Stolen Screams

On Sunday, August 22, 2004, Christina Vassiliou stepped inside the doors of a small art museum in Oslo. For Vassiliou, who was traveling with her mother, the vacation to Norway was a reward and a pilgrimage: a reward for her recent graduation from Rutgers University law school in New Jersey, a pilgrim-age to see a work of art that fascinated her almost as much as its creator, Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch.

The Munch Museum is situated in a northeastern neighborhood of Oslo, Norway's elegant, quiet capital city. There are narrow cobblestoned streets, trams, immaculate squares and well-tended parks. Every hour or so, delicate chimes ring from towers on the street corners, giving visitors the impression of a city set inside a music box.

The tourist season was waning. The streets were deserted that morning except for a few people walking to cafes. A little after 11 A.M., Vassiliou, 26, stood in front of the painting she had waited 10 years and traveled 3,700 miles to see: The Scream, the iconic depiction of human angst, which has become one of the most recognized images in the world.

The painting, created in 1893, is nearly as enigmatic and mysterious as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Is the man screaming, or is he shielding his ears from some infernal noise? Whatever the viewer sees, Munch's bold, thick brushstrokes conjure a creation whose power far exceeds the two-and-a-half-foot-by-three-foot frame that contains it. "It is the primal image of urban alienation," says Robert Rosenblum, a curator at New York City's Guggenheim museum. "It looks like an anxiety attack."

Vassiliou, jet-lagged and overwhelmed by the power of the painting she had read about for so many years, found herself deep in thought, lulled by the soft shuffling sounds of the other gallerygoers, when she heard a man's voice cry out.

"Gun!"

This single word, shouted in English, echoed through the hushed interior of the museum. There were more shouts, this time in Norwegian, and a commotion erupted just out of sight, back in the main foyer.

Two men ran past the cafe and the little gift shop and up to the ticket booth. One pulled out a revolver with an enormous, Magnum-size barrel and held it to the head of a female guard. He shouted to the crowd to get down.

Vassiliou turned in the direction of the shouting. She saw the second man, dressed in a gray hooded top and wearing a black face mask and black leather gloves, heading straight toward her. Suddenly he veered away and moved toward an 1893 Munch painting titled Madonna. He banged it against the wall until it broke free, severing the gray wires that connected it to an alarm that sounded at the local police station. He took the painting to a viewing area and continued to smash it against a wooden bench, obviously trying to break off its dark, ornate frame.

Then the man stopped and spun in a complete 360. He appeared to be confused, as if he didn't know what to do next. His eyes, the only part of his face visible behind the black mask, searched the walls. Then he saw what he was looking for.

With Madonna still in one hand, the man strode past Vassiliou and tore The Scream from the wall. The young American woman was frozen to the spot in fear. She stood close enough to touch the robber, who at over six feet tall towered above her. She says she will never forget his blue eyes.

In an instant he was gone: back to the lobby, where he handed one of the paintings to his armed accomplice. They fled the building, dashing about a hundred yards over a lawn—one of them twice dropped a painting—to a waiting black 1992 Audi A6 wagon manned by a third member of the crew. The works were placed in the car, and the Audi peeled away, disappearing into the Norwegian capital's winding side streets.

In no more than two minutes the thieves had helped themselves to two modern masterpieces estimated to have a combined value of more than $100 million.

•

No alarm rang in the museum, and no guards gave chase. Despite a collection containing 1,000 paintings and more than 23,000 drawings and prints worth about $3 billion, the Munch Museum does not arm its guards.

The three men sped away from the museum, briefly hooking to the west on a street called Tøyengata before turning north, following a road that encircles the zoological gardens opposite the Munch Museum.

Inside the getaway car, the thieves were tearing away Madonna's frame and hurling pieces out of the car windows: Fragments were later found lying on the sidewalk, in gutters and under parked cars, like a bread crumb trail marking the robbers' flight.

By the time they passed through a major intersection bisected by tram lines, they were out of the immediate vicinity of the museum. Up hills and through Sunday-quiet roads, they drove deeper into the suburban outskirts of the city, the roads getting smaller, until they pulled behind a block of modern apartments. There, in a muddy spot used to store construction materials, they broke off the final pieces of the frame and tossed them from the car. Turning around, the robbers continued north. Only two or three minutes had passed since they exited the museum.

They took a road called Hasleveien into a residential area of Oslo, past a Bible school and over a graffiti-emblazoned railway bridge, then made a sharp left into the dirt parking lot of the dreary Sinsen tennis club. Sinsen is one of those drab neighborhoods so familiar to the outskirts of all big cities: utilitarian, frayed at the edges, squeezed between highways and rails, a place you pass through to get somewhere else.

The thieves ditched the Audi in a parking lot and set off a fire extinguisher inside it in an attempt to destroy any forensic evidence they'd left behind. It was smart thinking not to torch the vehicle, which would have drawn police to Sinsen; the car was not discovered for hours.

At this point police lost the trail. Perhaps another car or cars were parked there and the crooks simply swapped vehicles. Or maybe they exited the parking lot on foot. Only 10 feet of grass and weeds separated them from the railway tracks that run to Bergen and Trondheim. It would have been an easy stroll to the highway opposite and from there into the ether. There were too many possibilities.

•

Back at the museum there was chaos. Three guards were present that day, two women and a man. None seemed to have any idea what to do. Vassiliou remembers being told, "It's okay. They didn't get any paintings," the guard seemingly unaware of the blank spaces on the walls right in front of her.

