The Trail From a $6 Million French Art Heist Ends in Suburban South Florida

By Michael J. Mooney
Published on March 31, 2009 at 1:31pm
Tourists stroll along the Promenade des Anglais. Tan bodies dot the beach. It's a peaceful Sunday afternoon, August 5, 2007, and Nice's wealthiest young partiers sip coffee at the Hotel Negresco, staring out into the sparkling blue waters of the Bay of Angels.

Two blocks away, a motorcycle and a blue Peugeot van pull up to the Musee des Beaux-Arts. Five men assemble by the steps. They wear athletic clothing with hoods and carry black bags. As they enter the peach-colored building, one man carries an automatic weapon. In a gruff voice, he yells at six patrons and a handful of museum employees.

"Down on the floor!" he commands in French.

French police reports will identify the man with the gun as Pierre Noël-Dumarais, a 60-year-old escaped felon with a long record. With him are Patrice Lhomme, a tall, broad-shouldered, 45-year-old former boxer with flowing blond hair; Patrick Chelelekian, a slim Armenian drug dealer living in Marseille; and two others. Noël-Dumarais watches the door and the front desk, pointing his gun at the people on the floor. The other men split up — two down a long hall and two up the marble staircase. They move quickly through the rooms of what was originally a palace when it was built in the late 1870s. Converted into a museum in 1925, the building houses four centuries of work created by artists inspired by the beauty of the French Riviera.

This daring, mid-day heist will make headlines in dozens of languages. The audacity and brashness will shock people around the world. And the series of events set off by this robbery will seem more like classic American cinema than true crime: a journey into the world of underground art dealing that will lead the main characters from the South of France to the coast of Spain to the suburbs of South Florida.

They had cased the place for weeks. The thieves pass the Picasso and the Rodin. The sculptures of Carpeaux and the room full of Dufy. Two men arrive at the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, who painted around the beginning of the 17th century. When they come to Allegory of Water and Allegory of Earth, they rip the paintings off the wall. They stuff them into garbage bags.

Upstairs, the other two men grab The Lane of Poplars at Moret by Alfred Sisley. They also nab the Cliffs near Dieppe, painted in 1897 by Claude Monet.

The thieves try for a fifth, but when they pry it off the wall, it's too big for the bag. They decide they don't have time and leave it on the floor.

All five men head out the same door they came in — right past the "Free to Public" sign. Two leave on the motorcycle, and the rest speed off in the van. As suddenly as the mayhem began, it's over. In less than five minutes, they've stolen $6.3 million worth of art.

Two months after the robbery, a Frenchman cruises past Aventura Mall on his scooter. He pulls into a plaza across the street and leaves the scooter near Target. He walks across the parking lot and stands in front of Marshalls department store.

His name is Bernard Jean Ternus. He's five-foot-eight, with a short, light-brown mullet, a triangular face, athletic shoulders, and an ample paunch. The 54-year-old is, by all accounts, friendly. But his police record in France dates back to 1966, when he was 13, and includes breaking and entering, theft, armed robbery, possession of stolen goods, destruction of a vehicle, and, as recently as 2002, assault with a deadly weapon.

Ternus isn't waiting long when an American sedan rented from Alamo pulls up. The Frenchman gets in, and the car parks near the back of the lot.

The driver is a nicely dressed gentleman in his 60s. His name is Bob. He never gives his last name. He has an open collar and expensive slacks and shoes. He's tall, knowledgeable, and confident. In the back seat is a friend of a friend of Ternus' who speaks French and English.

Bob hands Ternus some pages he has printed off the Internet. "These are the insurance values," Bob says through the translator. Ternus sorts through them. Bob explains that because the paintings were stolen so recently, their value on a black market will be considerably less than the figures on these sheets.

"I just need to get this done," Ternus says in French. His English is horrible, and his Spanish isn't much better.

Ternus wasn't the ideal middleman to sell the stolen artwork from Nice. His involvement began when he received a call from his friend Patrick Chelelekian, the Armenian drug dealer cops say took part in the robbery. Chelelekian asked if Ternus knew anybody interested in buying stolen artwork, and Ternus had rather thoughtlessly said yes. Ternus didn't have a job, but in the year he'd lived in South Florida, he had met plenty of wealthy people. He didn't have any immediate takers for the art, so he started quietly telling South Florida art dealers about some newly acquired impressionist paintings he wanted to unload.

Word soon reached a pair of local drug traffickers. Ternus knew the traffickers controlled a juicy vein of cocaine from Colombia. Like Ternus, they admitted that they knew nothing about the stolen art trade but they knew someone who did. For a cut of the sale, they agreed to put Ternus in touch with a broker from Philadelphia they'd purchased black-market art from in the past.

The night before the parking-lot meeting in Aventura, Ternus met Bob in a room at the Embassy Suites in Miami. Ternus told Bob right off that he needed to close the deal quickly, because his associates in France were ready to get paid. "They're putting my feet to the fire," Ternus told Bob through a translator friend. "I told them I have buyers." They agreed to meet again the next day to discuss a possible price range.

In the car in Aventura, Bob from Philadelphia finally tells Ternus how much he might be able to offer. For the paintings insured at more than $6 million, Bob tells Ternus he's willing to pay $100,000. "I'm going to have a hard time finding a buyer for something so well-known," Bob says.

