u/Heistorium

Le 21 août 1911 est un lundi, jour de fermeture du Louvre. Vincenzo Peruggia entre dans le musée, décroche la Joconde du Salon Carré, l'emporte dans un escalier de service, la sort de son cadre et de sa vitre, glisse le panneau sous ses vêtements et ressort. Il avait travaillé pour l'entreprise chargée de poser les vitrines de protection. Il connaissait les lieux, et un ouvrier qui déplace un panneau un jour de fermeture n'étonne personne.

Ce n'est pas le vol qui m'intéresse, c'est ce qui vient après.

Le lendemain matin, un peintre s'installe dans le Salon Carré pour travailler d'après le tableau. Le mur est vide. Il le signale à un gardien, qui lui répond que la toile est sans doute montée à l'atelier photographique. La réponse est plausible : le musée faisait effectivement monter des œuvres pour les photographier, et une absence de quelques heures n'avait rien d'anormal. Le peintre attend. Il faut qu'il insiste, plus tard dans la journée, pour que quelqu'un aille enfin vérifier.

Le tableau le plus regardé du musée a donc disparu pendant plus d'une journée sans que personne ne s'en inquiète. Non pas parce que la surveillance avait échoué, mais parce qu'une explication ordinaire était disponible et qu'elle suffisait à tout le monde.

Le cadre a été retrouvé dans un escalier. L'enquête a interrogé Apollinaire, puis Picasso, et n'a rien donné. Peruggia a gardé le panneau chez lui, à Paris, pendant plus de deux ans, avant de se faire arrêter en Italie en essayant de le vendre à un antiquaire florentin.

La légende que je ne reprends pas, autant le dire tout de suite : on lit souvent qu'il aurait agi par patriotisme, pour rendre l'œuvre à l'Italie. C'est ce qu'il a plaidé à son procès, devant un tribunal italien, et ça lui a remarquablement bien réussi. C'est une ligne de défense qui a fonctionné, pas une preuve de motivation.

Ce que je n'arrive pas à trancher, c'est si cette histoire dit quelque chose du Louvre de 1911 ou de n'importe quelle organisation. Une explication plausible arrive toujours plus vite qu'une vérification, et elle coûte moins cher à tout le monde sur le moment. Si vous avez un contre-exemple, un cas où quelqu'un est allé vérifier quand même, je suis preneur.

In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men dressed as police officers rang the buzzer at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and said they were responding to a disturbance. The guard on duty broke protocol and let them in through the employee entrance. They handcuffed him and a second guard, tied them up in the basement, and eighty one minutes after they entered they walked out with thirteen works.

What gets far less attention is what they left on the floor. Five of the thirteen were paintings that had been taken or cut out of their frames, and those frames stayed in the building. The museum's own conservation department has written about them, and they carry more history than the theft does.

The Vermeer frame is French, from the second half of the seventeenth century. At some point the top and bottom rails were cut down the middle so that sections could be taken out and the frame narrowed to fit the painting. That was ordinary practice. For centuries frames were altered, reused and swapped as owners and tastes changed, which is how a Dutch painting ends up in a French frame that has been sawn to size.

There is a second Vermeer frame in that building, black, with ripple moulding, a technique that mechanically carves the look of small waves into the wood. Gardner never got rid of it. She reused it years later to hold a textile fragment in another room, and the gilt label plate naming the painter is still attached to the bottom edge. So there is a frame in that museum today, holding a piece of cloth, still wearing the name of a painting that is not in the building.

One of the Rembrandt frames was modified again much later, during the Second World War, so that the painting could be taken off the wall quickly in case of invasion. It was rebuilt to come out fast in an emergency, and the emergency that eventually emptied it was two men with handcuffs and a borrowed uniform.

The Manet frame is the odd one. The four Dutch Room frames were left on the gallery floor where the paintings had hung. The Manet frame was found on the other side of the building, in a security office. The painting is small enough that it did not need to come out of the frame at all, and nobody has explained why they carried the empty frame across the museum before putting it down there.

