Located in the city’s Royal Palace, the Grünes Gewölbe, or Green Vault, was started as a dedicated effort for storing precious metals, art, and artifacts collected by Saxon elector August the Strong, who later become king of Poland from 1723 and 1729.

Five members of a criminal gang broke into the Green Vault in a nighttime heist in November 2019. They were sentenced to six years in prison for stealing the trove of 18th-century jewelry last year.

The group, known as the Remmo Clan, a family crime network operating in Germany, smashed the glass in the display cases using an axe, pocketed 21 pieces of jewelry, and fled within five minutes. The looted Saxon royal artifacts contain more than 4,300 diamonds and is collectively valued at €114 million (about $125 million). The thieves were ultimately sentenced on charges of armed robbery, aggravated arson, and grievous bodily harm.

The Green Vault announced the public reopening of the gems and other relics with an exhibition restored to “almost all its glory”, with the majority of the jewels having been recovered.

“The jewels are presented exactly as they were returned to the [Dresden State Art Collections] — with damage that is barely visible, although in need of restoration,” Marion Ackermann, director general of the Dresden State Art Collections, said in a statement.

Following the heist, the regional court allowed the recovered artifacts to be returned to the museum for display.

“In 2019, criminal clans from Berlin took possession of our cultural heritage,” Saxony Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer said in German in a post on X. “But we fought for our treasure!”

Though the breast star of the Polish Order of the White Eagle decorated in diamonds and a diamond-covered sword were recovered by German law enforcement authorities in late 2022, a large breast bow of Queen Amalie Auguste, made of 611 small diamonds, silver and gold, and an epaulet that includes the so-called Saxon White diamond, is still among the items missing.

An international commission of experts is expected to convene on how to restore the recovered jewels.

But did a GQ editor’s relationship with Warner Bros. play a role in the softening and ultimate removal of the story? 

GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch is producing a movie at Warner Bros. titled “The Great Chinese Art Heist,” which is based on a 2018 GQ article by Alex W. Palmer. Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”) is attached to direct and produce the film, which chronicles an audacious European museum crime wave that targeted Chinese antiquities. The project already has a script in place by Ken Cheng, Jessica Gao and Jimmy O. Yang. Sources say Welch was involved in the discussions surrounding the removal of Bailey’s initial story and made the call to pull the revamped story, which ran some 500 words shorter than the published version. Those same sources say Warner Bros. Discovery complained about the initial story to two GQ editors, one of whom was Welch. 

A representative for GQ said, “A piece published by GQ on Monday was not properly edited before going live. After a revision was published, the writer of the piece asked to have their byline removed, at which point GQ decided to unpublish the piece in question. GQ regrets the editorial error that led to a story being published before it was ready.”

But a spokesperson for Warner Bros. Discovery offered a slightly different take.

“The freelance reporter made no attempt to reach out to Warner Bros Discovery to fact-check the substance of the piece before publishing — a standard practice for any reputable news outlet,” the spokesperson said. “As is also standard practice, we contacted the outlet and asked that numerous inaccuracies be corrected. In the process of doing so, the editors ultimately decided to pull the piece.”

Still, removing an entire story from a news outlet’s website would constitute an extreme action and is almost never done, except in the most egregious cases of journalistic malpractice. Even then, an editor’s note would typically appear when readers clicked on an excised story with an explanation of why it was killed. 

Welch’s involvement in the decision-making process would constitute a conflict of interest. As a producer on a Warner Bros. movie in early development, Welch would meet the criteria from the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics that says reporters and editors should “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived [and] disclose unavoidable conflicts.” Furthermore, journalistic best practices dictate that stories never just disappear and that any significant corrections be noted with full transparency. A Warner Bros. Discovery source says no one at the corporate level was aware of Welch’s ties to the movie studio.

As for what changed between the first and second versions of the piece, it appears from archived versions to be mostly tonal in nature. Gone from the softened version was Bailey’s description of Zaslav as akin to Richard Gere’s ruthless financier character in “Pretty Woman” who boasts of selling off companies for their parts, as well as mention of Zaslav co-hosting a party in Cannes with Graydon Carter for the movie studio’s 100th anniversary.

Bailey declined to comment on Warner Bros. Discovery’s characterization of his work as containing multiple inaccuracies or that he never reached out to Zaslav for comment.

Roger Friedman first reported about the missing article on his Showbiz411.com.

The group, which had previously committed a string of high-profile heists, broke into the palace’s Grünes Gewölbe, or Green Vault, in an audacious nighttime heist in November 2019. They were sentenced on charges of armed robbery, aggravated arson, and grievous bodily harm, according to the Dresden prosecutor’s office.

Two of the defendants, who were minors during the heist, were handed juvenile sentences of five years, and four years and four months. Around 40 suspected accomplices to the crime are still wanted by authorities.

The convicted men belong to the “Remmo clan,” an extended family based in Berlin and wanted for numerous ties to organized crime. This past January, defendant Rabieh Remmo told police how the men entered Jewel Room, one of 10 rooms in the vault, through damaged bars on a window. The room held a collection of 3,000 artifacts assembled by August the Strong, an 18th-century prince-elector of the German state of Saxony, as well as a monarch of Poland and Lithuania.

The thieves smashed the glass in the display cases using an axe, pocketed 21 pieces of jewelry, and fled within five minutes. The looted Saxon royal artifacts contain more than 4,300 diamonds and is collectively valued at €114 million (about $124 million).

