The world's most prolific art thief stole $2 billion worth of art in broad daylight without a weapon, and he didn't do it for the money.

This is the "Art Thief," a true story of love, crime, and obsession.

I'm Ann Bocock and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Bestselling author Michael Finkel is here.

He's traveled the world on assignment and for research, from the Sahara Desert to Mount Kilimanjaro, from Haiti to Afghanistan.

His latest book is in France and I cannot wait to talk about this.

Mike, welcome.

I have told everybody in my orbit about "The Art Thief."

I'm honored to be here, thank you.

Okay, I'm hooked from page one, and where did it start for you?

Where did you meet Stephane Breitwieser?

So if I could describe my working style in one word or less, it would be inefficient.

I worked on this for 11 years.

I read a small French newspaper article about Breitwieser.

I was impressed by the number of thefts, how he stole them nonviolently, but mostly, that he stole for love.

We exchanged handwritten letters, in my poor French and his good French, for about three years.

Then he finally agreed to meet me for lunch.

I guess he was a little bit charmed by my French accent.

And then granted me, I was the first American he ever spoke to, granted me about 40 hours of interviews, including going to art museums with the world's greatest art thief.

Let's go way back, let's do the backstory, because his family dynamic is so important to understanding this man.

Who was he, who were his parents, and how did he fit in into this family?

Yeah, I wanna stress that everything, this sounds like an incredible, this sounds like a made up story, I just wanna stress that this is true, this really happened.

Stephane Breitwieser was born in 1971, so this is not historical fiction, this is current.

He was born in the Alsace region of France, which is where France, Germany, and Switzerland meet.

He grew up in a fairly well-to-do family.

When he was a teenager, his parents had a contentious divorce.

His father had a collection of ivory and weapons and oil paintings.

His father took everything with him and he cut off contact with his father after the divorce, moved in with his mother, met a girl, fell in love, and thought, "I really miss the stuff my father used to have."

That's where it starts.

He meets, let's talk about the girlfriend.

And I probably am gonna pronounce her name incorrectly, AnneCatrine?

Anne-Catrine Kleinklaus, yep, that's perfect.

He meets her, they fall in love, she's an interesting character too, and here begins this Bonnie and Clyde-type romance until it wasn't.

But talk a little bit about them together.

So everyone who spoke to me about Stephane Breitwieser, the art thief and Anne-Catrine Kleinklaus, his girlfriend, said, "Wow, what a toxic relationship.

This was a terrible idea."

But they also said, everyone, to a person, said the same thing, "They were truly in love."

And, Ann, you may know that love, of course, can make you do crazy things.

Anne-Catrine had never committed any crimes before, Stephane Breitwieser, nothing but petty criminality and there was something about the two of them, some alchemistic combination, that created the most historically unprecedented art thieving team.

It was based on love of each other and love of art.

Love of art.

Truly.

They did more than 200 heists, which blows your mind when you think about this.

And the frequency, it starts out, like, other people will go on a date.

Maybe they'll take a hike, maybe they'll try a new restaurant.

They go to a new museum to scope it out.

Right, some people go to Applebee's, "Honey, let's get a Picasso".

You know, it's like, that's so funny.

I mean, art museums have been in existence for about 250 years and in the entire history of art museums, outside of war, outside of the Nazis, there's never been anyone, a thief or a team of thieves, that have stolen from more than 19 museums.

Stephane Breitwieser and Anne-Catrine Kleinklaus stole from 201 different places starting in 1994.

And for a decade, they averaged one art theft every 12 days, which is just impossible.

Like, it's such an unprecedented thieving pace that there's not even any, like, second place in the history of.

There is no second place there.

I think I read there were more than 300 objects.

Yeah, of course!

They sometimes stole more than one piece at a time!

Why not, if you got two pockets or something like that?

It's not only what they stole, we're going to talk about that as well, but they didn't have a plan.

We'll talk about their methodology, which was based on, like, psychological acumen, nonviolent, which is sort of makes the whole thing more digestible or comprehensible?

They started out, well, I guess in his mind, "Okay, we'll steal something small."

Right.

Then it got very brazen.

Give me some ideas.

Tell me what it is that they did when they walked into a museum.

Right, yeah, let's give a little bit of the, I think a couple of points of background for Stephane Breitwieser.

Two of his earliest jobs were, one, he worked as a security guard in a museum, right outta high school, so he had this inside education on how security works in a museum.

Mostly they, Europe, of course, is filled with museums.