The museum repaired all five and put them back on the walls as place holders. One correction I would like to make while I am here, because I believed it myself until I checked. It is very widely repeated that the frames stay empty because Gardner's will forbids changing anything in the galleries. I cannot find the museum saying that. Their own account of the frames is a simpler and more deliberate thing than a legal obligation. If someone has read the will itself and it does say so, I would rather be corrected than keep repeating the tidy version, because the story everyone tells and the story the museum publishes are not the same story.

Over the Easter weekend of 2 and 3 April 2015 a crew went into the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit company in London. They came in through the lift shaft, dressed as workmen, and put a diamond tipped industrial drill through a reinforced concrete wall about half a metre thick. Most of them were in their sixties and seventies. The oldest was seventy six.

The preparation is what interests me here. The planning ran back roughly three years. There were reconnaissance trips, and at least one of them was inside the building weeks before the weekend, later picked up on camera near the lift. By the standards of this kind of job that is a long and careful build, and almost all of it went on things they could control.

Then there is the part they could not. At twenty one minutes past midnight on 3 April the monitoring company telephoned the police to report that the alarm at the premises had gone off. A grade was applied to that call which meant no officer was sent. The force said afterwards that it was looking into why the call had been handled that way, and that its procedures had not been followed. Nobody came, and the men carried on through the weekend.

That is the thing I keep turning over. Three years of preparation, and the single most dangerous minute of the whole weekend was decided by somebody else's call handling, in a room the crew had no contact with and no influence over. You can plan the drill, the shaft, the disguise and the timing. You cannot plan the grade someone puts on a phone call at twenty past midnight. A plan that survives only because that call went the way it did has priced that risk at zero, which is still a decision even when nobody says it out loud.

The other half of it went the other way. They hit trouble getting through, and two of them walked out partway rather than stay, including the oldest man in the crew. The rest came back and finished the job. Three years of preparation had produced no agreed answer to the question of what to do if the hole did not get them in, and when that question arrived the group simply split on it.

The total has never been settled. Figures around fourteen million pounds get repeated, and were revised upwards later as more box holders came forward, which is the same problem every vault job has. A safe deposit box is where people put what they have not declared, so the only people able to total the loss accurately had every reason not to.

What I would like corrected is one thing. There is a detailed version going round in which the first night was abandoned because something on the far side of the hole was in the way, and I could not get that to stand up in anything I could reach. If someone here has worked from the trial material rather than the press coverage, that is the part I actually want.

Over the weekend of 16 to 18 July 1976 a team came up through the floor of a Societe Generale vault in Nice. They had spent about two months underground first, digging a tunnel of roughly eight metres from the city sewer system towards the bank. Once they were inside they had the vault to themselves until Monday.

The preparation is the part that gets retold, and one detail in it is worth more than all the rest. Before committing to the tunnel, Albert Spaggiari rented a safety deposit box in the branch and left an alarm clock inside it, set to go off in the middle of the night. Nothing happened. That told him the vault had no acoustic alarm, which is the one assumption the whole plan rested on, and he had bought the answer for the price of a box rental. Everything after that was labour. That was the only moment where the plan could have died cheaply, and it is the moment he tested first.

They emptied somewhere around three hundred boxes and left a line painted on the wall to the effect that there had been neither weapons, nor hatred, nor violence. The total has never been settled. The figure that circulates is around forty six million francs and I would treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a number, for the reason that applies to most vault jobs. A safety deposit box is where people keep what they have not declared, so the only people able to total the loss accurately had every reason not to.

Spaggiari was arrested a few months later. In March 1977, during a session in the judge's chambers at the courthouse in Nice, he went to the window, opened it and jumped. A motorcycle was waiting for him. Accounts differ on what broke his fall. He was sentenced to life in his absence in 1979 and the French police never had him again.

He died in Italy in 1989 and even that has two versions. The press at the time ran the story that his body turned up in front of his mother's house in France. The account that now looks better supported is that his wife was with him when he died near Belluno and drove him back across the border herself. I have seen two different cancers named as the cause, so I am not going to repeat either.

