Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny, & Perpetual Motion

by John Biggs

  When the lawyer brought out a small box marked in Hebrew, and opened it and tapped out its contents, Hasson, the matronly curator who twenty years before had awoken to an early morning phone call describing a burglary at her museum, began to cry. In the lawyer’s hand was a gold and rock crystal watch, the Marie-Antoinette, intact and unharmed. The Queen was alive.

  “I opened [the boxes to reveal the watches], and identified them from their numbers. Most were in good shape. Some were damaged,” she said. “When I came to the Marie-Antoinette, I couldn’t help crying, it was so moving and exciting to see it after so many years.”121

  Kahan remained calm through the negotiations, only later succumbing to shock when he and Hasson packed up the boxes and prepared to take them away.

  Efron-Gabai asked again how much money would be paid in good will, and the pair offered the board-approved $30,000. Efron-Gabai allegedly refused. They then settled on $35,000, and Kahan wrote a check and handed it over. The mysterious Ms. England would receive her tribute, and the museum curator and board chairman had gotten their treasure. “During all those years, when they were missing, I didn’t pay any attention to the watches or the story,” said Kahan. Now that they were back, he said “it was like a fairy tale.”

  As he realized what this collection meant for the museum – increased revenue, world prominence, a surge of popularity – as well as the historical value of the pieces in those disintegrating boxes, his mood changed from guardedly cautious to giddy. Fearing that he would crash his car on the way home, he and Hasson took a taxi back to the museum with the boxes in the trunk.

  The clocks were theirs. After a slow and careful transfer of the boxes that probably, at least in spirit, mirrored the meticulous way the thief had originally removed the objects from the museum, the head of its security open the underground vault near the administrative office. Here, they kept the watches hidden from view, telling no one on the staff about their return. Even Boris Sankov, the museum’s patient, long-haired, Russian resident watchmaker, was not told of their presence. Kahan scrawled on each box with a black Magic Marker, writing simply “Property of Eli Kahan. Do not touch.”

  Spear, a stickler for propriety, contacted the insurance agents he dealt with and explained the situation. The original insurance company that had paid out for the watches was gone, acquired and absorbed into a succession of conglomerates. Months of phone calls by Spear went nowhere. “No one remembered or cared,” Spear says.

  If the museum had had to pay back the entire amount, with interest, Speer calculated that it would be over $1.5 million. Instead, with a touch of shrewdness, Spear cited his own original documents and pointed out that the museum had received $700,000 for the loss of the collection. In the end, the insurance company agreed to “sell” the watches back to the museum for less than it paid for them: $400,000 for the forty found in Tel Aviv and $300,000 for any watches and clocks found elsewhere if they still existed. “We were very glad,” Kahan recalls.

  To try to hide something as monumental as a portion of the Salomons collection was iffy, and to hide it in the basement of the museum itself was folly. Although the small museum had a staff of only a few dozen people, it was inevitable that someone would eventually grow curious. A few weeks after taking possession of the watches, and after Hasson finally felt it safe to tell Sankov, she led the watchmaker to the collection. Sankov urged Hasson to go to the police, but she refused.

  Sankov retrieved the watches and clocks from the vault, and he began restoring them, delighted to examine each piece after all these years. Inadvertently, his polishing rubbed away any fingerprints that might have provided the police with clues. A rumor slowly spread among the museum staff that Sankov was working on a new project, but somehow the news didn’t leak outside the museum’s thick, stone walls.

  Sankov set about undoing the damage wrought by the thief, which for the most part was light or nonexistent. The only problems Sankov faced as he pried the cases open with his long, precise fingers, were the drying of the oil around the gears and the vagaries of temperature that knocked many of the movements out of whack.

  There was some outright damage, however. One of the items — a golden automaton, about six inches tall, of an old woman on two canes—had been broken in half, and her head was missing, leading to the grim quip that she resembled Marie-Antoinette.

