[CPProt.net] theft last year of Edvard Munch's The Scream may have been part of an elaborate criminal plot

[MSN CPPnet]

Master plan 

It's the priceless artwork that conveys existential despair. It may also
never be seen again. But, as Kris Hollington reports, the theft last year of
Edvard Munch's The Scream may have been part of an elaborate criminal plot 

Monday June 13, 2005
The Guardian 

At about 8am on April 5 2004, a man drove a large white van in front of the
police station in Norway's cathedral city of Stavanger. Another man got out
of the cab, walked to the main door holding a canister of tear gas, pulled
the pin and threw it inside. The two men drove off in a passenger car, the
van bursting into flames as they fled.
At that same moment, the police started receiving calls of a robbery in
progress at the offices of Norsk Kontantservice (Nokas), a cash transport
service in the basement of Norway's central bank. Five men wearing black
overalls, gas masks and helmets had entered the building carrying bags
stuffed full of equipment. Another three, armed with automatic weapons, had
taken up strategic positions at the junctions of two nearby streets.

Two patrol cars were dispatched to the scene. As the police arrived, the
robbers opened fire, peppering both cars with bullets, forcing commuters to
run for their lives. Norwegian police need special permission to carry guns
that are kept locked up in police stations. But one of the officers, Arne
Sigve Klungland, 53, happened to have a revolver in the car's safe and
returned fire, hitting one of the gunmen. Not seriously injured, the gunman
raised his machinegun and sprayed Klungland's car with bullets, fatally
wounding him. At 8.20am, one of the robbers took a hostage - without
realising it was a plainclothes policeman.
Inside the bank, the gang used sledgehammers and a variety of other tools to
gain access to the Nokas offices. This took nearly 15 minutes but the police
were unable to make use of this time to dispatch armed officers because of
the van, burning in front of the station. At 8.40am, the robbers crashed
through the doors of the bank and spilled into the street. They drove out of
the city at speed, firing wildly as they went. They drove off-road, under
the main highway, over a bus lane and vanished. At about 9am, thick black
smoke was spotted rising from the edge of a forest two kilometres from the
centre of town. The getaway cars were still ablaze as armed police entered
the forest but the robbers were gone. Their prize: £5m in untraceable cash.

Only seven police officers have been killed on duty in postwar Norway. The
country's special organised crime unit, Catch, and special police
force,Kripos, were instructed to drop all other cases. The Director of
Police, Ingelin Killengreen, said every policeman in Norway would be put on
the case. And then, a few weeks later, another robbery took place - a
robbery that changed police priorities immediately.

On August 22 2004 at the Munch Museum in Oslo, two thieves, wearing hooded
tops and balaclavas, ran straight into a plate-glass sliding door. Startled
museumgoers watched as they picked themselves up, waited for the door to
slide back and tried again. Once inside, they turned right, then left, then
left again. Realising they should have gone right, they doubled back and
finally arrived in the central room of the museum where their iconic target
was hung.

The Scream by Edvard Munch is a symbol of Expressionist angst, showing an
individual on a bridge, hands clasped around their head and mouth wide open,
howling despair at the viewer. One of the most famous paintings in the
world, it is said to reflect Munch's existential despair after the early
deaths of his mother and elder sister. It is widely considered to be
priceless.

One robber held a gun to the head of a terrified security guard while the
other tore the painting from its mountings. On the way to the exit, almost
as an afterthought, the thieves stopped and tore down another Munch
painting, The Madonna. As they fled the two thieves were caught on security
cameras ripping the wooden frames off to remove electronic tracking devices.
The Scream, painted on cardboard, was badly damaged in the process.

Despite the bungled start, the heist had taken just a few minutes. A
national outcry followed. One newspaper carried the headline: The World
Screams. Arrests were demanded. The press were severely critical of museum
security and derided the police for failing to make a quick arrest. Just as
he did a month before, Killengreen said that every available policeman would
be put on the case in an effort to ensure the quick return of the painting.

