1It's a hot summer's evening in Paris.
2For weeks, a record-breaking heat wave has been cooking the city,
3leaving the streets empty and the Louvre quieter than ever.
4No one dares to go outside
5but for one man, it's time to strike.
6Throughout the night he pulls off the heist of the century:
7plucking the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and disappearing into the city.
8This set off a worldwide investigation
9leading French police down a 2 year rabbit hole of false leads and famous arrests
10before a mysterious letter eventually gave the thief away.
11We modeled the entire thing to show you how a single man stole the Mona Lisa,
12how he almost got away with it
13and the elaborate plan behind the heist that was eventually revealed decades later.
14As the sun went down that Sunday evening,
15the last few tourists were trickling out of the Louvre
16but just before it closed, a man entered the museum dressed in the Louvre's official white uniform
17blending in as an employee, he quickly found his way to a small storage closet,
18squeezed his way in, and waited out the entire night.
19The Louvre was closed the next day
20so very few employees were going to be patrolling the museum.
21At precisely 7:15 the next morning,
22the thief emerged into an almost empty Louvre.
23With no one in sight, he quickly made his way into the Salon Carre and there it was.
24At the time, the Mona Lisa didn't have its own room
25and it wasn't nearly as famous as it is today
26but the thief was about to change that.
27With no one in sight, he pulled the painting off its metal pins
28and carried it to a nearby stairwell.
29Using a screwdriver, he managed to remove the painting from its protective frame
30before covering it in a white sheet
31and heading straight for the nearest exit.
32But as he reached for the door, it was locked.
33At that exact moment, a plumber working for the Louvre appeared out of nowhere.
34He assumed that the man was a Louvre employee
35and so he helped him open the door
36and just like that, the thief disappeared into the city
37with the Mona Lisa under his arms.
38The whole heist was over in just a matter of minutes
39but it would take another 28 hours before anyone realized the painting was really gone.
40That week, photographers had been going through the museum
41and taking the paintings to be officially photographed,
42so blank spaces on the wall were completely normal.
43But when the photographers showed up the next morning without the Mona Lisa,
44it became clear that something was extremely wrong.
45The Mona Lisa was officially missing.
46When the Louvre announced that one of its prized possessions had disappeared,
47it sent shock waves all around the world
48and the question was "where did it go?"
49All the police had found was the wooden picture frame and a fingerprint left behind by the thief.
50To get the investigation going,
51local newspapers started offering a reward of $250,000
52for any information that would lead them to the painting.
53The response was overwhelming.
54Thousands of people sent letters and showed up to police stations
55with all kinds of information placing the Mona Lisa all over the world.
56Two separate witnesses recalled seeing a man leaving the Louvre with a bulky object.
57But the descriptions of the man were completely different.
58One person claimed that the Mona Lisa was on a freight train heading through Belgium
59and another claimed that the painting was on a ship which had already set sail for America
60but perhaps the most promising suspect was the famous artist Pablo Picasso.
61A secretary who knew Picasso wrote to the police
62and admitted that he had stolen several Iberian statues from the Louvre.
63He claimed to have sold these statues to Picasso,
64who went on to use them in one of his paintings.
65It seemed unlikely,
66but after checking the serial number on the statues
67the Louvre confirmed that they really were from the museum.
68Picasso was arrested and taken in for questioning.
69Meanwhile, the police turned their attention to another famous suspect:
70American banker and art collector JP Morgan.
71At the time, art forgery was a big business
72and paintings were often being forged and sold to naive millionaires in America.
73According to the claim, Morgan had commissioned the heist
74and the painting was now on its way to him.
75Police in America stopped and searched a boat pulling into New York
76but there was no Mona Lisa onboard.
77Theories kept coming in from all over the world
78but after 2 years of searching,
79the location of the Mona Lisa was still a complete mystery.
80As it turned out, the Mona Lisa hadn't gone far at all
81and it was sitting in an apartment just 2 miles from the Louvre.
82This was the apartment of Vincenzo Peruggia
83a 29 year old Italian who used to work at the Louvre as a handyman.
84He knew every weakness of the Louvre.
85He knew that it was closed on Mondays.
86He knew about the photographers
87and it was him who had made the Mona Lisa's protective case
88which he dismantled so easily during the heist.
89After leaving the Louvre he hid the painting in a trunk with a false floor which he had made himself
90but how did he get away with it for so long?
91Amazingly, Peruggia already had a criminal record
92and his fingerprints were already in the system
93but only his right-hand fingerprints were in the system
94and the one on the picture frame was a left-hand print
95and so a match was never found.
96During the investigation, police had visited Peruggia's apartment twice but never found anything.
97Little did they know that the Mona Lisa was hiding right under their noses.
98Peruggia had pulled off a stupidly simple heist
99and it seemed like he would get away with it.
100But after 2 years holding the painting hostage,
101he started to get impatient.
102He wrote an anonymous letter to an art dealer in Florence
103the city where da Vinci painted the masterpiece.
104In the letter he claimed to have the Mona Lisa in his possession
105and said he wanted to return it back to its home.
106He signed the letter with the name Leonardo and took the next train to Florence.
107The art dealer and his associate agreed to meet Peruggia in his hotel room to authenticate the painting.
108With the doors locked, Peruggia opened up the trunk
109and to their surprise it really was the Mona Lisa.
110In order to further authenticate the painting,
111the art dealers took it back to their studio
112assuring Peruggia that he would be rewarded for bringing it back to Italy
113but just an hour later the police showed up at his door and arrested him.
114Peruggia ended up spending just 7 months in prison
115and died just 10 years later.
116Although the search for the Mona Lisa was over,
117the truth behind what really happened seemed to have gone to the grave.
118But in 1932,
119a story was published that revealed a much more elaborate plan behind the heist.
120Written by Karl Decker.
121He claimed to know the man who was really behind the heist
122a man named Eduardo de Valfierno, an expert in art forgery.
123He had come up with a grand plan to sell not one, but six perfect copies of the Mona Lisa to six unsuspecting millionaires lined up in America.
124He commissioned a talented French painter to make the copies
125and shipped them off to America and put them into storage.
126In order for them to believe they were really getting their hands on the Mona Lisa
127the real one had to go missing.
128And so he contracted Peruggia to pull off the heist.
129When news spread that the Mona Lisa had gone missing,
130the paintings were sold to their buyers
131and the three involved ran off with the equivalent of 90 million dollars.