The Art Thief

All forms of security have a weakness.

The castle had repelled outside marauders for a thousand years, but wasn’t quite prepared, Breitwieser noted, for an invader to come from within.

Crime works best, he says, not with overpowering force but when nobody knows it’s being committed.

Mühll devotes almost all his time to the case, trying not to be overly menacing or judgmental. “I can’t excuse that, but I can understand,” is a phrase the detective is fond of saying.

The few people Breitwieser has permitted into his life—his mother, his father, his grandparents, Meichler, Anne-Catherine—had all reacted to his thieving in strangely tolerant ways, almost validating his behavior as acceptable for someone who seems as smitten by art as him. “There is no parental figure in this group,” says the art journalist Noce. “No one ever said to him, ‘You must stop, you have to give back the works, you must act like an adult,’ and that was part of his problem, I think.”