  During this time, a rogue member of the museum board apparently tipped off the Jerusalem police, describing the situation and explaining the chain of events that led up to the return of the watches. Two police officers, Oded Shama and Oded Janiv, were assigned to the case, and although both were in their late thirties, they knew little about the original theft. Both had shaved heads, and both had a manner more jovial than inspectorial. In a city of constant change, there was little to interest the two detectives in this particular case, with its dusty old boxes, dead suspects, and closed insurance file. The Central Investigation Unit of Jerusalem, which normally investigated murders and major thefts, and which had conducted the original investigation into the Mayer Museum heist in 1983, was nominally on the case. But the contract signed with Efron-Gabai prohibited the museum from discussing it, so there was little to go on. No one who investigated the original break-in was still on the force. For months, the return of the watches was more a novelty to the two young detectives than anything else, exciting only for its brushes with intrigue and the unique nature of the theft. It was a cold case they didn’t intend to pursue further.

  Every day, Sankov, after working tirelessly on the watches, returned them to their cases in his workshop and shut it tight for the night. The museum began to contemplate a new exhibit of the collection, but no one knew quite how to break the story to the public. For a long while, the watches lay in their felt-lined boxes, invisible to all but a handful of people.

  On the morning of November 11, 2007, more than a year after the collection came back to the museum, Danny Rubinstein, a well-known Israeli journalist, wrote a 790-word article in English in Ha’aretz, headlined “Priceless Clocks Stolen In Museum Heist Found 24 Years Later.” Suddenly, the world learned that the denouement of one of the biggest unsolved thefts in Israeli and watchmaking history had nearly escaped it.

  Rubinstein, a long-time journalist for Ha’aretz and now a college lecturer, is a blue-eyed older gentleman who grew up in Jerusalem’s Nachlaot market district. For years, he took long walks through the city, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, and he often visited Ohannes Markarian’s shop in the Old City on Christian Quarter Road, a compressed stretch of pottery, clothing, and antiques merchants all vying for the attention of passers-by. He and Markarian spent hours talking about the theft, the watchmaker noting that instead of millions of shekels the museum should simply offer a free pass to the thief. Clearly, the old watchmaker said, the culprit wasn’t interested in selling the pieces, so why not share them with the world, and he could visit them whenever he wanted?

  Rubinstein spoke Arabic and often gave talks at the L.A. Mayer Museum, and he had been one of the first journalists to write about the break-in in 1983. He seemed to know everyone, or at least everyone knew him. He wears a ball cap to hide his face from the admirers who often approach him on the streets of the capital, regaling him with tales of old Jerusalem. He is the face of an older generation, one that still remembers the wars and the formation of the State of Israel.

  One morning in November of 2007, Rubinstein was at a health clinic for a check-up when another old acquaintance, a retired police officer, came in.

  “Danny,” he said, “I remember you used to know Markarian. I assume you know his watches came back?”

  Rubinstein was taken aback but quickly regained composure. The retired policeman, realizing the reporter had not heard of the return of the watches, quickly recanted. “You can’t print any of that,” he said.

  Using an old reporter’s trick, Rubinstein smiled and said: “We already knew about it. What else can you tell me? We won’t mention your name.�
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  The story, what little of it there was, poured out, and Rubinstein began making calls.

  Chapter 17

  When Rubinstein’s article on the recovery of the stolen watches appeared in Ha’aretz on November 11, 2007, the international press picked it up immediately. Hundreds of follow-up stories appeared, and watch bloggers and on-line watch forums were aflame with speculation. The tale was richly compelling: a heist, a watch worth an estimated $11 million, a mysterious widow, a taciturn lawyer. The same things that made the tale so hard for the police to follow gave it a frisson in the global media. It was an evocative detective story, suffused with intrigue. Where had the watches been all those years? Rubinstein closed his article on a note of conjecture, writing that “the identity of the thieves remains a mystery. However they are believed unlikely to have been inveterate watch collectors, but rather local operators, at least two in number.”122

  As calls from other reporters seeking comment came in to the Jerusalem Police, the embarrassed authorities realized they needed to dig further. The Central Investigation Unit, which normally investigated murders and major thefts, had conducted the original investigation in 1983. Now, the unit assigned the same two young detectives, Oded Shamah and Oded Janiv, to the case. Together with a team that included a muscular Russian investigator named Eddie Zharkov and two female detectives, the well-travelled Revital Zaraf and computer whiz Na’ama Mai, they began piecing together the puzzle. Their first stop was the L.A. Mayer Museum.