The Frenchman initially has no reaction. "I don't think that's a good price," Ternus says finally, but he'll relay the offer to his comrades. As the three of them discuss the sale of 400-year-old oil on canvas, strip-mall shoppers buzz back and forth past the rental car.

Ternus will be going to France soon, he tells Bob, and he'll have a chance to see the paintings himself. He says that when he gets there, he can email pictures to Bob to prove they really have them. Bob seems skeptical of Ternus. He says he's flying back to Philadelphia that afternoon and they'll talk soon.

"I just want to get this done," Ternus says again.

When they're finished, Bob drops Ternus off in front of the Marshalls. The meeting has lasted about 20 minutes.

When Ternus and Chelelekian, the Armenian drug dealer involved the initial heist, arrive at a hotel in Barcelona, Bob politely asks Chelelekian to wait downstairs. The Armenian stands alone in the lobby. The posh hotel looks out over the Mediterranean Sea.

The South Florida drug traffickers are waiting in the room with Bob, the illicit art broker. So is a Spanish man with whom they have some business. It's the first week of January, five months since the robbery.

Through Ternus, the French thieves and the American drug traffickers have inched toward some sort of sale. But the thieves — still holding the paintings — have grown suspicious of the deal. They told the Americans that if they don't come to Europe to meet in person, the deal is off. They're also growing suspicious of Ternus himself and have wondered what he may have gotten them into.

They make it clear though: They want their money.

When a thief is close to cashing in, sometimes his thinking can change. Cuban gangsters in Miami call it coronado — being crowned. Like reaching an opponent's back row in a checkers game. Getting crowned means getting paid. It's converting the risk of something like smuggling cocaine into a few weeks of comfortable living. The gang in France makes clear it thinks the time it spent casing the museum and the risk involved with armed robbery and walking into broad daylight with cultural treasures is worth millions.

Before he left Florida, Ternus had a final meeting with the drug traffickers, on the water in Miami. Over a steady flow of booze, they decided they'd finalize the deal with either cash or a cocaine shipment.

Most art theft isn't committed by discriminating Pierce Brosnan types with a deep appreciation for Claude Monet or René Magritte. Heists are done by criminal opportunists who can't resist the combination of value and availability provided by most museums and private collections. And art is relatively easy to hide and move.

Most art is unloaded to a dirty broker for about 5 percent of its full value. The broker then deals the item to a middleman for about 10 percent. The middleman must be willing to hold onto it for a while. It's often a decade or more before an item can be sold at a small, clandestine auction, where it might be purchased by a dirty dealer for 50 percent of its original value. When enough time has passed and the trail of ownership can be sufficiently obfuscated — sometimes generations later — a dealer can sell the work at an auction where he can reintroduce the piece at full price to collectors.

Ternus has told the Americans that he doesn't like the pressure he's getting from the thieves in France. He loves America, though. The land of opportunity. He tells the drug traffickers that he feels at home in Florida. Ternus rents a home with his wife and young children in a quiet, middle-income Cooper City neighborhood near Stirling Road and University Drive. Ternus has a two-car garage and a pool out back. Every house has a stone driveway and trees in the front yard. Neighbors see Ternus picnicking with his family by the pool. Sometimes when he takes his scooter for a spin, he passes the parked squad car of the Hollywood police officer who lives on his street.

From the room in Barcelona, Bob sends for Chelelekian, who speaks broken English with an Armenian accent.

There are brief introductions: Drug dealers, meet art thief. They begin with a discussion of the price. Chelelekian says that he's heard the pitiful $100,000 offer and that the number should be at least 3 million euros — about $4.7 million.

For "security purposes," he says, they will sell the paintings only two at a time, 1.5 million euros for each transaction. If the first exchange goes smoothly, they'll wait a few days and sell the other two paintings. If something goes wrong and cops get involved, they'll hold the Monet and the Sisley as bargaining chips for reduced sentences.

Chelelekian explains that he has a friend in the States who can accept the cash payment. He says they will simultaneously hand over the paintings somewhere in Europe.

Bob the illicit art broker from Philadelphia hints that he's beginning to feel like all the hassle might not be worth it. He tells Chelelekian he's not confident he can find a buyer at that ridiculous price. He says he has a phone call to make, and he asks both men to go out in the hall. When he brings them back into the room, he says he may have a buyer in America.

After the hour-and-a-half-long meeting, Chelelekian, now fancying himself a fine negotiator indeed, tells Bob he's going to go out and buy a special international phone he'll use only for this deal. It's a sign both sides finally trust each other.

Special Agent Alex Peraza walks up a dusty trail in the Grand Canyon. He has a large pack on his back. It's the first week in May. Over six feet tall and muscular, with short, dark-brown hair, the FBI agent has hiked more than 35 miles of canyon trail in the past few days. Now he's hiking back from Phantom Ranch.

As he approaches his campsite, he sees two park rangers going the other way. After a brief chat, Peraza introduces himself.

"Oh, you're the guy we were looking for earlier," one of the rangers tells him.

As he had been enjoying his vacation, hiking around the trails of the Grand Canyon, Peraza was out of cell phone range. When he arrives at his tent, there's a message there from the rangers telling him to call the office immediately.

Peraza hikes back to the nearest phone at the ranger station. His office in Miami has news. It's about the case he's been working on for almost ten months. The deal Ternus has worked out to sell the stolen French paintings is falling apart — and with it, so is Peraza's case.