by R. A. Scotti
Because the Louvre was closed to the public on Mondays, the only people in the galleries would be maintenance men and security guards. Around six-thirty a.m., the museum workers began arriving. The three thieves, now dressed in the anonymous white smocks, mingled easily. The marques relished the simplicity of their disguise.
“It was a psychological tour de force. Our success depended upon one thing—the fact that a workman in a white blouse in the Louvre is as free from suspicion as an unlaid egg.”
He had mapped an exact route for the men to follow through the museum complex and out to the street. They would lift Mona Lisa from the wall and carry her through the Salon Carré into the Grande Galerie. There they would turn to the right and continue through to the Salle de Sept-Metres, where the Italian primitives hung. In the right wall at the corner, a door led to a back stairway used only by museum employees. They would carry Mona Lisa down the stairs, unlock the door at the bottom, and go through to the Cour du Sphinx. Across the court was the Cour Visconti, where a door opened to the street. There they would remove their smocks and exit the museum.
The first stage proceeded flawlessly. The usual attendant did not come in, which left one guard to cover the Grande and Petite Galeries, the Salon Carré, and the Salon d'Apollon. When that guard took a cigarette break, Peruggia and his accomplices saw their opportunity.
Peruggia was a small man, and lifting Mona Lisa off the wall was not a simple feat for him. The wood panel with the frame and the glass box were cumbersome. With one of the Lancelottis serving as lookout, Peruggia and the other brother removed the painting. They passed unnoticed through the three empty galleries to the service stairway. On the small landing, Peruggia took a screwdriver from his pocket and, working quickly, unfastened the outer frame. Opening the glass box that he had constructed was easy, but taking the painting out of the ornate antique frame, the marques said, “had them sweating.” Packing paper—stuffed inside to hold the panel in place—ripped, leaving a paper trail across the landing.
Although it seemed an eternity, in five minutes, Mona Lisa was free. Pushing the two frames into a corner of the landing, Peruggia slid the painting under his smock and dashed down the stairs. The Lancelottis returned to the Salle de Sept-Metres to keep watch. The operation was proceeding perfectly. “Then,” the marques confided, “for the first time our beautiful scheme failed to click.” The door at the bottom of the staircase was locked, and the key he had given Peruggia did not fit. He blamed the Italian for being careless. Valfierno had repeatedly instructed Peruggia to go to the Louvre and test the key. The Italian had failed to carry out orders, and the escape route was blocked.
Valfierno's voice dropped dramatically. “Imagine. That one little lapse nearly ruined us.”
Peruggia still had the screwdriver he had used to open the frames, and again he worked quickly. He had removed the brass doorknob and was starting on the lock when he heard his lookouts whistle. The coast was no longer clear.
Peruggia was sitting on the bottom steps in an attitude of annoyance, leaning lightly against Mona Lisa, who was behind his back, hidden under his smock, when the plumber Sauve padded down the stairs and became an unwitting accomplice. The instant Peruggia heard the footsteps behind him, he began cursing that some fool had locked the door. Sauve, using his master key and a pair of pliers, opened it. After that helpful deed, the rest was a cakewalk.
Telling Peruggia to leave the door ajar until the knob could be replaced, the plumber went on his merry way, and Mona Lisa went on hers. The brothers joined Peruggia, and together, they crossed the Cour du Sphinx and entered the Cour Visconti. The Porte Visconti entrance by the side of the Seine was unattended. The guard, who had been washing the vestibule, had gone for a fresh bucket of water and stopped on his way back to rest in the sun. The thieves could see him under a red umbrella, sleeping soundly. Taking off their smocks, they slipped out of the museum. By nine o'clock, Peruggia was hurrying along the Quai du Louvre, the Leonardo, wrapped in the white museum smock, in his arms and his accomplices on the lookout behind him.
The marques swirled his cognac, savoring the bouquet and the memory.
“Everybody tried to make it easy for us. What helped us was as much dumbness as luck.” Within the hour, Peruggia reported to the marques's headquarters on the Left Bank. Valfierno said, “We gave ourselves up to a quality of hilarious enjoyment. The big job was finished, the great coup had been pulled off. The most magnificent single theft in the history of the world had been accomplished, and we were proud and happy.”
