He Stole the Mona Lisa?

Meet the greatest thief you're never heard of.

This is Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian house painter from a town in northern Italy who lived and worked in Paris. What makes this rather dapper individual unique is that on August 21, 1911, he walked into the Louvre and walked out with Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece — the Mona Lisa. What’s even more mind-boggling is that he kept the painting in his one-room flat in Paris’ 10th arrondissement for nearly 2-1/2 years before bringing it to Florence, Italy and giving it to the director of the Uffizi Gallery.

How did he commit the theft? Why did he keep the painting so long? How did he avoid the police for all that time? And the biggest question — WHY did he do it?

We have spent more than 50 years investigating the story and have thousands of documents and photographs from the French and Italian archives, as well has hundreds of hours of filmed interviews of members of the Peruggia family, including the thief’s daughter.

In the upcoming months, we’re going to examine the evidence piece by piece, in bite-sized readable chunks. We’ll see how the newspapers of the time covered it, and we’ll talk to modern art crime experts and even Louvre and Uffizi officials to get to the bottom of the greatest and least known art heist of all time.

In the end, you’ll see how the theft helped make the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world and why the name Vincenzo Peruggia is a largely unknown footnote in the painting’s 500-year history.