1985 Theft
On 28 October 1985, during daylight hours, five masked gunmen with pistols at the security and visitors entered the museum and stole nine paintings from the collection. Among them were Impression, Sunrise (Impression, Soleil Levant) by Claude Monet, the painting from which the Impressionism movement took its name. Aside from that also stolen were Camille Monet and Cousin on the Beach at Trouville, Portrait of Jean Monet, Portrait of Poly, Fisherman of Belle-Isle and Field of Tulips in Holland also by Monet, Bather Sitting on a Rock and Portrait of Monet by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Young Woman at the Ball by Berthe Morisot, and Portrait of Monet by Sei-ichi Naruse and were valued at $12 million.
A tip-off led to the arrest in Japan of a Yakuza gangster named Shuinichi Fujikuma who spent time in French prison for trafficking heroin and was sentenced for five years. There he met, Philippe Jamin and Youssef Khimoun who were part of an art syndicate. Fujikuma, Jamin and Khimoun were the people who planned the Marmottan heist. In his house, police found a catalog with all the stolen paintings from museum encircled. Also found were two paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot stolen in 1984 from a local museum in France. This led to the recovery of the stolen paintings in a small villa in Corsica in December 1990.
Read more about this topic: Musée Marmottan Monet
Famous quotes containing the word theft:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)