Meanwhile the crime scene was being overrun. The guards hadn't closed the front doors, and tourists continued to enter, mingling with the witnesses to the heist. Vassiliou estimates it was at least 20 minutes before the first police officer showed up. Many witnesses had already left the museum.

A helicopter scrambled to scan the city for signs of the Audi, but by then the getaway car had been abandoned. The police did not find it until three P.M. Airports, ports and border crossings were put on alert, but this was a futile gesture.

The police stumbled across one bit of luck: some remarkable videotaped footage of the robbers leaving the building. The images came not from the museum's few security cameras but from the cameras of tourists disembarking from a bus in the parking lot.

"No glass in front of the paintings, no alarm systems as in French museums—where a bell rings if visitors have gotten too close—not even a cordon to keep people back a certain distance. There was no search of people's bags at the entrance, and the guards were nowhere to be seen." This assessment, given to a reporter by an indignant French witness named François Castang, was repeated in newspapers throughout Europe and the U.S.

Norway seemed to turn against the museum directors rather than the thieves. Almost as Easy as Robbing a Kiosk, read the headline in the daily newspaper Aftenposten. Most of the world's media carried the news on the front page or in prime time, adding to Norway's embarrassment.

In Oslo, Munch Museum spokesperson Jorunn Christofferson responded defensively: "We have guards, but when thieves threaten the guards with a gun there is not much to be done."

A palpable sense of shame radiated not just from the museum but from Norway itself. Munch and his most famous painting are deeply embedded in the national psyche. They are examples of world-class achievement in a country of 4.5 million souls striving for a sense of identity among Scandinavian nations. From the upper reaches of the intelligentsia to the criminal underworld, every Norwegian knows Munch and his value to the national pride. The country was ashamed not just because of the ease with which one of Norway's national treasures had been taken but because, as it turns out, this wasn't the first time The Scream had been stolen in Oslo. (continued on page 84)Screams(continued from page 74)

September 2004: Dick Ellis

It is late September 2004, and in London's Gray's Inn—a large quadrangle inhabited by members of the British legal profession since the 1500s—fall leaves are being blown in tight eddies around a courtyard. The Scream and Madonna have been missing for a month. In a discreet third-floor office in a discreet redbrick building, Dick Ellis is poring over the details of the robbery. Like most stolen-art experts (he is a former member of a British police art-crimes squad), he fears it will be years before the paintings resurface.

Ellis, a former competitive rower, has settled into a comfortable middle age. In a dark blue suit, cream shirt and red tie, he gives off the confident, authoritative air of a career policeman, which he is. The son of a surgeon and a physiotherapist, brother to a doctor and a psychiatric nurse, Ellis figured out early on that he would not follow the family tradition. "I knew I didn't deal terribly well with people who are ill," he says. At the age of 19 he joined London's Metropolitan Police.

Early in his career a burglar broke into his parents' house and made off with the family silver. It was a clean, professional job; the crook drilled a small hole in a window at the back of the house before inserting a wire tool that lifted the catch. Ellis took it upon himself to investigate and two days later tracked the family's silver sugar bowl to a stall at a local market. His detective work resulted in the return not only of his parents' collection but also of silver belonging to their neighbors, all targeted by the same thief. Ellis went on to co-found Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad in 1990 as a detective sergeant. Now retired from the Metropolitan Police, he runs his own consultancy, International Art Recovery, tracking stolen art and antiques for private clients and institutions.

"The stolen-art market works like any other market," he says. "Criminals are just businessmen who have made a career choice to earn their money illegally, and art is like any other commodity in which they deal, such as drugs or firearms. But when it comes to something as distinctive as The Scream, you're talking about an extremely difficult market. Yes, these paintings are incredibly valuable, but they are also so well-known they are unsellable."

Then what possibly could have motivated these three men to commit an audacious daylight theft of paintings that have little or no street value?

"It wasn't for the insurance," says Ellis matter-of-factly. "As any art thief worth his salt knows, such paintings are rarely insured, due to the prohibitive cost of the premiums." For ransom, then? Again unlikely, says Ellis: "The museum has no real money of its own, and the Norwegian government has clearly stated that it will not, under any circumstances, pay ransoms."

Criminals usually assign a stolen painting a value of about 10 percent of its highest publicly reported worth. The painting can then be used in negotiations for drugs, arms or other black-market items such as jewelry or silver. In 1990 a painting by Dutch master Gabriel Metsu was recovered in Istanbul, where it had been part of a heroin deal. And Vermeer's 1670 work Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid was recovered from an Antwerp gem dealer, who had taken it as collateral against a loan he'd made to the thieves. "Paintings circulate like bonds," Ellis says, "like any other international commodity."

But Ellis ventures that something else may have been at work here. In the case The Scream, he thinks the thieves may have decided to steal something "so significant nationally that it would be a big snub to the authorities. It would really catch the headlines and make a statement—a way of showing the police and their colleagues that these men are the number one criminals in Norway."

Bragging rights for the thieves—could that have been the motivation? That deduction, the educated guess of a savvy art cop, turned out to be the key to solving the case of the missing 1994 Scream. Dick Ellis should know—he headed up the international investigation that recovered it.

