The Deathbed Confession That Solved a 50-Year Carnegie Hall Mystery

On the humid evening of February 28, 1936, the Polish virtuoso Bronisław Huberman took the Carnegie Hall stage for his only New York recital of the season. For the second half of the program he chose his Guarneri "del Gesù," leaving his 1713 Stradivarius—known as the "Gibson," after an earlier English owner—resting in its double case in his dressing room. During the applause following the Franck Sonata, Huberman's valet crossed the stage to whisper that the Stradivarius was gone. The violinist reportedly took the news with startling calm—"It is insured, do not worry," he told his panicked secretary.

The theft made the front pages. The next morning's New York Times reported that the thief had ignored nine violin bows worth $1,500 each and the heavy, red-velour-lined case, taking only the instrument itself—valued then at $30,000 and fully insured. Huberman told police he doubted a musician was responsible, reasoning that the untouched bows would have been easy to sell. It was not the violin's first disappearance: it had been stolen from Huberman's Vienna hotel room in 1919 and recovered by police within three days. This time, luck ran out. Lloyd's of London paid Huberman a $30,000 settlement, took ownership of a violin nobody could find, and the case went cold. Huberman died in Switzerland in 1947, never having seen the Gibson again.

The Stradivarius had not gone far. It had passed into the hands of Julian Altman, a New York café violinist who, by his widow's account, bought it for $100 from a "sticky-fingered" friend who boasted of lifting it from Carnegie Hall—though many suspected Altman himself was the thief. Rather than fence the too-famous instrument, Altman hid it in plain sight. He darkened its glowing varnish with shoe polish to disguise it and played it for the rest of his career, including a stint as first chair with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, performing for presidents and politicians on the very violin that had eluded a nationwide hunt.

The secret held for nearly fifty years. In 1985, Altman lay dying—imprisoned for molesting his wife's grandchild—and summoned his wife, Marcelle Hall, to his hospital bedside. There he confessed the true identity of "his" violin and told her where to find the corroborating evidence. Inside the case's canvas cover, Hall discovered decades-old newspaper clippings chronicling the 1936 Carnegie Hall theft.

After Altman's death on August 12, 1985, Hall set out to return the instrument—and to claim a reward. She negotiated with Lloyd's, and in 1987 the London violin dealer Charles Beare flew to Bethel, Connecticut, to examine it. Comparing the instrument to an old color photograph he had obtained from a New York violin shop, Beare needed only a glance. "No problem," he pronounced. "Between 'no' and 'problem,'" Hall recalled, "I almost died". The long-lost 1713 Gibson Stradivarius had surfaced at last.

Lloyd's paid Hall a finder's fee of $263,475.75—a sum that later triggered years of litigation among Altman's heirs, reaching the Connecticut Supreme Court. Restorers spent nine months cleaning away half a century of grime and shoe polish, a process one workshop likened to "taking dirt off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel". The violin was flown back to Cremona—Stradivari's birthplace—for a 1987 exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of the maker's death.

In 1988, Lloyd's sold the restored instrument for $1.2 million to the British virtuoso Norbert Brainin of the Amadeus Quartet. In 2001, the American violinist Joshua Bell—who had been having his own Stradivarius serviced in London when the Gibson came up for sale—bought it for just under $4 million and has performed on it ever since. The instrument that a thief silenced under shoe polish now sings again on the world's greatest stages, its improbable journey immortalized in the 2012 documentary The Return of the Violin.