SAO PAULO—Police say that they believe the theft of Picasso's Portrait of Suzanne Bloch and Candido Portinari's Coffee Worker from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art last week was not the thieves' first attempt, reports the New York Times. On October 29 intruders overpowered two security guards, who did not have keys to the section where the paintings are displayed, and on December 17, security guards chased away two people using a blowtorch to cut through a back door. Following last week's theft, which took just three minutes, there have been calls for the Brazilian government to take control of the museum, whose $1 billion collection is uninsured and not protected by an alarm system. “It’s appalling that anyone with half a brain would be able to walk into one of Latin America’s most important museums and steal a Picasso,” Jones Bergamin, who runs the auction house Art Bourse in Rio de Janeiro, told the Times. “The guardians of art in Brazil nearly invited these thieves to rob them."