Starting 2010 Off Wrong with Two Big Art Thefts in Marseilles

Welcome back! We hope you had a nice, long weekend and a very happy New Year’s. To make the painful transition back to normalcy after what seemed like a particularly lengthy series of breaks and downtime, we thought we’d start you off with a fun story of a couple of good art thefts. As we all know from movies, the best time for a professional thief to make their play, it’s always around some big event. Say, New Year’s for example. Such was the case in Marseilles, where not one but two very large art thefts took place. In a countryside villa there, some 30 paintings were grabbed, which included work by Picasso and Rousseau (the most expensive of the collection, valued at near $1.5 million). Across town at the Cantini Museum, someone broke in overnight and swiped a Degas, on loan from the Musee d’Orsay, valued at more than a million dollars. According to Reuters, the local police don’t think the two thefts are related, and have released a night watchman at the museum, who one can assume might have been the first suspect. But isn’t that pretty odd, two big art burglaries within days of each other in the same small town? We think you UnBeige readers should pay for us to head out there and investigate. We’re guessing it’ll take at least three or maybe four weeks to really do some serious crime solving.

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