Stealing Van Gogh

It's shortly before 8am in central Amsterdam

on Saturday the 7th of December, 2002.

It's cold, just two degrees, and it's a miserable day,

there's hardly anyone about.

In the Museum Quarter,

a van pulls up and two men unload a ladder and pack some tools into a bag.

They leave the vehicle,

looking for all the world like two regular workmen on a cold winter's day.

They came here, to this spot.

They climbed over this gate and set their ladder against that wall.

They then put on ski masks and proceeded to climb

one of Amsterdam's most recognisable cultural landmarks,

the Van Gogh Museum.

Heading to the other side of the building,

and hidden from the gaze of anyone down here by a small wall,

they use a pair of sledgehammers

to smash a hole in one of the gallery's

reinforced security windows...

..setting off the first of a series of alarms.

Inside, the men quickly scan the walls

and snatch two paintings close to the hole

through which they'd entered,

a seascape and a picture of a church,

both from Van Gogh's early period.

That triggers two more alarms and, meanwhile,

the CCTV has picked them up.

A female security guard contacts the police,

but until they arrive, she's helpless because museum regulations

don't allow her to confront the thieves.

Finally, the robbers bundle the paintings, still in their frames,

into their tool bag and make their escape,

coming down a rope

that they'd attached at the start of the heist

to a flagpole at the front of the building.

One of them came down so hard

that he smashed the seascape on the ground.

Then, as the police finally arrive,

looking for them at the back of the building,

they resume their disguise as ordinary workmen and make their way,

with the paintings, into the city.

The whole operation lasted just three minutes and 40 seconds.

So who on earth would steal not one but two paintings

by the world's most famous artist?

Who might they hope to sell them to, these untradeable goods?

What could be their motive?

What might they hope for?

Well, that's what I'm here to find out.

I'm Andrew Graham-Dixon.

I'm an art historian.

I don't often get mixed up in the world of organised crime.

But now I'm uncovering the true story behind the most shocking art crime

of the 21st century -

the theft of some of Van Gogh's most personally charged

and cherished paintings.

It's an investigation that'll take me into

the dizzyingly wealthy world of the international art market.

And also to some of the poorest, most deprived areas of Europe.

I'll meet some extraordinary people.

And venture deep into the dark side,

where the leaders of criminal organisations

actively use stolen art for their own twisted purposes.

It's a race against time,

where cops and investigators try to save masterpieces before they're lost forever,

as the criminal underworld meets the works

of the most famous and popular artist on the planet.

It seems that, these days, everybody wants a piece of Van Gogh.

Two million people visit Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum every year.

His work, in all its forms,

is enduringly popular with the public at large.

And it's a magnet for millionaire art collectors.

So this is painted in 1889.

It's a time when Van Gogh was at the asylum in Saint-Remy.

This forms part of the Impressionist and modern art evening sale.

We are offering 32 lots

at a rough low estimate of around £140 million.

This is certainly one of the top pieces in that sale.

It's very rare to find a picture of this quality up on the market.

Van Gogh oils are pretty rare anyway.

I think this is a painting that has huge universal appeal,

so we've got a very long list of clients

who are looking at it from all over the world.

So we move to this Van Gogh, The Reaper,

painted in Saint-Remy in 1889.

I start this at £9 million.

£9 million. 10 million, and 11 million already.

12 million. At 12 million.

13 million is bid.

14 I have. 15 million.

£16 million. 17, a new place.

Thank you, sir. Welcome into the bidding.

18 million is bid.

Many bids in many places, but the gentleman here has it at 19.

At 19 million for the Van Gogh.

20.

20,500,000.

21 million. 21.5.

It's the American bidder just behind.

For the Saint-Remy Van Gogh, at £21,500,000.

Are we all out?

Sold to you at 21.5.

Well done. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

When paintings sell for sums like that,

it's hardly a surprise that the art market should have become

such a wasps' nest of artful dodgers,

dealers with hopeful attributions, forgers, fakers.

But the number-one dodge is theft,

and of all artists whose work have been stolen,

Vincent van Gogh ranks pretty much at the top.