  The group began by visiting Rachel Hasson and Eli Khan in the library. They went over the negotiations and the return of the watches. The museum staff knew almost nothing, and Hasson said very little, citing her promise to keep mum about the lawyer and her mysterious client. Janiv found Hasson’s reticence frustrating. “She had none of the details of the widow,” Janiv said later. “She also refused to talk to the press and would not talk to the police because that was also in the agreement.”

  But Yakubov, the watchmaker, produced a document found on one of the boxes, and it led the detectives to the warehouse where Efron-Gabai had stored the items. At the warehouse, in central Israel, the police found bills of lading from a woman in Los Angeles, Nili Shamrat.

  Entering Shamrat’s name into a police computer, Detective Mai came up with nothing. Then she performed a similar Google search. In seconds, a story by reporter Dalia Karpel appeared: “Eagle’s Wings Cut,” published on May 26, 2004. There in black and white, a snapshot showed a skinny man with a dark buzz cut lying in a hospital bed after being shot by the Israeli police in the 1970s. His name, according to the article, was Na’aman Diller. Arrayed around the image were four other pictures taken after this man committed a series of ingenious robberies between 1967 and the early 1980s, when he disappeared. Next to the photos was a paragraph of text:

  Diller’s 59-year-old wife, Nili Shamrat – who also flew in from the United States – tearfully eulogized him. Supported by a childhood friend, she spoke softly, “My darling, so gentle, noble and talented. You have returned to your roots.”123

  “Bingo,” Mai shouted, running down the hall to her partners to show them the printout.

  According to town lore, one summer morning in 1957 a North American T-6 Harvard, one of the smaller training planes in the Israeli Air Force, buzzed low and fast over the eucalyptus trees and under the low power lines of Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh, a small community about sixty kilometers north of Jerusalem. The plane, painted bright yellow and, by its markings, based at the IAF training school at Petach Tikva, “went on to skim the fish ponds at Kibbutz Maabarot, coming in so low that it knocked a farmer off his tractor.” The pilot then pulled up, waggled his wings, and disappeared into the horizon and into infamy.

  The pilot’s name was Na’aman Diller, and his family had been early members of Ein HaHoresh, literally the “Plowman’s Spring,” a small settlement founded in 1931 and home to some five hundred idealistic and taciturn settlers. The town motto was a verse about flight and acceptance:

  Our best years behind us

  We did not chase winds in a dream

  No dream more beautiful than our actions

  Although Ein HaHoresh had many brave sons and daughters in the Israeli military, it was Na’man Diller who took the motto to heart and took to the air at an early age. Now, he was about to be grounded.

  As the plane flew overhead, one resident, Giora Furman, then twenty-two and a flight school instructor on vacation, approached Aaron Shavit, the commander of the nearby IAF flight school and inquired as to the name of the “falcon” who buzzed his village. “He promised to find out,” Furman would recall years later. “The next day he kicked Diller out of the course.”

  Recklessness and repentance were the two constants in Diller’s life. His widow, Shamrat, would later describe him as kind and friendly, outgoing but quiet in large groups, the heart of any gathering. Look at pictures of him and you’re drawn to his deeply lined face, the pat of curly hair that he sometimes shaved to a military buzz, and his large blue eyes. He was whippet-thin, even as a child, and had the studied, careful demeanor of an athlete at rest. He exhibited flashes of sobering intelligence, and at the same time his manner marked him as a man of the earth, a kibbutznick, someone who would make his parents proud.

  “In some ways,” said Shamrat. “It separated him from so many other people, but [he] was very quick to understand things. In Hebrew, there is an expression that says somebody has golden hands, meaning that he can do everything. He was very, very technically and mechanically oriented.”