Nothing from the vault has ever surfaced. In 2010 a book appeared under a pen name whose author claimed he had run the job, and in 2018 a man from Marseille stood trial in connection with laundering the proceeds. He told the court the book was fiction. He was cleared on that charge and convicted on unrelated business offences.

So the heist is closed and the ending is not. What I would like corrected is the second half. If anyone here has worked from the French court file rather than the press coverage, I want to know what it actually establishes about who was in that tunnel, because the version everybody repeats has been shaped by a book and by films rather than by the record.

On 9 May 1671 a man in a parson's gown walked into the Martin Tower at the Tower of London, hit the Keeper of the Jewels over the head with a mallet, and left with the crown of England flattened under his coat. He got about as far as the wharf.

The setup had taken weeks. Thomas Blood was an Anglo-Irish officer who had already tried to seize Dublin Castle and had later attempted to kidnap the Duke of Ormonde, so this was not a first offence in any sense. He had been visiting the Tower in clerical dress with a woman playing his wife. The Keeper, Talbot Edwards, was an old soldier who lived above the jewel house with his family and showed the regalia to paying visitors, which was the ordinary arrangement at the time. Blood cultivated him across several visits and eventually proposed a marriage between Edwards's daughter and a wealthy nephew who did not exist.

On the morning of the theft the nephew was to be introduced. Blood arrived with three men, Edwards was struck and stabbed, and the party went to work on objects that were never designed to be carried anywhere. The crown was beaten flat enough to go under a cloak. The orb went down a man's breeches. The sceptre would not fit in the bag at all, so one of them laid it on the floor and set about sawing it in half.

What stopped them was not security. It was Edwards's son arriving home unannounced from abroad at the wrong moment. The old man, bleeding, got up and shouted. The party ran, were chased along the wharf, and were taken with the regalia still on them.

Then comes the part I cannot explain, and I have not found anyone who convincingly can. Blood refused to answer to anybody but the king, and he was granted that. He was brought to Charles II, and instead of being hanged for an armed assault on the crown of England he was pardoned, given back estates in Ireland he had lost, and put on a pension reported at five hundred pounds a year. He then lived openly in London as a man people pointed at in the street.

The explanations offered fall into three families and not one of them rests on a document. That the king was charmed by the sheer nerve of it, which is the version told at the time and the least likely to be the whole of it. That Blood knew enough about other people's plots to be more useful alive and talking than dead. Or that he had already been working for the crown in some capacity, and the affair was closer to an arrangement than to a crime.

I lean towards the second because it explains the pension, and charm does not. A king amused by a rogue lets him walk. He does not put him on the payroll for the rest of his life.

If anyone here knows of an actual document that settles this rather than an anecdote that has been repeated since the seventeenth century, I would rather be corrected than keep believing the version I find tidiest.

Sources: The National Archives hold the state papers relating to Blood and publish a document based education resource built on them, which is the closest thing to a primary route in for a general reader. One caution worth stating. The Tower of London's own account and almost every popular retelling descend from the same small set of seventeenth century sources, so the fact that they agree with each other is not independent confirmation of anything.

In September 1792 the crown jewels of France were being kept in the Garde Meuble, the royal storehouse on what was then place Louis XV and is now place de la Concorde. The monarchy had just fallen, Paris was in the middle of the September massacres, and the guard on the building had been thinned to almost nothing.

The robbery is unusual because it was not one night. Men climbed in, took what they could carry, and came back the following night. Then again. Over the course of several nights it turned into something closer to a crowd, with people drinking on the premises between trips, until the authorities finally noticed and started making arrests.

Most of the stones were recovered in the months and years that followed, including the Regent. The French Blue was not. A large blue diamond surfaced in London about twenty years later, smaller and recut, and it is the stone we now call the Hope. The connection was suspected for a long time before it was tied down using a lead cast of the original that turned up in a natural history collection, which let researchers test whether the French Blue could be cut down into the Hope without contradiction.

What I find hard to get past is that recutting is the only way to sell a famous stone, and it destroys most of what made it worth stealing in the first place. By the time a jewel like that is safe to sell, it has already stopped being the jewel that was taken.

