Two Van Goghs, Fourteen Years, and a Wall Cavity Near Naples

Shortly before dawn on 7 December 2002, Octave Durham — a career criminal nicknamed "the Monkey" — and his accomplice Henk Bieslijn propped a ladder against the side of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, home to the world's largest collection of the artist's work. They climbed onto the roof, smashed a window with a sledgehammer, dropped inside on a rope, and grabbed the two nearest paintings from the wall. The entire raid took only minutes. Durham later boasted in a documentary that the whole job lasted "approximately three minutes and 40 seconds," and that he had chosen the museum simply because he could.

The stolen works were "View of the Sea at Scheveningen" (1882) — the museum's only painting from Van Gogh's Hague period — and "Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen" (1884–85), which depicts the church where the artist's father served as a pastor. The FBI would list them among its "Top Ten Art Crimes," with a combined value later estimated at tens of millions of euros.

The thieves were caught relatively quickly. Durham had dropped a hat at the scene, and DNA from strands of his hair tied him to the crime. He fled to Marbella, Spain, where he was arrested in December 2003; Bieslijn was caught in Amsterdam. Both were convicted in 2004 and received prison terms of around four years. But the arrests brought investigators no closer to the paintings themselves, which had disappeared entirely.

The reason emerged only years later. Durham had spent his loot conspicuously — motorbikes, jewelry, a Mercedes E320, trips to New York and Disneyland Paris — and had sold the canvases into the criminal underworld. According to the BBC, one intended buyer, the notorious Dutch kidnapper Cor van Hout, was gunned down before a deal could close; another prospective buyer met the same fate. In March 2003, the paintings were finally sold — for roughly €350,000 — to Raffaele Imperiale, then a low-ranking mafioso running an Amsterdam coffee shop who would rise to become a leader in the Camorra's cocaine-trafficking Amato-Pagano clan. He would later claim he bought them because he was "fond of art" and they were a "bargain".

The break came from an entirely different direction. In January 2016, Italian anti-mafia police arrested clan figures — including Imperiale and an associate, Mario Cerrone — as part of a sweeping crackdown on international cocaine trafficking. One of them told investigators that the Van Goghs were hidden in a house near Naples. In late September 2016, police raided a property linked to Imperiale in the seaside town of Castellammare di Stabia, some 34 kilometers from Naples. There, wrapped in cloth and concealed in a hidden wall cavity near a kitchen, were the two missing masterpieces. Alongside them, police seized roughly €20 million in assets — villas, apartments, boats, even a small aircraft.

On 30 September 2016, Van Gogh Museum director Axel Rüger stood before reporters and struggled to contain himself. "The paintings have been found!" he said. "That I would be able to ever pronounce these words is something I had no longer dared to hope for". A museum curator, summoned to Naples to inspect the works, reached a firm conclusion: "They are the real paintings!". Investigators noted the canvases still bore Van Gogh's own telltale marks — grains of beach sand embedded in the seascape, and spots on the back where he had cleaned his brushes.

The paintings had lost their frames and "View of the Sea at Scheveningen" had suffered paint loss in its lower left corner, but both had survived their fourteen-year ordeal in remarkably good condition. After a brief display in Naples, they returned to Amsterdam, went back on public view in March 2017, and — following two years of conservation — were rehung in their full glory in April 2019. It remains one of the only cases on the FBI's list of top art crimes ever to be solved.