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

by John Biggs

  Julia came with him, wheeling Diller down the gangway and into the bustle of Tel Aviv, where they took an apartment in Yad Eliyahu. He thrashed around looking for a job, and finally settled on burning out the window grate of a bathroom in a local bank branch with an oxygen torch and trying to break into a heavily guarded ATM. He was arrested again, and he received one year.

  Diller was forty-two and exhausted. His lawyer, Tzvi Lydski, called him a “lonely dog with a broken foot,” and the formerly proud man was described as sitting with his “head bowed and his face unshaven” in court.125 “I am burdened by my defeat, my failures and my handicap,” he said. “I am far from a saint, but I try to reach the level of a repentant person.”

  Apparently this play-acting worked, for he was soon released. He seemed to disappear for a while, visiting Holland and France, and he continued his diet and exercise regimens. In Tel Aviv, he lived at 20 Sokolov Street, a block of modern apartments on a quiet tree-lined street. His mother had bought him a flat there in the early 1980s. One relative recalls seeing him on a bus during this period, wearing a wig and with a new nose that had apparently “shrunk.”

  It seemed his cycle had been broken. After all of the bad blood, he appeared to become closer to his mother Arne, and by the 1990s he was able to rekindle his relationship with Nili Shamrat, calling her daily to wake her up at her home in California. She had divorced her first husband and now lived alone in an apartment in Tarzana, where she worked as a teacher and guidance counselor. Nili began to visit him every summer, spending months at his apartment on Sokolov Street or travelling with him through Europe. He seemed a changed person, no longer under the sway of his old impulses. He was neither rich nor penniless. He always seemed to be buying or selling something, a practice that Shamrat assumed was the source of his money.

  By 2003, Diller’s cancer had returned. He spent months in a Tel Aviv hospice, where he was visited by his mother and by Shamrat. On April 15, 2003, Na’aman and Nili were married by the Jerusalem Rabbinate. It was, coincidentally or not, the twentieth anniversary of the L.A. Mayer theft. Shamrat returned to the U.S. shortly after the wedding. She would not return for a little more than a year.

  On April 13, 2004, Diller didn’t call Nili to wish her good morning. By the 15th, she was worried, and she called Arne. One of his nephews, Arne told her, had found him at 20 Sokolov on the floor, “wallowing in his own excrement,” and he was sent to the hospice at Tel Hashomer. Shamrat arrived in Jerusalem in time to see him lapse into unconsciousness. The cancer had spread a fiery path through his body and he died on the morning of April 20, 2004, his new bride and his mother by his side. His mother buried him at the cemetery at Ein Hahoresh, the community that had ousted him so many years before. He was sixty-five.

  Chapter 18

  What happened next is a point of contention between Israeli detectives and Nili Shamrat. Shamrat, who at the time was a tenth-grade adviser at the Shal Havet Jewish Day School in Los Angeles, claims not to remember what was said in the trying months between her wedding to Diller and his death.

  I began speaking to Shamrat in 2009, when a close relation put me in contact with her. We spoke primarily over the phone, and it was clear she was still very much in love with the man once called the “Kibbutznik burglar.” It was strange – to speak about a Diller that many didn’t know while the facts of the case began to pile up and meld into a mélange of fact and fiction. The press painted a picture of a narcissistic international playboy, while Shamrat told of a man who made delicious fruit sorbet and delightful vegan meals.

  “Na’aman was a very, very unique person,” she said one afternoon, wistfully recalling his ability to fix things around the house. She called it his “golden hand.” She had a slight accent and her voice grew soft with her reminiscences.

  “He did things that were definitely a crime, but he was really very positive in so many instances, so many other ways,” she said.

  According to the police, Diller took her to the L.A. Mayer museum shortly after their wedding, and showed her how he had accomplished the break-in. She was dumbstruck that her husband, the man she had known for almost three decades, had pulled off a final robbery before settling into the leisurely pace of middle age. She said he showed her a number of boxes at his home and at his Aunt Hilda’s empty apartment and explained that they came from the museum. These were the boxes that Shamrat gave to Ephron-Gabai to return to the museum, and these were the boxes that contained the Marie-Antoinette.

