$100 MILLION ART THEFT IN PARIS

A thief just committed one of the largest art heists ever at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. It took incredible cunning, however it did notinvolve slipping through a maze of laser beams. From the Washington Post:

In a brazen display of stealth, cunning and cool nerves, a thief using a sharp cutting tool opened a gated window and sneaked into the Paris Museum of Modern Art.

Three security guards were on duty at the time, but the thief — or perhaps thieves — detached five major cubist and post-impressionist paintings from their frames without being detected and slid back into the night with a rolled-up treasure worth well over $100 million.

The embarrassing heist — of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger — was discovered just before 7 a.m. Thursday, Paris officials said, probably long after the celebrated canvases had disappeared.

One thing seemed certain: Whoever did it knew what he or she or they were doing. It appears that someone had figured out how to frustrate the alarm system or perhaps had gotten wind that it was faulty. Someone had identified the gated window, with its lone padlock, as a chink in the armor and had figured out how to evade the security guards. And the guilty party headed straight for some of the museum’s best-known works of art.