by Lewis, Dan
An Argentine con man named Eduardo de Valfierno allegedly was behind the theft. In 1914, after the theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa, but before Peruggia was brought to trial, Valfierno told his story to an American journalist named Karl Decker after extracting a promise that Decker would not publish the story until after Valfierno’s death. Decker agreed. This is the only source for Valfierno’s account.
Valfierno’s “business” was in faux masterpieces. He commissioned artists to create realistic-looking copies of famous works of art and sold them to collectors around the world, claiming the works were original. To buttress his claims of authenticity, he passed off other forgeries—documents from the museums in which the originals hung, stating that the originals had been stolen and, to avoid embarrassment, the museums instead quietly displayed replicas. Unfortunately for Valfierno, one such collector bragged about one of his purchases, leading to press coverage of the (faked) theft—and almost exposing Valfierno’s fraud. So Valfierno decided to take no further chances.
As the story goes, Valfierno hired Peruggia and others to steal the Mona Lisa—but not before he commissioned the creation of six counterfeits and made sure they were distributed around the United States. (Valfierno surmised that it would be easy to get through customs before the theft but nearly impossible afterward.) Once the media took up the story of the theft itself, Valfierno was able to sell the six fake paintings without much trouble—and without much risk, as the purchasers, now knowingly buying stolen property, had no real recourse if they ever caught on to the swindle. With the real Mona Lisa in Valfierno’s possession, he also had the luxury of knowing that the Louvre would never get back the original, making it unlikely at best that the purchasers of the fakes would catch on, anyway. Of course, this part of the scheme did not go according to plan.
Valfierno claims that Peruggia was well compensated for his role, but that the thief gambled the money away. Peruggia’s solution? He knew where Valfierno kept the true Mona Lisa, so he simply did what he had done a year or two earlier. He stole it. Again.
BONUS FACT
The Mona Lisa is not painted on canvas, but on three pieces of wood roughly an inch and a half thick.
UNVANDALISM
VANDALS WHO SAVE ART FROM ITSELF
Originally a church, the Panthéon is now a mausoleum in Paris. Building started in 1758 and was completed in 1790. It is the final resting place of Voltaire, Louis Braille, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Marie Curie, and others. Modeled after the building of the same name in Rome, it contains large columns, a dome, and—of unique relevance to the following discussion—a clock. The clock, a relic from the 1800s, stopped chiming in the 1960s when rust overtook its gears, bringing it to a halt.
All that changed in 2006. That year, after an eight-month restoration project, the clock was fixed. But its repair was not due to some public works project nor funded by some fabulously wealthy patron of the arts—at least not outwardly. It was done, surreptitiously, by a group of underground art restorers, cultural preservation advocates, and, perhaps, criminals. The group, which is still around, is called Urban eXperiment, or UX for short.
The history of the UX is murky, but according to Wired, its beginnings stem from a theft three decades ago. A group of teenagers managed to steal a set of maps detailing the series of tunnels running beneath much of Paris—tunnels that provide clandestine access to many Parisian landmarks. Rumor has it that some of these teenagers ended up starting UX, and the maps have become a key way for these pseudo-criminals to avoid detection during repair jobs.
In 2005, a subset of UX called Untergunther used the maps to enter the Panthéon in hopes of restoring the clock in question. Then, they created a secret workshop in the landmark, in a room just below the dome, and got to work. For eight months and at the expense of $10,000 in member-donated monies (their time was uncompensated), the group secretly toiled to repair the long-broken clock. They avoided guards without much effort; the floor where they set up shop was rarely frequented, even by security personnel. They even grew a small vegetable garden on the terrace outside their makeshift workshop.
When they completed the restoration, a new challenge arose. The clock was in working order but needed the Panthéon’s staff to maintain it—which, unfortunately, would require telling the staff that the clock had been fixed. This proved incredibly difficult and came at a price, as recounted by Wired:
They notified the director, Bernard Jeannot, by phone, then offered to elaborate in person. Four of them came—two men and two women, including Kunstmann and the restoration group’s leader, a woman in her forties who works as a photographer—and were startled when Jeannot refused to believe their story. They were even more shocked when, after they showed him their workshop (“I think I need to sit down,” he murmured), the administration later decided to sue UX, at one point seeking up to a year of jail time and 48,300 euros in damages. Jeannot’s then-deputy, Pascal Monnet, is now the Panthéon’s director, and he has gone so far as to hire a clockmaker to restore the clock to its previous condition by resabotaging it. But the clockmaker refused to do more than disengage a part—the escape wheel, the very part that had been sabotaged the first time. UX slipped in shortly thereafter to take the wheel into its own possession, for safekeeping, in the hope that someday a more enlightened administration will welcome its return.
In the end, some UX members were brought up on criminal charges but, as noted by the Guardian, were acquitted. As for the clock? It is, again, stopped. In the Panthéon, the time is, eternally, 10:51.
BONUS FACT
Marie Curie, whose groundbreaking work on radioactivity changed the history of science, is interred in the Panthéon, as noted above. She died in 1934 from aplastic anemia due to her regular exposure to radioactive isotopes. During her research career, she stored the isotopes in a desk drawer along with her papers. To this day, her papers are tainted with radioactivity and are too dangerous to read as one normally would. According to her Wikipedia entry, her documents “are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.”
