Word: peruggia
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...reported to have been shipped to Switzerland or South America. She was in an apartment in the Bronx, a private gallery in St. Petersburg or a secret room in the mansion of J.P. Morgan. In fact, she had never left Paris. The thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia - the Hooblers spell it Perugia - an Italian house painter and carpenter living in France, though he was arrested for the crime - in December 1913 - in Florence. He had gone there with the painting after contacting a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, who he hoped would help him dispose of his hostage...
...whole episode proved embarrassing for France. Peruggia had escaped the dragnet of French police, despite the fact that he had once worked at the Louvre, knew the exits and escape routes and had even helped build the glass-enclosed frame Mona Lisa was displayed in - so on the fateful morning he knew how to get her out of it quickly. Then he spirited her back to his shabby apartment and flung her like Patty Hearst into a dark closet, which is where she remained for more than two years...
Though there's evidence that Peruggia tried repeatedly to sell the picture, he always insisted that his only motive in stealing Mona Lisa was to return it in glory to Italy and to exact revenge for Napoleon's massive theft of artworks all across Europe. One problem: Mona Lisa had never been part of the Napoleonic plunder. Though Leonardo had begun the painting in Florence in 1503, he took it with him to France 13 years later when he resettled at the court of the French king François I. After his death there in 1519, the painting passed...
...Peruggia's patriotic rationale made him a hero in the Italian press, but it didn't persuade an Italian jury, which convicted him in August 1914. His sentence was reduced to time served. Eventually he moved back to France and opened a paint store in Haute-Savoie. Mona Lisa meanwhile was permitted by France to go on a triumphal tour of Italy before she returned home...
Though no one doubts that it was Peruggia who actually stole the painting, to this day there are questions as to whether he had help that night or if he was working for bigger operators. This is where both books dive headfirst into a huge pile of baloney. In 1932 a swashbuckling American journalist named Karl Decker published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he wrote that in 1914 in Morocco, he met an aristocratic con man, Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, who told him that he had masterminded the theft as part of a scheme...