  “I came to her and I said I had inherited things that my husband stole,” said Shamrat. “Before he died he told me that he stole them from that museum and that I wanted to return them to the museum. And I only had one condition: anonymity.”

  She chose the lawyer based on a friend’s recommendation in Tel Aviv, and thought this would be the best and most legally prudent way to return the watches. She says she does not remember who first mentioned the possibility of a reward, but as far as she recalls it was mutually agreed upon that Ephron-Gabai would mention but not press the point. “I don’t care what happens,” she told the lawyer, “these things have to be returned to the museum.”

  I asked her why she didn’t just leave the items on the doorstep of the museum. Why didn’t she just ship them anonymously? She replied that she had no experience with this sort of thing and that she knew that these things need to be returned posthaste.

  “I think the main reason was that I thought, really thought, that if any issue is like that, you go to a lawyer,” she said. “Not having a lot of experience with lawyers in Israel, or hardly any I thought that the most common thing to do was to go to a lawyer who will take care of it.”

  “You know I could have left it and then nothing would have happened, but for me something that was stolen needs to be returned.”

  She wanted to do the right thing.

  After the return of the watches, the police approached the Lidor/Diller family. They learned details about his previous crimes in other countries and information on Shamrat herself. The family told them about his lover, Julia, in Holland, and also revealed that Na’aman had owned a number of safety deposit boxes in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and France before his death. They said he received about 1,800 euros a month from a bank account in Paris, his main source of income, but the family, suspicious of its black sheep, believed he had more. By January 2008, the Israeli police had organized cross-jurisdictional investigations in Holland and Paris, where they hoped to find the last missing pieces from the L.A. Mayer collection.

  The Jerusalem police also released a general statement requesting that no Israeli journalist write about the case and asking police to remain quiet when talking to reporters. But on October 29, 2010, ignoring the gag rule, Danny Rubinstein published another article in Calcalist Magazine, entitled “Na’aman Diller Is The Man Behind Israel’s Biggest Robbery.” In it, Nili Shamrat made her first statement, saying that she was “very uncomfortable” talking about it. “The museum received the clocks back. Na’aman is a forgotten story. The important thing is the collection was returned, and people can see it and everyone is happy.”126 However, the police had already tracked down most of the other watches and were beginning to plan a case against Shamrat with the help of the L.A. police department.

  Revital Zaraf was the first to find a new cache of watches. In May 2008, she had travelled to the Netherlands, where she had trouble adjusting to the cold. The warehouse on the outskirts of the Hague felt like a freezer to the tan, dark-haired detective. She had come with a member of the Dutch police, carrying a slip of paper with the name of a man who more than two decades earlier had rented one of the storage spaces. As they walked the vast room, threading through a labyrinth of boxes, the Dutch officer consulted a list of renters, zeroing in on one locker in particular. It belonged to Julia, who lived nearby, and earlier, Zaraf had gone to see her.

  The interview was fairly quick. Julia hadn’t spoken to Diller in years, and she was sad to hear of his passing. She expl
ained that he had asked her to hold a few items for him until his return. As time went by, and he never resurfaced, she forgot about him.

  What they found inside the locker was disappointing: just boxes full of papers. But Zaraf also found the number of a safe deposit box in the city, and soon she and the Dutch detective were there with a search warrant. Inside a metal box, in smaller, cardboard medicine boxes nestled in yellowed newspaper, they found six watches. Revital recognized them as having been among those stolen from the Mayer museum. Scattered at the bottom of the box, she found fake passport stamps and photographs of a skinny man with hollow cheeks and large aviator-style glasses. They were of Diller, taken during his most active criminal period.

  In L.A., another case was building. In December 2007, Israeli National Police were routed to the California Department of Insurance (CDI) Fraud Division, and a CDI detective travelled to Israel, where he went over the details of the case before returning to Los Angeles to prepare for a formal investigation by California police.

