money and said he was looking for leverage to get his debt repaid.) Vazquez then turned around and sold the script to a production company, receiving $1 million up front and a 10-percent stake in the movie’s profits.
According to MySanAntonio.com , the plea agreement came with a strange price—the government demanded that Vazquez give up his 10-percent cut of future earnings, with that money going into the Feds’ bank account.
Why the government believed that Vazquez had the right to give them those proceeds, is, at best, unclear, given that it was incarcerating Vazquez in part for his method of acquiring the rights. Certainly, Madrigal disagreed that Vazquez had any ownership of the screenplay. On the day Vazquez plead guilty, Madrigal sued Vazquez in an effort to reverse the latter’s sale of the script.
----
BONUS FACT
In recent years, a common Christmastime “prank” sprang up in the United States—thieves began stealing baby Jesus dolls from nativity scenes around the country. According to the Awl, from 2011 to 2012 there were well over 2,000 reports of such thefts. For many, it’s no laughing matter. In 2012, the
New York Post
reported that police treated one theft from a Brooklyn church as a hate crime. That same year, according to the
Los Angeles Times,
a Florida church, tired of having its baby Jesus statue stolen, outfitted their new one with a GPS device to catch a future thief.
----
STOLEN SMILE
THE INCREDIBLE HEIST OF THE MONA LISA
On August 21, 1911, the
Mona Lisa
—Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece—was stolen off the wall of the Louvre, leaving bare the four iron pegs on which it hung. The thief, later identified as then-Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, hid in a closet on Saturday, knowing that the museum would be closed the next day. He emerged from his hiding place on August 21, took the
Mona Lisa
off the wall, discarded its nearly 200 pounds of security devices and decorative frames, and carried the painting under his smock. He walked out the door and into freedom—until, twenty-eight months later, he tried to sell it, and was instead nabbed by the authorities.
Peruggia’s motivations, however, are almost certainly not those of the standard art thief, that is, he was not looking to simply (to understate the feat) fence the masterpiece and become an overnight millionaire. Rather, Peruggia was either a nationalist ideologue looking to reclaim the artwork on behalf of his native Italy, or, perhaps, a rube to a master criminal in the making.
The former theory is straightforward: Peruggia, an Italian by birth, allegedly believed that the Italian da Vinci’s work could only be properly displayed in Italy—so he stole it to fix that “problem.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Peruggia simply used this excuse—successfully, it turned out—to limit his jail time once caught. (Tried in Italy, he served seven months, with
Time
implying that his patriotic motives played into his short amount of time behind bars.) Some reasons not to believe Peruggia include the fact that he attempted to sell the painting (for the equivalent of $100,000) and not merely donate it; that he waited more than two years to move it; that he returned to France after his release; and that he was at least loosely affiliated with another criminal syndicate of art counterfeiters.
It is the art counterfeiters’ story that suggests that Peruggia’s motives were less honorable than patriotism.
An Argentine con man named Eduardo de Valfierno allegedly was behind the theft. In 1914, after the theft and recovery of the
Mona Lisa
, but before Peruggia was brought to trial, Valfierno told his story to an American journalist named Karl Decker after extracting a promise that Decker would not publish the story until after Valfierno’s death. Decker agreed. This is the only source for Valfierno’s account.
Valfierno’s “business” was in faux masterpieces. He commissioned artists to create
According to MySanAntonio.com , the plea agreement came with a strange price—the government demanded that Vazquez give up his 10-percent cut of future earnings, with that money going into the Feds’ bank account.
Why the government believed that Vazquez had the right to give them those proceeds, is, at best, unclear, given that it was incarcerating Vazquez in part for his method of acquiring the rights. Certainly, Madrigal disagreed that Vazquez had any ownership of the screenplay. On the day Vazquez plead guilty, Madrigal sued Vazquez in an effort to reverse the latter’s sale of the script.
----
BONUS FACT
In recent years, a common Christmastime “prank” sprang up in the United States—thieves began stealing baby Jesus dolls from nativity scenes around the country. According to the Awl, from 2011 to 2012 there were well over 2,000 reports of such thefts. For many, it’s no laughing matter. In 2012, the
New York Post
reported that police treated one theft from a Brooklyn church as a hate crime. That same year, according to the
Los Angeles Times,
a Florida church, tired of having its baby Jesus statue stolen, outfitted their new one with a GPS device to catch a future thief.
----
STOLEN SMILE
THE INCREDIBLE HEIST OF THE MONA LISA
On August 21, 1911, the
Mona Lisa
—Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece—was stolen off the wall of the Louvre, leaving bare the four iron pegs on which it hung. The thief, later identified as then-Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia, hid in a closet on Saturday, knowing that the museum would be closed the next day. He emerged from his hiding place on August 21, took the
Mona Lisa
off the wall, discarded its nearly 200 pounds of security devices and decorative frames, and carried the painting under his smock. He walked out the door and into freedom—until, twenty-eight months later, he tried to sell it, and was instead nabbed by the authorities.
Peruggia’s motivations, however, are almost certainly not those of the standard art thief, that is, he was not looking to simply (to understate the feat) fence the masterpiece and become an overnight millionaire. Rather, Peruggia was either a nationalist ideologue looking to reclaim the artwork on behalf of his native Italy, or, perhaps, a rube to a master criminal in the making.
The former theory is straightforward: Peruggia, an Italian by birth, allegedly believed that the Italian da Vinci’s work could only be properly displayed in Italy—so he stole it to fix that “problem.” Unfortunately, there are a lot of reasons to believe that Peruggia simply used this excuse—successfully, it turned out—to limit his jail time once caught. (Tried in Italy, he served seven months, with
Time
implying that his patriotic motives played into his short amount of time behind bars.) Some reasons not to believe Peruggia include the fact that he attempted to sell the painting (for the equivalent of $100,000) and not merely donate it; that he waited more than two years to move it; that he returned to France after his release; and that he was at least loosely affiliated with another criminal syndicate of art counterfeiters.
It is the art counterfeiters’ story that suggests that Peruggia’s motives were less honorable than patriotism.
An Argentine con man named Eduardo de Valfierno allegedly was behind the theft. In 1914, after the theft and recovery of the
Mona Lisa
, but before Peruggia was brought to trial, Valfierno told his story to an American journalist named Karl Decker after extracting a promise that Decker would not publish the story until after Valfierno’s death. Decker agreed. This is the only source for Valfierno’s account.
Valfierno’s “business” was in faux masterpieces. He commissioned artists to create
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