If anyone here knows the current state of the argument on the recut, I would like to hear it, including the version where I have this wrong.

Over a weekend in September 1971 a team tunnelled into the vault of a Lloyds Bank at the corner of Baker Street and Marylebone Road in London. They had rented a leather goods shop two doors down and dug under the business in between, coming up through the vault floor.

The detail that makes this one strange is that they were overheard live. An amateur radio operator picked up their walkie talkie chatter during the night, worked out what he was listening to, and called the police. He kept listening and kept passing on what he heard. The problem was that nobody could work out which bank. Officers checked branches across a wide radius of central London through the night, and the men underground kept working.

The value taken has never been settled, and the reason is quietly interesting. A lot of what sat in those boxes was never declared by the people who owned it, so the loss could not be totalled by anyone with an incentive to be accurate. Several men were convicted a couple of years later. Most of the contents were never recovered.

I want to flag one thing because it gets repeated as fact. The story that the government suppressed press coverage of the robbery comes mainly from a much later film, and I have not seen it stand up. If someone here has a primary source that settles it either way, that is the part I actually want.

I am also happy to be told the tunnel length or the sequence is off. This is one where the retellings have drifted a long way from whatever happened.

Over the weekend of 15 and 16 February 2003, a crew emptied most of the safe deposit boxes in the vault of the Antwerp Diamond Centre. Reported losses start at around a hundred million dollars. Almost none of it has ever been recovered, which is why this belongs here rather than in a heist thread.

The vault sat two floors underground behind roughly ten independent layers of security: a combination lock with about a hundred million possible settings, a magnetic field on the door, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar, infrared heat and motion detection, light sensors, and private security on top of the building's own guards. None of it was defeated by force. The crew got past all of it without a single alarm reaching anyone in time.

The way in was patience rather than technology. Leonardo Notarbartolo had rented an office in the building for years, which gave him a tenant's access, a tenant's badge, and the ordinary right to walk past the reception desk without anyone looking twice. Reporting puts the crew's preparation at around twenty eight months.

They were not caught in Antwerp. They were caught in a wood beside a motorway outside the city, where one of them dumped the team's rubbish instead of burning it. A local man who walked there regularly reported the mess. In it were gloves, camera film, envelopes printed with the Antwerp Diamond Centre's name, and a partly eaten salami sandwich carrying Notarbartolo's DNA. The sandwich also led investigators to shop footage of another member of the crew buying it.

Convictions followed. The stones did not turn up.

Two things here are worth arguing over, and I would rather be corrected than agree with myself on either.

The first is the number. The hundred million figure comes from claimed losses, and claimed losses in a room full of people who trade untraceable stones are not the same thing as verified losses. Nobody in that building had an incentive to be precise.

The second is Notarbartolo's own account. In a prison interview published in 2009 he claimed the job was arranged by a diamond dealer as an insurance fraud, that most boxes had been quietly emptied beforehand, and that the real haul was far smaller. It is a good story and I do not buy it, for a reason that is checkable rather than instinctive: the vault had been refused an insurance policy because of weaknesses in its security. A fraud built on a policy is hard to run without one. Writers and investigators on the case have generally not accepted his version either.

What I keep coming back to is the shape of it. Ten layers of engineering held. A man with a lease walked through all of them. Then the whole thing came apart because somebody would not stop at a bin.

If anyone here knows whether any of those stones have ever surfaced in a traceable way, that is the part I have never been able to settle.

Sources: the case is covered at length by Joshua Davis, writing in Wired in March 2009, which is also where Notarbartolo's own account appears. Guinness World Records lists it as the largest diamond theft on record. Belgian court reporting from the 2005 trial covers the convictions.

On Monday 21 August 1911 the Louvre was closed to the public, as it was every Monday. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had worked at the museum on the protective glazing being fitted to its paintings, spent the night inside the building. In the morning he took the Mona Lisa off the wall, carried it to a service staircase, removed the panel from its frame and its glass case, and walked out with it under his clothes.