Edvard Munch painted the harrowing figure in The Scream multiple times: in oil, in tempera and in a mixture of the two on cardboard. He created lithographs as well, and the originals of these are worth millions, though not nearly as much as the paintings. In the early hours of February 12, 1994, two young criminals raided the National Gallery in Oslo and stole its copy of The Scream, which is called the first version of the painting and considered the most valuable of the four known versions. The 2004 thieves stole the painting known as the second Scream, for the order in which it was painted. (It is also called, unkindly, the seasick Scream, for its livid green palette.) Version three is still held safely in the Munch Museum, and the fourth is in the hands of a private collector. Though less well-known, the thieves' other 2004 trophy, Madonna—a dark, erotic portrait of a woman—is considered another example of the artist's genius.

After examining the circumstances of the two robberies, Ellis has begun to believe that faint undercurrents may connect the heists. It's not a simple story. A full decade divides the two crimes, which involve three stolen masterpieces, half a dozen crooks, squadrons of police, art experts from three countries, $472,000 in cash and a murder. But tangled in the strands of the tale that follows may be tantalizing clues to solve the 2004 theft, as well as the reasons professional thieves have gone to such trouble to steal Norway's most famous painting—twice.

Bad boys: ellingsen and enger

"Thanks for the bad security."

These five words were handwritten on a postcard and pinned to the space on the wall where, a few minutes earlier, The Scream had hung. It was the early hours of February 12, 1994; a curtain twisted in the winter wind blowing through the window where the thieves had entered. A ladder led down to the street right outside the front door of the National Gallery in Oslo.

Grainy security camera footage would later document the crime for police and embarrassed gallery officials. At 6:30 A.M. two masked men came around the side of the museum. They propped their ladder against the museum's front wall; while one held it steady, the other began to ascend the rungs. He didn't make it to the top. Maybe it was the cold, maybe the rungs were slippery with ice, or maybe he was just so nervous that his shaking legs couldn't hold him, but 18-year-old William Ellingsen slipped and nearly fell on top of Pål Enger, his partner in crime.

Ellingsen quickly recovered and went back up, reaching the window. The teenager broke the window, went inside and simply pulled The Scream off the wall.

It was all over in 50 seconds. Fifty seconds to pull off the greatest and easiest art theft since 1911, when former Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia made off with the Mona Lisa tucked under his smock. That theft wasn't noticed for an entire day, but the masterpiece was finally recovered two years later from a trunk in a Florence, Italy hotel room. The ensuing publicity ensured that the Mona Lisa (continued on page 152)Screams(continued from page 84) would become the most famous painting in the world.

Now The Scream was suddenly gone, and this 1994 theft also produced national embarrassment for Norway. Not only had the most famous and valuable painting by its most famous citizen been stolen, but it was taken on the morning of the first day of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, a town about 80 miles north of Oslo.

Police suspected the theft was a publicity stunt by a radical antiabortion group that had threatened to disrupt the Olympic Games. The group immediately claimed responsibility and announced it would return the painting if a graphic antiabortion commercial was aired on national television. For the Norwegian authorities, it certainly appeared to be a political crime. Little did they know that the assault had actually been planned and perpetrated by two friends from the poor Oslo neighborhood of Tveita.

Enger, 26 at the time, had played professional soccer for the Norwegian club Valerenga, but his first love was theft. In 1988 he made his first major score, walking off" with Munch's Vampire from the ill-fated Munch Museum. Enger was quickly caught and jailed, and the painting—also worth millions—was safely recovered.

A few years later, out of jail and back in Tveita, Enger hooked up with the teenage Ellingsen, a young man with spiky blond hair, a slight build and an almost cherubic face. "We were like brothers," Enger later told a reporter.

In those heady days of winter 1994, Enger and Ellingsen must have been jubilant. Their 50-second snatch was famous, on front pages and in leading newscasts around the world. They were the toast of the Norwegian underworld.

But the duo could not be accused of thinking ahead. They assumed that the deep pockets of the museum's insurance company would pay the ransom they demanded. But The Scream, they learned, was uninsured. And as Dick Ellis could have told them, the Norwegian government would never pay a ransom.

Ellingsen and Enger found themselves in possession of a $60 million painting everyone wanted back but no one wanted to pay for.

They desperately needed a plan B.

Charley Hill

Charley Hill is probably the politest man you'll ever meet. He asks if our interview can take place in London's Kew Gardens, a lush botanical paradise and former haunt of kings and queens of England. Once inside, he proceeds to guide a detailed tour, pointing out horticultural and architectural features and displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of the people and events that shaped the gardens. During a stop for a cup of tea and a slice of cake at Kew's cafe, he carefully thanks everyone—the attendant at the gate, the girl at the cash register, the busboy cleaning the tables outside.

This is not your typical cop. He looks and sounds like a university professor. He plays choral music in his car, a little silver Renault.

The son of a U.S. Air Force officer and an English mother, Hill was raised on both sides of the Atlantic. He attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where, he says, he was "bored out of my mind." So he volunteered for the Vietnam draft and in 1968 found himself in the 173rd Airborne Brigade, fighting deep in enemy territory. "I was the intellectual grunt of our platoon," he says.

