Stolen Picasso and Mondrian paintings found stashed in a ravine in Greece | Hacker News Reader

Stolen Picasso and Mondrian paintings found stashed in a ravine in Greece

nytimes.com

237 pointsprismatic78 comments

> He took the metro into town, changed clothes in a park next to the gallery and waited until the museum’s 9 p.m. closing time, before finding a balcony with unsecured doors. When he moved a door and a beep sounded, he said, he reconsidered his course of action ... "That's when I decided that annoying the security guard was the best way to do the theft, by making him believe that there was a technical problem in the alarm zones," the suspect told the police. So he opened and closed the door several times to confuse the guards.

This is a great hack, applicable to probably most human security. Can it apply to computer security? Well, if you've ever been inclined to silence an alarm you can't diagnose...

There must be some infosec term for this, but I'd imagine it's close to "signal poisoning" - turning signal into noise.

Alarm fatigue.

Alert Fatigue.

That sounds more correct.

The alarm that cried wolf

Reminds me of Sentry’s “ignore this until it happens x times.”

Pretty much the same thing is already called "semantic satiation" when it comes to language.

As well as what others have said ("alarm fatigue") specifically to this case, I think it falls under the more general category of "Resource Exhaustion Attacks". Most tech types think of those primarily in the context of DDOS. But the fundamental idea behind it, where an attacker doesn't exploit any specific weakness in the system but rather seeks to exhaust some finite consumable resource necessary to the system's operation, applies to a lot of different areas of modern society. And not just security either, humans in general have finite attention and mental resources. Rather then seek to convince people of any specific thing, or hack a forum or the like, attackers may seek to simply spam so much noise, or to use asymmetrical rhetorical hacks (argument is low energy to write but high energy to refute), that a target population runs out of energy to respond.

All security involves an economic equation of finite resources for both defenders and attackers. Defenders definitely have to consider the ratios there, and particularly if they've made any implicit assumptions of a given resource as unlimited (like in this case, a guard's tolerance for tech SNAFU bullshit).

Wonderful explanation, thank you.

Not so much infosec, but "the boy who cried wolf" is the folklore story to go with it. It's one reason why audible car alarms are phased out - they go off so frequent and falsely (e.g. because of a cat) that they don't have the desired effect of people looking at what's going on or deterring a thief.

They certainly draw attention at night.

I learned the wrong lesson from that story as a child: Even when I was not the perpetrator, I always made sure to look guilty, and was in most cases exonerated. Eventually when I was the perpetrator, nobody would believe it was me, even if I looked guilty!

Or he is well-versed in classics - this is exactly what happens in “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole.

Something similar was in one of Donald Westlake's Dortmunder novels, I forget which one.

Westlake doesn't get mentioned often enough on here. I love his books.

In one of the biggest heists ever (still unsolved) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum [1], alarms went off before the theft occurred.

Interesting to hear this being validated as a tactic in another art theft.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museu...

There's a fascinating Derren Brown program The Great Art Robbery where (if I remember right) he tells a gallery what he will steal and the exact time, and still manages it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb1I7Ld7Cc0

If you think this was not staged I have a bridge to sell you.

Derren Brown is an interesting case within magic. His stage shows aren't 100% stooges and almost seem less believable than some of his TV specials. He's one of if not my favorite contemporary magicians (especially since Ricky Jay died)

Staged in what way? I don't think so. (I've seen just about all his TV shows and read his books, including the 2 meant for magicians only, which give away as much as his other books and verbal explanations conceal)

How does he guess what card Stephen Fry mentally picks here? It seems kind of impossible, but not when you know how it's done—combining 3 different elements/techniques.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI5-NDiY7IM

Marc Paul doing the Berglas Effect seems probably faked somehow. It seems impossible! I read a book with 200+ pages explaining how this one trick is done, The Berglas Effects. It's hugely complicated, and was even much moreso the way Berglas did it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdXIVQ-asqU

>How does he guess what card Stephen Fry mentally picks here? It seems kind of impossible, but not when you know how it's done—combining 3 different elements/techniques.

Or just fixing the cards and/or paying Fry (a professional host and actor) and/or editing the video.

Cheating with editing video/paying stooges would be one way, but far as I know he never does/did that, in any of his TV or live shows. He worked for years in restaurants, going from table to table doing magic, without assistants or any props but those in his pockets etc, and developed a lot of his tricks and skills then. He explained this trick in one of his books:

1. the deck has only (from memory) 8 different cards, enough to appear a full deck. He has 8 different card-cigarettes in his pockets for the later part of the trick.