Nobody noticed. Staff who saw the bare wall assumed the painting had gone upstairs to be photographed, which happened often enough to be unremarkable. It was only the next day, when the painter Louis Beroud came to work in the Salon Carre and asked when it was coming back, that anyone thought to check. By then it had been gone for more than twenty four hours.

The best part, for me, is what happened with the evidence. Alphonse Bertillon was brought in. This is the man who built the first systematic criminal identification service in Europe, the inventor of the mug shot and of anthropometric filing, and he held records on hundreds of thousands of people. A thumbprint was recovered from the discarded glass case. Peruggia was already in those files from an earlier arrest, and he was even interviewed during the investigation. The print was never matched, and the reason the accounts give is that Bertillon's system catalogued right hands, and the print left at the Louvre came from a left one.

The investigation went wide instead. Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and held, and Pablo Picasso was questioned, both over an unrelated affair involving statuettes taken from the Louvre by an acquaintance of theirs. Neither had anything to do with the painting. Meanwhile Peruggia kept the panel in his lodgings in Paris for about two years. In December 1913 he took it to Florence and offered it to a dealer named Alfredo Geri, who brought in the director of the Uffizi to authenticate it and then called the police. Peruggia served a short sentence, having argued that he was giving the painting back to Italy, which does not sit easily with his asking to be paid for it.

One thing is worth flagging because it gets repeated as fact. The story that a con man called the Marques de Valfierno organised the theft in order to sell six forged copies comes from a single magazine article published in 1932 by Karl Decker. No independent evidence for Valfierno has ever turned up, none of the six copies has ever surfaced, and Decker had a reputation for decorating his reporting. I would treat it as fiction until someone produces a document.

What interests me most is the last part. Before 1911 the Mona Lisa was a well regarded Leonardo among other well regarded Leonardos. While it was missing, people queued at the Louvre to look at the empty space where it had hung. It came back in 1914 as something else, and a good deal of what makes that face instantly recognisable today was manufactured by two years of absence.

I have seen the opposite argued, that its reputation was already climbing and the theft only sped up something that was going to happen anyway. I am not sure that is wrong. If you know the scholarship here I would rather be corrected than agree with myself.

Sources: R. A. Scotti, Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa, Knopf, 2009. Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, Little Brown, 2009. The Musee du Louvre publishes its own account of the 1911 theft. On the Valfierno claim, the original source is Karl Decker, writing in the Saturday Evening Post in 1932.

In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men in police uniforms rang the intercom at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and said they were responding to a disturbance. The guard on duty let them in. Both guards were restrained in the basement. The thieves spent eighty one minutes in the galleries and left with thirteen works. Nothing has been recovered.

What keeps pulling me back to this case is not who did it but what they chose. In the Dutch Room they cut Rembrandt's Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee and A Lady and Gentleman in Black out of their frames, took Vermeer's The Concert and Flinck's Landscape with an Obelisk, lifted an ancient Chinese bronze gu from a table, and pulled a small Rembrandt self portrait etching off the side of a chest. In the Short Gallery they took five Degas works on paper and a bronze eagle finial. On the floor below they took Manet's Chez Tortoni.

One floor above the Dutch Room hung Titian's Rape of Europa, by a wide margin the most valuable thing in the building, and they never touched it. Eighty one minutes is a long time to be inside a museum. They had it, and they still walked past it, and instead they spent part of that time taking a finial and five drawings of real scholarly interest and modest market value.

Every explanation I have read has to give something up. If they were amateurs, that fits the crude cutting and the missed Titian, but the uniforms and the intercom story were not amateur work. If they were filling an order for a named buyer, the order is a strange one, because a Vermeer can never be sold and a Chinese ritual bronze is not what a collector of Dutch painting asks for. If they simply took what was portable, the Degas drawings fit and the Titian does not, but a large Rembrandt hacked out of its frame is not portable either.

The part I find genuinely moving is what the museum did afterwards. The empty frames were repaired and hung back in place, as placeholders, waiting. That decision has kept this loss in public memory more effectively than any reward, and it turned an absence into the most looked at thing in the room.

