“Who hasn’t read a novel about a big art heist? This was a chance to be a part of a novel,” said former CTV Montreal reporter Bob Beneditti.
It was in Montreal, 1972, one year into his job as a reporter for CFCF (a CTV affiliate), when Benedetti covered a story so big, it made headlines around the world.
Benedetti got the call on Sept. 4, 1972. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada’s oldest art museum, had been robbed overnight. He was one of the first reporters on scene.
When he arrived, police were combing the premises for evidence, looking for any clues as to how 53 pieces of art and jewelry were stolen from the historic museum.
It soon became apparent to Benedetti that this was not an ordinary crime. It was, and still is, Canada’s biggest art heist.
“Two million bucks worth of paintings was a lot in those days. Two million was real money,” Benedetti told CTV W5. But what really shocked him was how thieves were able to pull it off.
“I can probably name a couple of novels where the thieves went in a skylight and went down the [rope], the whole thing was out straight out of a novel,” he said.
Investigators told Benedetti that three thieves gained access to the museum roof. They then entered a skylight that was under repair. It was not alarmed at the time and only covered with a plastic sheet. Like spies from a Hollywood movie, they lowered a rope and slid down undetected onto the museum floor. Once inside, they encountered little resistance. One shotgun blast was enough to subdue the guards.
The thieves systematically tore some of the museum’s most valuable paintings from the walls. Among the stolen items were paintings by Delacroix, Jan Brueghel the Elder, Millet, Rubens and Rembrandt.
Back in 1972, rules for roaming reporters were ‘loose.’ In fact, Beneditti was able to walk right up to the ladder left behind by the thieves, and climb it to record a stand up. CTV has footage of the young intrepid reporter, getting unprecedented access to a piece of evidence, in the middle of a crime scene.
Back in 1972, Bob Beneditti was able to walk right up to the ladder left behind by the art thieves and climb it to record a stand up. (CTV News archives)
“Unlike today, where it would have been surrounded by flashing cop cars and yellow crime tape and everything, there was none of that,” said Benedetti. “Things were a little more casual in those days. The fact that I could climb the ladder, a major piece of evidence, to do a stand up…“
Something that would never happen today.
Benedetti remembers the relationship he had with police. “There was a certain trust and camaraderie that we were doing the same kind of job. We were trying to find out who did what and they were trying to find out who did what,” he said.
Police were stumped. “I don’t remember them ever having a real suspect. You know, a lot of these cases, they used to have somebody they knew did it, but they just couldn’t prove it,” said Benedetti. “But in this case, they had no idea. Perhaps that was because of the novelty of this kind of theft in Canada. There weren’t professional art thieves roaming around.”
Laughing, Benedetti told us, “you know, people didn’t rob museums. They robbed banks. We were the bank robbery capital of Canada.”
Bob Benedetti is an award-winning former journalist who had a 35-year career working in a variety of roles including newscaster and producer.
Benedetti had his own theory: “It smells to me as to a bunch of local guys that got really lucky, in that maybe the busy weekend helped in distracting the investigation.”
Fifty years later, there has been no sign of the stolen art and police are no closer to finding out who was able to pull off Canada’s biggest art heist. Montreal police told W5 that the case is now “closed.”
They also went on to say, “If new information came forward, we would verify it and if it turned out to be serious, we would reopen the case.”
Watch CTV W5’s documentary ‘Raiders and the Lost Art’ on Saturday at 7 p.m.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