After Vietnam, Hill returned to his studies, winning a Fulbright scholarship that took him to Trinity College in Dublin. From there he experimented for two years as a schoolteacher before deciding he wanted to be an Anglican priest. Using money from a Veterans Benefits Administration grant, Hill completed a bachelor of divinity at King's College London. By the time he earned his degree, he says, the most valuable thing he had learned was that his strong faith had little to do with the Church. "So I joined the police," he says, and for the next 20 years he distinguished himself as a gifted, if maverick, detective. "I was not the Yard's idea of a good police administrator," he says. "I take that as a compliment."

In 1993 Hill was assigned as Scotland Yard's liaison to Europol, a European organization that tackles transborder crime. Stationed in the Hague, the Dutch capital, Hill commuted each week from his London home, catching a plane early on Monday mornings and flying back late on Fridays.

The Monday after The Scream was reported stolen, Hill got the call from London. Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad had come into possession of a lead and wanted him to go undercover. Hill, who had spent much of his career in the Yard's Criminal Intelligence Unit infiltrating drug crews and organized crime gangs, was a natural choice. He had undercover skills and the intellectual pedigree. Now he was asked for a strategy.

"Give me a few minutes to think about it," Hill said to his contact before hanging up. He stared out his office window, gazing down at the canal below. A plan formed in his mind, and he called back immediately. "Here's what we'll do," he said. He would pretend to be a representative of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which was at the time spending tens of millions of dollars in a major acquisitions spree. The thieves would be told the museum had decided to pay to retrieve the painting for the sake of world art. Hill theorized that, with the Getty's money as bait, the crooks would lead him to the stolen picture.

Dick Ellis, the Yard's point man for the Scream investigation, liked the plan. Now all they needed was for the thieves to make their move—and for the Getty to play along.

Ellis flew to California and arranged a meeting with the Getty's head of security. To Ellis's delight, the museum gave the plan its wholehearted support. It created a special post for Charley Hill, who would adopt the identity of Chris Roberts, a roving ambassador for the Getty. To ensure the charade was convincing, the Getty made up business cards and letterhead stationery, created a telephone number that would always be answered by a secretary and even put Roberts on the payroll, backdating its computer records to give him seniority.

Ellis returned to London triumphant. The trap was set.

Dealing with the Devil

Charley Hill is explaining why crooks steal "smudges," art-trade slang for paintings. "You have to understand," he says. "There's nothing glamorous about this. It's not like in the movies. There's no Mr. Big in a castle on a hill ordering the theft of great works of art so he can hang them m his private museum. That's just crap."

The true face of art theft, says Hill, is rather more mundane, practical and brutal. Most stolen paintings are minor works, valuable but not too well-known and easy to slip into the hands of the many dealers who bridge the world between the black market and the legitimate one.

Art is bought and sold in a free-market economy, and within it the black market in stolen art is unregulated, unpoliced and uninvestigated. Stolen paintings are recycled through auction houses or private trades, often ending up in the hands of innocent purchasers.

According to Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, it takes seven to eight years on average for a painting to resurface from the black market. Forty percent of the 160,000 stolen items in the ALR's database are paintings, he adds.

Hill has scored a number of high-profile recoveries in the past decade, including that of Rest on the Flight to Egypt, a masterpiece by Titian, considered the greatest painter of the Venetian Renaissance school. The painting was stolen in 1995, and Hill recovered it in 2002. He adds that one option for art thieves is to use paintings as collateral to fund other illicit deals.

"What you quickly learn in this game," says Hill, "is that no crook steals art exclusively." Art theft is usually part of a lively portfolio of criminal activities, including burglaries, petty theft, drug deals and even bank robberies.

On the trail of a stolen painting, you must enter this world, and once there a deal with the devil is normally required. It is a deal that places most art recoveries on a fine ethical line.

In 2003 the Tate paid $6.7 million to secure the return of two J.M.W. Turners, stolen in 1994 and valued at $46 million. The money was paid to a middleman who brokered the deal between the crooks and the museum. Hill had similarly arranged for a $139,000 finder's fee to be paid to the middleman who engineered the return of the Titian.

The art world doesn't consider these deals to be ransoms, as they usually involve people steps removed from the thieves themselves. Still, it is dangerous territory. "Given the choice between never seeing these pictures again and getting them back, most people would prefer to get them back. If someone helps in getting them back, that person should get what is proportionately a small sum of money compared to what the art is really worth," says Hill.

These negotiations usually require time and patience, two qualities Ellingsen and Enger were not familiar with. They demanded outright ransom. In order to get The Scream back, police decided they would have to allow the crooks to get uncomfortably close to a huge sum of money.

Plan B: Olsen and Ulving

With the hottest painting in the world on their hands and an ever decreasing number of options for getting rid of it, Ellingsen and Enger turned to an acquaintance in Norway's criminal underworld. Jan Olsen, who had completed an 11-year jail sentence for arson a few years earlier, was recruited to act as a go-between in negotiations for the painting's return. Olsen's major qualification for this role was his claim that he could get direct access to the chairman of the National Gallery. Olsen's tactic was to approach the gallery and tell the chairman that unless someone paid up, The Scream would be returned in pieces.

Olsen's inside track was a circuitous one. By chance, he'd been sporadically buying pictures from an art dealer and auctioneer named Einar-Tore Ulving. Over the course of their business relationship the two men had had several conversations, and during one exchange Olsen learned that Ulving's wife's cousin was the National Gallery's chairman.

Ulving remembers Olsen's first approach shortly after The Scream was stolen: "He called and said he wanted to meet me. He seemed very uncomfortable talking on the telephone. We met outside a hotel, and he told me he could get The Scream back and asked if I could arrange a meeting using my family connections." A meeting between the crook and the chairman was duly arranged.