2. You can hear him "forcing" the K of diamonds before Fry picks it.. burn the image of the card (red picture card) .. burn that into your mind..don't go for the 3 of hearts (red but not a heart). He's highly skilled in this kind of suggestion, with years of practice, guiding your choice without your noticing. This doesn't guarantee K of diamonds, but vastly increases the odds, which a lot of Brown's stuff, and other mind readers, involves—increasing the odds, by various means. Then,

3. to me the most interesting part, the framing. When he says repeat that over and over in your mind, like K of Diamonds, K of Diamonds - Fry picked that card, and it seems even more impressive than if Derren had correctly guessed his card at that point and ended the trick, more casual and witty, pretending he didn't know it when he did. It seems as if Derren knew the card, but he didn't know for certain. There was just a fair chance it was right, maybe 30-50% or more. If he was wrong, as in many other times he performed it, the trick would continue naturally, no harm done, and he's learnt it's not the K of Diamonds. The trick will always end in success, but this bonus mind reading miracle along the way has a fair chance of success, maybe much more than 50% in Derren's hands.

I've heard magicians say the best possible magic trick is to get someone to shuffle a proper deck of cards, then you announce the top card before they turn it over. 1/52 times you will be right, and they will never believe it was just chance, but forever believe you can do miracles. This is a version of that, but with much greater odds, and a very natural, invisible "out" if you are wrong.

> Or just fixing the cards and/or paying Fry (a professional host and actor) and/or editing the video.

Fry does not need that money and he really, really does not strike me as the type who would wittingly go for that kind of shenanigans.

I am however certainly not convinced that Brown does what he claims he does.

>Fry does not need that money and he really, really does not strike me as the type who would wittingly go for that kind of shenanigans.

It's showbusiness. You don't need to need the money. Tons of actors endorse BS products or do BS movies despite having 10s or 100s of millions in the bank.

And tons don't.

If someone told you they'd steal a 100k GBP item from you at 3 PM tomorrow, would you only have one person watching it?

I guess you don't read much or watch many movies. This is a device used in almost every museum heist plot to the point that it's cliché.

We must watch different heist movies then. The device used in most that I remember is the IR lasers, lol.

Yup; over-eager virus- and malware scanners have much to answer for in that regard. And Windows' attempts at security in windows Vista I believe it was - by having an intrusive "admin approval" screen - is another example where after only a few "false alarms", people already automate hitting OK when something like that pops up without reading the details.

And they let the Picasso painting drop on the floor lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wfmFsNec24

That‘s hilarious

It's frankly hard to imagine somebody putting a Picasso in that position. Look at the height of the painting! Look at how low the wall it's resting on is! Look at the surface it's sitting on! How is it that nobody there has their intuitive every-day-physics alarms going off??

What really got me is how immediately after it fell, they put it back exactly the same.

Sometimes, you need to be honest even if harsh - the people putting a picasso painting on that space to fall off are incompetent fools who should never touch expensive art in the first place...

How much of your salary are you willing to sacrifice in order for police to be able to afford such competent smarts?

$3.50

In other words, the same amount the government is willing to pay you to do your civic duty of sitting as a juror.

"Local man surprised police officer who makes $15.50 an hour lacks qualifications to handle $100m artwork."

Who cares. It's just a piece canvas that derives its value from provenance, not condition.

You've confused value and price. Its price may not be affected by deterioration. But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in.

The most obvious example is "Ecce Mono", item 15 on a list of botched restorations here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-history-restoration-fa...

> But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in.

Who cares for its value "to people who study art"? It's also contigent on BS cultural norms. It's not even some objectively impressive artwork. Not to mention that Picasso mass produced tons of them after he got famous, for easy money...

Who cares? People who study art. People who care about people who study art.

And almost everything is contingent on "BS cultural norms". Most of the rest is contingent on random evolutionary history. If your point is that everything is ridiculous, I certainly agree. But I disagree that the things other people care about are more ridiculous than the things I care about. It's all bananas.

> But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in.

> The most obvious example is "Ecce Mono", item 15 on a list of botched restorations here

You are right, but probably not for the reason you think. Ecce Mono had no value until it was botched, and then it became famous. So, yes, its value to people who study art probably is affected by the shape it's in, but it's anyone's guess whether the value of the Picasso will go down or up now that it's "the Picasso that fell on the floor".

You are also confusing value and price.

Ecce Homo lasted 90 years and was important enough to the people responsible for it that they wanted to restore it. Those are clear signs of value.

You're right that the open-market price of Ecce Mono, were it ever to be cut out and sold, has gone up due to its global meme status. You're also right that the price of the Picasso could well go up due to notoriety.

You mean item 17.

I would argue that the restoration is way more valuable than the original in this case. The original is a decently executed yet run-of-the-mill iconography with nothing remarkable about it. The restoration is a unique world-famous piece of art that draws thousands of visitors each year (before the pandemic) to see it.

> Who cares. It's just a piece canvas that derives its value from provenance, not condition.

Apple II. It's just a piece of plastic and silicon that derives its value from provenance, not condition.

See how that works? Just because you don't care, it doesn't mean that it isn't important to a lot of people.

>See how that works?

Great? You kind of made the parent's point.

>Just because you don't care, it doesn't mean that it isn't important to a lot of people.

And just because it's "important to a lot of people" doesn't mean it should be.

