"Criminal Masterminds"

Two instances of bizarre breakings and enterings caught my attention recently. Apparently Whitey Bulger is the only person who can pull of a decent art theft these days.

On Feb. 9th, three masked men walked into the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich and walked out with a Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh, and a Monet. That's it: they walked in, grabbed, the paintings, walked out, and sped off in a van. So much for an elaborate heist plan. And to make things extra weird, police found two of the paintings nine days later in a car parked outside a psychiatric facility. Perhaps they were stolen by some intrepid inmates?

And back in November, news surfaced that a group of "cultural guerillas" had broken into the Panthéon in Paris and set up a secret lair in the dome. They didn't steal anything, but they restored a rusty old 1850 clock over the course of a year. Nobody noticed what they were doing until one of them walked into the Panthéon administrator's office and said, "hey guys, we made this clock work again." In true bureaucratic fashion, the French Centre for National Monuments responded by suing the clock fixers, but a jury cleared them of all charges within 20 minutes. This brought to you by Untergunther, the same organization that built a cinema with a bar and restaurant under the Seine. Thanks to Isaac for the news story.