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 STOLEN Masterpieces  The Mona Lisa Theft, the Gardner Museum Mystery, the Nazi Art Looting, and the Forger Who Fooled Göring Gilt Edge Books · London · 2026 Copyright © 2026\. All rights reserved\. First Edition\. ISBN 978\-1\-78460\-923\-5\. Published by Gilt Edge Books, London\. Every effort has been made to verify the historical accuracy of the events described\. All named individuals are real historical figures\. Primary sources are cited in the bibliography\. For the guards who looked away, the detectives who never stopped looking, and the empty frames that still hang on the walls\.  # Chapter 1 __THE MAN WHO STOLE__ __THE MONA LISA__ Paris, August 21, 1911  On the morning of Tuesday, August 22, 1911, a painter named Louis Béroud arrived at the Louvre Museum in Paris to sketch a copy of the Mona Lisa\. He set up his easel in the Salon Carré, the small gallery where Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece had hung since 1804, and looked up at the wall\. The wall was bare\. Four iron pegs protruded from the plaster where the painting had been\. The frame was gone\. The glass was gone\. The painting was gone\. Béroud assumed the work had been removed for photography—the Louvre had recently begun a project to photograph its major works\. He waited\. An hour passed\. He asked a guard\. The guard shrugged\. Béroud found the section chief\. The section chief checked with the photography studio\. The photography studio knew nothing about it\. It took four hours for the Louvre to confirm what Béroud had seen in an instant: the most famous painting in the world had been stolen\. The thief was a thirty\-year\-old Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia\. He was not a master criminal\. He was not an art expert\. He was a house painter and glazier who had done contract work at the Louvre and who, on the evening of Sunday, August 20, had simply walked into the museum during visiting hours, hidden in a supply closet until closing time, lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall on Monday morning when the gallery was empty, tucked it under his white workman’s smock, walked down the service staircase, removed the painting from its frame in a landing alcove, and walked out a side door into the streets of Paris\. The whole operation took approximately twenty minutes\. It was, in the assessment of one security analyst, “the most poorly guarded theft of the most valuable object in the history of civilization\.”  ## The Investigation That Arrested the Wrong Man The Paris police assigned their best detective to the case: Alphonse Bertillon, the inventor of the mugshot and the pioneer of criminal anthropometry\. Bertillon was a genius of measurement—he had developed a system for identifying criminals based on the precise dimensions of their bodies—but he was entirely wrong about the Mona Lisa theft\. The investigation quickly focused on two suspects: the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and his friend, a young Spanish painter named Pablo Picasso\. Apollinaire had a shady acquaintance named Géry Pieret who had stolen two small Iberian stone sculptures from the Louvre in 1907 and sold them to Picasso, who had used them as inspiration for his revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon\. When Pieret, apparently feeling guilty—or seeking attention—offered to return the sculptures through a newspaper, the connection to the Louvre made Apollinaire a suspect\. Apollinaire was arrested on September 7\. Under interrogation, terrified and confused, he named Picasso as an accomplice\. Picasso was hauled before a magistrate on September 9\. Both men wept\. Both men denied everything\. And both men were telling the truth—they had nothing to do with the Mona Lisa theft\. They were released, humiliated and shaken, and the investigation stalled\. For two years, the Mona Lisa remained missing\. Its empty space in the Salon Carré became a tourist attraction in its own right—visitors came to see the blank wall where the painting had hung, leaving flowers and notes of mourning, as if the gallery had become a tomb\. The French press raged\. The police floundered\. Conspiracy theories multiplied: it was the Kaiser, it was an American millionaire, it was a secret society of Italian nationalists\. ## The Return The truth, when it emerged, was both simpler and stranger than any conspiracy\. Peruggia had kept the painting in his apartment in Paris for over two years, stored in a trunk with a false bottom\. In November 1913, he traveled to Florence with the painting and contacted Alfredo Geri, an art dealer, offering to sell the Mona Lisa for 500,000 lire\. He told Geri he had stolen it as an act of patriotism—to return a masterpiece that Napoleon had looted from Italy\. This was historically false—Leonardo had brought the painting to France himself in 1516, and it had been in French hands since his death—but Peruggia believed it, or claimed to, and it played well in the Italian press\. When he was arrested in his hotel room at the Albergo Tripoli\-Italia on December 12, 1913, with the Mona Lisa propped against