Valfierno and Chaudron celebrated at a lavish dinner, wining and dining through the night. The American buyers had been told to read the newspaper on Tuesday, August 22. Although he had lined them up months before, the marques had been cagey. He had left the transactions open—no palms crossed, no contracts sealed, no irrevocable commitments made until the identity of the art for sale was emblazoned on the front page of every newspaper in New York and Paris.
The triumphant pair waited for the first editions of the morning papers. They expected the missing Mona Lisa to fill the headlines. Instead, Paris greeted her disappearance with a stunning silence. There was no picture, no word. There wasn't even a white lie noting that she had been removed for cleaning.
Neither Valfierno nor Chaudron had gone anywhere near the museum, not even venturing across the Seine for two days. They had perfect alibis for Sunday and Monday. Suspecting a double cross, they stormed to Peruggia's apartment and roused him rudely from his bed. At first, dazed and confused, then angry and defensive, Peruggia opened a closet, took out a white wooden box, unwrapped a red cloth, and there she was. Chaudron, stunned by the true art, picked up Mona Lisa and held her like a man transfixed. The marques had imagined every possible scenario except the actual one. No one at the Louvre had noticed that Mona Lisa was missing.
He and Chaudron passed a second anxious day. That evening, Le Temps published an extra edition with the news, and on Wednesday, August 23, 1911, banner headlines in papers around the world announced that the unimaginable had occurred. A front-page article in The New York Times reported:
LA GIOCONDA IS STOLEN IN PARIS
MASTERPIECE OF LEONARDO DA VINCI
VANISHES FROM THE LOUVRE
Once the story broke, the sting moved swiftly. The marques contacted each expectant buyer and arranged the deliveries. Reliving his greatest moment, he could not repress his delight.
“Chaudron almost died of joy and pride when he learned the prices his work had brought,” he told Decker.
The forgeries sold quickly, netting the equivalent of $90 million, and the conspirators kept the prize. The partners left the true Leonardo hidden in Peruggia's apartment, divided the money, and disappeared from Paris. After so many successful years together, mastermind and forger went their separate ways. Yves Chaudron retired to a country chateau outside Paris, occasionally doing a little work to keep from growing rusty, and Valfierno moved on to the next opportunity.
“We would have returned the painting voluntarily to the Louvre in due time,” he told Decker, “had not a minor member of the cast idiotically run away with it. To his elementary mind, it followed that the painting must be the prize.”
The marques dismissed the ensuing imbroglio as a farce caused by stupidity and greed. He never really cared what became of Mona Lisa as long as she remained lost for a reasonable time. She was much too hot to handle, he said, and any attempt to sell her would have meant immediate arrest. Even an obvious copy would have attracted attention. But Peruggia never understood that Mona Lisa herself was not for sale. Although he had been paid handsomely for his role, Peruggia gambled away the money on the Riviera and soon was looking for more. He had Mona Lisa secured in the false-bottomed case that he had built himself to her exact measurements, but he had no idea how to dispose of her until he saw Alfredo Geri's ad.
The muezzin was chanting the sunset call to prayer in the minaret of the mosque when Eduardo de Valfierno finished his story. Th
e terrace had grown cold. The marques drained the last drop of cognac and, with a farewell salute to the American, disappeared into the evening crowd of Arab shopkeepers, French Foreign Legionnaires, and Spanish dockworkers in Morocco's darkening alleys.
∗ James H. Duveen, Art Treasures and Intrigue.
A PERFECT STORY
THE SATURDAY EVENING POST
The Karl Decker story featured in the June 25, 1932, issue of the Saturday Evening Post was a perfect story, but was it the true story? (Courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations)
I
EIGHTEEN YEARS LATER, on June 25, 1932, Karl Decker broke the story. In an exclusive article in the Saturday Evening Post headlined WHY AND HOW THE MONA LISA WAS STOLEN, he revealed the confession of the late Marques Eduardo de Valfierno. Decker's tale of a suave international scam artist executing a brilliant sting and then making his stunning confession is a romantic adventure, far more satisfying than Vincenzo Peruggia's quixotic myth.