I doubt their salary is that high, btw.

And touching it with their bare hands getting finger prints on the canvas.

Puts it back in the exact same position too

OMG they're touching it with bare hands too to put it back in the same spot it fell from! There's an art restorer somewhere choking watching this...

This has been a source of endless memes in Greece for the past few days. We are greatly amused and chagrined.

The title is clickbait. It makes it sound like someone hiking in a ravine just happened to stumble upon these paintings. In actuality, the guy just felt guilty, so he confessed and gave them back. The subtitle says it all:

> Ending a long-running mystery, a construction worker guided the police to the hiding place after admitting he had taken the works in a daring one-man raid on the National Gallery in Athens in 2012.

I think the thief does deserve leniency. He had nothing to gain by turning himself in other than guilt relief, and a lot to lose. Much respect. Prison time still seems appropriate, but a lot less than otherwise.

Maybe, hopefully. But this paragraph suggests that he thought the police were onto him before he turned himself in.

> According to the news reports, the suspect said he had moved the paintings there in May after reading that the police might be onto him.

He didn’t even return one of the items! I feel like the thief’s lawyer is very happy about this story being leaked like this.

It kinda depends; did he steal it for himself or was it "to order", in which case it depends on whether he can help convict the bigger fry. Was it damaged? Etc. Motivation matters a lot in a case like this, I think, and of course damages because a lot of money has been spent on police and museum investigation, possibly insurance money, restoration, etc.

https://archive.is/Qx5Lz

Thank you

I wonder how the recovery of stolen artworks plays out with insurance. If a museum's (or ultimate owner's) insurance company pays out for the theft, and then a decade later the works are recovered, does the museum (or owner) have to return funds to the insurance company? What if the museum is not in a financial position to do so... could they be forced, ironically, to sell the recovered art?

I would imagine accepting an insurance payout might require waiving/handing off any claim of ownership of the asset?

There was an EconTalk about Art Loss Register that covered this very question [1]. The insurance company returns it as long as the original owner pays back the amount paid out with some interest. The insurance company doesn't benefit from any appreciation of the artwork though.

What's unclear though is that (as described in the same podcast), the insurance company doesn't pay out the full value of the artwork. The TV show Lupin uses this as the plot device whereby a fraudster claims the artwork is stolen to get the insurance money as a kind of temporary loan.

[1] https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-lost-art/ @ ~minute 20

Youtube link w/ timestamp: https://youtu.be/eRbSFSZPY8s?t=1149

A small follow-up on that destroyed sketch by Caccia

https://www.ekathimerini.com/culture/1163872/the-mystery-of-...

He would have been better off framing them and hanging them on the wall, nobody would believe that that construction worker had the stolen originals on his wall. The other benefit is that he would have been able to enjoy the art.

Maybe he wasn't a surrealist, and more into classical instead?

He did: "the suspect had kept the paintings at the home of a relative that he frequently visited to look at them,"

The article doesn't say if the relative knew they were stolen originals or presumed they were prints.

> The Caccia sketch was damaged during the robbery and discarded, the suspect told the police.

The real crime.

Works being stolen usually adds to their value.

Really?

That means some of these heists are staged!

And many of the "returned/rediscovered" works are forgeries.

I'd like to read more on this. Any source?

I don't remember the titles, but there are a slew of books at your local library on the topic. False Impressions by Thomas Hoving is the only one that comes to mind.

What's interesting about art as a money laundering scheme is that it's win-win for everyone but taxpayers. The galleries don't fight it, the investors don't, the experts don't, the museums(!) don't.

For example, there were two crucifixes made from wood by Michelangelo recently bought by (I think) the Louvre and Bargello. But Michelangelo didn't work in wood, it's not in his style, and there's no documentation that he ever did these works. The wood, indeed, dates from the 1490's -- and that's it for any "proof". There are more people making money off of this than people who want to find out the truth.

Are you telling me the art market is artificial!?

"Incentives matter"

This EconTalk podcast episode is an interview with an author of a book about the "Art Loss Register," a private registry for stolen works of art. The economic aspects of provenance and trust are likely interesting to folks interested in blockchain applications.

https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-lost-art/

> The Caccia sketch was damaged during the robbery and discarded, the suspect told the police.

> Mr. Kehagioglu, the lawyer, said that his client was no regular thief and that his remorse had led to the paintings’ safe return.

I don’t understand the lawyer’s statement.

It's 'lawyer talk'. It does not make sense, but if you are not paying attention while reading it, you would register it as something positive for the thief.

FYI this is a week old.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/stolen-picasso-mondria...

Yes.. Jack Ma got to the top doing business in China, but then proves himself to be a bad judge of the situation by making speeches against the Chinese authorities. I don't think so.

I think Jack Ma is just a figurehead (like most business people) - an actor that is there to raise the profile of the brand. I don't think he owns what they say (though I'm sure he is well remunerated).

All we can really say I think, is that his role came to an end, and he has stepped off the stage.

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