Displaying items by tag: police

Pedro Luis Enriquez who goes by the nickname “El Loco” or “the Madman” has pleaded guilty to stealing $15 million worth of jewelry and watches from Provident Jewelry in Jupiter, Florida.

Investigators believe that three people were involved in the heist that took place on January 22, 2011 although Enriquez, 41, was the only suspect who has been apprehended. The thieves used a jackhammer-style tool and a high-pressure cutting torch to open a vault surrounded by 10 inches of reinforced concrete. Inside the vault, police found an open bottle of wine and a small flashlight, which contained DNA matching Enriquez’s.

Miami-Dade County Police have recovered 170 of the 1,6000 pieces of jewelry, loose stones and watches that were stolen; four arrests have been made in connection to the trafficking of the stolen goods.

Investigators received their first break in the case three weeks after the robbery when one of the stolen loose stones turned up at the Gemological Institute of America in New York. Police tracked the stone to a pawnshop in Miami and were able to recover another 100 stones.

Enriquez, who will serve 15 years in prison, has not volunteered any information about the heist or his accomplices.

German police arrested two people and raided 28 locations in an effort to halt a multi-million dollar international forgery ring responsible for selling fake paintings they claimed were by Russian avant-garde artists including Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). Apartments, business premises, and art galleries in Wiesbaden, Mainz, Suttgart, Munich, and Hamburg were searched by police officers. Over 1,000 items were seized including supposed forgeries and sales documents. Additional searches were carried out in Switzerland and Israel.

The forgers are believed to have sold over 400 works ranging in price from $1,332 to over $1 million since 2005, accruing more than $2.7 million. The two men who were arrested are believed to be the leaders of an international group of six counterfeiters. Private collectors in Germany and Spain acquired most of the fakes sold by the forgery ring.

Confidence in the German art market has been unstable since it was shaken by the largest forgery scandal to date in 2011. Art forger Wolfang Betrachhi was sentences to six years in jail after admitting to painting copies of works by Fernard Leger (1881-1955) and Max Ernst (1891-1976) and then selling them as masterpieces to unwitting collectors.  

French traffic police found a stolen Faberge egg worth $1.3 million while conducting a routine car search near the Swiss border. The egg, which is made of more than two pounds of pure gold, is covered in diamonds, sapphires, and emeralds. The work of art has been missing for four years.

The Faberge egg was stolen in 2009 from a Kuwaiti import-export firm based in Geneva but the work’s whereabouts were never determined. The officers, who recovered the egg from a suspicious looking BMW, immediately placed the two Belarusian men in the car under arrest. Another man who was driving behind the suspects was also arrested. When questioned by the police, the suspects claimed conflicting stories; one alleged that they had found the Faberge egg on the ground and another maintained that they had bought it for a low price at a flea market.

Officials believe that the three suspects were given the task of transporting and negotiating the sale of the artwork. They are currently in police custody and have been charged with handling stolen goods and possessing a weapon.

Pickpockets have always been most prevalent at locations that attract a high volume of tourists such as the Louvre. However, the pickpocketing problem at the French museum has gotten so severe that 200 members of the institution’s staff staged a walkout earlier this week in protest of the pickpocket gangs that target visitors. The museum reopened to the public on Thursday, April 11, 2013 with a squad of approximately 20 uniformed police officers patrolling the grounds.

The police officers were recruited in response to staff concerns. Many Louvre employees have endured violent altercations with pickpockets including being spat at, insulted, and hit. Many of the criminals return to the museum repeatedly after being barred from the premises. Museum officials hope that a strong police presence will deter pickpockets from setting up shop at the Louvre, which sees about 10 million visitors each year.

Serbian police recovered Rembrandt’s (1606-1669) Portrait of a Father on Tuesday, March 12, 2013, seven years a after it was stolen from the Novi Sad City Museum located in the northern city of Novi Sad. Police arrested four people in connection to the 2006 heist that involved three other paintings including a work by the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a 17^th century piece by the Italian Baroque painter Francesco Mola (1612-1666), and another painting from the 16^th century by an unknown German-Dutch artist.

Rembrandt, one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history, painted Portrait of Father in 1630 and it is estimated to be worth around $3.7 million. The painting was stolen 10 years prior to the 2006 robbery, but it was eventually recovered in Spain.

None of the other works involved in the Serbian heist have been found.

