As ARTINFO previously reported, three people were recently arrested in connection with the brazen heist of five paintings worth about $134 million from Paris's Musée d'Art Moderne in May 2010. The paintings have still not been recovered, and may not ever be: one of the accused has told police that he dumped the artworks into a trash can on the street, which means that Picasso's "Dove with Green Peas," Matisse's "Pastoral," Braque's "Olive Tree Near Estaque," Modigliani's "Woman with a Fan," and Léger's "Still Life with Candlesticks" may now be torn up, crushed, and buried somewhere in a Paris garbage dump.

The story behind the crime began to unfold when a 43-year-old Serbian man, Vrejan T., was arrested for burglary last May and later questioned about the museum break-in, according to Le Journal du Dimanche, which broke the story. Nicknamed "Spiderman" for his ability to scale luxury apartment buildings, Vrejan T. admitted to stealing the five masterpieces. He described visiting the museum before the heist and carefully unscrewing the screws from the window near Léger's "Disks in the City." Three days later, under cover of darkness and wearing a mask, he climbed up the balcony, opened the window, and cut the lock on the sliding gate. But his preferred Léger had been moved and replaced with "Still Life with Candlesticks," which he decided to take instead and carried to his car.

Stunned at how easy it was to escape detection (the museum's alarm system had been broken for a month), Vrejan T. couldn't resist the chance to steal more paintings. He told police that he re-entered the museum and wandered through the rooms inspecting the artworks for over an hour — despite the presence of security cameras and guards who were supposed to be monitoring the screens. He finally chose the Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Modigliani paintings. "He thought the Modigliani was the most beautiful one of all," a police source told Le Journal du Dimanche.

Vrejan also told police that he acted at the behest of a 56-year-old antiquities dealer named Jean-Michel C., who had promised him €40,000 ($54,000). Police then questioned the antiquities dealer, who denied having ordered the break-in but acknowledged that the five paintings turned up at the house of his associate, Jonathan B., a 34-year-old expert watch-repairer. Jonathan B. was arrested in September and told police that when his accomplices were being questioned by the authorities last May, he panicked, destroyed the paintings, and tossed the ripped-up canvases into a trash can on the street. Auctioneer Claude Aguttes, for whose auction house Jonathan B. had consulted as a respected authority on antique watches, was surprised at his arrest, describing him to Le Journal du Dimanche as "someone very efficient, very authoritative, who never caused the least problem."

French police are at a loss as to whether or not to believe that the paintings — which, in any case, could never have been sold on the open market — were really destroyed by a panicked watch-repairer who found himself in over his head. "To my knowledge, there were no ransom demands," deputy mayor for culture Christophe Girard told Le Journal du Dimanche. Girard said that he is still hopeful that the missing masterpieces could turn up.

Meanwhile, in other art crime news, a different modern art theft now has a happy ending: two Picasso paintings, "Horse's Head" and "Glass and Pitcher," which were stolen from an exhibition in Pfaeffikon, Switzerland, in February 2008, have been recovered in Serbia, CBC reports. The paintings had been on loan by the Sprengel Museum of Hanover, Germany.