Venice Jewellery Heist: Skillful Insight From The 'Gentleman Thief’

From The Guardian, Nov 17:

Vincenzo Pepino, the exclusively other somebody to conduct maintain successfully robbed Doge’s Palace, suspects £1.7m theft was an within job

Until January, exclusively 1 other somebody had pulled off a burglary at Doge’s Palace, the topographic point of ability during Venice’s years equally a republic, together with a museum since 1923.

In 1991, Vincenzo Pipino, nicknamed the “gentleman thief” for the polite means inwards which he pursued his criminal exploits, spent nearly of a nighttime hidden inwards a prison theatre cellular telephone inwards the New Prisons edifice adjacent door, carefully calculating a safety guard’s manoeuvres. At his chosen moment, Pipino slipped out together with walked across the Bridge of Sighs, which connects the prisons to the palace. From there, he entered the Consoli room, took the highly valuable Madonna col Bambino (Madonna alongside Child), painted inwards the early on 1500s, covered it alongside a blanket together with sauntered out of the edifice through a side door.
The theft inwards January of €2m (£1.7m) worth of jewellery owned past times a fellow member of Qatar’s regal identify unit of measurement on the in conclusion twenty-four hr menses of an exhibition of Mughal together with Maharaja treasures bore all the hallmarks of the Pipino heist – slick, gratis from violence, together with successful.

“When I did my robbery, at that topographic point was exclusively 1 safety guard,” Pipino, 75, told the Guardian this week. “Security has improved a lot since together with then … only something was amiss. Possibly at that topographic point were cracks inwards the alert system, perhaps the alarms weren’t modern enough.”

January’s thieves managed to deactivate an alert system, intermission into a reinforced instance inwards the Chamber of the Scrutinio – an immense room on the building’s 2nd flooring – bag unopen to earrings together with a brooch, together with melt into a crowd of tourists. Police were thence perplexed they were forced to telephone telephone inwards experts from Rome.

Vito Gagliardi, the principal constabulary commissioner, said at the fourth dimension that the reinforced case, which was provided past times the Qatari curators, had been opened similar a tin can. Officers suspected the thieves had scoped out the vast palace, which attracts upward to 4,000 visitors a day, earlier seizing the correct moment. Two of the suspects were seen on CCTV.

On ix November, xi months after the heist, at that topographic point was a breakthrough when five people were arrested inwards Croatia. In a farther unexpected twist, 1 of the suspects briefly escaped custody, reportedly past times climbing out of a bath window at a constabulary station inwards the Croation town of Tovarnik. He was afterwards intercepted trying to cross the nearby edge into Serbia.

Another of the captured suspects is said to survive operate of the Pink Panthers, an international network of gem thieves. Investigators had been hunting for the human being after €10m of jewels were stolen from a 2011 exhibition inwards Basel, Switzerland....MUCH MORE

We visited Vincenzo inwards February's "Pipino Gentleman Thief: Magicians, Mafiosos, a Missing Painting, together with the Heist of a Lifetime".

And a couplet prior mentions of the Pink Panthers:

'Pink Panther' gem thief breaks out of Swiss jail (340 robberies, 330 meg euros [£280m] booty)
How the Hell Did Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Lone Bandit Steal $136 Million In Diamonds?
"Cannes Thief Nabs $53 Million Worth of Jewels together with Diamonds"

And together with then there's e'er Gary Grant, Grace Kelly, French Riviera, directed past times Hitchcock:

The picnic scene that overlooks Monaco: 1009 D53 (Avenue des Anciens Combattants d'Afrique du Nord), 06240 Beausoleil.^[1]

^{[1]  Le Stuff: To Catch Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 Thief} 

From: "To Catch a Thief (1955) - locations<sup>" 

Here's a side-by-side comparison of how the locations conduct maintain changed</sup>