the wall wrapped in red silk, the Italian public treated him not as a thief but as a hero\. He served seven months in prison\. The Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in January 1914\. And the theft—far from diminishing the painting’s reputation—made it the most famous artwork in human history\. Before 1911, the Mona Lisa was admired but not iconic\. After 1911, it was the painting that everyone in the world could name\. Peruggia’s crime did more for Leonardo’s legacy than four centuries of art criticism\. There is a footnote to the story that has never been fully resolved\. In 2011, the investigative journalist Jeremiah Dillon published evidence suggesting that Peruggia may not have acted alone—that he may have been recruited by a notorious confidence man named Eduardo de Valfierno, who had planned to commission six expert forgeries of the Mona Lisa and sell them to private collectors as the “real” stolen painting\. If true, Peruggia was a pawn rather than a patriot, and the real mastermind of the theft was a man who never intended to sell the original at all\. The Mona Lisa, one suspects, would have appreciated the irony\. She has been smiling about it for five hundred years\.  # Chapter 2 __THIRTEEN PAINTINGS,__ __EIGHTY\-ONE MINUTES, ZERO ARRESTS__ Boston, March 18, 1990  At 1:24 a\.m\. on March 18, 1990—St\. Patrick’s Day in Boston, a city where that matters—two men dressed as police officers approached the side entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum\. They pressed the buzzer\. The night security guard, a twenty\-three\-year\-old Berklee College of Music student named Rick Abath, looked at the CCTV monitor, saw two cops, and buzzed them in\. It was the most expensive mistake in the history of art\. The fake officers told Abath they were responding to a disturbance call\. Abath came out from behind the security desk—a violation of protocol that, had he followed it, would have left the intruders locked on the wrong side of a bulletproof barrier\. They told him he looked familiar, that there was a warrant out for his arrest\. They asked him to step away from the desk\. He did\. They handcuffed him\. Then they handcuffed the second guard, who had been in the basement\. They duct\-taped both guards to pipes in the basement, and told them: “This is a robbery\. Don’t give us any problems and you won’t get hurt\.” For the next eighty\-one minutes, the thieves moved through the museum with terrifying efficiency\. They took thirteen works of art from five rooms, including three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, five Degas drawings, a Manet, a Govert Flinck, and a Chinese bronze beaker from the Shang dynasty\. They cut paintings from their frames with a blade\. They dropped at least one painting—there were scrape marks on the floor of the Dutch Room\. And they left behind works of far greater monetary value, including a Titian and a Raphael, suggesting either haste, ignorance, or a shopping list provided by someone else\. The total estimated value of the stolen works: over $500 million, making it the largest property theft in world history\. A distinction it holds to this day\.  ## The Will of Isabella Stewart Gardner What makes the Gardner theft uniquely haunting is not the value of the stolen art but what happened afterward: nothing\. The paintings were never recovered\. No one was ever charged\. And the empty frames still hang on the museum’s walls, more than three decades later, exactly where the paintings used to be\. This is not an oversight\. It is a condition of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will\. Gardner, a flamboyant Boston socialite and collector who built the museum as a personal monument to her passion for art, stipulated that the collection must be displayed exactly as she had arranged it, in perpetuity\. If any work was ever removed permanently, the entire collection would be dissolved and the proceeds given to Harvard University\. The empty frames are therefore both a crime scene and a legal obligation—a permanent memorial to absence, mandated by a dead woman’s iron will\. The FBI has pursued the case for over thirty\-three years\. Hundreds of leads have been investigated\. The museum has offered a $10 million reward—raised to $10 million in 2017\. In 2013, the FBI announced that it knew the identities of the thieves—believed to be members of a Boston\-based organized crime network with connections to the New England Mafia—but had insufficient evidence to prosecute, and that the stolen works had been moved multiple times since the robbery, their current location unknown\. The leading theory, supported by FBI investigation, points to two career criminals: Robert Guarente and his associate David Turner, both connected to the Carmello Merlino gang\. Guarente is believed to have stored some of the paintings in the attic of his Maine home for years before his death in 2004\. His widow, Elene, told the FBI that she had given two of the stolen paintings to Robert Gentile, an aging mobster in Connecticut\. Gentile denied everything\. He died in 2021\. The paintings remain missing\. There is a Vermeer somewhere in the world—The Concert, one of only thirty\-four authenticated Vermeers in existence, worth an estimated $250 million alone—that has not been seen by human eyes since March 18, 1990\. It may be in a basement\. It may be in a warehouse\. It may have been destroyed\. The thought is enough to make anyone who cares about art feel slightly ill\. In the Dutch Room of the Gardner Museum, the frame that once held Rembrandt’s only known seascape—The Storm on the Sea of Galilee—hangs on the wall, empty, waiting\. The gold leaf catches the light\. The wall inside the frame is bare\. It is the most eloquent artwork in the building: a portrait of nothing, commissioned by thieves\.  # Chapter 3 __HITLER’S MUSEUM,__ __GÖRING’S GALLERY__ Europe, 1933–1945 “The art was not collateral damage\. It was the objective\.” — Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa  Adolf Hitler was a failed painter\. This is one of the most consequential facts of the twentieth century\. He applied twice to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts—in 1907 and 1908—and was rejected both times\. His test drawings were competent but uninspired; the examiners noted that he could render buildings but not people\. He spent the next five years as a homeless itinerant in Vienna, selling watercolors of postcard scenes to tourists and frame dealers, nursing a grievance that would metastasize into one of the most destructive ideologies in human history\. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he brought with him a vision that combined political tyranny with aesthetic megalomania\. He planned to build a colossal art museum in his hometown of Linz, Austria—the Führermuseum—that would house the greatest art collection in the world and establish Linz as the cultural capital of the Thousand\-Year Reich\. To fill this museum, he needed art\. A lot of art\. And he did not plan to buy it\. The scale of Nazi art looting is almost impossible to comprehend\. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime systematically plundered approximately 600,000 artworks from museums, galleries, churches, and private collections across occupied Europe\. The operation was organized, bureaucratic, and ruthlessly efficient\. Two agencies led the effort: the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg \(ERR\), which targeted Jewish\-owned collections in occupied France and the Low Countries, and the Kunstschutz, a military unit nominally tasked with protecting art that in practice facilitated its transfer to German hands\. The looting was not random\. It was guided by detailed inventories of European art collections that had been compiled before the war by German art historians sympathetic to the Nazi cause\. Teams of experts accompanied the invading armies, identifying and securing works of art with a speed and precision that suggested extensive advance planning\. In Paris alone, the ERR seized over 22,000 objects from 203 Jewish\-owned collections between 1940 and 1944\.  ## Rose Valland: The Woman Who Kept the Records The most important resistance to Nazi art looting was conducted not by soldiers or spies but by a quiet, bespectacled French art historian named Rose Valland\. Valland was a volunteer curator at the Jeu de Paume, a small museum in the Tuileries Gardens that the ERR had commandeered as its central processing depot for looted art in Paris\. For four years, from 1940 to 1944, Valland watched as thousands of artworks passed through the Jeu de Paume on their way to Germany\. She was permitted to remain at the museum because the Nazis considered her harmless—a mousy, middle\-aged woman with no apparent political sympathies\. They were catastrophically wrong\. Valland secretly recorded everything: the names of the collectors from whom the works had been stolen, the names of the German officers who supervised the shipments, the dates of departure, the destinations, and the rail routes used to transport the art across France and into Germany\. She did this at enormous personal risk\. Had the Nazis discovered her records, she would have been executed immediately\. But Valland was as meticulous as the bureaucracy she was documenting, and her notes were never found\. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, Valland’s records became the single most valuable resource for the recovery of looted art—a comprehensive map of where the stolen works had gone, compiled by one woman with a pencil and an extraordinary memory, working in plain sight of the enemy\. ## The Monuments Men The recovery of the looted art fell to a small, unlikely unit of the Allied forces: the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section, known informally as the Monuments Men\. They were a ragtag collection of art historians, museum curators, architects, and educators—men and women who had volunteered to protect and recover cultural property in the war zone\. Their leader was George Stout, a conservation scientist from Harvard’s Fogg Museum, who had lobbied tirelessly for the creation of such a unit and who was, by all accounts, the most qualified person in the Allied forces to lead it\. Stout and his colleagues—including Walker