It took thieves less than three minutes, the police said, to make off with three artworks by Cézanne, Renoir and Matisse worth millions of dollars during a bold nighttime heist in March.
On Friday, Italian officials announced that they had arrested five people in connection to the theft and recovered the art.
The Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, said in a statement that the recovery had followed “a complex investigation” overseen by the Parma public prosecutor’s office.
Following up on clues left at the scene of the crime and wiretaps, the authorities tracked down “a group of professional thieves,” Col. Andrea Pagliaro, the commander of the carabinieri unit that led the investigation, said in a telephone interview. The suspects are all from Moldova, he said.
On Friday morning, police found the three artworks in the storage room of a home in Parma, hidden inside an empty television cardboard box, he said.
The police released a video of the March heist captured by cameras inside its target, the Magnani-Rocca Foundation, a private art museum outside Parma, northern Italy. The video highlighted the ease with which the artworks were taken.
The artworks are:
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Paul Cézanne’s “Still Life With Cherries,” a pencil and watercolor work valued at 6 million euros, or roughly $7 million.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Les Poissons,” an oil painting valued at €3 million, roughly $3.5 million.
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Henri Matisse’s “Odalisque Sur La Terrasse,” an etching valued at €20,000, roughly $23,000.
The video showed two masked figures slipping into the museum in the early hours of March 23 after breaking the glass panel of the front door, flashlights fixed to their heads. It then showed them moving through the museum atrium, entering the room where the three works hung and easily lifting them from the walls.
Then the video cut back to the front hall, where one intruder passed two artworks through the front door to a waiting accomplice, before the second approached the door, carrying the third work.
Colonel Pagliaro said the video showed that the thieves had been “very organized,” working quickly and managing to deactivate the alarms with electronic devices.
The suspects had been based in Parma and some had lived there “for many years,” he said.
“Finding the works was the most important thing,” Colonel Pagliaro said, in particular because the suspects had begun to look for buyers, “even through international channels.”
The raid made headlines worldwide, coming some five months after burglars broke into the Apollo Gallery at the Louvre in Paris in daylight, making off with eight pieces of crown jewelry valued at more than $100 million.
The Magnani-Rocca Foundation was founded in the 1970s by Luigi Magnani, an Italian intellectual and collector. The collection includes work from several countries and centuries, including paintings by Goya, Titian, Dürer, and Van Dyck, as well as works by the 20th-century Italian artist Giorgio Morandi.
Stefano Roffi, who oversees the collection. said the theft had left colleagues “devastated,” and that the three works’ return called for “a fitting celebration,” according to an interview with ANSA, the main Italian news agency.
He said the thieves may have found it hard to sell the works because of their high profile.
“They are certainly not works that can enter the commercial market with impunity,” he said, according to ANSA.
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