For a French Burglar, Stealing Masterpieces Is Easier Than Selling Them

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2021

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Vjeran Tomic has been stealing since he was a small child, when he used a ladder to break into a library in his home town, in Bosnia. After moving to Paris, he graduated to lucrative apartment burglaries, living off the jewels he took and often doing time in prison. He became known in the French press as Spider-Man, and he began to steal art. Tomic has a grand sense of his calling as a burglar; he considers it his destiny and has described his robberies as acts of imagination. He eventually carried out a truly epic heist: a break-in at the Musée d’Art Moderne, in Paris, in which he left with seventy million dollars’ worth of paintings. But selling these masterpieces proved harder than stealing them, and that’s where Spider-Man’s troubles began. The contributor Jake Halpern tells Vjeran Tomic’s story; excerpts from Tomic’s letters from prison are read by the actor Jean Brassard.

This segment was previously aired in 2019.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNWC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.2	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:12.2	On a night in May 2010, some 70 million dollars of art were stolen from a museum in Paris
0:18.7	in one night.
0:20.2	For months, the French police couldn't find the thief and they still haven't found the
0:24.6	paintings.
0:25.8	Who pulls off something like this?
0:28.0	And how?
0:29.0	Here's contributor Jake Halpern with a story of the thief known as the Spider-Man of Paris.
0:44.3	It was the screw that gave it away.
0:47.1	Vierin Tomich was standing in the dark at night in front of a window of the M.A.M. in Paris.
0:52.7	That's the Museum of Modern Art.
0:56.2	He just used his pocket knife to scrape the paint away so that he could see the screw
1:00.4	better, examine just how it bit into the window frame.
1:04.4	And it confirmed his hunch.
1:05.9	The frame was old-fashioned, just like the window from a job he'd done before.
1:11.0	He knew how to take it apart.
1:18.3	A few days later, Tomich goes back to the M.A.M.
1:21.5	The galleries were open, and like everyone else, he goes into the front door, buys a ticket
1:26.2	and wanders around.
1:28.1	On the walls there are Picasso's, Kandinsky's, and some motion detectors that don't seem
1:33.3	to be working.
	...

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