I would like to hear what people here make of the selection specifically, rather than the usual question of who did it. Does that group of thirteen read to you as taste, as a commission, or as eighty one minutes of bad decisions made under pressure? And is there another theft where the choice of objects only started to make sense years later?

Quick bit of context first, mine is an app rather than a printed book. I should have led with that in an earlier post here and didnt, so im doing it now.

There is a point in it where you can walk into a room and handle something yourself, or stay outside and let someone else handle it badly. Waiting is plainly the weaker move. It costs you money and it costs you a friend. On paper it has no reason to exist and i keep almost cutting it.

What stops me is that i think some readers would take it on purpose, just to find out what the other guy does when youre not in the room, even though it costs them. If thats true then the weak branch is doing something the strong one cant, and cutting it would be the mistake.

So im curious how that lands with people who actually read this stuff. Do you choose for the ending you want, or do you sometimes take the worse branch just to see what it does?

Im writing a long crime story for mobile and session length is the thing i keep circling. On a phone people play in ten minute chunks, on a train or in bed, and a story that needs you to remember who betrayed who two weeks ago can lose you without you even deciding to quit. So what actually happened with the story games on your phone, did you finish any of them? And if you dropped one, was it boredom or was it that you lost the thread and never found a way back in?

In the crime story im writing the player can suspect the wrong person all the way to the end, and the game never corrects them. No reveal panel, no summary of what really happened unless they dug it up themselves, they just live with the outcome. Half of me thinks thats the entire point, the other half thinks people will feel cheated. Where do you sit as players, do you need the story to confirm what really happened, or is not knowing the more interesting ending?

mine tracks money, heat and crew loyalty and i keep fighting the urge to add more trackers. as readers do you enjoy managing a small sheet while you read, or does every extra number pull you out of the story? where is your personal limit, two stats, five, a full character sheet?

after reading players say they bounce off anything with forced ads i committed to premium, the story mode is free and the full campaign is a one time 4.99. no ads anywhere, no timers. devs who shipped paid on mobile recently, what surprised you, refund behavior, conversion from free to paid, store placement? trying to learn before launch instead of after.

my heist story runs from 1964 to 1978, so no cell phones, no cameras everywhere, information moves at the speed of a payphone and a newspaper. i love researching the era but i keep wondering where the line is for players. do you enjoy period detail for its own sake, rotary phones and all, or does it become homework that slows the story down? and is there an interactive fiction that handled a historical era so well you still remember the feel of it?

Charts are dominated by the same puzzle and casino apps, the story rich stuff never surfaces on its own. Almost every narrative game I have played on my phone came from a Reddit thread or a friend, basically never from browsing the store.

For people here who like narrative games, interactive fiction, gamebook style things, where do you find them? Curated lists, this sub, specific sites? And does anyone else feel the store itself has given up on surfacing them?

Lately I keep bouncing off free to play games, not because the games are bad but because the economy around them wears me out. Energy timers, three currencies, a shop tab blinking at me. I drift back to anything I can pay for once and just own.

It feels almost old fashioned now, and the App Store does not exactly make premium games easy to find.

Curious where everyone lands in 2026. Do you still pay upfront for mobile games? And if you mostly stopped, what would a game need to offer for you to pay again?

the writing side of this i mostly get. what im chewing on is the systemic version.

say you want the player to slowly stop trusting a member of their crew. what actually works in play instead of a scripted "he was bad all along" beat? stuff im toying with: advice from them that is subtly wrong often enough to notice, a cut of the take that never quite adds up, an option they push that is always a little too convenient.

the goal is the player building the suspicion themselves out of how the game behaves, so by the time anything happens they already felt it. what have you seen actually land, and what tips the hand too early?

been chewing on this one. the fantasy usually sells you the cool competent criminal who has a plan for everything, but the moments that actually stick with me are when the plan falls apart and you're just improvising, lying to someone's face and hoping they buy it.

so im curious where other people land. when you read or play this stuff, do you want to feel in control the whole time, or do you want the floor giving out under you a little? and whats a scene that really nailed whichever one you like?