The 10 Greatest Art Heists of All Time (3 of 6)

Canada Experiences Her Darkest Hour (1972)

Picture this: it’s early in the morning at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the three guards tasked with protecting all that precious artwork suddenly witness a team of bandits descending from a skylight. The guards are bound and gagged, presumably in a polite fashion as this is Canada, after all. The thieves—who it is speculated were linked to the Montreal mafia—make off with 39 pieces of jewelry and 18 paintings, including a Rembrandt that would probably be worth $40 million today, eh? More than 50 years later, nobody has ever been caught, nor have any of the stolen items been recovered.

Spider-Man Goes Rogue (2010)

Vjeran Tomic needed some money, but working a regular 9-to-5 job to earn it wasn’t going to cut it. So he decided he would find a way into Paris’s Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville Henri and steal a painting for a sketchy art dealer, for which he’d earn a commission. Spraying acid on a window did the track, and for this he earned the moniker Spider-Man. He opted for Matisse’s Pastorale (1905), and when he noticed no alarms going off, he snagged four more. Alas, he was eventually caught and sentenced to eight years imprisonment for, in the words of the no doubt snooty French judge, taking “cultural goods belonging to humankind’s artistic heritage. Hon-hon-hon.”