Olsen was told that if things were to progress, he must provide absolute proof that he could deliver The Scream. "Read Dagbladet on Tuesday," Olsen told Ulving. "You'll get your proof."

Sure enough, the Tuesday cover story of this Norwegian daily newspaper featured a nearly full-page picture of a fragment of The Scream's broken frame, discovered near a bus stop in the small town of Nittedal, about 10 miles northeast of Oslo. The piece of frame had been found following an "anonymous" tip to the paper. "That was good proof," says Ulving.

The Sting

On May 5, 1994 Charley Hill (as Chris Roberts) spoke with Ulving. It had been decided that the Roberts character should be based in Brussels to further muddy any possible connection between him and the London police. Hill flew to Brussels that morning to make the call. He told Ulving he would be in Oslo that evening and staying at the Plaza Hotel. Could a meeting be arranged between him and Olsen?

A little before 10 P.M. Hill walked into the lobby of the Plaza. Sporting a jaunty bow tie and looking every inch the art scholar, he strode up to the reception desk and loudly announced his name. Ulving and Olsen approached the man from the Getty.

Olsen made an immediate impression on Hill. Although in his 40s, he was clearly in superb shape, a good-looking, confident man who while in prison had become an expert kickboxer. Next to him stood Ulving the art dealer, shorter and balding, nervously smoking Marlboro Lights.

After some quick introductions, Ulving made his excuses and tried to leave. "I thought I was there just to introduce Olsen to this man Roberts," he says. He was rudely disabused of the notion. Olsen told him, "No, no, you're not leaving here. My English is not good. I need you to translate." Thus beginning what he described as a "long, long two days," Ulving reluctantly checked into the Plaza.

Hill went to his suite on the 27th floor to freshen up. Three floors below, an advance team, including a British undercover officer called Sid Walker (not his real name; his identity is still secret), had established a surveillance operation to monitor the sting along with Norwegian police.

That evening Hill, Olsen and Ulving sat in the lounge of the Plaza and began their negotiations for the return of The Scream. Olsen said the robbers wanted 3.15 million Norwegian kroner (about $472,000) to return the painting, a price Hill agreed to. Given the lateness of the hour, the men called it a night and arranged to meet again at breakfast.

At eight A.M. Hill and Ulving were taking the elevator down to breakfast when, Hill says, he began to get a bad feeling. When the elevator doors opened, he was confronted with a sight that filled him with horror.

"What was absolutely, staggeringly unbelievable was that the Scandinavian police were having their annual drug conference that weekend in the hotel," says Ellis. "Neither the Norwegian police nor the bad guys had thought to check the hotel out before our team turned up." Added to the mix of hundreds of cops were dozens of plainclothes Norwegian officers who had been drafted to monitor the sting operation. "It was a disaster," says Ellis.

Hill, Olsen and Ulving reconvened that afternoon in the Plaza's reception area, but this time Hill was accompanied by Sid Walker, whom he introduced as a guard for the money. While Ulving stayed in the lobby, Hill and Walker took Olsen upstairs to Walker's room, where Walker produced a sports bag filled with nearly half a million dollars in what police call flash money.

Police have an awkward relationship with flash money, says Ellis: "You need it because once you have flashed the bad guys the sight of a suitcase full of cash, they tend to go for it. Trouble is, you have to make sure you get it back." Hill and Walker were nervous about the sheer volume of cash now inches from the face of Olsen, a violent career criminal. Being that close to half a million dollars seemed to calm Olsen, though, who had become increasingly agitated by the police presence in the hotel. He left the two undercover policemen, saying he had a "short but important meeting" to attend, and returned an hour later having apparently received the authorization to proceed.

Because of the police conference at the Plaza, nobody argued with the suggestion that they move to the quieter Grand Hotel a few blocks away. While they switched hotels, Olsen ordered Ulving to drive him to the underground parking lot of an apartment building. Once they were inside, a man appeared from the shadows equipped with what looked to Ulving like some sort of metal detector. Olsen and the man spoke briefly, and then the car was swept for bugs and tracking devices. Satisfied the car was not under electronic surveillance, the men drove to a quiet side road near the city center, where Olsen ordered Ulving to stop the car and turn off the engine and lights.

They sat in the dark in Ulving's black Mercedes 300TE wagon for several minutes. Then a rear passenger door opened and a man slid onto the backseat. He was dressed in all black, with a cap pulled down over his forehead and a scarf pulled up over his nose and mouth. He positioned himself directly behind Ulving, preventing the driver from observing him. For the next 12 hours the man Ulving knew only as Mr. X would be his constant shadow, sent by the crooks to supervise the handover of the money and the painting.

"I had a very bad feeling. I was very unhappy," says Ulving of Mr. X's entrance. The hulking, silent man scared him.

Hill was in his room when the phone rang. He glanced at the clock; it was 11:30 P.M. Ulving was in reception. The deal was on. Hill went down to meet the three men. Sitting in the back of the Mercedes, he told them bluntly, "I am not going for a midnight walk in the woods with you."

"Then the painting will be destroyed," said Mr. X. "It's now or never."