Mostly, they stole from small museums that are less guarded, fewer security guards.

But sometimes they did steal from Louvre-like museums.

And the second thing, Stephane Breitwieser, he worked as a framer for a while, ostensibly learning how to put frames on pictures, but really learning how to take them off.

How does, how do you enter an art museum if you're an art thief?

You go to the front desk and you buy a ticket.

They bought it in cash, please.

They bought it in cash and they would walk in, they were always really nicely dressed.

They presented themselves as a young, you know, sort of art-loving couple.

And Breitwieser, as he told me, you know, he didn't just wanna steal anything.

He only wanted to steal things that he fell in love with.

They had to speak to him.

They had to talk to him.

They had to, he called it a .

In French, a hit, a blow to the heart.

He had to truly fall in love with it.

Breitwieser was sort of the master thief, Anne-Catrine, his girlfriend, sort of served as the lookout, the magician's assistant sort of thing.

But they really, together, had this sort of dance and they were able to, I mean, do things that professional master thieves could only dream of, and do it more than once every two weeks.

What was the largest thing that he stole?

Okay, so generally speaking, Breitwieser liked small things that he could hide at the small of his back and cover with his jacket.

But as his success mounted and his ego grew and his confidence, you know, sort of broke the limits of all, you know, sense, we went to a full non-sensibility.

He once stole a tapestry that is 10 foot by 10 foot.

Now, I'm not great at math, but that sounds like a hundred square foot tapestry.

How do you steal something that big?

He managed.

I was surprised, reading the book, how little security there was.

Which doesn't mean you could still walk out with something and people don't see, but, generally speaking, the money was not put into security.

You're totally correct, Ann.

When I talk to museum directors, this is one thing they're like, "We don't really like to talk about this too much, but museums are based a lot on trust."

I mean, the point of a museum is to let you commune with a work of art as closely as possible.

I mean, all museum theft could be immediately ended if you just put bars over the window and had the guards carry machine guns.

But that would not be a very enriching museum experience.

And so, you know, very few people are like, "Honey, let's go to a museum.

I heard they had a new security system."

They really wanna see a new Renoir or a Picasso.

And so whenever there's extra money, instead of putting it into security, understandably, a museum will purchase new works.

That's what people wanna see.

So meanwhile, they have amassed this fortune in stolen art, but how they live just took my breath away.

You have to describe this.

This is, again, as I said before, it's a true story, but this blows my mind also.

Where did all this art go?

300 pieces, worth $2 billion.

Breitwieser, what was his job?

He didn't have a job.

He was a fulltime art thief.

Remember, they didn't sell the pieces.

They stole just to love them.

They put all the 300 stolen pieces in this little attic bedroom that Breitwieser and Anne-Catrine shared.

It is like living inside a treasure chest.

I think he called it, like, Alibaba's Cave.

Imagine this beautiful antique fourposter bed and surrounding this bed, like, the richest, like a room in the Louvre.

Gold, silver, bronze, ivory, and 69 oil paintings from the Renaissance, the 16th, and 17th century.

And this is where Breitwieser and his girlfriend slept, in a nondescript, basic house in the suburbs of an industrial town in northeastern France.

It's like the stuff of fairytales, except it's true.

It's true.

There in the attic of his mother's house, surrounded by $2 billion Yeah, I mean, it's crazy.

Worth of art and artifacts and they're broke.

Right.

And I kept telling myself, "This is a true story".

I think we have to just get into the motivation for just a little more.

It's not financial at all.

Right, so I spent 11 years on this project.

I built up so much trust with Stephane Breitwieser, the art thief, that he eventually gave me signed, written permission to see his psychology reports.

And it was fascinating.

Now, you might be thinking kleptomaniac.

Doesn't fit the definition of a kleptomaniac.

They couldn't pin a psychological issue onto Breitwieser.

Clearly he has one.

But all five of the psychologists reports that I read said the same thing, that he truly was in love with the objects he stole.

He was in love with his girlfriend and he was in love with these particular objects.

I won't get into it, but they have a funny syndrome called Stendhal Syndrome, named after the French writer, Stendhal, where people just, like, you know, some of us can see a sunset and be like, "Yeah, sunset," and some of us can see a sunset and feel like we wanna just faint.

We all have different reactions to things.

And if everybody, like, sort of thought of the most beautiful thing in the world, whether it's a lover or a piece of art.

There's variance in sensitivity and Breitwieser was on the extreme scale of sensitivity.

