The Cellini Salt Cellar theft
Vienna, Austria, 2003
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In the early hours of 11 May 2003, a man crossed the building site of the renovation at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, entered through a window and took from a display case the Saliera, the gold and enamel salt cellar that the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini finished in 1543 for King Francis I of France, one of the most valuable pieces in the museum. The alarm went off, but the guard responsible took it for a false alarm, and the theft was only discovered around 8:20 am.
For almost three years there was no lead. In October 2005, the thief sent the police the removable trident of the piece as proof, along with a ransom demand of 10 million euros to the insurer, and tried to steer the handover by mobile phone messages, sending the police back and forth across Vienna until he gave up. Investigators linked one of the phones used to security camera images showing the buyer of the device.
Sources
In the game
Torch in the Net
Vienna, Sunday, 11 May 2003, 9:00 am. In a large art museum on the Ringstrasse, its facade covered in renovation scaffolding, curator Hedwig Lanz found room 37 open to the wind at 8:20 am.
In January 2006 the police released the images. The man, an alarm systems specialist from Vienna, then 50 years old and with no criminal record, went to the police and, on 21 January, led officers to a wood near Zwettl, in Lower Austria, where he had buried the salt cellar in a box. The piece went back to the museum. He was sentenced to four years in prison in 2006; at a retrial in 2007 the sentence became five years, and he was released early, in 2008.
