steals a white smock, looks like an employee,
because he fabricated the piece,
he knows how to take it off, takes it off immediately,
and then heads to the stairwell.
Peruggia said he'd stolen a key
to open that door to the stairwell, but it didn't work.
So he tried to use a screwdriver,
but all that happened was the doorknob fell off.
By the time that plumber came along,
he'd managed to safely tuck the painting under his smock
to make that getaway.
The defendant insisted that he had done this
all out of national pride
because Mona Lisa belonged in Italy,
the home of Leonardo da Vinci.
To immense fanfare, France's national treasure,
the Mona Lisa, is returned on January 4, 1914.
Peruggia pleads guilty,
but the court finds him guilty of the theft,
but for the right reasons,
they claim that he was acting under a patriotic duty
and he's sentenced to only one year.
Peruggia serves only eight months
for stealing the Mona Lisa.
Once the Mona Lisa returns to the Louvre,
it becomes more famous than ever,
attracting over 100,000 visitors in its first two days.
Today, huge crowds still vie for a firsthand look.
Few of them aware
of the international mystery she sparked
more than a hundred years ago.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching this "Case Closed" episode
of "History's Greatest Mysteries."