1972 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts robbery

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) was established in 1860 as the Art Association of Montreal, to encourage art appreciation in the city. It did not start to exhibit works until the late 1870s and 1880s, when wealthy patrons who had prospered from Canada's industrialization began to donate both cash and works, and it was soon able to build Canada's first space explicitly intended for art exhibition. In 1913 it built its current main building, now the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion, on Sherbrooke Street. The neighborhood is known today as the Golden Square Mile, because it was home to many of Canada's wealthiest and most successful families.^[10]

The museum's patrons were predominantly of British descent, all members of Montreal's Anglophone elite. At the end of the 1950s, their political and economic domination of the city began to yield to its majority Francophone population, as Quebec separatism rose in the province. Fearing the consequences should that movement succeed the Anglophones began leaving the city over the course of the 1960s. These departures grew after the terrorist attacks of the Front de libération du Québec which led to a 1970 declaration of martial law in the city,^[1][10]

The Anglophone exodus deprived the museum of much of its traditional financial support. In 1957, Bill Bantey, a former journalist who was appointed the museum's head of public relations, began reaching out for the first time in its history to Francophones. But the contributions from newer philanthropists in the city did not yet equal their predecessors, and provincial funds only covered 40% of the museum's annual budget.^[10]

As a result, the museum cut back financially in the early 1970s, going from a strictly private institution to a semi-public nonprofit organization.^[11] The museum needed to expand, and to renovate the 1913 William Sutherland Maxwell Beaux-Arts building on Sherbrooke Street. Its many cramped rooms and corridors were unsuitable for a late-20th century art museum.^[10] The museum planned to close the Maxwell building in 1973 for three years.^[12]

On two prior occasions thieves had taken, or attempted to take, works from the museum.^[1]

One night in 1933, someone hidden in the museum overnight passed 14 paintings, mostly by Canadian artists, to another person through an open window in the women's lavatory. Later the museum received a ransom note asking $10,000 for the paintings' return. Three months later, the English-language Montreal Star and the French La Presse each received half of one painting in the mail. A note said if a ransom of 25% of the remaining paintings' total value was not paid, they too would be returned in pieces.^[1]

The paintings were recovered before that could occur. Paul Thouin, a petty criminal, was arrested after burglarizing a rail freight car. He confessed to the theft and led police to a one-metre-deep (3 ft) sandpit near the village of L'Épiphanie, a short distance northeast of Montreal, where he had buried them wrapped in a tarpaulin with newspapers. Thouin, who had killed a police officer attempting to apprehend him in a railroad warehouse, was reportedly terrified at the prospect of being returned to prison for a very long term. He killed himself by poisoning himself with a concealed dose of strychnine in the police lockup that night.^[1] A gang of armed robbers attempted to steal some van Gogh paintings during a special exhibition of the artist's work at the museum in 1960. They were foiled and escaped. They have never been identified.^[1]

In Montreal, Labour Day weekend of 1972 began with two major news events, neither of them well received. On the night of Friday, September 1, four intoxicated men who had been refused entry to a downtown country-and-western bar retaliated by setting the club's steps afire; the ensuing blaze killed 37, the deadliest fire in the city in 45 years.^[1] On the following evening, the Soviet national hockey team defeated their Canadian counterparts 7–3 in the first game of the Summit Series at the Montreal Forum.^[9] Canadians considered hockey their national sport, whereas the Soviets had only begun competing in international ice hockey a quarter-century earlier. They had expected their team of National Hockey League stars to overwhelmingly defeat the Soviets.^[13] Fans in Montreal were eagerly looking ahead to the next game in the series, to be held Monday evening in Toronto.^[9]

At the museum, the board president, director, and director of security were all on vacation in either the United States or Mexico for the holiday weekend. Bantey, the public relations director, was the most senior official in charge.^[1]

Shortly after midnight on September 4, police believe, a group of three men gathered out in front of the museum on Sherbrooke Street. They went to the museum's west wall, between it and the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul. One of the men, who wore a pair of the pick-equipped boots used by utility-company workers to climb telephone poles, went up a tree next to the museum and got on to the roof. From it he lowered a ladder to the other two. They went to a skylight covered by a plastic sheet in the course of some ongoing work. No alarm sounded when they opened it as the plastic sheet had rendered it inoperative. The men then lowered a 15-metre (49 ft) nylon rope to the museum's second floor and slid down.^[1]