Could the two, spectacular heists have been connected? The hunt for those
responsible for the Nokas robbery had proven only partly successful. By
July, seven arrests had been made, in Norway and elsewhere in Europe, but
28-year-old David Toska, who is later said to have confessed to being the
ringleader, remained elusive. Meanwhile, in the hunt for The Scream, police
had a clear target - Paal Enger, an ex-professional footballer turned
art-thief extraordinaire who admitted to having a Munch obsession.

Enger's criminal career had been nothing if not colourful. His first spell
in prison was for stealing Munch's The Vampire. At the time, in 1988, Enger
played for the Norwegian club Valerenga, but low wages meant most players
had another career. Two of Enger's' teammates were policemen who noticed
that, despite not having a second job, he threw away brand new tracksuits at
the end of each training session, claiming it wasn't worth washing them.
Intrigued, they followed Enger through Oslo and watched as he spent large
sums on watches, clothes, restaurants and holidays. They soon discovered
that he was a thief, mainly stealing jewels and cash. When police raided his
home, The Vampire was found hanging on his wall.

After Enger was released in 1994, he soon returned to crime and, later that
year, was given an unusual commission: to steal The Scream. He would be
well-paid and his mystery employer didn't even want the painting - Enger
could do what he liked with it. Enger gladly accepted and hired three
accomplices. They broke into Oslo's National Gallery on the night the
national attention was distracted by the opening ceremony for the Winter
Olympics, held that year in Lillehammer, Norway. After stealing the
masterpiece in less than a minute, Enger left a postcard which read:
"Thousand thanks for the bad security!"

An incurable show-off, Enger helped draw suspicion to himself by boasting in
a newspaper birth notice that his baby son had arrived "med et Skrik" -
"with a scream". Police hired a British art recovery expert, Tony Russell,
who helped put together a sting when Enger tried to ransom the painting for
£700,000. He was captured during the handover in a small town near Oslo and
the painting was recovered undamaged. He was sentenced to
six-and-a-half-years. He escaped from prison while on a field trip in 1999
but was captured 12 days later in a blond wig and dark sunglasses trying to
buy a train ticket to Copenhagen.

Later, police learned that the unnamed inspiration for the Scream raid was,
in fact, a member of the "Tveita Gang", a group of armed robbers whose
activities had been severely curtailed by a police crackdown. The theft of
The Scream was supposed to take the heat off them - and it worked. They
successfully raided several banks in the weeks following the theft.

As police considered the second raid they became convinced that Toska had
commissioned it, like the Tveita gang, fearful of being arrested for his
other crimes. Iver Stensrud, the head of the organised crime unit of Oslo
police, who is leading the inquiry into the recovery of the pictures, said:
"You can't sell The Scream, it's impossible. Toska used the same methods as
the Tveita Gang."

The theft of a world-famous painting demands attention; it was vital the
police made rapid progress as the whole world watched. And while they gave
all their attention to The Scream, Toska slipped out of Norway. He made his
way to Madrid, and is believed to have hooked up with a Norwegian hashish
smuggler, using a large part of the money from the Nokas robbery to buy
several hundred kilos of hashish.

In April the pair were arrested in a hotel room in Malaga and Toska
allegedly confessed to having orchestrated the Nokas robbery, also giving
police vital evidence that confirmed their suspicions about who had taken
the painting, naming all four of the individuals who have been arrested for
the Scream robbery. Enger, who had already been questioned in November, was
finally taken into custody in May. He denies any involvement in the crime.

As for the paintings, their whereabouts remains unknown. "We don't know
where [they] are, whether they are still in Norway, or whether they have
gone abroad," Stensrud says. Fears are mounting that they may be
irretrievably damaged. Reports in the Norwegian daily VG cite criminal
sources claiming that both paintings were incinerated by the thieves because
they thought police were getting too close. On June 2 police offered a 2m
kroner (£170,000) reward for information leading to their recovery.

The beleaguered Munch Museum, closed since November, will reopen this month
after a £4.3m security upgrade, installing metal detectors and a new
labyrinthine floor plan. It is designed to fox even the most well-prepared
art thieves.