• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Perugia was paid well for his part in the scheme — “enough to take care of him for the rest of his days if he had taken his good fortune with ordinary intelligence.” However, he squandered the money on the Riviera, possibly in casinos, and then, knowing where the real Mona Lisa was hidden, stole it a second time. The story that he carried it around in his trunk for two years was false. “The poor fool had some nutty notion of selling it,” Valfierno told Decker. “He had never realized that selling it, in the first place, was the real achievement, requiring an organization and a finesse that was a million miles beyond his capabilities.” 13

What about the copies? Decker wanted to know. Someday, speculated Valfierno, all of them would reappear. “Without those, there are already thirty Mona Lisas in the world. That in the Prado Museum is, if anything, superior to the one in the Louvre. Every now and then a new one pops up. I merely added to the gross total.” 14

Perhaps significantly, Decker chose not to publish this sensational story in one of the Hearst publications, even though he was still a Hearst employee. His boss, William Randolph Hearst, was a wealthy man who voraciously collected art — just the sort of person to whom Valfierno might have sold one of the fake Mona Lisas. Hearst Castle, his fabled California estate, was donated to the state of California in 1957, and a curator there in 2005 reported that “there is not — and was not — a copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa at Hearst Castle,” although it was impossible to tell if one might have been part of “his larger collection located at various other venues, past and present.” 15

The Decker account is the sole source for the existence of Valfierno and this version of the theft of the Mona Lisa. There is no external confirmation for it. Yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing about the case. True or false? That mystery has yet to be solved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We want to express our appreciation and thanks to Lyn Nosker and Ellen Hoobler, for their work translating certain books and documents for us. Our thanks also to Dick Nosker, for explaining scientific concepts to us, and to Yohann Thibaudault, for his assiduous research in the Paris Préfecture de Police Museum.

Clearly, we have drawn on the works of many authors, whom we have listed in our bibliography. We owe a particular debt, however, to Dr. Benjamin F. Martin of Louisiana State University and Dr. Edward Berenson of UCLA, whose works have informed our writing of chapter 9; and to Richard Parry, whose comprehensive book on the Bonnot Gang provided the basis of our research for chapter 7.

Our thanks to the staffs of the New York Public Library, the Avery Library, and the Butler Library of Columbia University.

We owe more than we can adequately express to our editor, Geoff Shandler, who initially conceptualized this book and provided many insights and suggestions, and to his assistant, Junie Dahn, who as always was the god in the details.

Finally, our gratitude to our agent, Al Zuckerman, whose support for our work has been unwavering.

NOTES

THEFT

1. There were an estimated 275,000 works in the museum’s possession, not all of which were on display.

2. It began as a fortress constructed by Philip Augustus around the year 1190, but many alterations and additions had been made since then.

3. Lawrence Jeppson, The Fabulous Frauds: Fascinating Tales of Great Art Forgeries (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 44.

CHAPTER ONE: THE CITY OF LIGHT

1. Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve: 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 36.

2. Ibid., 35.

3. Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981), 158.

4. Theodore Dreiser, “Paris,” Century Magazine 86, no. 6 (October 1913): 910–11.

5. Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 1.

6. Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995),