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Scene of the crime: In April 2017, a trio of burglars pulled off the audacious smash ‘n’ grab of paintings by famed artist Gottfried Lindauer from an Auckland gallery. They’ve never been brought to justice, nor have questions about their motives ever been answered.
Like great art, the beauty of a great heist is in the eye of the beholder. Yet despite the nerve it took to pull off one of New Zealand’s great art thefts, you couldn’t call it pretty.
The robbery was supposed to go off pretty quietly in the early hours of April Fools’ Day 2017, when three criminals in a stolen white Holden Commodore pulled up outside the International Art Centre, a glass-fronted box on Auckland’s Parnell Road selling what the rich like to call “fine art”.
Hanging in one of its front windows, behind a single panel of strengthened glass and between two topiary box planters, were the robbers’ targets. They had come for two soon-to-be-auctioned oil portraits by Gottfried Lindauer, a 19th-century Czech artist and painter of Māori who had washed up in this colony in 1874 after fleeing Europe to avoid the Austro-Hungarian draft.
Though some might think them rather dull, these 1884 portraits of Chieftainess Ngatai-Raure and Chief Ngatai-Raure were sought after by collectors and were expected to sell for around $450,000 apiece. Proof, perhaps, that robbery may only be a matter of context.
Why these three crooks wanted the chief and the chieftainess may never be known publicly. But as the wheelman waited in the Holden, the two others, their faces hidden behind bandanas, got to work.
According to a police report later released to Stuff under the Official Information Act, CCTV footage showed one of the crew carrying a portable gas blowtorch. While the other kept a lookout, Mr Blowtorch started in on the window, apparently intent on using his device to heat up a section of the glass. A short time later, Mr Lookout, who was carrying a bottle of what the cops later concluded was liquid nitrogen, sprayed its contents on the bit of window that had just been heated. Once the vapour cleared, the moment of truth came: Mr Blowtorch used his device’s gas canister to bash at the window.
Nothing happened. Nothing at all. But if these three weren’t too bright when it came to the physics and practice of using heat and cold to shatter a reinforced glass window, they were definitely tenacious. The pair returned to the Holden and the trio left the scene, only to return fewer than 10 minutes later. They were back with their Holden, but also with a second stolen vehicle. This one was a Ford ute taken from somewhere nearby, and Mr Blowtorch was behind the wheel.
If they’d proved they didn’t know much about the thermal fracturing of strengthened glass, it turned out they did know a thing or two about basic physics: Mr Blowtorch reversed the ute into the window, once, twice, finally breaking the glass. What was supposed to have been a nice quiet job had become a shattering smash’n’grab done with the finesse of a hammer being used to kill a snail.
Still, it was done. Within moments they were gone again, and so too was the brace of Lindauers. Silence returned to Parnell Road. Under the glare of the streetlights, the badly smashed front window looked for all the world like a crap art installation.
A why-dunnit
This wasn’t just a whodunnit, it was a why-dunnit. As the cops put alerts at the border and advised Interpol of this spectacular but also quite ridiculous burglary, speculation rippled across the city.
Had the Lindauers been stolen to order? Would they be shipped overseas to foreign collectors? Was some local art aficionado skipping the auction for a five-finger discount? Had they been taken for a ransom?
There was even the wild, false rumour, shamefully published by media, that posited latter-day relatives of the chief and chieftainess might have liberated these portraits of their family so they could no longer be bought and sold by rich collectors. If only.
The owner of the paintings, then an “unidentified Auckland businessman and prolific art collector” who remains unidentified, could apparently shed no light on the mystery. According to Stuff’s OIA documents, he told police that he had swapped the two Lindauers with a joker called John in return for a work by renowned modern artist Don Binney.
“I think, in retrospect, the Don Binney was worth probably more than both these paintings,” he bragged to the cops. “[But] I already had a Don Binney, and I didn’t need two.” Dear, oh dear.
Given the values of the paintings, the audaciousness of the crime and the wild stories in the media, Auckland police put some of their best on the job, for all the good it seemed to do.
The released, heavily redacted file offered little insight. There were suspects who were later ruled out, and a report of the art dealers receiving a vaguely threatening phone call about six months before, when they were selling a work by Lindauer’s contemporary CF Goldie.
The strongest early line of inquiry was the stolen Holden. After CCTV picked up the plates, these led police to Wellington, where a white Holden Commodore with the very same rego number was quickly located in the Hutt Valley.
When confronted, the owner said the car had never left the region, a fact backed up by the car’s GPS data.
It appeared the thieves, while rough-as-guts burglars, weren’t entirely stupid. The plates of their stolen white Holden Commodore had been altered to match those of the white Holden Commodore in Wellington, a switcheroo done so that any police check on the plates prior to the crime wouldn’t cause suspicion.
But while the real car hadn’t left Wellington, the Holden with the fake plates had been picked up by car rego recognition systems at two petrol stations, one in Tauranga and the other in Te Puke, in the weeks before the raid. But not after. One of the strongest leads petered out — pfft! — as the crims and the car disappeared into thin air.
If the scumbags who pulled off the Lindauer heist were no artists at breaking and entering, they clearly weren’t amateur crooks. And they had got away clean.
A risky operation
Was this a crime of diabolical-if-chaotic genius? Or among the country’s stupidest heists?
On the face of it, given that police were unable to recover the stolen paintings or to find the villains in 2017, it might have appeared to be the former. Yet given events five years later, it seems more likely the crime was the work of fools.
Simple common sense dictates that stealing famous, high-value art is a risky operation. And if you’re doing it for financial gain, the risk is even higher.
Unless the art has been stolen to order, which is thought to be very rare in New Zealand, you have to find a buyer. No easy task when you’ve got stolen but easily recognised artworks to sell; it’s not like you can flog them on TradeMe or eBay.
Of course, the Lindauers may have been personally stolen by a reprobate art collector for their own private thrill and enjoyment. However, the required skills in the theft of the cars, the selection of burglary tools, not to mention the nerve to pull off the final heist, would suggest such a person would be more Bond villain than a real world Lindauer specialist. The only other possibilities are that the crime was the work of cranks or activists with an agenda.
We may never know the motivation of the trio who pulled up outside the International Art Centre on April Fools’ Day in 2017 — police are yet to catch them — but we do know what happened to the chief and chieftainess.
In early December 2022, police called an unexpected press conference. The good news was the paintings had been recovered, though slightly damaged, and had been “returned to their rightful owners”. The bad news, at least for the public, was the police were keeping shtum on how the Lindauers had suddenly been returned.
All Auckland City CIB Detective Inspector Scott Beard would say at the time was that police “were contacted by an intermediary, who sought to return the paintings on behalf of others”.
Six months later the NZ Herald broke the news that two senior gang members doing long prison stretches had been the ones to broker the deal. Although unable to report further details because of suppression and non-publication orders, the Herald believed the lags, though apparently not involved in the heist, had “used their standing in the criminal world to obtain access to something the police wanted”.
Why the thieves might do this will likely never be publicly known, though out of the goodness of their hearts seems unlikely. The how of the recovery joins the why of the theft as just another mystery in one of the weirdest, most brazen and ultimately most pointless high-profile heists in our criminal history.