It had taken them almost an hour and a half to gain entry. Shortly after they did, around 1:30 a.m., one of the three guards on duty was walking to the kitchen to get some tea^[1] when he encountered two thieves. Their faces were covered by ski masks but their long hair was visible;^[3] both about 5 feet 6 inches (168 cm) tall.^[4] One fired both barrels of a pump action shotgun into the ceiling to get the guard's attention and made him lie down on the floor. The noise brought the other two guards, who were unable to overpower the thieves. All three guards were taken to a lecture hall and bound and gagged.^[1] The captive guards recalled hearing, but not seeing, a third thief speak to others in French.^[3]

In the lecture hall, one robber stood guard with a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun^[9] while the other two removed paintings, jewellery and figurines from their displays and brought them to the museum's shipping department. The thieves originally seemed to have planned to leave via the same skylight, but eventually concluded it would take too much time to put together a system of pulleys to get themselves and the stolen artwork out. After finding that one guard had a set of keys to one of the museum's panel trucks, they fled that way.^[1]

However, this alternative also went awry. They chose to exit through one of the museum's side entrances, setting off an alarm. Leaving half their take behind, they fled on foot down Sherbrooke. Back at the museum, one of the guards freed himself an hour after the thieves left. He called Bantey, who told him to call the Montreal police (SPVM^[b]). Bantey arrived shortly after the police, along with Ruth Jackson, the museum's curator of decorative arts. After surveying the broken frames, smashed display cases and general disorder the thieves had left, they found that 18 paintings and 38 other pieces had been taken. Collectively they estimated the value of the stolen work at US$2 million,^[1] ($11.1 million in 2023^[6])

All of the stolen paintings were by European artists from the 17th through 19th centuries:

• Landscape with Vehicles and Cattle, attributed at the time to Jan Brueghel the Elder but later reattributed to his students (subsequently recovered)
• Landscape with Buildings and Wagon, Jan Brueghel the Elder
• La rêveuse á la fontaine (The Dreaming Woman at the Fountain), Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
• Jeune fille accoudée sur le bras gauche (Young Girl Leaning on Her Left Arm), Corot
• Landscape with rocks and stream, Gustave Courbet
• Head, Honoré Daumier
• Lioness and Lion in a Cave, Eugène Delacroix
• The Sorceress, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz
• Portrait of Brigadier General Sir Thomas Fletcher, attributed to Thomas Gainsborough but possibly by Joshua Reynolds
• Still Life: Vanitas, Jan Davidsz de Heem
• Still Life with a Fish, de Heem
• La barrateuse (Young Woman Churning), Jean-François Millet
• Portrait of Madame Millet, Millet
• Portrait of a Man, Possibly a Self-portrait, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta
• Landscape with Cottages, Rembrandt van Rijn
• Head of a Young Man, Peter Paul Rubens
• Portrait of a Lady, François-André Vincent
• Portrait of a Man, Vincent

Most of the paintings taken were small works around a foot (31 cm) along their longest dimension; the three smallest (the Brueghels and Millet's La barrateuse) were less than 80 square inches (520 cm²), smaller than a standard letter-size piece of paper. The largest was the Courbet, at 287⁄8 by 361⁄8 inches (73.34 by 91.76 cm), with the Gainsborough and Corot's Dreamer close behind. It was possible that when the thieves ran away each of them held a batch of smaller paintings in one hand and a larger one in the other.^[14]

The thieves also took 38 pieces of jewellery and figurines. Among the former pieces were an 18th-century gold watch once owned by the wife of Jacques Viger, Montreal's first mayor; a 19th-century French blue enamel latch box set with diamonds and two 17th-century Spanish pendants.^[1]

