The first thing Stéphane Breitwieser steals from Belgium’s Art & History Museum is an index card. Folded in half and set inside a partially empty display case, it reads, in French, “Objects Removed for Study.” The museum contains one of the largest collections of art and antiquities in Europe, but Breitwieser immediately recognizes that, for his purposes, its most valuable item is the notecard. He jimmies open the case, pockets the card, and, together with his girlfriend and accomplice, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, strolls onward. To anyone who happens to notice them, they look like a happy, art-loving young couple enjoying a date at a museum, which, in a sense, they are.
A few rooms later, another display case catches Breitwieser’s eye. This one is filled with fantastically ornate sixteenth-century silver objects, including goblets, chalices, and a miniature warship. The lock, he notices, is high end but poorly installed; he smacks the top and the cylinder drops out of its housing and into the display case. Breitwieser helps himself to two chalices and a tankard, then sets the index card down where they used to be. Only when he and Kleinklaus have reached his car does he realize that he has left the lid of the tankard behind. That won’t do. He is an aesthetic perfectionist; a topless tankard will be a torment to him. Kleinklaus knows this about her boyfriend and, although he is usually the improvisational genius, she can hold her own when circumstances require it. She takes out one of her earrings and returns to the entrance, Breitwieser in tow. When she shows the guard her remaining earring and says she thinks she knows where she lost the other one, he lets them both back inside. At the display case, Breitwieser takes the tankard lid, along with—why not?—two additional goblets.
They return two weeks later. The index card is still in the case. So is the warship, which Breitwieser puts in Kleinklaus’s purse. Then, from the same display, he nicks a two-foot-tall chalice, which he stuffs up the sleeve of his coat, making it impossible to bend his left arm. The pair are on their way to the exit when a guard asks to see their tickets. Kleinklaus’s is at the bottom of her purse, beneath the ship. Breitwieser’s is in his left pocket, which he can’t access with his left hand. He reaches across his body, like a man drawing a sword, fishes out the ticket, hands it to the guard, and explains that they’re just headed to the museum café to grab a bite to eat. The guard waves them on, and they go to the café, sit down with their ill-gotten goods, and have lunch.
Two days later, they come back for more, bringing the total number of artifacts they have stolen from that single display to eleven. Aside from the “Objects Removed for Study” card, the case is now almost empty. On their way out of town, they stop at an antique shop whose front window boasts a beautiful seventeenth-century silver-and-gold urn. Later, back home, Kleinklaus phones the shop and asks how much the urn costs. Around a hundred thousand dollars, the owner tells her, but it’s worth it. “Madame,” he says, “you really must see it.” But of course, by then, the urn is no longer in his window. It is in a modest house in an industrial town in eastern France, in the attic rooms occupied by Breitwieser, Kleinklaus, and some two billion dollars’ worth of stolen art.
All this is recounted, thrillingly, in “The Art Thief” (Knopf), by the journalist Michael Finkel. It is his third book, and also the third one to search for meaning—moral, aesthetic, existential—in criminal acts. This is an interest he comes by honestly, or, more precisely, dishonestly. In 2002, Finkel, who was then a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, plummeted from grace when the protagonist of an article he wrote, about allegations of child slavery on West African cocoa plantations, turned out to be a composite character. The Times fired him and soon afterward published a lengthy correction, which took his transgressions from private to public and took a sledgehammer to his reputation.
An hour and a half before that correction ran, Finkel got a phone call from a fellow-reporter. To his surprise, confusion, relief, and horror, the man was not calling about his journalistic offenses; he was calling to ask if Finkel was aware that someone named Christian Longo, who was accused of and would later confess to murdering his wife and three young children in Oregon, had recently been captured in Mexico, where he had adopted the identity of a writer he admired—Michael Finkel of the Times Magazine. Real and faux Finkel began to correspond, and both men’s misdeeds became fodder for the writer’s first book, “True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa.” A dozen years later, Finkel published “The Stranger in the Woods,” an account of a man named Christopher Knight, who, for twenty-seven years, lived in the forests of central Maine entirely outdoors and alone, getting by on the haul from a decades-long burglary streak that kept him in both necessities and luxuries: food, clothing, batteries, propane tanks, sleeping bags, mattresses, books, television sets, handheld games.