Since the Nazis in Germany first confiscated Van Gogh paintings in 1937,

more than 40 of his masterpieces have been stolen

in at least 15 separate heists,

from galleries all over the world.

Many of those works were eventually recovered,

but some are still missing.

In Amsterdam in 2002,

the race was on to track down the missing paintings

from the Van Gogh Museum before they disappeared forever.

The Dutch police put one of their top detectives on the case - Bob Schagen.

What was your instinct about the kind of people who'd done this?

Professional burglars.

In and out, three minutes, very professional.

And gone by the wind.

But the thieves had made a crucial mistake.

Inside the smashed window was a hat.

And downstairs, by the rope, we had a cap.

-Like a baseball cap?

-Yeah, like a baseball cap.

Yeah, and then inside the hats were DNA.

Analysis of the DNA led to a clear match from the Dutch database of

previously convicted offenders.

The chief suspect, Octave "Occy" Durham,

was well-known as a professional thief.

And he was known as a very good burglar, so...

We know that he was specialised in burglaries, and big burglaries.

And we followed him, and we wanted to see what his behaviours were, and...

..earned he a lot of money?

Was he spending a lot of money, or whatever?

After fleeing to Spain,

Occy Durham was eventually arrested in December 2003,

and brought back to Holland.

So when you arrested him,

was he co-operative, was he silent, was he...?

No, but he didn't say anything about the Van Gogh.

He was denying, and he didn't say anything.

-"Not me, not me."

-No, "Not me."

You have arrested somebody, but where are the paintings?

I'm not sure there's much that the Van Gogh Museum

could have done about it.

He smashed the window...

..and the fact is there was a three-minute window.

That was the flaw in the system.

If you could do what he could do, if you could climb like Occy,

get in, get out, make your escape.

His mistake was to leave his hat, because inside his hat was hair,

and in his hair was his DNA,

and pretty soon enough they knew who it was who'd done the deed.

The problem was, they didn't know where the paintings were.

One of the few ways to track down the pictures

was to follow the money.

To find out if the suspects were suddenly flush with cash

and, if so, who had it come from?

Dutch prosecutor Willem Nijkerk.

We had wiretaps where they were talking about

a lot of money that they were getting.

They never wanted to say where they got the money from.

So the fact that part of your evidence

actually has them talking about money,

that suggests that they must already have sold the paintings by 2004.

Yes.

We have indications that they sold the paintings quite fast.

There is a wiretap dated in March 2003,

when they are talking about an amount of 50,000 euros.

And that was only half of what they were expecting.

Also, the police found out that they were buying watches, cars,

they made trips to New York, to Disneyland in Paris.

Amsterdam is not only famous for its art,

it's also been plagued by a violent criminal underworld.

I've been told that, in early 2003,

Occy Durham attempted to sell the stolen Van Gogh paintings

to a notorious figure in that Dutch underworld,

Cor van Hout,

who, amongst other serious crimes, had previously been involved

in the kidnapping of the heir to the Heineken fortune.

Occy and Cor were said to have been negotiating the price

for the stolen pictures,

but then Cor was suddenly assassinated in a gangland hit.

That left Occy and his accomplice with a major problem.

They needed a new buyer.

There is one tantalising piece of evidence from a police wiretap made

before Occy D was arrested, in which he describes the moment

when he sold the paintings.

He received the money,

apparently, in a notorious club in the centre of Old Amsterdam,

and he received it from a mysterious man called Pinocchio.

Then the trail went cold.

They couldn't find anybody with an alias "Pinocchio".

Occy Durham was put on trial in May 2004.

The DNA and the wiretaps were enough to put him away.

He was sentenced to four and a half years in prison

and ordered to pay 350,000 euros in compensation to the Van Gogh Museum.

But he still wasn't saying what had happened to the paintings.

Some organisation, or somebody, was keeping him very quiet indeed.

I was struck by something that the judge said at the end.

He said something about what the crime was, a crime against...

..against culture, almost.

Well, cultural heritage, Dutch cultural heritage.

These are very important works of art,

and it really struck me that they were stolen just for ordinary money

and buying watches, going to New York, buying a car.