It was Ulving who solved the impasse. "Look, why don't I go with Mr. X to see the painting, and Olsen can stay here with you and the money?" Everyone agreed, but as Hill got out of the car, Mr. X said, "If anyone follows us, my people will find out immediately, and the painting will be destroyed." He closed the door and turned to Ulving.

"Drive."

Ulving did as he was told. "We started to drive going out of Oslo," he says, "turning left, right, left, right, going straight ahead and through some tunnels until we ended up in Etterstad, in east Oslo. Mr. X told me to stop. He got out and walked about 50 yards to a phone box where, I assume, he made a call. He came back a few minutes later and told me to drive south on the E18 highway and not use my cell phone. He said someone would call and give me instructions. Then he walked off."

•

The E18 led straight to Ulving's home in the picturesque town of Tønsberg, 30 miles south of Oslo. An hour later there had still been no call, so Ulving decided to go home. It was two A.M. on Saturday, two days since he'd last seen his wife and children. Ulving pulled up in front of his house and went inside. As he opened the door to his house, his home phone began to ring. A man's voice told him to get back in his car and drive to a diner called By the Way, just outside Tønsberg.

Spooked at the realization that his house was being watched, Ulving did as he was told and five minutes later pulled into the diner's deserted parking lot. Five minutes after that he was still there, sitting alone in the dark. "Suddenly Mr. X appeared from behind the building, and he was holding something wrapped in a blue sheet," he says. "He put it in the trunk of my car and then told me to drive home. At that point I refused."

It was one thing to be at the beck and call of Mr. X (whom Hill describes as a psychopath). But Ulving says he drew the line at letting the man into his home, where his wife and two daughters were sleeping. "My brain was racing," Ulving says. "There was no way I wanted this man in the same place as my family." A solution suggested itself. Ulving owned a summer residence a few minutes farther up the road in the old fishing village of Åsgårdstrand, which by coincidence also happened to be where Munch had a summerhouse and studio in a converted fisherman's cottage. Ulving knew the Åsgårdstrand house would be closed up for the winter and deserted.

It was freezing inside the summerhouse. The wrapped painting was placed on the dining room table. Ulving gingerly unwrapped the package.

He says it felt as though the air were vibrating around him. "When you are that close to genius, you can feel it coming out at you from inside the paint," he says. He rewrapped the painting and took it to the basement through a small hatch in the kitchen floor.

Mr. X ordered Ulving into the front room. It was now three A.M. For the next two hours they sat in cold, dark silence, the anonymous thug brooding silently, hunched inside his coat, facing the door. Ulving, exhausted but unable to sleep, was chain-smoking, reasonably concerned for his life. No one in all of Norway knew where he was at that moment.

An hour or so later, sick of waiting in the cold, dark cottage, Ulving hatched a plan to lure Mr. X out of the house. He promised the criminal the chance to drive his Mercedes 500SL, a tiny two-seat convertible that was not only expensive but rarely seen in Scandinavia. So the art dealer and his hulking bodyguard drove back to Ulving's family home, swapped cars and then spent a few hours killing time, driving the back roads between Tønsberg and the small town of Drammen, waiting for dawn to break and Ulving's cell phone to ring.

May 7, 1994: "I've got it!"

For the first time since he'd gotten to Oslo, Charley Hill was enjoying himself. He was sitting in the backseat of a rental car watching his partner, Walker, put on a show for Olsen. Walker was giving the crook a master class in anti-surveillance driving. "Olsen was obviously impressed," says Hill. "He had no idea the man in the driver's seat was the most accomplished professional undercover officer in the London Metropolitan Police." Dick Ellis says of Walker, "He was just amazing."

The three men were on their way to Drammen, about 20 minutes southwest of Oslo, their destination a diner near a tollbooth where they had been told the exchange could take place. As they arrived Hill noticed a brand-new Mercedes 500SL parked outside.

Inside the diner at a table with his minder sat Ulving, looking miserable. Walker volunteered to get everyone coffee, and when he returned Ulving was confirming that, yes, he had seen the painting. So the robbers had seen the money, Ulving the intermediary had seen the painting, and now here they all were, sitting somewhere in the middle of nowhere without a plan. Nobody seemed to know what to do next. A tour bus began to unload its passengers, and the cafe started to fill up.

Walker suggested a solution: He would take Olsen and Mr. X back to the hotel, where the money was stashed, while Hill and Ulving went back to Åsgårdstrand for the painting. As Oslo was closer, it seemed to give the crooks the advantage of getting to the money at least half an hour before Hill and Ulving could get to the painting. It was agreed that Hill would call the hotel as soon as he had seen the painting, and the money would then be handed over by his partner, Walker.

Hill and Ulving set out for the summer cottage in Ulving's Mercedes 500SL. Hill says the journey took years off his life: "Not only was Ulving a terrible driver, but he was also groggy from exhaustion and lack of sleep and kept weaving all over the road. I was sure we were going to end up in a ditch or under the wheels of a truck." Eventually the pair arrived at Ulving's house and went inside. Ulving went to the kitchen and opened the hatch to the basement.

Hill never lost his sense of caution, even with the mild-mannered Ulving. "I'm not going down there," Hill said. Ulving shrugged and disappeared into the darkness, emerging a second or so later holding the wrapped painting. Hill took it from him and walked to the dining room table. He carefully laid it down and pulled back the edges of the sheet.

"Shit."