He truly, like, as hard as it is to believe, did not steal for money.

He just wanted to surround himself with things he found beautiful.

It fulfilled him to the ultimate degree.

He said to me he felt like a king, like the richest person in the world, even though he was so broke that, on his getaway drives, he avoided paying highway toys.

I know, I'm going to talk about that too.

You had said earlier you were the only American journalist that was granted access.

You happen to have been living in France with your wife and three children at the time.

So this, that's very interesting.

Did you communicate in French?

Yeah, I mean, I learned French as an adult and it was a struggle.

The only saving grace I have is that I'm not shy.

But I have a bad French accent, I make mistakes all the time, but there was something about, I guess he found it a little charming that he could speak with an American.

Breitwieser sort of didn't like the French media, he loves American movies, and when we communicated, yeah, we spoke in French.

He spoke in beautiful French, I spoke in not so beautiful French, but it sort of allowed us to have this, you know, if it's your second language, you can ask, like, impertinent questions sort of by, like, "Oh, I'm a foreigner!"

And so it really opened up, allowed our relationship to really flower and grow in ways that might not have happened if we both spoke in English.

You're really good at what you do.

Was it tough at all to break through to him?

So, yes, but I wasn't in a rush.

I think that was the secret.

Well, 11 years to put this together, maybe not.

Ridiculous, ridiculous.

I mean, I was doing other things in the meantime to keep the lights on in my house.

But, yeah, so I think the fact that I wasn't in a rush and wasn't pushing and let Stephane Breitwieser himself sort of dictate the pace as trust gradually built over years, literally.

You know, there was a COVID pandemic, there was this and that, and I think he eventually just completely opened up to me and expressed his passions and he was utterly honest about his crimes, though he didn't like to be called A criminal?

He didn't like to be called an art thief.

I'll let you know what he did like to be called.

Was there any one moment during all of these, I think you said 40 hours of talking to him?

Yeah, at least that.

Any one moment that really stood out to you?

So, Breitwieser, as you mentioned, stole during the day, sometimes with tourists in the room, sometimes with guards in the room.

And so this, I couldn't quite get my head around, like, how do you steal?

How do you steal, like, a work of art worth millions, right from under somebody's nose?

And one tiny moment when we were interviewing, when I was interviewing him, we did a lot of our interviews in my small French hotel room, so small that there was only, like, one chair.

He would sit in the chair, I would sit on the luggage rack, we'd put my laptop in between us.

Breitwieser knew so much about art.

He was self-educated.

Whenever he'd make an obscure reference, I would open up my laptop and type it in and close it and we would have an interview.

And I like to maintain eye contact during an interview and let my recorder capture everything.

But every once in a while, I'll take a note about gestures or facial expressions.

And I'm asking him, I was like, "Stephane, I don't understand how you are able to steal something right from under somebody's nose".

And in the middle of this line of questioning, he stops it and says, "Did you see what I just did?"

And I'm, like, looking around my hotel room, I'm thinking, "Oh, I'm gonna win this game!"

And I was, but I was like, "Stephane, I'm sorry I didn't see what you just did."

And he stood up and he turned around and lifted up his shirt and my laptop computer Your whole laptop Was tucked into his waistband at the small of his back.

It was right there.

But he has such, like, psychological acumen that he, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but you really don't sometimes notice something missing.

Like if there was suddenly, like, you know, a cactus on the table between us, I would be, "Look at that!"

But something missing, I just didn't notice that my laptop wasn't there.

You just, your mind just sort of fills in the blank.

And he's like, "Yeah, I took that when you lowered your eyes to write a note."

He lifted it up, put it in, sat back down in exactly the same position.

I didn't notice a thing.

But after he did that, literally taking my laptop, right, I mean, where I was a foot away, I was like, I viscerally understood this sort of skill, which I do not have.

If I tried to steal something, I'd have been caught immediately.

As would anybody else.

Hopefully.

You know, Mike, there have been art thefts for centuries.

Tombs have been raided, art has been stolen in wartime.

Even in this country, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was hit and paintings were cut out of the frames.

Now, reading your book, knowing what I know now about Stephane, that would not have been to his standards.

He would not have harmed the art to steal the art.

As I mentioned, Breitwieser hated being called an art thief.

He didn't deny any of the 201 crimes.

What did he like to be called?

He told me he liked to be called a collector with an unorthodox acquisition style.