Later that morning, Bantey, who had covered the crime beat in Montreal as a journalist prior to his tenure at the museum, held a news conference. He identified all the stolen works and described how the robbers had entered the museum and taken them. "They did show quite discriminating taste," he told reporters, "though as far as the objects are concerned, they could do with more art and historical training." In their haste to leave, he noted, the thieves had left behind another Rembrandt as well as works by El Greco, Picasso and Tintoretto that they could as easily have taken.^[1] Jackson believed that the works left behind showed that the thieves had planned "a general clear-out of the museum."^[3]

The news conference was initially effective in publicizing the theft. It, as well as lists of the stolen paintings, were reported as front-page news in many major newspapers across the U.S. and Canada the next morning. As soon as they learned of the theft, the SPVM had also put out the alert to the crossings along the U.S. border, about 60 kilometres (37 mi) from Montreal, to look out for the thieves and/or the paintings should anyone attempt to take them to New York City, 530 kilometres (330 mi) farther south.^[1]

However, further publicity that might have drawn attention to the theft and perhaps helped solve it was stymied by news events of September 5. At that year's Summer Olympics in Munich, Palestinian terrorists with the Black September Organization took 11 Israeli athletes hostage, eventually killing them along with a German police officer, the following day. Those events were of particular interest in Montreal since the city was preparing to host the next Olympics, and as a result further news about the art theft got less priority in the media. The investigation continued despite the lack of media attention.^[1] CTV News reporter Bob Benedetti, who was granted unrestricted access to the crime scene when he covered it, to the point of doing one of his standups while on the ladder, told W5 a half-century later that he believes the thieves were local to Montreal and benefited from the subdued coverage due to the other events dominating the news.^[5]

From interviews with the three guards, police learned that there had been three thieves. The guards saw two of them, describing them as both about 5 feet 6 inches (168 cm) in height. One spoke French and the other English. The guards also reported the Francophone they heard but did not see.^[1]

Investigators were immediately struck by the similarity to another recent art theft in the Montreal area. On August 30, another group of three thieves had broken into the summer home of Agnes Meldrum, wife of a Montreal moving-company owner, in Oka, roughly 30 kilometres (20 miles) west of the city. They had all climbed up a 200-metre (600-foot) cliff from a powerboat on Lake of Two Mountains to do so. Witnesses said that while they wore hoods to prevent identification, two spoke French and the other, English. Once inside the home they stole paintings worth $50,000 in total.^[1] However, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ), the provincial police force, soon excluded any possibility the two thefts were related.^[3]

The presence of two Francophones and one Anglophone, plus the climbing skills involved, led the chief investigator on the case to believe the thieves involved in both incidents had been local, and possibly the same. That, and their apparent knowledge of the skylight's non-functional alarm, fostered a theory that someone at the museum had aided the thieves. This is common when museums are robbed, two New York City detectives who specialized in art crime said when commenting about the Montreal case later in 1972.^[1] In 2017 art-crimes investigator Anthony Amore said there was a 90% chance the crime was an inside job.^[15]

However, the SPVM considered that speculation too broad to be helpful in focusing their investigation, and evidence did not bear it out. While it was possible that the thieves had actively involved someone working on the skylight, it was as possible that they had learned of the security flaw without inside knowledge. An intense investigation of the workers involved with the skylight found no evidence they had passed information about it to anyone criminally inclined.^[1]

It was also possible that the robbers had learned of the skylight flaw through simple reconnaissance. Roughly two weeks before the theft, someone reported encountering two men sitting on chairs on the roof, wearing sunglasses and smoking. When questioned by the person who reported the incident, they claimed to be museum employees. The chairs on the roof were not found after the theft. Likewise, no fingerprints or other evidence was left on either the ladder or nylon rope. Inside-job theories were also undermined by the thieves' poorly planned exit. If they had based their panel-truck alternative on inside information, they would have known how to disable the alarm they set off on the side entrance before opening it. Even if they had not chosen to do so, they would have known it did not sound anywhere else besides the museum—and thus not have abandoned half of what they had stolen to escape on foot.^[1]

While the jewelry and figurines seem to have been chosen because they could be easily carried, the paintings stolen seem to have been a matter of choice. Their small size, in addition to making them easy to carry and conceal, would also facilitate quick sales. The robbers, and any dealer working with them, might, investigators have speculated, have been looking to sell to private collectors who display their paintings in their homes. The pairs of small paintings with similar subject matter by the same artist—Brueghel, Corot, Millet and Vincent—would be excellent choices to decorate a room.^[1]

