NY Times February 12, 2006
The Case of the Missing Munchs
THE thieves struck on the morning of Aug. 22, 2004, not long after the
Munch Museum had opened. Many of the 80 or so visitors there were
clustered in the ground-floor gallery, where the collection's most
precious paintings were on display.
The late-summer Sunday doziness was broken by the sudden shouting
presence of two men in balaclavas who burst in through the main
entrance. They came so unexpectedly, so brazenly, that at first it was
hard to know what was happening. Using a gun to force the museum
guards to the ground — neither security guards nor police officers are
routinely armed in Norway — the intruders wrenched two paintings from
the main gallery wall. They treated them with so little care, banging
one repeatedly against the ground to dislodge it from its frame, that
witnesses spoke afterward of their shock at the brutality of the
assault as much as of the theft itself.
The whole thing took less than five minutes, and by the time the
police arrived the thieves had long since disappeared. So had two
treasures from the museum's huge collection of works by the Norwegian
expressionist Edvard Munch. One was "Madonna," a lush, *****c ****trait
of a long-haired, bare-breasted woman. The other was "The Scream,"
Munch's classic embodiment of existentialist horror, angst and
despair.
The crime, and the ease with which it was pulled off, were seen across
the country as a humiliating blow to Norway, which regards Munch's
paintings — along with, perhaps, the music of Edvard Grieg and the
plays of Henrik Ibsen — as among its most precious cultural assets.
The police threw themselves into the job of finding the thieves, and
the city of Oslo offered $386,000 for the paintings' return.
One and a half years on, six men stand accused of the crime; their
trial is set to begin tomorrow. But the laborious, complicated
investigation has stumbled in a fundamental and profoundly frustrating
way. The police may have the thieves, but they don't have the
paintings.
"It's no secret that we don't know where they are," Morten Hojem
Ervik, the police prosecutor who is coordinating the case,
acknowledged in an interview.
Sitting on a wooden bench outside an Oslo courthouse before yet
another wearying pretrial hearing, Mr. Hojem Ervik tried valiantly to
put a positive gloss on the situation. But the fact that the paintings
are still at large is as much a source of embarrassment to Norwegians
as is the original crime.
"These paintings are national treasures, but also international
icons," Jorunn Christoffersen, director of communications at the Munch
Museum, said in a recent interview.
Followers of this sort of crime may remember that "The Scream" was
stolen once before, in 1994. But that was a different version, the one
owned by the National Art Museum across town (there are four versions
in all, each a slight variation of the others; one is in private hands
and one is a work on paper). And that theft was risibly amateurish,
involving a ladder propped up against a second-floor window and a
thief so nervous he fell off, nearly braining his accomplice. Timing
their crime for maximum public exposure on the morning of the first
day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, the thieves escaped with
"The Scream" and left a snide little note behind. "Thanks for the poor
security," it said.
That story had a happier conclusion. The police recovered the painting
four months later after an elaborate undercover sting operation, and
it once again hangs in the National Art Museum (away from the
windows).
But the 2004 theft was slicker and more violent, and the ensuing
investigation has proved to be that much more difficult. From the
beginning, everything seemed to conspire against the investigators,
starting with the glaring lack of security at the Munch Museum, which
had not so much as a cordon to keep people away from the art on the
walls. "As easy as robbing a kiosk," one police officer was quoted as
telling re****ters.
The police took so long to arrive that by the time they did, the crime
scene had been contaminated with additional visitors, and many of the
witnesses, including tourists sick of hanging around, had already
left. Although the closed-circuit television cameras in front of the
museum were working, they showed only grainy hooded figures moving
swiftly across the grass — no help for identification purposes.
The police do know something of what happened next. Clutching the
paintings, breaking off bits of their frames (and twice dropping
"Madonna" on their way out), the thieves bundled into a black Audi
idling outside and were driven away by an accomplice. They abandoned
the car shortly thereafter, after spraying its interior with a fire
extinguisher in an effort to obliterate forensic evidence. The police
found it later that day.
The Munch Museum waited for a ransom demand. Dozens of calls came in —
one from a psychic who claimed to feel the paintings' presence in the
United States, another from a trio of Filipino witches who said they
could intuit the paintings' whereabouts, though only if they received
an original Munch first — but nothing credible. And then, nothing at
all.
If the thieves were looking to make a splash, they certainly
succeeded. Munch painted both works in the 1890's during a period of
great, tortured creativity. "Madonna" (1893-94) is precious, but "The
Scream" (1893) is part of the national psyche. Its arresting image —
the strong, swirling brush strokes; the bold, vivid colors; the
anguished skeletal figure at the center, his mouth frozen in a rictus
of psychic pain — makes it one of the world's most recognizable
paintings.
A favorite of tortured adolescents, of readers of Dostoyevsky and
Schopenhauer, of anyone who has ever felt overwhelmed by the horrors
of existence, "The Scream" has been widely appropriated in popular
culture. It has been evoked by Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone," turned
into a brisk-selling line of inflatable plastic dolls and used on
anti-Bush buttons (and toilet paper) in the 2004 election with the
question, "Bush again?" (An exhibition, "Edvard Munch: The Modern Life
of the Soul," is scheduled to open on Feb. 19 at the Museum of Modern
Art.)
The worth of "The Scream" and "Madonna" together has been put at
anywhere from $40 million to $100 million. But the reality is that
such paintings are far too recognizable, and their histories too well
known, to be sold openly.
"They're never going to come on the legitimate art market," said Sarah
Jackson, recoveries and historical research director of the Art Loss
Register, which keeps a database of some 160,000 stolen and looted
artworks and antiques.