Now comes “The Art Thief,” which documents a different kind of crime, one that circumvents both the moral horror of murder and the mundanity of petty theft. From 1994 to 2001, Breitwieser, working mostly with Kleinklaus but sometimes alone, stole at a pace unprecedented in the history of art: roughly three out of four weekends per year for eight years, resulting in some three hundred purloined works of art. He plied his craft during business hours, in museums and galleries and auction houses, with tourists and docents and security guards milling around. He never wore a mask and rarely disguised himself at all. He carried no weapons, never hurt anyone, and never threatened to hold anyone hostage. He did not use the art he stole to fund other illegal activities or sustain an extravagant life style. He simply took it home to those attic rooms and admired it.
As illegal activities go, the crime spree of Stéphane Breitwieser was decorous, electrifying, and, for all its outrageousness, familiar. As a form of entertainment, “The Art Thief” has less in common with Finkel’s earlier books than with movies such as “Ocean’s Eleven.” Like that film, it unmistakably belongs to the genre of the heist, a category of entertainment so fun and frictionless that it is easy to skate right past the obvious question it raises. Why, given our over-all disapproval of theft, are stories about heists so appealing—to so many of us, and specifically to Michael Finkel?
A heist, to be clear, is not a legal category. If you are caught with a Rembrandt in your raincoat on the way out of the Louvre, you will not be charged with attempted heist. The term is pure slang, coined in America in the nineteen-twenties, a high-water decade for crimes of all kinds. It likely comes from “hoist,” either in the sense of hoisting someone up to shimmy through a window or in that other sense of picking something up, the one implied by “shoplifting.” But no one has ever described the pilfering of a can of Red Bull and a pack of condoms as a heist; indeed, real-life crimes are only infrequently characterized that way. For the most part, “heist” suggests less a specific illegal action than the form of entertainment that depicts it.
Although the heist genre shares a border with mystery novels, spy novels, true crime, and crime fiction, it has its own distinctive conventions, the first of which is that the object of the theft must be spectacularly valuable. Steal thirty thousand dollars or a Rolex watch and it’s a crime; steal thirty million dollars or the Hope Diamond and it’s a heist. Second, that object must be taken from an institution of significant standing. Heists do not occur at Sunoco stations or suburban homes; they happen in banks, preferably on Wall Street, or museums, preferably the Met. Third, the theft must be borderline impossible. That’s why every heist plot pauses at some point to explain why, for instance, the thieves have to rob not one casino but three at the same time (as in Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 remake of the aforementioned “Ocean’s Eleven,” among the most genre-satisfying of all heist films), or why they have to steal not one car but fifty in less than three days (as in the 2000 remake of “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which features Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie in what you might call a car-studded cast: among others, an Aston Martin, a Ferrari Testarossa, a Lamborghini Diablo, a Bentley Arnage, and a 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500). Give or take some paraphrasing, in almost every heist story someone says, “It can’t be done.”
But it can, of course; you just need the right criminals. That’s the fourth convention of the heist: assembling a team. Its members are typically underworld all-stars, each one the master of a highly specialized skill: picking pockets, counting cards, hacking computers, back-flipping over motion detectors, strolling into Sotheby’s with so much savoir faire as to seem like a legitimate customer. Collectively, they illustrate the point, made by, of all people, Aristotle, that just as there are outstanding doctors and musicians there are also “perfect thieves,” who “have no deficiency in respect of the form of their peculiar excellence.” According to a fifth convention, however, when we first encounter these perfect thieves they are wasting their talents on petty chicanery or attempts at moral rectitude; a sixth convention is that at least one of them has retired and must be dragged back into a life of crime for one last irresistible gig. (In a nice meta move, Soderbergh came out of retirement to direct “Logan Lucky”—essentially an Appalachian “Ocean’s Eleven,” in which the West Virginian protagonists set out to rob a Nascar speedway.)
Perhaps the most crucial convention of the heist story, however, is that, despite possessing so many illicit aptitudes, the thieves must barely seem like criminals. Often, they reassure us that they steal for pleasure rather than for profit, delighting either in the work itself or in the specific item they are stealing. (“I didn’t do it for the money,” Cage’s character declares in “Gone in 60 Seconds.” “I did it for the cars.”) When the thieves are motivated by profit, their victims are presented as so wealthy and corrupt that they deserve to be robbed. Per the logic of Robin Hood, it’s appropriate to steal from the rich as long as you redistribute the bounty to the poor; per the logic of the heist, it’s appropriate to steal from the rich because they are rich. The implication—a comfortable one in today’s one-per-cent world—is that anyone affluent enough to own so much desirable stuff didn’t come by it honestly, either.