DOUBLE BONUS!
In 1903, Curie—with her husband Pierre and physicist Henri Becquerel—won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work with radioactivity. In 1911, Marie Curie herself won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. To date, she is the only person to win Nobels in two different scientific disciplines.
DISSOLVING MEDALS
HOW TO HIDE NOBEL PRIZES FROM NAZIS
During World War II, Adolf Hitler prohibited the export of gold from Germany. But gold, being valuable and not easily traced, is very difficult to regulate. (Indeed, that is probably where its true value comes from.) Hitler’s edict was, in almost all cases, unenforceable.
One exception? Nobel Prize medals.
Before 1980, the medals given by Sweden (all of them except the Nobel Peace Prize—that award is given by Norway) were made of 600 grams of 23-karat gold—and therefore subject to Hitler’s export ban. The recipient’s name was engraved on the back of the medal, making it clear who might be breaking the law. This proved uniquely dangerous for two physics laureates, Max von Laue (winner, 1914) and James Franck (1925), both Germans. When World War II began, the two entrusted the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark (the research institution of fellow physics laureate Neils Bohr) with the safekeeping of their medals, assuming that Nazi soldiers would have otherwise confiscated their prizes. When Nazi troops invaded Denmark, they raided the Institute. Had von Laue’s and Franck’s medals been discovered, the consequences would most likely have been dire.
Enter Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy, a future Nobel Laureate himself (in chemistry). He, Jewish, had gone to the Institute looking for—and temporarily at least, finding—safe haven from the Nazis. He and Bohr decided that more standard ways of hiding the medals (e.g. burying them) would not suffice, as the risk of harm to von Laue and Franck was too great to chance the medals’ discovery. The chemist de Hevesy took more drastic acti
on. He created a solution of aqua regia—a concoction consisting typically of one part nitric acid to three parts hydrochloric acid—so named because it can dissolve two of the “royal” metals, gold and platinum. He placed the medals in the solution, which promptly dissolved them. He then left the gold-bearing aqua regia solution on his laboratory shelf within the Institute, hidden in plain sight as Nazi storm troopers ransacked the Institute.
The plan worked, and von Laue and Franck were safe—as were their awards. The gold remained safely on that shelf, suspended in aqua regia, for the remainder of the war, unnoticed by the German soldiers. When the war ended, de Hevesy precipitated the gold out of the solution, and the Nobel committee recast the medals.
BONUS FACT
Throughout human history (through 2009, at least), humankind has successfully mined roughly 165,000 metric tons of gold. At gold’s density, that comes out to about 300,000 cubic feet—a relatively tiny amount. For comparison’s sake, all the gold ever mined could be contained by the New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room, which has a volume of approximately 1.2 million cubic feet.
A CITY FIT FOR A KING
COCA-COLA’S BATTLE AGAINST RACISM
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. On October 14, 1964, he became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize. His hometown of Atlanta wanted to throw him a party: an interracial banquet, with official invitations going to the city’s leaders and titans of industry. The city’s mayor, religious leaders from across faiths, a university president, and the publisher of the major area newspaper signed the invites.
Unfortunately, Atlanta was still racially segregated, and although King had many fans, he also had many enemies. Many whites were upset that King had been honored by the Nobel committee; one of the state’s senators, Herman Talmadge, expressed his dissatisfaction with the honor, wondering aloud why the committee gave a peace prize to a person who promoted law-breaking. Invitations to the highly exclusive event came back with many more declinations than expected. A New York Times report claimed that a well-known (but unidentified) banker in the Atlanta area took to the phones, hoping to convince other whites to abstain from attending the banquet, and certainly others preached the same message.
As the days ticked by, it looked more and more likely that the Dinkler Plaza Hotel—the site of the gala—was going to be rather empty on the evening of the event. Mayor Ivan Allen realized that such a result would be a stain on the city’s reputation, both immediately and forevermore. He also knew that it could significantly set back the clock on racial relations in Atlanta. He struggled to find a solution, but then, an unlikely hero stepped in.
Mayor Allen and J. Paul Austin, the chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, called a meeting of Atlanta’s business leaders, and Austin threw down the gauntlet. According to a memoir (An Easy Burden) by a former aide to King named Andrew Brown, Austin told those assembled that “it is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.”
They decided. Within two hours, all the tickets were sold, and interest in the event skyrocketed so much that Martin Luther King, Sr. (yes, the honoree’s father) had trouble getting enough tickets for his own use. The Dinkler Plaza was stuffed to the brim with more than 1,500 partygoers, and, perhaps most importantly, the police detail outside had nothing to do. The police were there to combat the hordes of protesters expected to descend upon and disrupt the party—but the threat never materialized.
BONUS FACT
MLK’s birthday became a holiday in 1986, but some states were slow to adopt it. It would not be celebrated in all fifty states until 2000, and Mississippi celebrates it in conjunction with the birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, born January 19, 1807.