It made a perfect story, but was it the true story?
Whether the Marques Eduardo de Valfierno was a reliable source is certainly questionable. Whether he even existed is equally dubious. Since Decker never revealed the marques's true name or offered any corroborating evidence, nothing can be verified.
As with Mona Lisa herself, very little is certain about the case. To separate indisputable facts from fancy: The person who removed Mona Lisa from her frames on Monday, August 21, 1911, in a back stairway of the Louvre Museum was Vincenzo Peruggia, the Italian-born glazier who had helped to build a glass-enclosed frame for the painting. There is no question that Peruggia performed the actual theft. He left his calling card. The left thumbprint on the frame was his, and examinations by French and Italian experts proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the Mona Lisa he returned was the same painting that he stole. Beyond that are only questions.
The long absence, the random recovery, and his spurious grasp of history cast doubt on Peruggia's claim that he alone planned and executed such a stunning crime. His account sounds dubious, and Decker's story sounds phony. If Peruggia was not the lone thief and the marques and his expert forger were fictions, the mystery remains: Who masterminded the theft and, even more puzzling, why?
From the first, there were rumors of politics at play. The theft conveniently coincided with the flare-up in Morocco between France and Germany. Was Mona Lisa stolen to avert or foment war? To embarrass France? To rile Germany? There were persistent stories of a German man of means and middle age, a frequent visitor to the Louvre, who cultivated one of the Italian workers. He supposedly filled the young man's mind with false history and patriotic fervor. Over months of clever goading and suggestion, the German planted the notion that returning Mona Lisa to Italy would be a grand act of patriotism that would bring honor to the young man's family.
While the young Italian presumably was Peruggia, no trace of the German svengali has turned up. His motive remains obscure, and in any case, the denouement was a fizzle. The only trail left to follow is Decker's own.
2
SINCE HIS DAYS as a cub reporter for Hearst, Karl Decker had been making or manufacturing the news. He did not invent a story out of whole cloth, but embroidery and embellishment were journalistic skills he had learned from the master. The young reporter played by Hearst's rules, which meant pretty much anything goes to get or manufacture a story.
The motto “While others talk, the Journal acts” expressed the Hearst creed. If governments failed to right public wrongs, journalists should charge into the breach. In the 1890s, Hearst adopted the cause of Cuban rebels seeking independence from Spain. As his newspapers played the story, ruthless Spanish villains were denying the rights of Cuban freedom fighters, who were all noble and pure of heart. In his drumbeat to the Spanish-American War, Hearst dispatched the artist Frederic Remington to Havana to cover the impending conflict. According to a now classic account, finding the city calm, Remington telegraphed the publisher: EVERYTHING QUIET STOP THERE WILL BE NO WAR STOP COMING HOME. Hearst wired back: PLEASE REMAIN STOP YOU FURNISH PICTURES STOP I WILL FURNISH WAR.
At the height of his Cuba campaign, Hearst seized on the plight of a damsel in distress. Evangelina Cisneros, daughter of a revolutionary family, was nineteen, beautiful, and imprisoned in Havana. Hearst made her cause a crusade. He sent the young Karl Decker to spring Evangelina from her jail cell. Decker rented a house across an alley from the prison. One midnight after her prison bars were filed and the guards bribed, he laid a ladder across the rooftops, climbed to the jail, and spirited Evangelina away.
In the purple prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, Julian, who was on the Hearst payroll, the rescue had the elements of a classic myth: “A tropic island, embosomed in azure seas off the coast of the Spanish Main, a cruel war waged by the minions of despotism against the spirit of patriotism and liberty, a beautiful maiden risking all for her country, captured, insulted, persecuted, and cast into a loathsome dungeon,” and her savior, “a young American of the best and oldest strain, with the Constitution in his backbone and the Declaration of Independence in his eyes.”