Breitwieser, I mean, yes, as you mentioned, the Isabella Stewart Gardner thieves not only did they come in the night, attack the night guards, bind their faces with duct tape, handcuff them to pipes in the basement, absolutely not Breitwieser style, but then they did something worse.

They went to the most magnificent painting in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a Rembrandt seascape, and they stuck a knife in the canvas and cut it out of its frame, 19 feet around.

When Breitwieser told me that story, I could see his face just like, ah!

Breitwieser never wanted to harm anything.

He wanted to protect it.

He actually thought he loved the works more than anyone in a museum did, that he, you know, I'm not forgiving him one bit.

He's definitely a criminal.

But he had this sort of, it was, like, out of an abundance of love rather than a profit motive or any sort of inclination for violence.

He thought he could love it more than the museums.

He also thought he could keep it well protected.

That's what he thought.

Which is quite interesting.

I'd like to talk about the girlfriend for a moment.

Lets talk about her.

What is her motivation in all of this?

I mean, I mentioned that powerful short word [Both] Love.

She had grown up in a very, of modest means.

She had not, you know, she felt like her life was a little circumscribed.

There was something about, I mean, just think about this.

Like, you want to live life to the fullest.

They're, she's literally sleeping inside of a treasure chest.

They're going on these crazy Bonnie and Clyde, you know, escapades.

You know, she believes her boyfriend is not a criminal, but an aesthete of the highest power.

And so, at first, she found it thrilling.

But then, if you think about it, it became clear to her, like, "What's the end game here?"

You can't, you have a room full of riches, you think that you're the freest person in the world, but you're actually almost your own prisoner.

You can't have any friends come over to your house, you can't have a repair person come up to your room.

You're kind of trapped.

And eventually, this dawned on Anne-Catrine.

She wanted to have a baby, a child.

Like, how do you start a family?

You can't even have a friend over.

What's the end game?

And this is sort of where the rift started.

You have to read the book to find that out, but I found her a very compelling character in this book.

Just the, and you needed both of them.

He needed her to do this.

Right, I think what elevates this story, I mean, as a journalist, this is like a once in a lifetime kind of discovery.

Theft after theft after theft can be a little bit cold and quotidian, but I really think that shot through the middle of this story is a love affair.

That love of art, love of girlfriend, the two of them sort of, when they had a moment, when they had a short breakup, he couldn't steal anymore.

It was funny 'cause he thought for a second, "Oh, you know, Anne-Catrine," who is the moderating influence in the relationship, saying, "Look, that guard is looking at us funny.

Let's not steal."

They didn't always steal.

When they had this breakup, Breitwieser thought to himself, "Oh, now I can take whatever I want."

But he found himself unable to steal without.

So there was, everything was sort of tied up, this love affair, this obsession with art, and this relationship really puts a little bit of heart into the story.

Mike, there's an amusing scene with the two of them.

They're leaving a museum, they have stolen one or two, I can't remember what it is that they've stolen, but they have it.

They're on their way out, they're outside, they're in the clear, all they have to do is get in the car and go with their stolen goods, and there's a parking ticket on his car and he dares to talk to the cop about this.

I mean, let's talk about chutzpah upon chutzpah.

So Breitwieser had this fascinating theory that you have to be so coldblooded to pull this off that I couldn't, which is his theory was something that an art thief would never do is precisely what an art thief should consider doing.

For example, like you said, they come, they literally have stolen goods on them, there's a police officer at their car.

Well, any other thief would freak out.

He sees this officer, "Oh, I'm just giving you a parking ticket."

And you would be like, "Whew, got away with that!"

But you know what a thief would never do?

Start arguing with the police officer that you didn't deserve the parking ticket while you have literally a two-foot-tall challis stuck up your sleeve, you can't even bend your arm.

And so Breitwieser not only argued with the police officer, but actually got the ticket withdrawn.

Another time, they're leaving a museum and a guard who hadn't seen them come in asked for their ticket.

And again, he's got stolen goods on, he can't actually get to his pockets and instead of, like, coming up with, that would've been like, "I confess, cuff me right now!"

They're like, "Hey, you know what, we were just going to eat lunch at the cafeteria," which is something an art thief would never do.

And they went, Breitwieser and Anne-Catrine, ate lunch at the cafeteria.

You can imagine, like, the police running in.

Who are the last people the police are gonna search?

The nice couples casually having a baguette at the cafeteria.

And that's, they sort of subverted all expectations and got away with it for years.

He was a cool as a cucumber character.