  A few days later, detective Oded Janiv flew to Los Angeles. At 6 a.m. on a warm May morning, Janiv arrived with CDI detectives and an L.A.P.D. SWAT team at the Tarzana home of Nili Shamrat. Warning Janiv that Shamrat might be armed (a concept that amused the Israeli detectives to no end), the Los Angeles police told him to stand back while one of the Americans knocked on the door.

  Shamrat opened it. She was a thin woman with curly brown hair and a runner’s thin physique. She took care of herself, eating small portions of mostly vegetarian food, and had been inspired by Diller to stay in shape. The U.S. detectives, on seeing this charming Californian, lowered their guns. They went inside.

  The cops sat down with Shamrat. She was worried.

  As she started to answer questions in accented English, another woman, her sister, came to the room, and in hushed Hebrew asked what was wrong. “This is probably about Na’aman,” Shamrat answered in Hebrew, unaware that there was an Israeli detective present.

  The house was small and cozy. A few pieces of Judaica hung from the walls. But, next to the commonplace, the investigators found three rare eighteenth-century oil paintings and an antique Latin manuscript stolen from the L.A. Mayer Museum, as well as some small labels from the original exhibit explaining the items in English and Hebrew. Shamrat denied any knowledge that the goods were stolen, and the police eventually left, but the next day she called to admit that she was the widow of Na’aman Diller. She told the police she had no more treasures. They believed her. But her effort to escape her husband’s sins was for naught. Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner of the California Department of Insurance charged her with acceptance of stolen property.

  On March 2, 2010, almost two years later, she received five years of probation and three hundred hours of community service for her complicity in the theft. She lost her job at the school and has not really worked since. She felt terrible and she wishes things had gone differently. But she never wished she hadn’t met the love of her young life, the quiet, skinny, strong man with golden hands, her Na’aman.

  For the Israelis there were still a few loose ends to tie up, including determining the location of the remaining watches. It seemed to the Israeli detectives that most of the watches were intact and safe. Oded Sarna picked up another fifty watches out of a safety deposit box in Paris under Diller’s name and received a plaque from the Paris Antiquities Authority for returning the Breguet masterpieces to their rightful home.

  Then the trail went cold. Diller’s real skill was burglary, and he was a horrible fence. He had almost been caught in the late 1980s trying to sell the watches, a mistake he never made again. Travelling on a fake passport, he took a train to Geneva, apparently to sell some of the stolen Breguets. At the Swiss border, customs officials checked his papers and pulled him off of the train. In his bag they found six watches but did not think to identify them further and instead sent him back into France, forcing him to sell his watches on the spot to buy a return ticket. Detective Janiv believed the watches were still in Swiss custody or floating around in someone’s collection.

  In the end, 96 of the 106 watches reappeared, including the Marie-Antoinette. The L.A. Mayer exhibit reopened on July 21, 2009, with only 55 of the 96 remaining clocks on display. The rest are kept under lock and key in Boris Sankov’s workshop. The rest are stored inside a massive vault built into the foundation of the little museum.

  Inside L.A. Mayer, the bustle of Jerusalem falls away. The new space is quiet and cool, and guards lounge in their chairs as school groups and scholars pay admission and stroll in to look at the trove of Islamic art in the heart of the Jewish state. Some only come for the watches. After all, a good watch was not just a collection of gears, but a symbol of permanence amid life’s flux.

  The Marie-Antoinette was the ultimate expression of that thought. The woman who inspired it, the man who loved her, and the maestro who kept the beat were all long gone. All that remained was this golden distillation of time, romance, and obsession.

  Now that watch hangs in a clear case, protected from theft by a state-of-the-art security system. Sankov hadn’t dared to wind it. It was too fragile and precious, although he did say that it still ran. Outside, Israel and the Middle East were roiled by conflict. Switzerland, France, and the rest of the world were wracked by a banking crisis. Here, in a bulletproof glass case, amid a constellation of tiny spotlights, suspended by arcs of crimson velvet and a golden chain, just as Marie-Antoinette would have carried it in the halls of Versailles had she been allowed to live out her days in peace, was a gold watch that had lived through everything this world could throw at it and thrive, a testament to the skill and endless dedication of one man to the art of watchmaking.

