In the early hours of the morning on September 4, 1972, three men climbed onto the roof of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, opened a skylight, and rappelled into the galleries below. The ensuing theft was one of the rare instances in the history of art crime when reality matched the antics normally dreamt up by Hollywood.
The criminals tied up three guards, fired a shotgun into the ceiling to show they meant business, and got busy pillaging and plundering. While a tripped alarm cut the shopping spree short, the thieves made off with a bundle of fine jewelry as well as 18 paintings, including a Rembrandt.
Eighteen years before the notorious Gardner Museum theft, the Skylight Caper, as this heist came to be known, was one of the biggest art thefts to date and it remains the greatest art crime in Canadian history.
But the news hardly made waves. Later in the day on September 4, Labor Day, museum official Bill Bantey held a press conference to publicize the missing canvases. But that initial burst of publicity was quickly overshadowed.
On the Friday three days prior, three men denied entry into Montreal’s famous Blue Bird Café set the bar on fire, killing 37 patrons inside. The day after the museum heist, news broke that Palestinian terrorists had taken a group of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics hostage. On September 6, news of their murder in the early hours of the morning blared from front-page headlines around the world.
The final ingredient that turned Labor Day ’72 into a verified news storm in Montreal was a very Canadian concern. On September 2, the Russians had handily defeated Canada in the first game of the two-country hockey face-off that would come to be known as the Summit Series. The teams were set to play again the night of September 4.
The brazen theft at the museum and the missing Rembrandt was lost amid the noise of other local and world events. Nearly 50 years later, 17 of the stolen paintings are still in the wind and no suspects have ever been detained.
“It would seem that they were discriminating thieves”
Montreal solidified its reputation as the Sin City of the North during Prohibition when thirsty Americans straining at the bounds set by the country’s vice police would hop the border to find relief from sobriety and prudery. A thriving red light district, free-flowing booze, and entertainment provided by burlesque shows and gambling dens welcomed all visitors.
While the city began to clean up some of its more unsavory elements starting in the 1950s, the seeds of organized crime had been planted. By the early 1970s, mafias of several different national persuasions held a foothold in Montreal as did the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.
Political tensions were also high in the city as the divide widened between French and English-speaking residents. In the 1960s, a French faction began campaigning for secession from English-speaking Canada, and some of the more extreme elements of the group turned to terrorism. The violence peaked in 1970 when the labor minister of Quebec was kidnapped and killed.
It was against this backdrop that the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was growing its collections and solidifying its reputation in the port city that was the financial capital of Canada at the time.
Art crime writer Catherine Schofield Sezgin, who has extensively studied the theft, tells The Daily Beast that most of the wealthy residents of Montreal “were new money. So of course, as soon as they could, they were buying art. At the same time, Europe was in chaos so the art dealers in Europe were selling…this is why Montreal Museum of Fine Arts actually had these named European artists. It was all about status.”
In 1966, the museum put together a traveling exhibition to show off the very best of their collection. As “Masterpieces from Montreal: Selected Paintings from the Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts” moved from Florida to New York to Pennsylvania, it was accompanied by an exhibition catalog that highlighted the paintings on display.
While exhibition catalogs are a standard practice for special art exhibits to this day, there is no doubt a catalog showing off a museum’s best treasures was a boon to any would-be thieves itching to join the growing movement of art crime that was taking off in Europe.
And so September 1972 dawned in all its political and social turmoil. The museum was undergoing some repairs, and workmen had left the alarm to part of the museum’s skylight disabled and one of their ladders on the roof over the holiday weekend.
While the culprits may have ultimately evaded capture, it was clear in the days that followed the theft that the thieves were aware of most of the particulars of the security gaps caused by this maintenance.
Around 1:30 a.m. on Labor Day, one of the criminal crew members scaled a tree next to the museum with the help of the “shoe picks” often used by utility workers. He lowered the ladder down to his two accomplices; once they were assembled on the roof, they opened the skylight and rappelled by rope into the gallery below.
There were three security guards on duty that night, one of whom had just finished his rounds and was about to make himself a cup of tea. But his break was interrupted when the thieves appeared and forced him to the ground. After they fired a warning shot to encourage the guard to pick up his speed, the two remaining guards rushed to the scene and were also tied up and gagged.
With no one to stop them, the intruders went about collecting their loot. They gathered Corots and a Gainsborough, a Courbet and a Rubens, and Rembrandt’s Evening Landscape with Cottages, which was the most well-known of the missing paintings, though it is a rather minor painting in the Dutch master oeuvre. The 18 paintings were accompanied by handfuls of the fine jewelry also on display in the museum.
The theft was bad, but the damage could have been much worse according to Anthony Amore in Stealing Rembrandts. An additional set of paintings had been pulled from the wall. But after an alarm was accidentally tripped, the second pile that included an El Greco, a Picasso, and another Rembrandt was left behind as the intruders fled.
It took an hour for the guards to free themselves but after they did, their first call was to Bantey, a former journalist who was the most senior museum official in town over the holiday weekend.
“It would seem that they were discriminating thieves, had a fairly good idea of what they were looking for certainly in terms of pictures,” Bantey told the press later that morning. “I would have to say that if they were discriminating in terms of the jewelry, it’s open to debate.”
Given the seedy-side of Sin City, fingers immediately began pointing all over the place.
According to Schofield Sezgin, “Bill Bantey was totally clear that it wasn’t an inside job. He was absolutely adamant about that.” And while the thieves clearly had inside information, the evidence supports this assessment, at least in part. The alarm that sent the three running was not actually connected to any law enforcement organization, a fact of which the thieves seemed unaware.
So that left just about everyone else as a suspect. While attention initially turned to the repairmen who had been working on the roof, officials eventually decided, if they played a part, it was probably more of the loose lips variety.
So was it a job committed by one of the mafia organizations in town or maybe the Hells Angels? Had one of the European criminal organizations hitting art collections on the continent migrated across the pond to pull off a new heist? And did the art students at the nearby École des Beaux-arts, who had a notoriously contentious relationship with the museum, have anything to do with it, possibly serving as the criminal labor?
In the months following the theft, there were several attempts to make contact, though it was unclear how serious the thieves were in demanding ransom. They initially requested $500,000, but then lowered their ask to $250,000. The negotiations resulted in one photo proving the men on the other end of the line had possession of the 18 stolen paintings, and the eventual return of one “small Indian pendant” and a painting attributed to Brueghel, which later turned out to be not by the master himself.
But after a botched meeting in a field outside of the city, the phone lines went silent. The remaining paintings and jewelry were gone with no leads as to their whereabouts, despite the continued work of at least one official, Alain Lacoursière, a retired Montreal police officer who has worked extensively on the case.
In the end, the museum didn’t lose entirely.
“The real big story should be that the museum did it…they are the only people who actually benefitted from this,” Schofield Sezgin said, pointing out that while it is clear this was probably not an inside job, the museum did receive a hefty insurance payout for the lost works.
In the end, though, even the museum didn’t fully benefit. Administrators used the insurance money, to buy a Peter Paul Rubens painting known as The Leopards, which was later revealed to be by his students and thus not worth nearly as much as they paid for it.
As for the stolen paintings, they remain in the wind as talk of the theft has faded. Perhaps they are in a private collection in Europe or maybe on the wall of a mansion down in Costa Rica, the preferred holiday playground of the Montreal mafia.
“Everyone forgot abut the theft except for the insurance companies,” Bantey told Schofield Sezgin. “Like a death in the family, you have to let it drop.”
