In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia shocked the world when he stole Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris, marking one of the world's first major art thefts.' Almost a century later, in 2007, "five armed and masked thieves walked into a museum while it was open on [a] Sunday afternoon" and stole four pieces of art within five minutes. In 2008, the world witnessed even more dramatic art crime, including "a stolen Caravaggio that turned out to be a fake, gunwielding thieves and under-the-table ransoms, and something of a reallife Thomas Crown affair.
Since the disappearance of the Mona Lisa, cultural property theft has become an increasingly prevalent crime in many countries despite inconsistent and often misleading statistics. Thefts range from large-scale museum thefts to smaller thefts from galleries, private homes, and religious buildings. France, for example, with "more than 1,200 museums across the country as well as hundreds of churches [with] valuable works of art," faces an astonishing amount of art crime each year, constantly prompting authorities to contemplate increases in security and methods of deterrence. Further, cultural property theft creates additional problems when it is "perpetrated by or on behalf of organized crime syndicates and used to fund other illicit activities, such as drugs or arms trades." Today in France, one of the most art-rich and most art-theftplagued countries, almost 38,000 works of art are missing, "of which 3,444 are known to have been destroyed and 145 reported stolen," with the remainder simply lost or unreported.