Eugène Delacroix’s (1798-1863) celebrated painting Liberty Leading the People was defaced while on view at the Louvre’s satellite location in Lens, which opened in the former mining town in northern France in December 2012. French police have a detained the woman accused of scrawling a graffiti tag along the bottom of the work.

Delacroix, a leader of the Romantic school in French painting, painted Liberty Leading the People to celebrate the July revolution of 1830, which brought down France’s Charles X. The work was featured on the country’s 100-franc banknote before the Euro was adopted and is rumored to have inspired New York’s Statue of Liberty.

Just before the museum closed for the day on Thursday, February 7, 2013, a 28-year-old woman scribbled in 12 inch writing what officials believe to be a reference to a 9/11 conspiracy theory. Officials believe that the work can be easily cleaned, but a restoration expert from the Louvre was being sent to Lens to perform a thorough examination. Museum officials have not yet decided if the painting will need to be removed.    

Following a two-year investigation conducted by the Italian art forgery unit, Christian Parisot, president of Rome’s Modigliani Institute, has been arrested. Police seized 18 works from Parisot including prints, bronzes, and a painting attributed to the Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920); the counterfeit works are said to be worth almost $8.7 million. The unit also apprehended forged certificates of authenticity from Parisot.

Parisot has worked with the Modigliani family for years and even served as secretary to Jeanne Modigliani, the artist’s daughter. Laura Nechtschein Modigliani, Jeanne’s daughter and the only living descendant of the artist, currently holds the rights over her grandfather’s works.

Modigliani’s oeuvre has proved problematic through the years; due to his consistent and distinctive style, Modigliani’s works are often subject to forgery. There are at least five catalogue raisonnés of the artist’s work and Parisot was in the process of compiling his own prior to his arrest.

A member of the canine unit recovered four paintings stolen from South Africa’s Pretoria Art Museum in a private cemetery on Tuesday, November 13. While the paintings still need to be verified, police officials are almost certain they are Maggie Laubser’s Cat and Petunias (1936), JH Pierneef’s Eland and Bird (1961), Irma Stern’s Fishing Boats (1931), and Hugo Naude’s Hottentot Chief, all of which disappeared after an armed robbery took place at the museum on November 11. Gerard Sekoto’s Street Scene (1939) is still missing.

The Pretoria Museum closed after the heist and will re-open on November 20 after officials finish a number of updates to the institution’s security system. The robbers entered the museum as paying visitors on Sunday but there is no surveillance footage as the museum’s security cameras had stopped working earlier in the week.

The victim of a devastating art heist that took place last Friday, the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam claims their security system is not to blame. The Museum’s director Emily Ansenk shot down allegations that a rear emergency door had been left open. However, police are investigating whether or not there was someone in the museum after hours that could have opened the door for the thieves, as there were no signs of forced entry.

After robbers swiped seven artworks including paintings by Picasso, Matisse, and Monet, the Kunsthal became the subject of intense scrutiny. The Museum admitted to Dutch police that there were no security guards on duty when the robbery occurred. An external security firm was the first to respond when the Museum’s alarm went off. Museum officials claim that their security system, which relies solely on alarms and security cameras, is state-of-the-art.

Late on Friday, police released three grainy surveillance photos of the burglars exiting the Museum out of a back door. While their faces were not visible, police hope that the bags the thieves were carrying are recognizable. Police proceeded to post leaflets around the neighborhood, asking potential witnesses to step forward.

On September 14^th, star bond trader, Jeffrey Gundlach, returned to his Santa Monica home to find his art collection, 2010 Porsche Carrera, watches, and rare bottles of wine missing. Two weeks later, police recovered the contemporary art trove. Including works by Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns, and Richard Diebenkorn, the collection totaled nearly $10 million. Gundlach had offered a $1.7 million reward for the collection’s safe return.

Santa Monica police arrested two suspects after officers received a tip that the stolen art was being held at an automobile stereo shop in Pasadena. After raiding Al & Ed’s Autosound, police recovered all but one of Gundlach’s paintings. The store’s manager, Jay Jeffrey Nieto, 45, was arrested on suspicion of possessing stolen property. A second suspect, Wilmer Cadiz, 40, was arrested on the same charges at his home. The final painting was recovered at a residence in Glendale.

The near-record reward is believed to have played a key role in the collections’ recovery. However, it is not clear whether the reward money will be paid to the person who provided the tip that led to the arrest of Nieto and Cadiz. Gundlach had offered $1 million for the return of the Mondrian painting, Composition (A) En Rouge Et Blanc. The offer is said to be the highest ever reward for a single painting.