Interest in art in recent years had driven up prices, a phenomenon which had been widely reported in both French- and English-language media, and the thieves would have known even if they had no interest in art what collectors were willing to pay large sums for. Some art dealers in the Montreal area refused to discuss their business with police absent a legal order. Around Christmas 1972, a Montreal Gazette columnist reported that, in fact, most of the paintings had been delivered to the homes of wealthy collectors in Mount Royal, with a small portion diverted to the U.S. This led police to interrogate two unnamed individuals, but no new leads developed as a result.^[1]

The robbers might not even have had to visit the museum to decide what works to take. Half of those they did keep when they ran away had been in Masterpieces from Montreal, a travelling exhibition that had been to several cities in the U.S. during the year before Expo 67. The Rembrandt had been included in a 1969 exhibit commemorating the tricentennial of the artist's death, and the following year many of the French paintings had been in another exhibit that the press in that language gave great attention to. All works in the special exhibitions would have been depicted in handbooks or catalogues produced in association with them. Only the Brueghels, the Rubens and the Vincent portraits had not been included in those exhibits nor mentioned in any publication save the museum's own catalogue.^[1]

Early in their investigation, the police began looking into a group of students at the nearby École des beaux-arts de Montréal. Mostly French-speaking, they had often visited the museum but had frequently been asked to leave before its official closing time so that the mostly English-speaking staff could take their tea. This had engendered considerable resentment on the students' part.^[1]

Police kept five of these students under 24-hour surveillance for two weeks. Eventually they decided they could not find any evidence, and dropped that part of the investigation. Alain Lacoursière, an SPVM art-theft specialist who investigated the cold case in later years,^[1] believes the students were not involved. "This crime was organized with a guy in charge who was 35 to 40 years old," well past his student years, he said in 2010.^[1]

In many art thefts the thieves seek ransom payments in return for the stolen works, and this happened twice in the MMFA thefts.^[c] Within a week of the robbery museum director David Giles Carter received a phone call from, he believed, one of the thieves. A man with a gravelly voice and an accent Carter described as "European" gave him directions to a phone booth near McGill University.^[1] Once there, another call told him to pick up a discarded cigarette pack on the ground. In it Carter found a pendant that had been among the stolen jewelry.^[3]

Soon afterwards, a brown manila Port of Montreal envelope arrived at the museum with snapshots of the stolen paintings. Carter nicknamed the thief "Port of Montreal" as a result, and dialogue was opened up between the museum and the thieves to negotiate a ransom. At first the thieves demanded $500,000, about a quarter of the works' publicly stated value^[1] (the initial police report had valued the stolen works at closer to $5 million with the Rembrandt accounting for $1.75 million^[3][2]) later they halved that.^[1]

Carter demanded the thieves, or whoever it was negotiating on their behalf, give more proof they had the paintings than snapshots. In response, they told the museum's security director to go to a locker in Montreal Central Station. Inside, he found the Brueghel Landscape with Buildings and Wagon. It is the only one of the stolen paintings that has so far been recovered.^[1]

As a result of these negotiations, approximately a month later the museum's insurance companies (primarily Lloyd's of London^[15]) and the SPVM set up a sting operation. An undercover detective posed as an insurance adjustor and agreed to meet the thieves or their representative in an empty field in Longueuil,^[3] where he hoped the thieves would believe he was ready to hand over $5,000 for another one of the paintings. However, when one of the local police cruisers passed by, completely unaware of the plans, the thieves apparently came to realize what was actually going on and never met the undercover officer. The next day they called Carter and complained that they had been set up.^[1]

Lacoursière believes that it was actually the museum and the police who were being set up. The field the robbers had chosen as the meeting site had few nearby houses at the time and could easily have been monitored from some distance away, allowing the robbers to detect even the more subtle police presence necessary to support a sting operation. "It was all a smokescreen", he says. Since the thieves never reopened negotiations afterwards, he believes they never had any intention of returning the paintings at the time and were using the purported ransom negotiations as a diversion while they bought themselves more time to sell or otherwise dispose of the paintings.^[1] Amore notes that it is much easier to fence stolen jewelry^[d] and the thieves were probably able to do that in order to profit from the crime within weeks.^[15]