COLA ENFORCEMENT AGENCY
HOW COKE GETS ITS COKE
In 1886, Atlanta, Georgia, passed a short-lived law prohibiting the sale and/or manufacture of alcohol. In response, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a faux wine, mixing together fruit flavors with extracts from kola nuts (caffeine) and coca leaves (cocaine). He dispensed it via soda fountains—at the time, carbonated water was believed to have a medicinal benefit—and with that, Coca-Cola was born.
The original Coke formula had a significant amount of cocaine in it, but that was quickly stemmed and, by 1903 or thereabouts, eliminated from the recipe. This was done, in part, because the desired flavor can be extracted from the coca leaves, thereby removing the cocaine, setting the drug aside as a by-product. To this day, Coca-Cola needs coca leaves to make its drinks; as a Coke exec told The New York Times, “Ingredients from the coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.”
In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) allowing Coke to import dried coca leaves from Peru in huge quantities (and to a lesser degree, from Bolivia). The dried coca leaves make their way to a processing plant in Maywood, New Jersey, operated by the Stepan Corporation, a publicly traded chemicals company. The Stepan factory imports roughly 100 metric tons of the leaves each year, stripping the active ingredient—cocaine—from them. The cocaine-free leaves are then shipped off to Coke to turn into syrup, and, ultimately, soda.
What does Stepan do with the cocaine? It goes to the Mallinckrodt Group, which creates a legal, topical anesthesia called cocaine hydrochloride. Cocaine hydrochloride is used to numb the lining of the mouth, nose, or throat and requires a DEA order form to obtain.
BONUS FACT
Legend has it that Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” It is heavily guarded. In early 2011, This American Life broadcast an episode discussing a potential early recipe for the drink but almost certainly not the one in use today. (Coke denied that NPR had discovered the true formula.) In that episode, Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country, and Coca-Cola, an unauthorized history of the company (and beverage), said that “only two people know how to mix the 7X flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully passed-on secret ritual, and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”
MR. ACID
HOW AMERICA GOT ITS LSD
The typical LSD “hit” has about 100 micrograms of the drug in it. At the high end, that means a gram contains about 10,000 doses. A kilogram of LSD has about 10 million hits in it. It should go without saying that a kilo of LSD is a whole lot of acid.
But not for William Leonard Pickard. At his peak, Pickard was producing a kilogram of the stuff every five weeks.
Pickard was born in California in 1945; his father was a lawyer and his mother an expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (better known as the CDC). He graduated from Purdue University and returned to California to study advanced chemistry, ending up with a high-level position at UCLA’s Drug Policy Research Program in the 1980s. How he obtained his knowledge of drugs and drug making is unclear, but we are sure of one thing: He made a whole lot of LSD.
In 1988, Pickard was making LSD at an architectural shop outside San Francisco, when a neighbor called authorities after detecting a foreign odor. The FBI raided what turned out to be Pickard’s lab, discovering 200,000 doses of acid and capturing the mastermind on the premises. Pickard was convicted of manufacturing LSD and served a five-year prison sentence.
After his release, Pickard soon returned to bad habits—and multiplied them. With an accomplice named Clyde Apperson (whose role was limited to setting up and taking down acid labs), Pickard traversed the United States, creating temporary LSD labs. He was in Oregon in early 1996, then in Color
ado later in that year, and from part of 1997 through most of 1999, in Santa Fe. In his labs, Pickard cranked out absurd amounts of the drug, moving on to another location before neighbors took notice.
Pickard was apprehended in 2000 in Wamego, Kansas, after another accomplice turned informant and assisted the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in apprehending him and Apperson. The informant, Gordon Todd Skinner, advised the DEA that the pair was moving operations to a former missile silo in that town (even though Skinner had actually moved the lab already but not yet informed Pickard or Apperson). The DEA arrested the pair when they attempted to relocate it again, in the back of a Ryder rental truck a few days later.
Per the Washington Times, the amount of LSD available in the United States plummeted by 95 percent after Pickard’s arrest. He is serving two life sentences in Arizona.
BONUS FACT
The little circles or dots you may “see” when your eyes are closed are hallucinations called phosphenes. Typically, when your eyes are open, light hits your retinas and your eyes’ optics work to build a picture of what the eyes are focused on. But the retinas can be stimulated mechanically as well—if something pushes down on them, the pressure will be translated into nonsensical images. When you rub your closed eyes, the pressure creates the images you’re experiencing. (This is also why you sometimes see “stars” when you sneeze or get hit in the head.)
HIGH AND OUTSIDE
BASEBALL’S MOST UNLIKELY NO-HITTER
One of the rare feats a Major League Baseball pitcher can accomplish is a no-hitter—a game in which he (or a group of pitchers on his team) prevents the other team from getting even a single hit during a regulation, nine-inning game. From 1875 through 2012, there have been only 272 “no-no”s. The accomplishment takes not only exceptional physical abilities—one has to be able to command multiple pitch types, throw a ball with superhuman velocity, and have pitching mechanics that are near-perfect—but also requires a lot of luck. And given the pressure of the situation, in most cases, pitching a no-hitter also requires mental acuity.