The Logistics of Persistence: On Heists, Fake Slings, and Quiet Guardians

I’m sure I’ve mentioned that I love podcasts. Well, just the other day I was sitting amongst my tiny herb but thriving and abundant herb and veggie garden with bees buzzing all around me, as I listened to Lindsey Tramuta chatting with Jo Piazza on The New Paris Podcast.

Yes, so many Jos!

Jo, the author, was talking about her new book, The Parisian Heist, and then said that Jo Van Gogh-Bonger had single-handedly dragged Vincent’s entire life’s work out of an old drawer.

I stopped, and I looked down at the pile of folders sitting on my little garden table, and I had to have a little laugh at myself because I’ve been sitting on these notes for years now. These records are a bit of a mess, really, but they’re all sorts of dossiers and scraps of paper on French library secrets, weird thefts, even some institutional blind spots, and the strange things people do when they think no one is looking.

I’ve only published a few essays on these themes so far. Actually, and those are more recent publications, and they’re the ones on the sticky-fingered side of it, like Ocean’s Four: French Connection and Ocean’s Four Meets Ocean’s Fork: France’s Sticky-Fingered October 2025. But rest assured there are many more to come. It will be impossible to hold me back. Whenever someone says, “art crime”, it seems to me that our brains immediately construct this glamorous Hollywood fantasy.

I’ve long been intrigued by and glamourised a French heist.

I don’t know about you, but when “art crime” or “heists” are mentioned, and especially a French heist, my imagination goes into overdrive, and I picture a thief, a mastermind in a black turtleneck lowering himself on ropes into a laser-grid vault in central Paris. Ha. A sort of silly, glamorous Hollywood fantasy construction... Does your imagination conjure up a similar image?

Now back to real life, when you read actual police reports, the reality is usually totally different. They differ enormously from “a bloke with his arm in a sling” “visiting the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris” … some forty times! Or two men “sawing through glass at Cagnes-sur-Mer in southern France, at six in the morning”, and dont forget that they left behind “a boulangerie bag and some DNA” while four Renoirs vanished in three minutes flat. It’s not a farce like the Ocean’s Eleven performance, but we all tend to devour the headlines. At least we seem to think of these people like brilliant rogues when they’re usually just taking advantage of the fact that institutions are built on trust with pretty open access to amazing things.

So, as you can see, Jo really got me going... She was in my archives, in my territory. Then as I started flicking back through my research, I again got completely waylaid by the contrast. Do you see it?

We all seem to swoon over the spectacle of someone stealing something. The noise, the scandal, the getaway. It seems so romantically exciting, yet nobody makes a film about the people who actually kept the place operating day in and day out. The people who protect the culture.

If you want to keep sitting here with me while I check the rest of my shelves and folders, you can jump across to an Annual or Mighty Supporter subscription. Your support keeps this little corner of the world running …

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