French man living in Florida nabbed for art theft in South of France
July 17, 2008
Monet, Sisley, Breugel masterpieces among paintings stolen in brazen museum heist in Nice, France in 2007.
A French man living in Florida has been charged with conspiring to sell four masterpieces, stolen from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Nice, France in August 2007. The Frenchman, Bernard Jean Ternus, was nabbed trying to sell four paintings, by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Pieter Breugel, to undercover FBI agents. The four recovered paintings were Falaises près de Dieppe by Claude Monet, Allée de peupliers de Moret by Alfred Sisley, and Pieter Breugel’s Allégorie de l’eau and Allégorie de la terre.
On June 4 in Marseille, France, when the French mastermind had told the FBI agents the deal would be consummated, French national police arrested two men, finding all four paintings undamaged in a van. They have since been returned to the museum in Nice.
The arrests of the two men in France plus Ternus was the culmination of a 7-month FBI investigation in cooperation with French undercover police. Ternus, a French citizen who had been living a Fort Lauderdale suburb, faces a maximum sentence in the US of five years in federal prison and up to $250,000 in fines. Ternus pled guilty to all charges, with no attempt at denial, and also volunteered information for the investigation, in the hopes of leniency. Ternus will probably be deported to France after he serves his U.S. prison sentence. The other men involved in the theft are being prosecuted in France.
The French art thief made his hapless deal with the undercover FBI agents aboard a yacht off the Florida coast, but other meetings had been held in Spain and France. The actual August 2007 theft of the paintings in France was executed in broad daylight by masked thieves, shocking museum-goers who were visiting at the time.
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