Hill found himself looking at a rather plain piece of board covered with a few scribbles and smears of paint. We've been had, he thought, before realizing he was looking at the back of the picture, which bears the remains of Munch's first, failed attempt to capture The Scream. Hill turned the painting over, and there in front of him at last was the famous howling figure. "The thing about a masterpiece is that it tells you it is a masterpiece," he says. "You can look at a thousand paintings, but when you look at something like The Scream—boom!—it comes straight out at you." The painting also bears telltale wax splatters caused by Munch blowing out a candle too close to it. The distinctive splatters are like a fingerprint Hill had memorized. "You can't blow a candle out twice the same way," says Hill. The wax marks he saw were the indisputable proof he needed.

•

"Oh fucking hell, what have I done?"

The painting was too big to fit through the door of Ulving's compact sports car. The two men opened the roof, and Hill managed to squeeze the painting behind the seats. Hill jiggled it and was able to push it down another inch or two—enough to close the roof. Hill then realized that, as he'd wrestled with the painting, he had accidentally pushed one of the Mercedes's headrests so far into the back of the picture that a small but noticeable lump had appeared in the screaming figure's shoulder.

"Oh shit."

He looked over at Ulving, who seemed not to have noticed. With his secret intact, the top secured and a slightly dented Norwegian masterpiece pressing into the back of his head, Hill let Ulving drive him to the nearby Åsgårdstrand Hotel. After renting a room Hill took the painting in through a rear fire escape and barricaded himself inside Room 525, pushing all the furniture against the door.

It was 10:30 A.M. Pouring himself a generous whiskey from the minibar, Hill picked up the phone and dialed.

"I've got it," he told the voice on the other end.

•

Back in Oslo, the Norwegian police surveillance operation had descended into fiasco. The team managed to miss Walker, Olsen and Mr. X walking in through the front of the hotel and going up to Walker's room. And Walker didn't know that the two-man police team that was supposed to be in the room next to his had wandered off to get breakfast, taking the bag containing the $472,000 ransom with them.

Walker sat in the room with the two crooks, unaware that he was totally alone and without backup. As the minutes ticked away, Olsen and Mr. X got more and more anxious. The tension in the room was rising to an uncomfortable pitch when the door suddenly swung open. Standing in the doorway were the two Norwegian policemen, in full uniform, holding Big Macs, cups of coffee and the bag of cash.

They had walked into the wrong room.

•

Not a scratch, began the story in Dagbladet heralding the safe return of The Scream on May 7, 1994. "They must have ironed the bump out," says Hill, "or not noticed."

Over the next few days Ellingsen, Enger, Olsen and Mr. X—revealed to be an old criminal accomplice of Enger's named Bjørn Grytdal—were rounded up and charged. Enger, it seemed, couldn't resist telling the world about his role. He was arrested after placing a notice about the birth of his son in a local newspaper, announcing that his son had arrived in this world "met et skrik!"—"with a scream."

The four conspirators were convicted, but the court decided that because Hill and Walker had entered the country using false passports, they had been there illegally; therefore their entire operation had been unlawful. Convictions against three of the four men were overturned on appeal. Only Enger's conviction of receiving stolen property stuck.

The Teflon Kid

Norway has changed in many ways since the 1994 heist; separated by a decade, the two crimes provide a picture of just how much. Ten years ago, stealing The Scream was an almost civilized affair: Two unarmed young men used a ladder to pull off an almost comical robbery in the still hours of early morning. In 2004 thugs with guns barged into a museum in broad daylight, threatening staff and visitors in a highly calculated and professionally executed raid.

Lulled by a liberal, open and—thanks in part to oil—affluent standard of life, Norway has been slow to react to the rapidly changing face of modern crime. Only 4.5 million people live in this land about the size of Montana, and they enjoy a lifestyle most Americans would envy. The average family income is about 60 percent greater than that of American families, and health and education are heavily subsidized. The UN Human Development Index rates Norway the world's most livable country year after year. Despite this affluence, though, crime rates have risen across the board in Norway, with violent crime increasing nearly 15 percent in the past eight years.

Yet there are few jails in this most liberal of countries, and the courts are loath to impose heavy prison sentences. Prisoners are often not remanded to holding cells before trial, and even when convicted they can spend months in the community waiting for jail space to open. Once inside, prisoners are released on leave after they serve a third of their sentence.

The system appears to be incapable of dealing with the highly mobile, professional criminal gangs that now operate across the open borders of Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. These criminals sans frontières slip through the porous borders with impunity, carrying out raids in one country and escaping to another.

In the past 10 years a highly violent hard core of professional armed robbers has evolved within Scandinavia. Not so much a gang as an informal network, this eclectic group includes Norwegians, Swedes, Albanians, Finns, Bulgarians, Pakistanis, Iranians—along with bikers and even neo-Nazis. Racial, cultural and spiritual differences are put aside when it comes to their work. They are real-life reservoir dogs, specializing in armed bank robberies planned and conducted with military precision. Among their number, according to Norwegian police, was the cherubic blond bandit William Ellingsen.

After walking away from his Scream charges Ellingsen entered this world. His crimes began to escalate. In 1998 he was implicated in a $ 170,000 bank robbery. He escaped to Costa Rica but was captured and deported to Norway, where he somehow managed to escape conviction. In September 2001 he was part of a team that pulled off what the Norwegian daily newspaper Verdens Gang called "the impossible."

