Originally published at: How Stéphane Breitwieser stole over a billion dollars worth of art, and the sad desperate destruction that ensued | Boing Boing
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Most expensive “my Mom cleaned out my room” story ever?
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Sounds to me like some sort of compulsion, which wouldn’t really be remedied by prison time. 
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Stephan got 3 years prison time for the first time he was caught then later got caught trying to sell a stolen art piece as a “paperweight”, and they found 60 more art pieces, so yeah prison time didn’t help him. ^_____^
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Is it wrong of me to take comfort to see that other countries have their own share of idiots doing idiotic things? Glad that we don’t completely own the space.
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Same. My Mom threw out my baseball card collection.
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a serial art thief identifying as an “Art Collector.”
The obsessive collector’s mentality exhibits itself in all manner of anti-social behaviours.
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It’s always interesting to hear these stories from the past that are the reason for current security (and/or security theater). That museums used to simply display the pieces on the wall with minimal guards or cameras is such a nice thought. But then every such situation gets one or two guys like this who come along and make it so that now every museum is a freaking fortress. We live in a series of fortresses because of a few people who can’t behave.
I do often wonder if it’s worth it. The collective positivity of a trusting world is, I think, worth the cost of the occasional guy like this. They get caught anyway, sooner or later, and in the big picture the stuff stolen isn’t that much. The cost to our psyches of living in dystopian emotional prisons everywhere we go is not worth it, IMHO.
We react to every partially successful crime with ever more security, instead of saying “well, the current system mostly works, so let’s treat this as the cost of doing business”. We only ever accept a theoretical future crime level of zero. Like anything else, security must be ramped up exponentially for diminishing returns, so pretty soon we’ve got SuperMax museums that we all live with daily just in case one guy might steal something sometime in the theoretical future.
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My Mum threw away my Baseball Card collect too; and it was a really good one; it was a Billy Ripkin, 1989 from Fleer.
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Having to paint a billion dollars worth of paintings from your Mom’s recollections (and maybe your own) sounds punishing enough…
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The list of people who have ever destroyed a Billion dollars worth of anything must be incredibly small. You’d have to get up very early in the morning.
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Do stock exchange listings count?
Because there are a couple of guys out there who can wipe out billions with a single Tweet. Sometimes of their own companies!
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Oh jeez, my mom is terrible at remembering faces. /s
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