These guys didn't know, whatsoever, what they were doing.

In Holland, it's as if Dutch art really is part of the soul of the nation.

I hope it is,

at least for a lot of people.

I don't think, for the two burglars that were convicted in this case,

I don't think they are art lovers.

But mostly the Dutch, they do love art, yes.

So why do we care so much about Van Gogh?

Why does his work continue to move so many people

from so many different backgrounds,

so many different parts of the world?

Well, I think it's partly because...

..he traced the movements of his own troubled soul in art

with such brilliance, such delicacy, such responsiveness,

that you can't help but be affected by it.

Here, Vincent is having a good day.

This is one of those days when nature seems touched by God's blessing.

He looks at the tree in blossom, it's aflame like a candelabra.

All is well. There'll be other, far darker paintings,

and I think that's also one of the things that moves us about him,

the fact that we know his life ended in tragedy.

We know his life...

..ended in darkness,

and yet we can feel his struggle against the darkness throughout.

So it's two things, it's genius and it's tragedy.

And one forgets very easily that his career, from when he decided to be

a painter to the moment he died, is astonishingly short,

less than ten years.

His maturity, his brilliant years, maybe just four.

And I think it's that simplicity,

tragedy and beauty of this life

that has moved people ever since...

..he was discovered after his death.

The missing paintings tell their own stories as well,

and each has a special significance in Van Gogh's life and work.

The thieves could never have known it,

but when they stole this small, slightly dark seascape,

they were actually stealing a really important little piece

of Vincent van Gogh's career as an artist,...

..because he painted this picture in the second half of August 1882.

Up until that point, he'd only worked in watercolour and in pencil,

but his brother Theo had encouraged him to paint in oils,

and, on this occasion, he followed the advice.

He bought some tubes of oil paint,

a new invention that allowed artists to come out into the landscape,

and he came here, of all places, Scheveningen Beach,

in the middle of a gale,

and he started painting this scene.

Imagine added to it a boat and a few figures struggling with the sea.

Van Gogh struggled with his canvas.

The wind blew so hard that, every time he applied paint,

it became encrusted with sand.

He had to scrape it off and start again.

Finally he finished.

The result in the end was this small but potent image.

And as he said to his brother...

"I can't believe I never discovered oil painting before.

"There's a kind of infinity in oil painting."

"I can't put it into words. I feel that painting is in my marrow.

"It's in my very bones."

From that moment on,

Van Gogh knew that he was destined to be a painter.

The other missing painting from the heist was also of great personal

significance both to Van Gogh and to his family,

and one man was particularly affected by news of the theft.

Well, Vincent himself, he had no children.

But his brother Theo, who was the most important person

in Vincent's life,

his brother Theo is my great-grandfather,

and I'm very proud to represent,

well, Vincent and Theo's heritage.

I'm trying to imagine how on earth it must have felt for you

when this terrible news comes, in 2002,

that these criminals have entered the museum

and taken these two paintings.

We didn't understand why they...

..took these paintings, so it felt as a great loss.

The Nuenen Church painting...

..that's even more personal, I would imagine, to a family member,

because I believe Vincent actually created it for his mother.

He created it for his mother,

early 1884 and Vincent's father passed away

and he was a minister in the Reformed Church.

And the church itself is the church in which Vincent's father,

the pastor, used to preach, is that right?

Used to preach, yeah.

So it's one of the most personal...

..paintings for...

..the Van Gogh family.

I suppose, often, when...

..things of this kind are stolen,

the hope is that they will come to light quite quickly.

But sometimes, when it doesn't work out like that, there's the fear,

you know, that maybe this is going to be a long process.

Maybe we'll never find them.

What were your feelings?

I felt quite pessimistic

and I thought of these paintings very often

and I thought, "Most possibly, I'll never see them again."

So just how do you go about getting stolen paintings back?

In 2005, in Hoorn, in northern Holland,

24 Dutch masterpieces were snatched in a single heist,

ripped from their frames.

They disappeared for a decade.

But some of them were suddenly recovered in 2016.

Their story gives a chilling and disturbing insight

into the murky world of international art crime.

