On the night of March 23, thieves took three works from a private museum outside Parma in under three minutes. The paintings surfaced again in August, undone by a single mistake.
The Magnani-Rocca Foundation, a private museum outside Parma in northern Italy, was robbed on the night of March 23. Two masked men broke a glass panel in the entrance door, disabled the alarm with electronic devices, took three works off the walls and carried them out through the same door. The entire operation, according to police, took less than three minutes.
The stolen works were a pencil and watercolor drawing by Paul Cézanne, "Still Life with Cherries" (valued at roughly $7 million), an oil painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Fish" (around $3.5 million), and an etching by Henri Matisse, "Odalisque on the Terrace" (around $23,000).
On August 14, Italian authorities announced the works had been recovered and five people arrested in the case. The paintings were found in a storage room in a house in Parma, hidden inside an empty TV box. Four of the suspects took part in the theft itself, while the fifth held onto the stolen works. All five were originally from Moldova, and some had lived in Parma for years.
Carabinieri traced the group through evidence left at the scene and wiretaps. According to investigators, the thieves had already started looking for buyers, but the works had been entered into databases of stolen art, including Interpol's, making them effectively impossible to sell. Police noted that these were not professional art thieves, just people who did not understand how the art market works.