The second attempt took place the following year. A few months after the museum closed for its three-year renovation project in May 1973, a caller to a member of the museum's board said he would share where the paintings were hidden for $10,000. André DeQuoy, one of the adjusters handling the case, was involved in the discussion and made it clear that while the insurance companies would pay for information leading to the discovery of the painting, they would not pay for the paintings themselves. After he agreed to deliver it personally to the source, the board made the money available.^[1]

The caller had instructed DeQuoy, who was being discreetly followed by police, to go to a certain phone booth in downtown Montreal one afternoon. From there the caller sent him to other phone booths elsewhere in the city, such as the Blue Bonnets race track, on St. Laurent Boulevard and at the Henri-Bourassa station on the Montreal Metro. The caller then informed DeQuoy that he had picked up the police tail and DeQuoy was to return to his office and await further instructions while the caller had the unmarked car called off.^[1]

DeQuoy did, and an hour later the caller said the police had been taken care of. Again he was sent out to phone booths, ultimately traveling back and forth across the island of Montreal to 11 of them, until at 4 a.m. the next morning he was told he could leave the envelope at the base of a sign in a vacant lot on St. Martin Boulevard, then return to the Henri-Bourassa phone booth where the caller would contact him again with the location of the paintings.^[1]

While DeQuoy waited for the call, he let the police know where he had been all night. But the caller never called, so the adjustor returned to his office. At 8 a.m. the caller called him there and told him the paintings were in a motel in Laval, north of Montreal. An intensive search of the building, however, produced neither the paintings nor any sign they had ever been there. The $10,000 was not recovered.^[1]

Lacoursière began investigating the case in 1984, by his account taking it over just before the files were slated to be shredded.^[17] His work on the case was strictly his own initiative; he was told by his supervisors not to waste time on it. The original investigation was perfunctory, closed after a year by the two detectives assigned to it, with no significant findings, Lacoursiere says.^[3]

Key files, some concerning tips, were mishandled, according to Lacoursière.^[5] Two statements were lost. He also faults the lack of followup. When he asked if it was possible to reinterview the security guards, he was told that two were dead and one was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. The records themselves had been transferred to microfilm, and by the late 2010s, with no one at the SPVM actively investigating the case to his knowledge, he believed the film was in danger of deteriorating.^[3] In the 21st century the director of the SQ's art-crime unit was transferred to terrorism investigations, mirroring a common trend, Amore also notes.^[15]

Beneditti, the TV reporter who covered the story, agrees that the police were ill-equipped to investigate an art theft since they did not occur much. "There weren't professional art thieves roaming around", he recalls. "[P]eople didn't rob museums. They robbed banks. We were the bank robbery capital of Canada."^[5]

Due to the minimal news coverage, in January 1973 Bill Bantey put together a circular, Attention: Stolen, depicting the stolen paintings and giving information such as their dimensions, in English and French. The idea was to distribute it widely throughout the international art community and familiarize possible buyers with the stolen works, a practice that was not common in art thefts at the time as most museums preferred to keep the news of their victimization to themselves. Major auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's would not routinely check for whether art offered for sale through them was on lists of stolen works until 1985. "[We hope that] the works become so catalogued and so well-known that it would be unlikely that any collector or museum buyer could innocently purchase them," Bantey told the Gazette.^[1]

The museum and investigators did not make the ransom negotiations in the year after the thefts public knowledge until ten years later. "For years we thought our chances of recovery were better keeping everything quiet," said one police detective, explaining the decision. "But now our hopes are small. Maybe this will stimulate interest and produce something." But while it did allow police to confirm what they have only described as "certain facts", those have apparently not led to any progress in the case.^[1]

The recovered Brueghel was kept in storage at the museum by Ruth Jackson for ten years until a new frame could be purchased, after which it was returned to the place it had been exhibited prior to the theft. However, it was later determined that it was not by Brueghel but one of his students; Lacoursière believes the thieves may have chosen to return it due to doubts about its authenticity. It nevertheless remains on exhibit.^[1][e]