There are no "art criminals"

who earn their money only by stealing art,

they are just plain criminals.

But they don't care about what they are stealing.

Because, if you see how these paintings were treated,

they were treated so badly.

We got them back in very, very, very bad condition.

But they didn't care, the paintings are just some goods to trade.

They are a currency in the criminal circuit.

So, um...

..the thief, who stole our paintings,

he probably got rid of them in two weeks or so.

They changed hands a lot of times

and, eventually, they turned up in Ukraine, of all places.

The theft of the Westfries paintings

was reported to international police art squads.

Although, how they subsequently got all the way to the Ukraine

remains unclear.

The whole episode's an alarming indication

of the global reach of organised crime.

The stolen art was traded several times,

finally ending up with Ukrainian warlords,

intelligence officers and senior government officials.

The man who was instrumental in finally recovering them

is an independent art crime investigator, Arthur Brand.

The art world and the criminal world are far more incorporated

than most people think.

So, let me into your world a little bit.

Who do you have to deal with,

where do you begin to look

when something well-known, or even obscure, goes missing?

This world is very small, the criminal underworld.

And they talk like old ladies at a tea club.

They gossip the whole day, so eventually you get a lead.

Stolen art goes from hand to hand very quickly.

It's used as a...

..as a banknote in the criminal underworld.

So they use it for trading arms, drugs.

What's the value in the underworld?

The standard is 10%.

It means, if you steal a painting worth 10 million,

you can use it as a banknote in the underworld for a million.

10% of the value on the open market.

This use of paint on canvas as a black-market currency

puts the art itself at great risk.

You must understand, these criminals are not art experts.

We are here in a room with perfect air-conditioning,

perfect conditions for these paintings.

These guys have no idea,

they store it somewhere in a humid place

and what you see is, after a couple of years,

some of these paintings fall apart.

So you cannot wait 20 years because it gets worse and worse.

Pictures come alive in a different way each time you look at them afresh.

But if I've learned one lesson on this journey

it's that criminals don't see paintings like that.

They see them as objects, objects of exchange,

collateral in drug deals,

tokens, perhaps, in deals to be made with the cops or the courts.

But going back to Amsterdam, by 2005, Occy the thief,

he's been convicted.

But he's not saying anything.

Where could the paintings be?

Holland? Somewhere unexpected like the Ukraine?

The fact is, nobody knew.

How were the pictures going to be recovered?

We never stopped looking for the paintings

and, during the years, our intelligence service

sometimes they got some information about where the paintings might be.

Did you ever, in a dark moment, think

maybe the paintings have been destroyed?

Of course. On the other hand...

..we always kept hope,

so that's why we always looked into every information we got

about the whereabouts of these paintings.

In the absence of new information,

the investigation here in Amsterdam stalled.

But then, suddenly, there was a new lead 1,000 miles away.

An earlier Van Gogh heist in Rome would eventually reveal,

for the first time,

concrete information about the Van Gogh paintings stolen in Amsterdam.

And it was the recovery of this stolen Van Gogh

that would provide the lead.

This is Van Gogh's The Gardener, of 1889.

A far cry from the paintings stolen from Amsterdam.

This is a picture that dates towards the end of his life,

the colours are much brighter.

But there's a darkness here, too.

1889 was the year in which Van Gogh was confined to a lunatic asylum.

Not long before creating this work of art,

he was found in his studio in the asylum,

having drunk kerosene from his lamp, having eaten his own paint,

apparently in the first attempt at suicide.

So why would he paint a gardener at this terrible time?

I think he had in mind a story from the Bible,

Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene

as a gardener after his resurrection.

I also think it's important to remember

Van Gogh had been a deeply Christian man,

had been a preacher in his youth,

tended to think in biblical terms.

Is he looking for some hope of finding Christ again,

finding some kind of salvation for himself?

We can never say for sure,

but we can say that this is a deeply poignant image.

A deeply vulnerable painting

and, here in Rome, at the end of the 20th century,

it would, once again, prove to be vulnerable,

but in a rather different way.

Masked gunmen have stolen three priceless works of art from a museum in Rome.

