San Francisco arrested man stealing Picasso’s drawing

A New Jersey native who tried to repeat the Thomas Crown scam was detained by police in a hotel apartment in Napa County.

Thirty-year-old Mark Lugo from Hoboken, New Jersey reportedly committed a reckless theft on Tuesday at Weinstein’s famous art gallery in San Francisco on Union Square.

A man, entering the Weinstein Gallery, happily mixed with a crowd of people wishing to see the collections of Chagall, Dali and Picasso. The 1965 Tete de Femme (Woman’s Head) was on display at the entrance to the gallery. Obviously, Lugo simply tore the picture from the wall, hurriedly shook it in the newspaper and left the gallery.

“The lack of a picture was instantly noticed by our guards,” Roland Weinstein, forty-seven-year-old owner of the Weinstein Gallery, told reporters.

Perhaps Lugo borrowed the idea from the 1999 film The Thomas Crown Scam, in which the protagonist freely left the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a stolen Mane work and disappeared into the assembled crowd in Union Square.

The shots taken by the surveillance camera of a neighboring restaurant captured a slowly walking thief with a wrapped picture at hand on the same side of the street where the museum is located. Police said that they used this video as well.

As a result of the theft, Picasso’s drawing was practically not injured, the frame was lost. Now he is under the protection of the government.

“As soon as I found out about the theft, I felt unbearably ill for two reasons,” added the gallery owner. “Firstly, the painting is part of the history of art, and secondly, this part of the story was entrusted to me and I allowed the opportunity to lose it.”.

A police spokeswoman told The San Francisco Chronicle that, unlike Crown, Lugo worked alone and planned to ship the stolen to a third party.

Weinstein acquired the painting in May at Christie’s auction in New York. The picture was exhibited in the gallery for a month. Roland Weinstein planned to sell it for about $ 275,000, however, now, most likely, he will remain in the gallery’s permanent collection, as now “it is an integral part of the city’s history”.

The most valuable painting in the Weinstein Gallery is the work of Marc Chagall, estimated at approximately $ 5 million.

Roland Weinstein, shared that he had never seen the mentioned film, but promised to watch it somehow.

Lugo was detained and detained with the possibility of bail in the amount of $ 5 million, he was charged with theft on a particularly large scale, misappropriation of stolen property, as well as possession of drugs.

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