A similar fate befell the painting the museum bought with the money it received from its insurers. A group of 20 of them paid out nearly $2 million to settle the claim; they in turn posted a $50,000 reward for the return of the paintings, which under the terms of the insurance policies they legally owned as a result of paying the theft claim. The museum used the money to purchase a Rubens, The Leopards,^[1] which the museum promoted as the largest Rubens exhibited in Canada. But like the Brueghel, it was later reattributed to the painter's assistants, after a conservationist determined that its red pigments were mixed four decades after Rubens' death,^[17] reducing its value and interest to museumgoers. On the 35th anniversary of the robbery, in 2007, the museum thus returned it to storage and has never put it on display again.^[1]

Even the attribution of some of the stolen work has been called into question. When the de Heems were being prepared for their inclusion in Masterpieces from Montreal, a Parisian art historian the museum contacted suggested that they were in fact the work of another Dutch master, Evert Collier. The Rembrandt landscape, while indeed signed and dated by the artist, is one that both he and his students frequently returned to as a subject, and some historians are not entirely confident the painting was his even with the signature. The Gainsborough portrait, too, may in fact be the work of Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough's rival, since its subject, Thomas Fletcher, is shown wearing a Madras regimental uniform, which he only started wearing in 1771, three years before his portrait was painted by Reynolds.^[18]

In 1992, on the 20th anniversary of the theft, a Radio-Canada story reported that the insurance companies now considered the paintings' value to have appreciated to $20 million.^[19] They had consequently increased the reward offer to $100,000. On behalf of the SPVM, Lacoursière, who began investigating art crime in 1994, offered an additional million in 1999. No one has yet come forward to claim these rewards.^[1]

Some promising leads over the years have yielded nothing. Lacoursière, now retired, has been told that the paintings, or some of them, are in Italy, and that two Montreal men in the French city of Nice were possible suspects. One heroin addict he interviewed in Vancouver seemed to have inside information about the robbery, but everything he knew had been previously reported in the media. When the man was asked about two details that police have withheld since only the actual robbers would know them, he was unable to do so.^[1]

One lead, however, has not been so easy for Lacoursière to dismiss. At a 1998 vernissage,^[3] a dealer he had gotten to know introduced him to a man who has been identified publicly only by the pseudonym "Smith". Smith impressed Lacoursière as an art aficionado well-versed in the subject, familiar with every major painter and particularly knowledgeable about the history of art in Quebec. He collected classic cars, with a fondness for Bugattis, and memorabilia associated with them.^[3]

Smith told the detective he, too, had been a student at the École des beaux-arts at the time of the theft, explaining to him the tension between the students and museum staff. In the course of their initial conversation Smith said he had not been one of the five students kept under surveillance afterward. But he knew a great deal about the robbery, perhaps more than the police did.^[1] And Lacoursière was not certain that all the things Smith knew that the police did know had been made public at the time, if ever.^[3]

For example, Lacoursière attempted to allay his suspicions by falsely describing the rope lowered from the skylight as made of steel, but Smith quickly corrected him by pointing out that it was nylon.^[3] He also told the detective that the rope used by the thieves to enter from the skylight was not grey as had been reported at the time, but yellow like the ones used at the school building.^[1] Upon reviewing the original file and talking with one of the original investigators, Lacoursière found that any information on the colour of the rope had been withheld by police in order to confirm any later confessions or statements by possible suspects. He considered Smith's statements "highly suspicious".^[1]

Lacoursière visited Smith at his home in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu 40 km (25 mi) south of Montreal.^[3] He investigated Smith's background, and found that a year after finishing his five-year course at the school, Smith had spent a quarter of a million dollars to buy himself a house and a local woodworking company. Lacoursière could not determine how Smith might have acquired that amount of money at such a relatively young age (Smith told him his family was wealthy^[3]). He implied in 2010 it might have been from selling the stolen work.^[1]