Thieves tied up three security guards

before getting away with two paintings by Van Gogh

and one by Cezanne.

Italy's elite Carabinieri art squad,

one of the top art crime units in Europe,

put one of their most senior and experienced detectives on the case,

Colonel Ferdinando Musella.

Colonel Musella's experience in recovering The Gardener

would prove crucial when he next got a lead

on the two Van Goghs stolen in Holland.

I'd heard that, in 2007, he received some very promising information.

So I asked him if he could talk about it.

It's a shame he didn't want to talk about the 2007 operation,

because I've heard a lot about that, a lot of rumours.

Great stories of policemen dressed up as Neapolitan pimps,

with blondes on their arm,

posing as interested purchasers of the pictures.

But I guess the one thing we do know about that operation

is that it didn't work,

because after 2007, the paintings still remained unrecovered.

What was clear from Musella's investigations

was that whoever owned the Van Gogh Museum's missing paintings

was almost certainly Italian.

Which would explain his Italian nickname - Pinocchio.

Meanwhile, more Van Gogh paintings were going missing from galleries

around the world.

In 2008, in Switzerland,

this Van Gogh painting was stolen.

Two years after that, in 2010,

thieves took an earlier work from a museum in Egypt.

In Amsterdam, six years went by with no reliable leads

to the missing Van Gogh pictures.

But, in 2016, everything changed.

Thanks to a quiet, but persistent investigation

in one of Italy's most violent, most beautiful cities.

Normally, I come to Naples, well, of course, for the coffee,

for the opera,

for the great masterpieces in the museums and churches

and just for the ramshackle beauty of the old city.

But there's another darker side of Naples.

Under normal circumstances,

I steer clear of it.

But these aren't normal circumstances.

ITALIAN RAP MUSIC PLAYS

Organised crime has plagued Naples for years.

One of the region's senior prosecutors

leading the fight against it is Stefania Castaldi.

Who or what are the Camorra?

Well, they are one of the oldest and largest

criminal organisations in Italy,

made up of a number of often ferociously competing factions.

Unlike the Mafia, which is based in Sicily,

the Camorra has its roots in Naples,

although its tentacles have reached across the world.

-NEWSREEL:

-The soldiers poured into Naples...

Largely stamped out under Mussolini,

the Camorra captured power again during the Second World War,

when the US military made secret deals

with crime bosses to overthrow the Italian dictator.

Today, the Camorra's main activities include drug-trafficking,

the illegal dumping of toxic waste, money laundering, extortion,

prostitution, murder,

and the occasional dealings in stolen art.

And just a matter of months after the Van Goghs were pinched,

a brutal war broke out in Naples

between different factions of the Camorra

for control of the drug trade.

Much of that turf war was fought out here in Scampia,

a '60s urban development in the north of Naples.

A local journalist has been covering the area

and the Camorra wars for years.

So why did the Camorra have such a stronghold in Scampia?

What's special about Scampia to make this a hotbed for drugs?

Every mafia is stronger in areas with many poor families.

Unemployed people must try to get money.

And Camorra uses desperation of people to make power.

So it feeds, like every mafia, it feeds on poverty

and feeds on despair.

This is the mafia story.

So instead of becoming a baker, or a pharmacist,

you become a drug dealer, because it's the only way to go up.

It was just like a war.

All for this control of drug business?

-Yes.

-Do we know how much money is at stake here,

for the group of the Camorra that wins control of Scampia,

how much can they hope to make in one year?

We said that drugs money, when they buy

-a big...

-Consignment?

-They take all the money

-in a big, um, sacco...

-In a bag.

-..and lo pesano.

And they weigh it! They don't count the money, they weigh the money?

Yes.

Scampia, it's a tough place, you can feel it's a tough place.

The truth is that decisions made here in the 1960s

that led to the creation of these honeycomb-like buildings,

created perfect conditions for those wasps, the Camorra, to flourish.

That led to a horrendous drugs war in which many,

many people lost their lives.

At the end of which, someone ended up with an awful lot of blood money.

But who was that person?

In the prosecutor's office, Stefania Castaldi's investigation

was getting close to senior Camorra crime bosses.