In short, in a heist story the bad guys are basically the good guys. At worst, they are cheerfully and debonairly amoral (as in “Ocean’s Eight,” the all-female entry in the franchise, whose plot involves an ethically indefensible but nonetheless enjoyable theft at the Met Gala of a whole lot of bling); at best, they are righting some grievous wrong (as in “Inside Man,” where the target of the heist is a Nazi collaborator). Much of the time, though, they are either robbing other criminals (as in “The Italian Job”), for whom one can have only so much sympathy, or simply getting their due (as in “Logan Lucky,” where the heisters retain just enough of their haul to leave behind their hardscrabble lives). In keeping with this ethic of ethicalness, many heists are bloodless, or largely so; if they deal out violence or death at all, it is only to the truly wicked.
Not all of these conventions appear in every heist story, of course, but taken together they define an identifiable category while allowing for endless riffing. Wes Anderson’s 2009 animated film “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is a heist narrative, as is the 2008 documentary “Man on Wire,” about Philippe Petit’s illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers—a planning-filled, panache-filled, victimless crime at a major institution. Heists of all kinds also appear in books of all kinds: in fiction that ranges from the potboilerish (Gerald A. Browne’s “11 Harrowhouse”) to the ambitious (Colson Whitehead’s “Harlem Shuffle”), and in nonfiction that details the theft of valuable goods from the obvious to the absurd: gold, diamonds, pearls, cash, rare books, rare maps, rare feathers, rocks from the moon.
Of all the priceless objects in the world, however, perhaps none lend themselves so well to the heist narrative as works of art. That’s not just because art is expensive, housed in grand institutions, and difficult to steal. It is also because anyone motivated to steal art—for art’s sake, as the convention dictates—seems intrinsically refined, the kind of genteel thief whose moral lapses are overshadowed by excellent taste. This idealized criminal reached its fictional apotheosis in the 1999 version of “The Thomas Crown Affair” (another remake, like many good heist movies), which stars Pierce Brosnan as an art thief so charming and cultivated that the insurance investigator tasked with trying to catch him falls in love with him instead. But, as the actual people responsible for catching art thieves understand, Thomas Crown is not merely fictional but also fantastical. A thief like him—daring and skilled, but also motivated by aesthetics and deeply knowledgeable about art—is a figment of our collective imagination: so virtually every police officer, detective, and museum-security expert would have told you, until Stéphane Breitwieser came along.
How does such a highly improbable person come to exist? The backstory, Finkel tells us, is this: Breitwieser was a troubled and solitary young man who, via the divorce of his parents, fell from the upper classes—a life of boating on Lake Geneva and skiing in the Alps—to a considerably lower rung of society. For him, the symbol of that fall and its essential injustice was that he went from enjoying a home filled with high art and antique weaponry to living with his mother in an apartment decorated with cheap movie posters and, horror of horrors, Ikea furniture. After graduating from high school, he flitted from job to job, beginning with a brief stint as a museum guard, the last day of which he celebrated by stealing a fifteen-hundred-year-old Merovingian belt buckle. Eventually, he met and fell in love with Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, a nurse’s aide with good taste and a calm demeanor, who later moved in with him in the attic rooms of his mother’s new home—small, but an upgrade from the apartment. The couple enjoyed visiting museums together, and one day, at a little one in an Alsatian village, they admired a flintlock pistol whose chief virtue, from Breitwieser’s perspective, was that it was nicer than any his father owned. She urged him to take the pistol and he did; they got away with it, and got a taste for it.
Unlike most art thieves but very much like a classic heist hero, Breitwieser steals art because he loves it. He spends his free time reading histories of art, biographies of artists, and catalogues raisonnés, and he tells Finkel that beautiful objects should be liberated from the “prison” of museums so that they can be experienced appropriately: at length, up close, in the privacy of his bedroom. Almost any of the works he steals could net him a small fortune, and plenty of them—a Brueghel, a Watteau, a Lucas Cranach the Elder—are worth a large one, yet he refuses to sell any. Instead, he lives off his mother’s patience, his girlfriend’s meagre salary, and intermittent low-wage jobs, leaving him so short on money that, Finkel writes, “even on getaway drives he avoids paying highway tolls.” But then, Breitwieser isn’t big on getaway drives in the first place; like the classic heist hero, he disapproves of haste, violence, and drama of all kinds. The best theft, to his mind, is not so much stylish as invisible.