If you were of the mind to steal a very expensive artwork from a prominent art gallery you’d probably plan it down to the tiniest detail, take every possible outcome into consideration, and get together a team of experts to assist in the operation.

Or…you could just walk into the gallery in the middle of the day, take it off the wall, and hope for the best.

That was what one man in Russia decided to do this past weekend. Here’s The Guardian:

On Sunday evening, a man in jeans and a dark shirt walked up to a painting by landscape artist Arkhip Kuindzhi in Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery and lifted it right off the wall. Then, as others looked on, he grabbed the frame in one hand and strolled out of the gallery.

It took several minutes for museum patrons to realise they had witnessed a theft. One eyewitness said that he had mistaken the thief “for a museum employee”. By the time the alarm was raised, the man had already vanished on to the street.

In other words, the theft was so idiotic that people didn’t register that it was happening.

According to some experts, the painting is valued at around £760 000 (R13,7 million), so the gallery wasn’t going to let this one slide.

The video below is in Russian, but you can see the thief stealing the painting, the police raid on his house, and the recovery of the painting:

It took the police roughly 12 hours to catch up with the 31-year-old thief who immediately denied the crime, claiming not to know where he was while it was being committed.

He then told the police that he had hidden the painting of the 1 234-metre Ai-Petri mountain at a building site, where it was soon recovered.

Clearly a master thief.

This guy should never have given up his day job.

[source:guardian]