And then she made a significant discovery, which,

for the very first time,

would provide a direct link

to the Van Gogh paintings stolen in Amsterdam.

But who is Raffaele Imperiale,

and just how is he connected to the missing paintings?

This is the picturesque town of Castellammare,

overlooking the Bay of Naples.

A far cry, you might think, from Scampia,

but the influence of the Camorra reaches even here.

It's not everyday that I find myself in the back of a police car.

But today I'm being shown around Imperiale's home turf

by Colonel Giovanni Salerno, an expert on the case.

From his Amsterdam coffee shop, legally selling cannabis,

Imperiale would expand his business,

eventually organising large-scale shipments of drugs for the Camorra.

By his own account,

Imperiale was earning between 15 and 20 million euros a year

from drug-trafficking.

But there was still no sign of the missing Van Goghs,

stolen and first sold to Pinocchio in Amsterdam over ten years earlier.

The breakthrough came in September 2016,

and it came from a pretty unusual source - the suspect himself.

Mario Cerrone was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment.

But although Imperiale was put on trial in Naples,

he wasn't going to jail any time soon.

He had the foresight to relocate to Dubai,

which has no extradition treaty with Italy.

He was well out of reach of the authorities.

Raffaele Imperiale spilled all the beans to the Italian prosecutors

in an extraordinary written confession.

Here it is.

Dated the 29th of August 2016.

"Io, sottoscritto Raffaele Imperiale..."

"I, the undersigned Raffaele Imperiale,

born in Castellammare di Stabia, declare the following."

Now he goes into great detail about how he got into the drug business

in Amsterdam in the 1990s,

and he goes into surprising detail

about just how much money he was making.

"Migliaia di chili di cocaina..."

He says, "Thousands of kilos of cocaine were being sold."

And what did he do with that money?

Well, as far as we're concerned,

the interesting part comes at the very end

of this lengthy document.

In annexe one,

part of Imperiale's listing of his personal possessions,

which he's prepared to surrender to the state.

"Due quadri di Vincent van Gogh."

"Two paintings by Vincent van Gogh."

"Di valore inestimabile"

"Of priceless worth, which I purchased in 2002,

"using the resources of the organisation, for five million euros."

Now we know the real identity of Pinocchio - Raffaele Imperiale.

This is the only known photograph of him, rather blurry,

taken surreptitiously on the Isle of Man,

where I imagine he was...

..laundering some drug money, putting some funds offshore.

But why would he have said that he paid five million euros

for the paintings

when the Dutch were sure that only 100,000 euros had changed hands?

It's certainly very Pinocchio.

HE WHISTLES

Why exaggerate?

Why would he have wanted the paintings in the first place?

And why did he confess?

The answers lie in the Italian legal system itself,

in a clause designed to encourage witnesses to speak out

against organised crime.

Imperiale always knew that valuable stolen goods, like the Van Goghs,

could be traded against time in prison.

Well, it's quite something to meet someone

who was at the epicentre of the Camorra drug wars

in the early 2000s.

Goodness knows how many people she's put away,

goodness knows what she's seen.

But I think what she really nailed was the question of motive.

You know, the question that's been bugging me throughout

this investigation, if you like,

why do these bad guys, why do they want paintings

by the great artists, like Van Gogh?

They know perfectly well that they can never sell them.

Well, as Stefania explained,

it's written into the Italian legal code that if you...

..if you give up some of your ill-gotten gains,

if you return them...

..you get a much lower sentence.

And if you have got something as valuable,

not just to Italy but to the world,

as a pair of paintings by Van Gogh, they are, if you like,

the crook's ultimate bargaining chips

when it comes to the final reckoning

- how many years is he going to get behind bars?

But after all this,

still the question - where were the paintings?

Although Imperiale's father has never taken part in

his son's criminal activities, or been investigated,

the search switched to his property.

After nearly 14 years,

the international investigation into the theft of

two priceless Van Gogh paintings ended in an Italian kitchen.

The search was finally over.

The missing Van Gogh paintings were finally resurrected

before the eyes of the world at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.

