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

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2019

⏱️ 20 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 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	These are just anecdotes, but it's building up into something more coherent.
0:09.0	And I think it's interesting to really try to unravel what his ties.
0:13.0	There's this sort of country city divide for their own convenient, and then it's not clear where it goes next.
0:20.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:28.9	You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:32.8	In 2010, on a night in May, some $70 million worth of art was stolen from a museum in Paris in one night.
0:42.3	For months, the French police couldn't find the thief, and they still haven't found the
0:45.7	paintings.
0:46.7	It seems like something from a heist movie, but this actually happened, a $70 million theft,
0:52.3	and who pulls off something like that? And how?
0:55.0	Here's contributor Jake Halpern, with the story of the thief known as the Spider-Man of Paris.
1:01.0	It was the screw that gave it away.
1:12.6	Vera and Tomich was standing in the dark at night in front of a window of the MAM in Paris.
1:18.6	That's the Museum of Modern Art.
1:21.6	He just used his pocket knife to scrape the paint away so that he could see the screw better,
1:26.6	examined just how it bit into the window frame.
1:29.3	And it confirmed his hunch. The frame was old-fashioned, just like the window from a job he'd done before.
1:35.3	He knew how to take it apart.
1:42.3	A few days later, Tomich goes back to the MAM.
1:47.4	The galleries are open, and like everyone else, he goes into the front door, buys a ticket, and wanders around.
1:53.9	On the walls, there are Picasso's, Kandinsky's, and some motion detectors that don't seem to be working.
	...

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