Patient police work and talkative robbers lead to the recovery of paintings by Van Gogh and Cezanne

By GREG BURKE /ROME

hen three armed men hid inside the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome just after it closed one night last May, they took their shoes off to reduce noise. They had planned their operation meticulously and immediately went to work, binding and gagging the three guards and deactivating all alarms. In less than an hour, the masked bandits pulled off one of the biggest art heists in recent years in Italy, snaring two works by Vincent van Gogh and another by Paul Cezanne. The paintings, Van Gogh's Le Jardinier and L'Arlesienne--the only works by the artist in an Italian museum--and the unfinished Le Cabanon de Jourdan by Cezanne, were valued at about $30 million. While the ease with which they moved about the museum and their choice of three of the most valuable paintings from the collection initially gave the impression that they were pros, they turned out to be first-class bumblers.

Last week, 48 days after the robbery, police recovered the paintings and arrested eight people, including a museum guard. "They made a lot of mistakes," said General Roberto Conforti, head of the art protection division of the carabinieri, or military police. "Either you get rid of the goods right away, or you freeze them for a while and keep your mouth shut." The thieves did neither. Finding themselves with extremely valuable paintings that were impossible to unload, they wrapped the works in cardboard and blankets and stashed them in a Turin apartment. Two were later brought to Rome when the burglars thought they had a buyer. And then they talked too much. After the robbery, police tapped dozens of phones and within two weeks had identified their suspects.

Figuring out which phones to tap did not require great detective work. The thieves knew too much about the gallery to have been working without some inside help. For example, they knew the video surveillance system wasn't working at the time, and they knew their way down to the night guard's post in the basement. Police and carbinieri quickly zeroed in on one of the museum's 160 staff, a guard named Stefania Viglongo. Although Viglongo had an excellent reputation at work, her husband, Claudio Trevisan, was unemployed and immediately triggered the interest of investigators. "His behavior was really quite suspicious," Conforti said. "He didn't seem to do anything for a living." Police put the couple under surveillance, and soon discovered that Trevisan, who had no criminal record, was good friends with Eneo Ximenes, who had served time in Belgium on robbery and murder charges. Viglongo, Trevisan and Ximenes were arrested last week, along with five others, including a Turin man with a criminal record for robbery, Roberto Petruzzi.

In addition to tapping phone lines and tracking the suspects' movements by their cell phones, police placed a bug in Ximenes' Volkswagen Golf. They were soon able to pinpoint the gang's locations to apartments in Rome and Turin. Though they had the thieves under surveillance for weeks, police were reluctant to move in for fear of not finding the paintings. "It was something like a kidnapping," Conforti explained. "You can't arrest the criminals unless you're sure you'll get the goods at the same time." And even when police felt confident enough to move, the investigating magistrate coordinating the probe made them wait another 24 hours until he felt the paintings were in the bag. It was only after the cops heard one of the bandits tell another, "The cars are parked. They're in bed and they're sleeping," that they raided the two apartments. The paintings were found under a bed and on top of a cupboard. By midweek they were back in the National Gallery of Modern Art in new frames, and visitors brought flowers to celebrate their return. "They were good robbers, but they didn't have the same expertise when it came to getting rid of the works," claimed Nicolo D'Angelo, head of the police investigative unit. "That was their handicap."

Italian Minister of Culture Walter Veltroni was ecstatic about getting the masterpieces back. He should have been, since he had to bear some of the responsibility for the fact that before the robbery, no one had bothered to hook up the museum's alarm system to that of the police. Veltroni, who was woken in the early morning hours seven weeks earlier to be informed of the robbery, was delighted to be shaken from his sleep this time. "It was almost like winning the World Cup," he reflected. Conforti's description of the operation was more prosaic: "This wasn't a James Bond film and there were no beautiful women and no fantastic cars. Just a lot of hard work for almost two months." Veltroni, who is also Deputy Prime Minister and had been kept abreast of the investigation's progress for those tense two months, was waiting for the sting as police closed in on their targets. He knew they were close. One of the bandits may have known as well. He was overheard on the phone telling one of his accomplices, "Don't talk too much. They might hear us." Indeed, they did.