These just symbolise the story of a miracle, really,

because it's real coup that these works have been found again.

And it's also a matter of, of course,

local and national pride here in Italy.

It's a coup against, also, the organised crime.

So, in that sense, it is a celebration on many levels.

There's now this added dimension of the crime and good versus evil,

and now the good has won.

It has always been an open wound, in a way, for all these years.

And even though those works may not be,

on the face of it, really famous works by Vincent van Gogh,

they're really important, first, historically

and also in terms of the family history

and the personal history of the artist.

So, in that sense, you know,

they really left a gap when they disappeared

and we're very happy that we can fill that gap again.

Six months later,

the paintings finally came back home to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Before going back on permanent display,

they need some tender loving care.

Well, the first thing that was clearly visible

when they came back was that, in the left corner,

a piece is missing.

-I can see.

-The original support and the paint layers.

It's a piece approximately two by seven centimetres.

Quite a fragile thing, then.

-Yeah.

-But, all in all,

I would say, given its status...

Mm-hmm.

..as possibly the very earliest oil painting by Vincent van Gogh,

it's actually in really good nick.

Yeah, it is, quite, yeah.

Very happy

that no more severe damage has been done to the painting.

Yeah. Now, in his letters,

he says it's so difficult because the wind is blowing,

there's this terrible storm.

-Yeah.

-And he actually refers to the fact

that the painting gets covered in sand.

Have you found any evidence of that,

looking at the picture under the microscope or in X-ray?

Yeah, yeah, we have.

It's difficult to see with the naked eye,

but with the microscope they are clearly visible.

Especially in the sea part, you can see them everywhere, actually.

What a thing.

It is extraordinary that this painting,

which was stolen...

..should have gone on this huge circular journey

and have come all the way back, now, here.

And I think at the time when it was stolen,

some people tried to be cheerful by saying,

"Oh, well, at least it's not one of Van Gogh's great paintings."

Mm-hmm.

But when I look at it now with you, it seems to me that,

well, that was wrong.

It might not be one of his masterpieces,

but it's a very, very important painting.

It's a very important piece of his wonderful,

tragic, beautiful life.

-Yes.

-Because it's really the first time that we see him taking

this material, oil paint,

that he would do such magical things with

and becoming excited by using it.

-Yeah.

-So it's a fantastically important picture.

-Yes.

-It's a wonderful thing that it's come back.

Yeah, it is.

It's the beginning of something, it's wonderfully exciting.

So, Willem, here it is.

-Here it is.

-How amazing!

Wow. Incredible.

And you can imagine how extremely happy we were

and really, really touched that this painting...

..came back home, back in its own home, the Van Gogh Museum.

Wonderful. I feel very lucky, actually, to be here with you,

looking at the painting.

Initially, he made this

and dedicated this painting to his mother.

His father passed away one year later

and he wanted to make a tribute to his father,

and he added all those figures, darkly painted,

as if they are attending a funeral,

and symbolically the funeral of his father, of course.

-Goodness.

-Yeah.

-Beautiful painting. Really, really.

-It is a beautiful painting.

At its heart, this has been a story, for me,

about the sacred and the profane.

Think of Vincent van Gogh,

with his sacred sense of mission to be a painter,

striving, struggling to create these visions of a blessed world.

And then...

..think of the murky underworld,

inhabited by characters like Raffaele Imperiale,

a man prepared to use his drug money to buy, on the black market...

..paintings by Van Gogh.

I don't think we should be surprised by the links

between the criminal world and the world of great art,

because criminals aren't stupid.

They know, they understand, the great value

that we set on works of art by the great painters.

They understand that...

..if they own one or two of those things,

when the time comes for their last judgment...

..they can use them, they can give them back...

..in order to get a few years off.

The very nature of the transaction,

in which the masterpiece is the criminal's bargaining chip,

means that, in almost every case, we will get the paintings back.

But it isn't a straightforward process

and you do always need a little stroke of luck.

So if you hadn't been

looking that deeply into the organisation...

-Yes.

-..you would never have got him...

-Yes.

-..and you would never have known about these Van Goghs.

Yes.