Ellingsen and his crew drilled their way through the concrete floor of a bank and dropped into the safe-deposit vault, where they opened and emptied more than 500 boxes, getting away with millions in cash, jewelry and other valuables. Ellingsen was caught and charged, but as usual the police couldn't make the case stick.

He was the Scandinavian Teflon Kid, good-looking, intelligent and daring. But on February 6, 2004, his luck ran out.

That night a number of underworld enforcers and debt collectors—the Norwegians call them torpedoes—held a party in the posh Gabels Gate area of Oslo. The gathering was well attended by members of the city's criminal fraternity, including Ellingsen. When a fight broke out between a bouncer and two torpedoes, Ellingsen tried to intervene. One of the men responded by pulling a pistol and opening fire. Ellingsen was hit and killed.

He was buried on February 13 to the sound of "Amazing Grace" and Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters." Three hundred mourners attended his funeral, among them the crème de la crème of Norway's criminal elite.

On that cold Oslo day it was doubtful that those at the funeral were conscious of the poignancy of the date on which they were burying their friend and comrade. Exactly 10 years and one day earlier, at the age of 18, Ellingsen had first burst onto the criminal scene when he made off with the second most famous painting in the world.

Epilogue: August 2004

Of the four men involved in the 1994 heist only Pål Enger and Bjørn Grytdal (Mr. X) were still in circulation when the August 2004 robbery took place. Ellingsen was dead, as was Jan Olsen, who had died the previous year as a result of intravenous heroin use.

Enger, who'd become something of a celebrity criminal over the previous decade, engineering little stunts to keep his name and photo in the newspapers, became uncharacteristically media shy in the aftermath of the Munch Museum raid. "Weapons are not my style," he said in a terse interview following the heist. "I have always used the methods of a gentleman." After being pulled in for questioning by Oslo police, the normally ebullient Enger disappeared. His cell phone is now dead, and at the time of this writing he had not been seen for several weeks.

For Charley Hill, The Scream has stirred both memories and curiosity. Hill, an analyst of the Norwegian criminal landscape, believes that the solution to last year's robbery may lie in the past. And in a surprising twist, he says, there may be connections to the fallen Ellingsen.

Two months after Ellingsen's death, the most violent robbery in Norwegian history was carried out in the west coast town of Stavanger. On April 5, 10 armed robbers raided Nokas, a hub for Norwegian banks. The robbers first drove a truck into the parking garage entrance of the local police station and set it on fire. As police ran from the building, the robbers hurled tear-gas canisters, creating a blinding fog. Mobile patrols responding to the alarms were sprayed with gunfire by the robbers, who were armed with automatic weapons. It was, by all accounts, like a scene from the movie Heat.

The gang then attacked the bank, smashing its way into the counting room with sledgehammers. In 30 minutes the crooks managed to haul away $8.5 million, keeping the police at bay with bursts of suppressing fire. During this firefight, which occurred around 8:30 A.M., a police commander was killed.

The level of violence and the murder of the policeman caused outrage in Norway. The authorities responded by declaring war on the criminal fraternity they suspected of being behind the raid: Ellingsen's former comrades. Soon many of those who had attended Ellingsen's funeral were either behind bars or the subjects of intensive police searches, their names appearing on wanted lists around Scandinavia. They included one of Ellingsen's pallbearers, who police believed was the mastermind behind the Stavanger robbery. (concluded on page 161)Screams(continued from page 158)

As police continued to turn up the heat on Ellingsen's former associates, rumors began to circulate in Oslo that another big score was imminent—one that would have significant symbolic value.

It is hard to deny that the theft of The Scream and Madonna perfectly fit the bill, says Hill. "Don't make the mistake of trying to rationalize a crime like this," he explains, "because both the 1994 and 2004 thefts were carried out by irrational people who see the world very differently from you and me. These people are short-term thinkers and planners. They live for the now, and they tend not to live very long."

Hill continues, "Crimes like this make sense to them because they feel they are showing the world what they are capable of. These are trophy crimes. They have nothing to do with money—they can make much, much more from drugs, prostitution or armed robbery. No, this is their telling the world, 'We can do what we like when we like, take what we like and fuck you.' For those involved in the Stavanger robbery, it would have made perfect sense to order this theft. The crooks would have seen it as a good way to get the police chasing after something else and a good way of telling the world they are still capable of pulling any job they want."

Sources close to the Norwegian police inquiry have admitted that one of the leading theories of the 2004 Munch theft is that it had been perpetrated to draw police and media attention away from Stavanger. Several newspapers and a Norwegian television station have run stories quoting anonymous sources confirming that the Stavanger crew ordered the robbery. The Norwegian television station TV2 reported that the robbers were paid about $30,000 to commit the crime.

In late December Norwegian police arrested an unnamed 37-year-old man and confirmed that they have identified two other suspects. The paintings remain missing. Iver Stensrud, head of the organized crime unit of the Oslo police department, said, "We don't know where they are, whether they are still in Norway or whether they have gone abroad." The Norwegian daily Verdens Gang, claiming to have information from criminal sources, reported that both The Scream, and Madonna are still in Norway but that both works sustained damage during the robbery. Madonna was thought to be significantly damaged, while The Scream was described as "diminished."

It took 50 seconds to pull off the greatest art theft since 1911, when the Mona Lisa was taken from the Louvre.

The stolen Scream was a $60 million painting everyone wanted back but no one wanted to pay for.

Francis Lundh contributed additional reporting from Norway.