[CPProt.net] A Gang, a Ladder and a Bold Art Theft

[CulPropProtNet / MusSecNetwork]

A Gang, a Ladder and a Bold Art Theft
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL


Creepy music accompanies the Bravo Network's six-part series, "Art 
Crimes and Mysteries," which makes its debut tonight with a hourlong 
docudrama on the 1994 heist of "The Scream" from the National Gallery 
in Oslo. The music is a cliché, but, let's face it, by this time so 
is Munch's 1893 Expressionist masterpiece, which now adorns 
inflatable dolls, T-shirts and coffee mugs. And so, too often, is the 
film, filled with lines like: "The cops used every trick in the book. 
It was a race against time to recover `The Scream.' "
 
The actual theft of the painting, valued at $70 million, was 
riveting, if not quite "the most famous art theft of the 20th 
century." (The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, and the 
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston lost a Vermeer, Rembrandts 
and other works valued at $300 million in 1990.) 

It was a ridiculously low-tech caper. On Feb. 12, 1994, as the Winter 
Olympics opened in Norway, two men drove up to the museum, threw a 
ladder against the wall, climbed up to a window, smashed it with a 
hammer, entered and emerged 50 seconds later with the painting.

Museum security was exposed as laughably lax, and the hapless 
authorities were plagued by hoaxes, including claims by antiabortion 
activists that they were behind the theft. Almost three months later 
the painting was recovered undamaged and four career criminals were 
arrested, lured into a Scotland Yard sting, this film's dramatic 
focus.

British operatives, Norwegian officials and others recount their 
roles on camera, but actors then play them in re-creations, a back-
and-forth that can be disconcerting, especially because the real 
people and those playing them bear little resemblance to one other. 
The bad guys are all actors.

Understatement is not this program's forte. "The world watched in 
horror as Norwegian police failed to locate the fragile masterpiece," 
we are told, and it is "three undercover cops pitted against Norway's 
most violent criminals." Charley Hill, the British undercover 
investigator who posed as a Getty Museum official seeking to buy "The 
Scream," actually says of one suspect, "He had the bug eyes you see 
in people who are obviously manic." And I thought the business of 
linking criminal behavior to physical attributes went out long ago. 

Once the sting gets underway, there are tense moments, as when the 
chief suspect, a gang member and convicted art thief named Bjorn 
Grypdal (yep, Norway has gangs) tries to lure Mr. Hill alone at night 
to a rendezvous site outside Oslo. If you don't get it, the narrator 
clarifies things: "What would Charley do? Go with the maniac, or risk 
losing `The Scream' forever?" Wisely, he risks losing the painting. 
There is, of course, a happy ending, but barely. From a basement 
crypt in an art dealer's country house, the painting is handed over 
to Mr. Hill as Mr. Grypdal's confederates in town demand a ransom 
equal to about $800,000. But Norwegian investigators are late 
delivering the money. Finally officers blunder in to make the 
arrests. 

There are other overtones of farce. All four gang members were found 
guilty, but three had their convictions overturned because the 
British operatives had entered Norway with false passports. The 
National Gallery's chairman, Jens Kristian Thune, who got a book and 
movie deal out of the affair, offers a post-mortem of some cynicism: 
"We didn't care about the conviction itself. For us the only 
important thing was to get the painting back." 

ART CRIMES AND MYSTERIES
`The Scream' 

Bravo, Tonight at 10 Eastern and Pacific times; 9 Central time. 
Directed by Ian Leese, Julia Harrington and Bob Bentley. Collette 
Flight, producer; Leanne Klein, executive producer. A Bravo and Wall 
to Wall Productions co-production, in association with the BBC.
With: Jesse L. Martin, host.
This series continues with "The Hairdresser's Tomb," the story of 
smuggled artifacts from the City of the Dead in Cairo (tomorrow); 
"The Puppet Master," about forged Giacometti paintings (Wednesday); 
"Women in a Bathhouse," about the recovery of drawings from the 
Bremen Museum (Thursday); "The Rubens Robbers," about a Miami sting 
that recovers a stolen Rubens (Friday); and "Tiffany Tomb Raiders," 
about robberies from a mausoleum (April 14).


http://www.nytimes.com/