From failed flight to lost loot: five high-profile art thefts in the Netherlands

Art theft, like that one this morning in Oisterwijk, they are not an unknown phenomenon in the Dutch art world. These were some high-profile robberies from the last few decades:

In the spring of 1991, a man was locked in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The alarm goes off around 3am. The man has a guard at gunpoint and forces the alarm system to go off. After this, he lets in a supporter and they go on a raid through the building together.

The gang produces a total of twenty works with a value of nearly a billion guilders. They go in the security guard’s car to the Amsterdam Amstel station, where someone will come to pick up the art. Once he is there, it turns out that the man is no longer there.

A short time later, officers found all the works in a stolen car. A large part is in fair condition, but several works are damaged.

The theft has been called the biggest art theft since World War II and attracted international attention. The Amsterdam Police Commissioner calls the robbery the next day “extremely clumsy”.

Four men, including the museum’s former guard, are arrested a few months later. In the end, they receive a prison sentence of between six and seven years. One of the thieves, Roy Peters, says in 2021 in return for the NH regional broadcaster said it is pleased in retrospect that the operation was recovered so quickly.

Early in the morning on Saturday, December 7, 2002, it happened again at the Van Gogh. Professional Amsterdam burglar Octave ‘Okkie’ Durham climbs to the roof via a ladder. Together with a partner, he breaks a poorly protected window and enters.

In the end they walk away with two jobs: Seascape near Scheveningen from 1882 and Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen from 1884-1885. Later, Durham says in an interview that they were really looking for the Potato Eatersone of Van Gogh’s most famous works.

A year later, the two thieves are found and convicted, but there is no trace of the photographs. In 2016, fourteen years after the robbery, they… was found in Naples. The photos ended up with the Italian mafia.

In 2017, the NOS spoke to Durham, who told his story in detail:

On the night of January 9 to 10, 2005, thieves punched a hole in the basement wall of the Westfries Museum in the center of Hoorn. They bypass the security system and seize almost everything they can: 24 paintings (all from the 17th and 18th centuries), seventy pieces of silverware and a lot of porcelain.

“They attacked like animals,” said the director of the museum after the robbery. There is glass and debris everywhere in the museum. The damage to the regional museum is huge: the works are worth around 10 million euros at that time and there is almost no insurance.

For example, the NOS Journaal reported on art theft in 2005:

In 2014, one of the stolen photos appeared for the first time on a Ukrainian website. Expert of the art of theft Arthur Brandt reported then that the works are in the hands of militias in the east of Ukraine, where war is already going on. According to the director the museum is “something in a vague political sphere of influence, in which there is an internal struggle for power”.

In April 2016, Ukrainian police recovered four pieces during a ‘secret operation’. The fifth photo is being delivered to the Dutch embassy in Kyiv. After a long diplomatic tug-of-war, the director of the Westfries Museum collected the works in Ukraine in September of that year.

In May this year there is again good news for the museum. One of the works was found during an attack on an apartment in the Polish city of Krakow. It’s about the picture Rebecca and Eliezer by the painter Hoorn Jan Linsen.

On the night of 15 to 16 October 2012, a group of thieves from Romania broke an emergency exit from De Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. The exhibition is currently on the ground floor of the building Avant-gardes, because of the museum’s 20th anniversary. There is no security guard present; the Kunsthal is studied at a distance.

The thieves make off with seven very expensive jobs. These include paintings by Monet, Picasso, Freud, Matisse, Gauguin and Meijer de Haan. The alarm goes off, but when the security guards arrive they only see the empty spaces on the walls where the artworks were hanging a few minutes before.

The art thieves apparently struck within minutes. Security footage shows them calmly leaving the building. The director of the museum calls that morning a “nightmare”.

When the men try to sell the artwork to a dealer in Romania, the police track them down. In the end, six people are convicted of art theft. The works are still undiscovered.

On Tuesday, June 28, 2022, four men will walk into the Tefaf art fair in Maastricht around noon. They are smartly dressed, with jackets and flat caps. They will be hitting the stand of London jeweler Symbolic & Chase. The display case is broken and smashed with demolition hammers.

While the men with weapons keep fair visitors away, the four ‘Peaky Blinders’ (based on the British drama series about a gang from Birmingham) leave the fair with tens of millions in the jewels of the pockets. The thieves then flee in rented cars, which are parked a few hundred meters from the exhibition building.

The current whereabouts of the perpetrators are unknown. According to the police, they may come from the Balkans and may live in the Belgrade area.

This year, the police report that they have taken “great steps” in the investigation. For example, two diamonds were recovered from one of the stolen pieces of jewelry: one in Israel, the other in Hong Kong.

This is how the thieves struck at the time: