Inspired by a real case

The Kunsthal heist

Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2012

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 October 16, 2012, at around 3 am, thieves entered through the back of the Kunsthal gallery in Rotterdam, which was celebrating its 20th anniversary with an exhibition of avant-garde works from the Triton Foundation collection. In a few minutes they took seven paintings: two views of London by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso's Harlequin Head, works by Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Meijer de Haan, and a painting by Lucian Freud. The alarm sounded, but by the time the police arrived they had already fled; the building had no night guard inside, only cameras and an alarm.

In January 2013 Romanian police arrested a group of young Romanians after a tip-off. The leader told the court that the back door he used to get in had not been locked. His mother stated that, afraid her son would be arrested, she had burned the paintings in the wood stove of her house, in a village in eastern Romania, and later took it back. Experts from the National History Museum of Romania found in the ashes remains of paint, canvas and old stretcher nails, consistent with oil paintings.

Sources

In the game

Zone Four

Rotterdam, Tuesday, October 16, 2012, 8 am. A large exhibition gallery beside a museum park is celebrating its 20th anniversary with the show “Avant-Gardes”. At 3:02 am the motion sensor in the west wing went off.

The perpetrators confessed to the theft and were sentenced in Romania, in 2013 and 2014, to prison terms; the leader and an accomplice received close to seven years. The court ordered those involved to compensate the insurers for about 18 million euros. The seven paintings were never recovered, and to this day it is not known whether all of them were destroyed or whether any was sold beforehand.

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