Five years on the trail of one of the world’s most famous paintings
The French authorities have been tracking one of the world’s most famous paintings, stolen from the Marmottan Museum in 1985, for five years. The story had many twists and turns. On October 27, 1985, “Impression, soleil Le Levant”, the famous image of the port of Le Havre that gave the Impressionist movement its name, was stolen along with nine other famous paintings. In less than five minutes, the thieves overpowered the guards and some forty visitors before making off with their precious loot without leaving the slightest clue. In 1984, five works by Corot, the forerunner of Impressionism, were stolen from the Semur-en-Auxois Museum in Burgundy. Who were the thieves? Were they acting on commission? And if so, whose? Many months passed without a clue. Finally, the investigation took an unexpected turn on the other side of the world.
Blackmail in yakuza land: ‘Next time, you’ll get your painting back in pieces’
Tokyo, on an April evening in 1986. At the cultural service of the French embassy, a strange visitor pulled five Polaroid photographs of Monet’s famous painting out of his pocket. “Here,” he declares. “If you want to get this back, it costs 500 million dollars.” Warned of blackmail, the French authorities tried to maintain contact, but the man quickly lost patience. “Next time,” he threatened, “you’ll get your painting back, but it will be cut into pieces. France then asked the Japanese authorities to intervene, but they refused to cooperate. The blackmailer vanished into thin air. But was Monet’s masterpiece really in the Land of the Rising Sun? In Japan, Western art is overpriced – a lucrative market infiltrated by the Japanese mafia. Are the yakuza, masters of art trafficking, behind the impressionist thefts in France? This is the hypothesis inherited by Mireille Ballestrazzi, who is leading this investigation with international ramifications. After a series of twists and turns (notably involving a gang of bank robbers in the suburbs of Paris), the intervention of a policeman with a controversial reputation will definitively redirect her towards another notorious mafia.
Corsican mafia threatened to “burn paintings in Place de la Concorde”
Charles Pellegrini was a key figure in the 1970s and 1980s, when he headed the local Crime Squad. Originally from Corsica, the former police commissioner did not hesitate to get close to members of the local underworld. In 1988, he received a phone call from one of his contacts. “We have the Monet paintings,” he said, demanding in exchange the release of several gangsters from the dreaded Brise de mer. Otherwise”, he threatened, “these paintings will be burned in Place de la Concorde”. Commissioner Mireille Ballestrazzi refused to give in to blackmail, but spent two years working on this Corsican lead. By the end of 1990, she was certain that the works in the Marmottan Museum were indeed on the island. And she was preparing a full-scale raid on the local mob. On December 4, 1990, about fifty policemen arrived in Corsica. In Porto-Vecchio, at the home of two brothers suspected of involvement in theft, one of them recounted the discovery in the basement of their house: “In a bag, a set of Polaroid photographs of the Marmottan paintings”. After finally obtaining the address where the paintings were hidden, the police rushed to the scene. In the apartment where no one lived was “a huge wooden trunk with handles. I pulled out the wooden box and a colleague searched…. And I’ll always remember,” says the investigator, still overcome with emotion, “the first painting I took out: Impression, soleil levant. All the paintings stolen from the Marmottan Museum and lost over the last five years were there.