You can say that.

When you go in a museum now, do you see things differently?

Do you ever think, like, "Hmm, wonder how you could steal," not you, but how it could be stolen?

Or do you look at it through Stephane's eyes?

So besides the stealing and the love affair, I did get something out of my years with Breitwieser.

He actually changed the way I encounter a work of art.

I wish that Breitwieser, instead of becoming a thief, became an art professor.

When you go into a museum, we all have this, we all have this tendency, after the age of, like, 10 years old to over intellectualize.

You look at this painting, you're like, "Look at the balance of form and the symbolism and the" Breitwieser said, "Put all that intellectualization behind you.

Look at it emotionally."

A painting of war should be horrifying, a religious painting should feel rapturous, paintings of women should feel, or men, should feel romantic and sexy.

And he had this sort of emotion first, intellectualization second.

And everyone's worried about being, like, wrong.

"Oh, I don't know if I'm supposed to like this or not."

There's no wrong.

It comes from inside of you.

And so I just would ask everybody, you know, then this is what I hope you might take outta the book besides a rollicking, ridiculous good time, a rise and fall of a absurdly successful and obsessed art thief is it really changed the way I interact with art, with the work of art.

It's much richer.

Although I still, when I'm going through a museum with my wife, we do, we will tap each other on the shoulder and be like, "That would look good over our sofa."

We do think that.

But then we let it go right out the other side.

Breitwieser couldn't do that.

Let's switch this up.

One of your previous books, "True Story", was made into a movie.

What's it like seeing yourself on screen, or your story on screen?

I found, I mean, I found it uncomfortable.

I could not watch myself on, I had to watch myself through, like, the slits of my fingers.

Yeah, so this story you're talking about is about, you know this old story, a murderer who took on, again, by the way, true story, not fictitious, a murderer who took on my identity while on the run.

And then, after his capture, only wants to speak to the real Mike Finkel after he pretended to be Mike Finkel, crazy.

Jonah Hill played Mike Finkel and James Franco played The Murderer.

I would just say, in a word or less, it was very uncomfortable to, you know, I think one of the great things about being a writer, I'm not a musician, I'm not, you know, I'm not getting on stage juggling and riding my unicycle.

You write a book and you can run away and you're not, like, watching people read it.

And there's something about seeing yourself on the screen that I just.

It might be a good movie, but I cannot watch it with any sort of unbiased or, like, strength and, again, like through the slits of my fingers.

That's wild.

Mike, when did you know you wanted to be a writer?

So I am definitely one of those lucky people that has sort of known this my whole life.

My mom showed me a journal that I kept at age 10.

And in that journal it said, what 10yearold says this, most 10 year olds wanna be, like, shortstop for a baseball team.

It said, "I wanna be a writer when I grew up."

Though it did say, the next sentence was, "If that doesn't work out, I'd like to be a mad scientist."

So take it as you want, but I believed pretty much all my life.

I like the mad scientist part!

Yeah, that was my backup position.

Not just scientist, but mad scientist.

What, when you, you have done so much research on everything that you write.

Is any, like, the craziest thing that ever happened when you were doing research for a story?

With this particular story, going into an art museum, touring an art museum with the world's greatest art thief who, by the way, is banned from most art museums?

Again, subverting expectations.

Simple is profound.

You know, he just puts on a baseball cap and a fake pair of glasses and we go into an art museum and I'm following around Stephane Breitwieser.

Again, I wish he became a professor rather than a thief.

He's telling me all about paintings and then of course his tour doesn't end there, because he is an art thief.

Then we look sort of how it's attached to the wall and he's noticing, "Look, there's no wire.

You can just lift this painting off."

And he's like, "There's only one camera right there.

We'll stop!"

Who stops in a museum at the emergency exit map?

But he does.

He's like, "Look at this exit, look at this exit."

And he'll look at the door.

No alarm in this door.

And so I'm thinking, the entire time I'm following Breitwieser through a museum, "What am I gonna do if this guy steals something?

Am I gonna call the police on the subject of my own book?"

And I am happy to say I did not have to cross that moral bridge, but it was in the back of my mind the entire time.

Whew, okay!

Mike Finkel, I wish we had another hour.

Me too!

I just wanna thank you so much for sharing your time with me.

The book is "The Art Thief: A true story of love, crime, and a dangerous obsession".

That it is.

Thank you.

Thanks Ann.

I'm Ann Bocock.

Please join me on the next "Between the Covers".