  The watch is viewable from all angles, and it looks surprisingly small in this windowless room, a crown jewel surrounded by the rest of the Salomons collection. The real Marie-Antoinette is just as striking as Swatch’s re-creation. It looks battle-scarred. Its golden case appears scratched by an unschooled polisher’s rag, and its cogs and wheels and spindles, minimally cleaned by Sankov, are dark and discolored, yet the edges still shine in places. Sankov found Diller to have treated the watches clumsily, but much of the damage was minor and easily repaired. Apparently because Diller’s efforts to sell off minor jewels and gold from the timepieces often failed, he had stopped disassembling them and instead simply became their steward. He, like so many held in the thrall of Marie-Antoinette and her namesake watch, was beset by the majesty of a beautiful thing.

  Every night, the room is closed behind a foot-thick steel safe door, and it is under constant surveillance. The Queen, long sought-after and a symbol of so much lost, was finally found and was not be likely to go missing again.

  Chapter 19

  Las Vegas

  In June of 2014, I flew from New York City to Las Vegas to the heart of modern horology. The JCK Show in Las Vegas – its name an abbreviation of Jewelers’ Circular Keystone, a magazine founded in 1875 – is the premiere American watch and jewelry show and a place for the established jewelers to converge en masse to stock up for the season. Worldwide, JCK is second only to BaselWorld in Basel, Switzerland, an event that plays host to watchmaking’s glitterati for almost two weeks every March.

  At JCK, watches are seen more as fashion items than as works of engineering or experimentation. But a small minority of watchmakers are still creating watches the way Breguet did in his atelier. I checked into the Paris hotel, with its outsized model Eiffel Tower outside and French-themed casino, and walked the strip to the imposing Venetian hotel, where under lavish chandeliers and applied moldings that would rival Versailles in opulence if not quality, I entered the world of haute horlogerie, Las Vegas style.

  Like any convention, the show is split up among multiple rooms, and each manufacturer or dealer has a booth. There are giveaways – towels, candies, or notebooks are popular – and the higher-end brands escape the rabble by hiring $10,000-a-night suites in the hotel’s upper floors, access
ible only by appointment and armed escort.

  Watchmaking in the modern age lives in a halfway place between art and commerce. The old piecework of the Swiss has been replaced by whirring robot arms on an assembly line, and Nicolas Hayek’s “pyramidal base” of watches consists of watches that cost a few dollars to make and sell for a king’s ransom. The mark-up for the jeweler, one manufacturer told me, is thirty to fifty percent. This means a watch a jeweler buys for $250 can sell for $500 or more in the store. Imagine this writ larger on some of the more opulent pieces, and a price of $100,000 in the jeweler’s window means a price of $50,000 wholesale.

  This goes a long way toward explaining why most watches are “expensive.” Watchmakers want to distribute their wares to shops – called “doors” in the business. While many manufacturers like Seiko and Citizen want more and more doors, including many department and discount stores, higher-end makers try to reduce the number of doors to which they sell. This creates scarcity, and when the watchmaker markets his wares on the pages of glossy magazines – when Cindy Crawford or another actor or starlet is seen wearing a Chanel J12 white ceramic watch (about $9,000 retail) – the dearth of product ensures the distributor can maintain his markup while the watchmaker makes a sale.

  Take Stephen Hallock, former president of MB&F North America. This boyish entrepreneur wears custom shirts, handsome tailored jackets, and the latest jeans of the season. He keeps fit and trim, his beard raffishly unkempt and his hair soft and tousled. MB&F – which stands for Maximilian Büsser & Friends – is a small company that calls on the talents of a number of master watchmakers, Büsser included, to create what Hallock cals horological machines. These watches are not your grandfather’s Rolex. Starting at about $200,000, they are masterpieces of design and horology, incorporating odd, rare materials with a disregard for watchmaking’s traditional forms. See, for example, the MB&F HM3 Frog. It looks like a stylized cyber-frog, with two bulbous crystals displaying the time and a rotor – shaped like a battle-ax – twirling over the “thoroughbred” movement in a window shaped like a jolly mouth. The effect is at once whimsical and alien and as far from a watch as anyone has ever seen.