According to Lacoursière, Smith even told him that he would at some point in the future tell him something about the robbery. In 2007, during the filming of "Le Columbo de l'art" ("The Colombo of Art"), a Radio-Canada special on his career as an art-theft detective, Lacoursière visited Smith and offered him the million-dollar cheque on camera. Smith, however, simply laughed, and invited the camera crew into his house so they could see for themselves that he had none of the stolen paintings.^[1]

In 2010, Quebec journalist Sylvain Larocque interviewed Smith by telephone. While he again denied any role in the theft himself, he claimed that professors and porters at the Université du Québec à Montréal, which the École des beaux-arts had been merged into in 1969, were behind the robbery. They were possibly, he claimed, the same people behind a robbery at the university a few weeks earlier.^[17]

The following year Lacoursière received a link to a video in an email from Smith, possibly intended to tease the detective, who by then had retired.^[20] It was a Mercedes-Benz advertisement from Hong Kong in which bank robbers steal a briefcase from a bank vault, then escape in a Mercedes. They elude capture but leave the briefcase behind; inside is a long-lost stolen da Vinci painting.^[21]

Smith died in the late 2010s, never having told Lacoursière any of the information he had intimated possibly having. The detective, by then retired, believes that while Smith neither masterminded the robbery nor had the paintings in his possession, he was likely one of the robbers.^[3]

The robbery is now largely forgotten, except by the insurance companies and police, who continue to search. "Like a death in the family, you have to let it drop," Bantey says.^[1] However, in 2009, Paul Lavallée, the museum's director at the time, said it continues to affect the museum, since it might not be able to reclaim the works even if they were recovered. "[W]e would be strapped for funds," he said, even if the insurer offered them to the museum at a discount.^[1]

It is possible the paintings may have been destroyed to prevent them from being used as evidence against those in possession of them. But Lacoursière believes they were likely sold through smaller dealers who may not have known they were stolen, or cared if they did, to collectors who likewise keep them private, especially today, since they cannot sell them. He also notes that criminal organizations have found stolen art useful in other ways. During the 1994–2002 Quebec Biker war, he recalls, he learned that one member of the Montreal-area Hells Angels served as a fence for art thieves, selling stolen art to the Italian Mafia at 10 percent of its price, who in turn used the names of dead residents of the affluent suburb of Westmount on faked provenance forms.^[1]

While it is not believed likely that the original robbers were affiliated with organized crime, the ransom attempts may point in that direction. The Port of Montreal envelope in which the snapshots of the stolen art was sent may suggest the involvement of the West End Gang, an Irish-dominated group that is one of Canada's oldest and strongest criminal organizations, which has historically been based in the city's port. Bantey, however, doubts this based on his familiarity with the city's criminal element from his journalism days. "[They] were interested in prostitution and drugs" exclusively at the time, he says, and no one involved would have had the expertise required to pull off the robbery. Nor does he believe the thieves were motivated by separatism or any other political cause, just a desire to enrich themselves.^[1]

Despite some suggestions the paintings, assuming they still exist, are still in Montreal, or elsewhere in Canada or the U.S. or Europe, the investigators believe the art has been moved to Latin America. Lacoursière notes that many of the West End Gang often spend their winters in, and retire to, Costa Rica. Police there have not responded to requests for assistance from their counterparts in Montreal. Bantey believes the paintings are in South America somewhere. "I've heard several people I respect say that."^[1] In contrast, Beneditti, the CTV reporter who covered the robbery when it happened, thinks the paintings are still somewhere in Montreal, as the thieves would likely have been unable to sell them.^[5]

The police files on the robbery remain closed to public inspection as the case is still considered open.^[1]

• 1972 in art
• 1972 in Canada
• Crime in Canada
• List of stolen paintings
• Timeline of Montreal history
• 2011 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts theft, the only subsequent theft in the museum's history, from which one of two stolen pieces have been recovered; took place on September 3, one day before 39th anniversary of 1972 robbery
• John Tillmann, Canadian art thief considered the most successful of all time
• Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, 1990 robbery of 13 pieces worth $500 million from a Boston museum that was until 2019 the largest art theft and largest theft of private property in history; also unsolved.
• 2019 Dresden heist, theft of jewelry and related items valued at nearly €1 billion, making it the largest such theft in history