Displaying items by tag: Theft

The Field Museum has put some new security measures in place after an employee in the membership department swindled the museum out of more than $900,000 in cash over seven years.

The museum revealed the $903,284 theft — discovered in April 2014 — in its 2014 Form 990 filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

The theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence from an oratory in Palermo in 1969 is still considered one of the worst art crimes in history.

The 17th-century masterpiece – a depiction of the newborn Christ on a bed of straw, painted in the chiaroscuro technique – was thought to have been painted by Caravaggio in Rome and later moved to Sicily, where it hung for centuries before being cut from its frame by two thieves in the night, never to be seen again.

Masterpieces by artists including Tintoretto and Peter Paul Rubens have been stolen fr om the Museo Civico di Castelvecchio, Verona, according to reports in the Italian media. The theft reportedly took place on Thursday evening (19 November). Three armed men entered the museum after it had shut, disabled the security system and immobilised a guard, before grabbing the 17 paintings worth in total around €10m-€15m.

An unknown Italian man identifying himself as a retired art thief has contacted the police in the northern city of Piacenza demanding €150,000 ($163,000) for the safe return of a Gustav Klimt painting.

According to Der Standard, the demand was made several days ago.

The artwork disappeared from the Galleria d'Arte Moderna Piacenza in February 1997 while the alarm system was incapacitated due to ongoing renovation work.

Danish police today announced that they are on the hunt for two suspects who robbed a Copenhagen museum in broad daylight and made off with a bronze bust by sculptor Auguste Rodin, reportedly worth as much as €270,000 ($300,000).

The theft took place on July 16 at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, and only took the two men, who were posing as tourists, 12 minutes to pull off, reports the Danish newspaper Politiken.

Two decades after stealing antiquities from a first-century Jewish city in the Golan Heights, on the borders of Israel and Syria, a robber returned the loot to a museum's courtyard, Israeli authorities announced.

The returned artifacts included two 2,000-year-old sling stones, also called ballista balls, which would've been used as weapons, and an anonymous typed noted saying, "These are two Roman ballista balls from Gamla, from a residential quarter at the foot of the summit.

A New Hampshire man who admitted transporting five stolen N.C. Wyeth oil paintings to California, where four of them were sold to a high-end pawn shop for $100,000, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

Lawrence Estrella, 65, of Manchester, New Hampshire, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of stolen property in April. Estrella was arrested Nov. 23, 2014, in Los Angeles by FBI agents, according to court documents.

A former employee of famed glass-blowing artist Dale Chihuly has been charged by authorities in Washington state with first degree theft and three counts of first-degree trafficking of stolen property.

Christopher Robert Kaul is accused of stealing 90 pieces worth over $3 million while working at the Chihuly warehouse in Tacoma, Wash., says the Pierce County Prosecutor's Office.

A French art dealer has been taken into custody after Picasso's step-daughter accused him of stealing some of the artist's works, a judicial source said Wednesday.

Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of Pablo Picasso's second wife Jacqueline Roque, filed a complaint against art dealer Olivier Thomas in March after noticing some of her paintings were on the market, the source said, confirming a report in British daily "The Telegraph."