The Observer.

Hello, I'm Alexi.

Welcome to the slow newscast from The Observer.

A few years ago, I spent some time investigating the murky world of art theft.

It's a subject that has always fascinated me,

from the recent Louvre heist to the 2004 theft of monks the scream. Maybe it's because

stealing a painting from a museum takes a lot of planning, like the thieves who disguised themselves

as police to steal $500 million worth of art from a Boston

museum, a 30-year-old case that is still unsolved. Or maybe it's because the world of art theft

involves all sorts of characters, from Old Etonians to Slovakian gangsters. When it comes to

recovering stolen paintings, insurance companies

and investigators often have to go deep into the criminal underworld. Through intermediaries,

they make contact with the thieves, and often negotiate secret ransoms to get paintings back.

But what happens if a thief isn't part of a criminal gang?

What happens if he's an obsessive, someone with a burning desire to possess a piece of art

for its own sake? How do you solve a case like that? That's the question our new show

examines, produced by Ada Baroume and reported by

Stephen Smith. This is Freud's Missing Bacon. I hope you enjoy the show.

We're just outside one of the few salient locations and, as it were, known facts of this case.

Tell me how this fits into the story.

The painting was actually stolen here in 1988, in May.

There was an exhibition organized here by the British Council.

...