Decker and Evangelina arrived in New York to front-page headlines and a hero's welcome. A tumultuous crowd of more than one hundred thousand cheered them at a rally in Madison Square Garden. Their next stop was Washington, where President William McKinley received them at the White House and praised Decker's exploit as “a heroic deed.” A few days later, the U.S.S. Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, either from spontaneous internal combustion or from a mine explosion. The cause was never determined, but “Remember the Maine” became a rallying cry that drew the United States into war.
In its daring and in its complete disregard for international law, the Cisneros jailbreak is unsurpassed in the often tawdry and tarnished annals of American journalism. Decker became the poster boy for the “journalism of action.” His name continued to make headlines in the Hearst papers:
JOURNAL PLANNED TO CONDUCT
MILITARY EXPEDITION TO CUBA
HEADED BY KARL DECKER
SPAIN MAKES WAR ON JOURNAL,
SEIZING THE YACHT BUCCANEER
TO ARREST KARL DECKER WHO WAS BELIEVED
TO BE ABOARD
SPAIN FEARS JOURNAL AND KARL DECKER
3
DECKER'S MOST RELIABLE SOURCE was often himself. As Julian Hawthorne wrote, “He had imagination to conceive, ingenuity to plan, coolness and resolution to carry out, and then—best of all—that wonderful power of belief in the possibility of the impossible.”
Decker loved a big story, and in January 1914, there was no bigger story than the recovery of the lost Leonardo. Through the years, he must have followed her misadventures and recognized the tantalizing tease waiting to be woven into a fiction as remarkable as Mona Lisa herself.
Maybe he was simply in the right place at the right time for an exclusive story. The possibility is no more or less plausible than anything else about the Mona Lisa caper. On the other hand, Decker may not have been in Casablanca at all. There are no stories datelined Morocco with his byline in the New York Journal of January 1914, and the gentleman thief Marques Eduardo de Valfierno reads like a stock character. That the two men happened to meet on the day the missing Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre seems more than serendipity. That Decker had the scoop on the criminal case holding the attention of the world and sat on the story for more than twenty years seems highly improbable.
When the Saturday Evening Post story broke, both the heist and the marques had passed into history. Decker was sixty-four. His feats of derring-do were old news, and the style of heroic journalism that had made him a legend was discredited. By the 1930s, American journalism had undergone a bleaching. The New York Times’?, staid style, the antithesis of Hearst's yellow journalism, had become the model. Readers were better educated and less easily gulled. The new reporter was a cool observer transcribing from the sidelines, not plunging headlong in
to a story. “Just the facts, please” became the motto.
For Decker, the Saturday Evening Post article might have been a chance to make headlines again and reinvigorate a waning career. He wrote it in the old sensational style that he had mastered in his youth and that can be embarrassing to read today: “For twenty-one years, the story of the world's single greatest theft has been kept’ under the smother.’ Until now there has been not even a hint of the tangled and intricate plot….”
A case can be made that, with his glory days behind him, Karl Decker played fast and loose with the truth, lifting elements of his story directly from various Paris newspapers and weaving them into a more memorable, more satisfying scenario than Peruggia's confession. The Marques de Valfierno's description of how the heist was carried out corresponds to the report made by Magistrate Henri Drioux and contradicts Peruggia's sworn testimony. The notion of a sting was suggested in the days immediately following the theft by Joseph Reinach of les Amis du Louvre and published in Le Temps.
If Decker spiced the story, he left a few clues. One is the forger's name. Chaudron means a large kettle or cauldron, something the French might use to prepare a cassoulet. Decker's Saturday Evening Post article seems to be a chaudron in which he has mixed bits of evidence and conjecture, laced with generous pinches of invention, imagination, and wry humor. There is also a street in Paris, Rue Chaudron, located just a couple of blocks from the apartment where Mona Lisa remained hidden for two years.
In perhaps another entertaining flourish, the forger allegedly honed his craft by faking the works of Bartolome Murillo, whose favorite subject was the Immaculate Conception. Decker's article was an immaculate conception of sorts. He provides no supporting material. Nothing in the article suggests that he ever interviewed Peruggia, and there is no evidence that the convicted thief knew of the article.