  In 1957, Na’aman was to be one of Ein HaHoresh’s wind chasers, protecting the hard-won homeland from the massing forces at her borders. Israel then was a wild and rugged place. That January, four Israeli POWs were traded for an astonishing 5,850 Egyptian prisoners, including a number of military generals. In March, another four soldiers were kidnapped in Petra, and the small planes of the IAF ran reconnaissance along the borders, hoping to avoid further losses. The Israeli government tasked the nascent IAF, flying used WWII planes and jets sourced from friendly Western nations, with protecting troops on the ground, and the soldiers were always in trouble. To be a Kibbutzim was an honor in itself, and to be a Kibbutzim military man was the highest honor a young man could bestow on his proud parents.

  Na’aman had been born on January 7, 1939, to an idealistic young Polish woman, Ernestine Friedman, nicknamed Arne. She was a psychologist from Jaroslaw, Poland, a small town west of Wroclaw, home to one of the few Jewish synagogues remaining on the San River. When she landed in Israel, near Eliat, in 1935, she barely spoke Hebrew. She was assigned to teach kindergarten, but when the children asked her the name of a flower or bug she couldn’t answer. Instead, she would promise to look it up and return with the answer in the morning. “There was a stage when I stopped going for walks in the garden with the children so they wouldn’t ask so many questions,” she said.124

  She was overbearing, opinionated, and dedicated to the Zionist cause. Her husband, Na’aman’s father, was Zvi Diller, a taciturn man who fell in love with Arne “because she worked hard.” Like Na’aman, he was tall and skinny with dark hair. He was the quiet to Arne’s storm, accepting and stoic in the face of his wife’s outbursts.

  The boy, born at the brand new Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva, was healthy and seemingly happy. But in his first few years he would lose much of the hale good health and hearty strength associated with his father and mother. Arne worked in the kibbutz kindergarten until a wave of typhus spread through Israel and Palestine, leaving her weak and bedridden. Out of work for months as she recovered, she reported back to the kindergarten only to be told she now had to toil in the fields with her husband. Refusing to work under the sun, she left Zvi and their young son and moved to Tel Aviv. Na’aman was one year old.

  Two years later she returned, chastened by her inability to find a permanent job in Tel Aviv. Ein HaHoresh now needed teachers, and they gave her a position at the school again. But after being away
so long, she now felt herself an outsider and not “accepted” by the Kibbutz.

  Trouble started almost immediately. The kindergarten had two rooms separated by a thin wall. Arne taught one group, while her son sat in another. When she spoke louder than a near-whisper, Na’aman would cry for her. Having her own class to teach, she could do nothing. The boy’s constant mewling caused a rift with the other teachers, who felt that he was weak and spoiled.

  The other children noticed it as well and began to pick on him. Absalom Artzi, a classmate, uncharitably recalled him as being a scrawny coward. “He was a weakling and kids are mean to weaklings. He was alone and had no one to protect him,” he said. As an older child, Na’aman came to love reading; he would recall that his “kingdom was in books.”

  Even his mother had trouble loving him. In a 1971 psychologist’s interview, she said Na’aman was “unwanted.” By then, his escapades could have hardened her opinion of her son, but from the beginning something had pushed him from her. Perhaps, she said, he reminded her of the isolation of the kibbutz, or perhaps it was because he was a “good boy but not a good kid,” as she characterized him in an interview. As a result, the psychologists believed, he always had something to prove.

  Na’aman went to jail for a year thanks to his 1957 airplane joyride. His mother, visiting him in the military brig, found him disconsolate: he missed flying. “It was the most wonderful thing I ever felt,” he said. “Up and down. I was quick as a bird and as canny as a reptile.” He was discharged from active duty but remained in the Army reserves.

  Na’aman returned to the kibbutz and lived quietly with his parents. But his fall from the IAF had changed him. He seemed haunted, now, and he kept his eyes open for an opportunity to leave. He knew he needed money.