"Paintings like that are commonly sold for ransom purposes or as a
tool for reducing your sentence if you're arrested for some other
crime," said Detective Sgt. Vernon Rapley, commanding officer of
Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad.
Many such pictures turn up years and even decades later, after they
have passed through dozens of hands. Some never surface again.
The authorities say they know, at least, where the Munchs were hidden
for a month after the theft: in a bus parked on farmland north of Oslo
belonging to Thomas Nataas, a man said to be on the fringes of Oslo's
criminal community.
In a recent interview with Reuters, Mr. Nataas, 25, who is to stand
trial on charges of handling stolen goods — the other defendants face
different charges — claimed that the paintings had been stashed in his
bus, covered in plastic sheets, without his permission. (The police
dispute that, saying he had allowed his bus to be used.) When the
thieves finally told him they were there, Mr. Nataas says, he saw the
paintings briefly, long enough to determine that "Madonna" had a small
rip in it and that "The Scream" was undamaged.
Speaking on Norwegian television, Mr. Nataas also said the police had
been eavesdropping on him via a wiretap. "I don't know why the police
didn't come and pick up the paintings," Mr. Nataas said. "They had
full control."
But by the time the police did arrive at the farm, the thieves had
retrieved their loot and the trail was once again cold.
Mr. Hojem Ervik, the prosecutor, acknowledged that some undercover
officers had indeed been close by when the paintings were moved. "We
had some information that these pictures could change hands, but we
didn't know where or who was involved," he said. "We had too little
information to move in. When the undercover unit arrived, they had
already left."
A full eight months passed before the police arrested Petter
Rosenvinge, 38, who has been charged with selling the getaway car to
the thieves. He in turn led them to the other defendants in the case,
they say. These are Bjorn Hoen, 37, who has previous convictions for
robbery and fraud and who has been charged with orchestrating the
entire operation; Morten Hugo Johansen, 38, charged with storing and
delivering the getaway car; Petter Tharaldsen, 34, who is serving time
for another robbery and has been charged with driving the getaway car;
and Stian Skjold, 30, who has been charged with the actual robbery.
(The other robber is still at large, as well as others said to be
involved.)
According to Norwegian law, the police do not discuss individual
defendants or the charges against them before a trial. But Mr. Hojem
Ervik is willing to discuss his theory about how they pulled it off:
"We think this is part of an organized robbery network," he said.
The Norwegian news media has aggressively followed leads about the
suspects' wider connections to the European criminal underworld,
particularly the violent Kosovar Albanian gangs with footholds in the
region. But Mr. Hojem Ervik insisted that the theft was a homegrown
affair, "planned by Norwegians and carried out by Norwegians."
In fact, some see a link to a theft that took place four months
earlier, which remains one of the most spectacular robberies in
Norwegian history. A gang of criminals parked a truck in front of the
police station in the town of Stavanger, set fire to it and tossed
tear gas at the officers running from the building. With the police
incapacitated, more than a dozen men armed with automatic weapons used
sledgehammers to break into the counting room at Nokas, a cash
trans****t service nearby, in the basement of Norway's central bank.
Firing repeatedly at the police, most of whom were unarmed, they
killed one officer and escaped with $8.5 million.
The theory that the Munch paintings were stolen as a way to distract
the police from the Stavanger case — as well as to demonstrate that
the criminal world can do what it likes — is popular in the Norwegian
news media. Rolf Wideroe, who has been covering the two cases for
Verdens Gang, one of Norway's largest newspapers, said in an interview
that the Munch defendants were connected to David Toska, who has been
charged in the Stavanger case.
Mr. Hojem Ervik declined to say one way or another.
"His name is mentioned," he said of Mr. Toska, "but we have not wanted
to comment."
Mr. Toska and Bjorn Hoen, the Munch defendant, were also associated
with William Ellingsen, a longtime figure in the Norwegian criminal
underworld, who was shot and killed in February 2004 outside an Oslo
nightclub, Mr. Wideroe said. In another strand of the cat's cradle of
connections, Mr. Ellingsen was one of the men behind the 1994 Munch
robberies, according to the authorities. (He was convicted, but freed
on appeal when a court ruled that the operation to recover "The
Scream" had been illegally carried out.)
With six defendants awaiting trial, why can the police not persuade
them to reveal where the lost Munchs are?
"The main reason is that they're terrified of retaliation," said
Charles Hill, a former detective with Scotland Yard's art and antiques
squad, who orchestrated the return of "The Scream" in 1994 and now
works as an art recovery consultant. "If any of these guys talk, the
criminals will go after their families."
With the paintings still missing, the authorities have been attacked
at every turn: for lax security, for inept detective work and, by some
critics, for devoting too much time and money to the case.
Mr. Hojem Ervik claims the investigation has had a secondary benefit,
however: it has brought the number of violent robberies way down, in
part because more criminals are in custody, and in part because the
rest know the police are watching them. "We have really put the heat
on these criminals, and I think they know that," he said.
As for the museum, it closed after the robbery and reopened 10 months
later, after a $6 million security overhaul. The galleries have been
reconfigured to make it harder to get in. Visitors now walk through
metal detectors. Employees must use special cards and numerical codes
to enter offices and conference rooms.
For a time, the museum did a brisk business selling a "Scream" board
game in which players could take on the roles of the robbers and the
police. But it was pulled in response to public complaints.
Speaking in the cafeteria, feet away from where the thieves entered
the museum in 2004, Mrs. Christoffersen tried not to criticize the
police, saying she believed they were doing the best they could. But a
museum without its masterpiece is like a body without a limb.
"For us, the im****tant thing is to have our paintings back," she said.
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