Michael J. Lewis catches up with the latest reporting on the Scream theft (mentioned a couple of weeks ago here) which suggests it was all a ploy to throw police off the trail of another investigation:
"[A]n armed band assaulted a government bank in the port city of Stavanger, machine-gunning a police officer in the process. The furious criminal investigation that ensued seems to have alarmed the robbers, who decided to try art theft as a diversionary tactic. It was the timing of the two crimes, only four months apart, which suggested to police that they might be related and which led them, in the end, to both the painting and the killers."
He adds:
"As the fate of The Scream shows, the rewards of art theft tend to be paltry. Hollywood notwithstanding, art thieves tend to be hapless incompetents like those who stole Goya’s Children with a Cart from a van last November as it was being shipped from the Toledo Museum of Art to the Guggenheim in New York."
For more on the hapless Goya incompetence, see here.
