At right, Breitwieser, wearing a light disguise, staring at the ivory statue he had stolen 21 years earlier. Paradise Found: 'Adam and Eve' by Georg Petel (1627) was stolen by Stéphane Breitwieser from the Rubens House in Antwerp, Belgium. The coveted ivory was made by the celebrated German carver Georg Petel. The gallery with Adam and Eve features items Rubens collected during his lifetime, including marble busts of Roman philosophers and a scattering of Dutch and Italian oil paintings. The more popular rooms in the museum display paintings by Rubens himself, but these pieces are too large to safely steal.
Even at noon there are too many of them, lingering. Except at lunchtime, when the chairs wait empty as the security staff rotates shorthanded to eat, while those who remain on duty shift from sitting to patrol, dipping in and out of rooms at a predictable pace. Most of the day, Breitwieser had observed, there is a guard in each gallery, watching from a chair. The flaw with the security guards is that they’re human. Tricky screws, sure, difficult to reach at the rear of the box, but just two. The flaw with the plexiglass box, he had noticed on his scouting visit, is that the upper part can be separated from the base by removing two screws.
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