“I don’t have to tell you how shocked we are by the brutality of this break-in,” Marion Ackermann, general director of the consortium of cultural institutions known as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, said in a public address shortly after the theft was uncovered. “As you know, the historical and cultural value of this is immeasurable.”

Dresden police have since recovered a “considerable portion” of the historic pieces amid “exploratory talks” with the defendants about a potential plea deal. Some artifacts were found damaged, while others remain missing. In a statement, the presiding judge Andreas Ziegel bemoaned the theft of “one of the oldest and richest treasure collections in the world.”

Police have detained three brothers, aged 50, 53 and 55, who allegedly targeted homes in Barcelona’s high-end neighboorhoods that held fine art and luxury goods. The robbery ring has been under investigation since January 2022 as part of operation ‘Gresca,’ and, on Friday, police announced that a trove of stolen jewelry and banknotes and art, including two 100-year-old illustrations by Dalí, were seized from the suspect’s hideout.

The Dalí charcoal drawings, pastoral scenes on brown paper and valued around $300,000, were authenticated by the Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, which manages the Surrealist’s legacy. The two works date to 1922 and were created on the request of the writer Pere Coromine for his book Les Gràcies de l’Empordà (The Empordà’s Graces in Catalan).

Two other suspects were arrested on charges of receiving the stolen goods and have been released along with the three brothers were released on bail ahead of the trial, per a report in Reuters in Friday.

Five works attributed to Miro were recovered and are currently awaiting authentication by the artist’s estate. Two pieces by the painter Paco Sola were also found on the scene, along with precious antiques, such as silver and golden pens, as well as coins and jewels.

The works stolen included Pablo Picasso’s painting Head of a Woman (1934), Piet Mondrian’s painting Stammer Windmill with Summer House (1905), and Guglielmo Caccia’s sketch St. Diego de Alcala in Ecstasy with the Holy Trinity and the Symbols of Passion.

The man, Giorgos Sarmantzopoulos, was found guilty of aggravated theft; the court, however, recognized his good behavior following the heist and suspended his sentence pending his appeal on the condition that he wears a monitor and stays within approximately two miles of his house.

Dubbed the “heist of the century,” the theft occurred on January 9, 2012, when Sarmantzopoulos entered the National Gallery through an unsecured balcony door. He tricked guards by triggering repeated false alarms. He then took the paintings and fled to a staircase leading to the basement, where he removed the paintings from their frames using a pocketknife. Though he maintains that he acted alone, another account detailed a second person who supposedly kept watch.

After the heist, the thief remained at large for nearly a decade.

Sarmantzopoulos was finally arrested in June 2021. Sarmantzopoulos told authorities then that he had been working in construction as a painter and that he stole the paintings out of a self-described “passion for art.”

At the time of his arrest, Sarmantzopoulos handed over the paintings by Picasso and Mondrian to the authorities and claimed the third by Caccia was destroyed.

“The irreversible damage was seen during the inspection. The color consistency was damaged. These works must be kept in special conditions so that they are not damaged,” Eftychia Agathonikou, the director of the museum’s collections, testified in court.

Lawyer and art collector Stelios Garipis said in court that he does not believe that Sarmantzopoulos committed a crime of passion. “He is a member of an international ring. A Dutch detective contacted me and told me that he has a lot of information about him… It was no coincidence that two works were returned,” he said.

“The painting [by Caccia], which is supposed to have been destroyed, was rumored to have appeared in an auction in Florence. I contacted the National Gallery to see what actions they had taken,” Garipis continued. “The simplest thing would have been to send documents [to the auction house] and see who received the painting. Because it wasn’t sold. They [the National Gallery] did nothing.”

It is unclear if the Caccia was actually destroyed. According to Garipis, foreign experts subsequently identified the work in Florence as the same Caccia piece that had been stolen from Athens.

Three glass sculptures by artist Ai Weiwei were snatched from an exhibition at a gallery in Hamburg, Germany, during a daytime heist.

In 1979, five Old Master paintings were stolen from Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha, in the former East Germany’s most audacious art heist. The group of works was recovered last September, and researchers now believe one of them, a Dutch portrait of a bearded elderly man, to be an unknown Rembrandt.

But the researchers who undertook the restoration and scientific analysis of the painting don’t believe either Bol or Lievens to be its artist. Timo Trümper, curator of the exhibition at Schloss Friedenstein, told the Art Newspaper that the signature only suggests that Bol owned the portrait at some point.

The portrait was initially set to be exhibited at the northern Italian gallery in 2020 as part of a series of shows dedicated to the Vienna Secession painter, but the opening was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers announced on Friday that the painting will finally be unveiled to the public this October at the Museum of Rome in Palazzo Braschi in an exhibit exploring Klimt’s period in Italy, which left a profound impression on his artwork. His signature use of gold-leaf was reportedly inspired by a visit to the St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice.

The work will be on view for five months before returning to Ricci-Oddi Modern, which also has plans to display the portrait. Klimt completed the painting in 1917, a year before he died, and it was acquired by Ricci Oddi Gallery in 1925. It depicts a young woman who is believed to the artist’s lover. She is shown before a deep green backdrop, glancing over her shoulder.

In 1997, ten months prior to the theft, an X-ray analysis revealed that that Klimt had created Portrait of a Lady by painting over the earlier piece. An exhibition focused on the discovery of the “double painting” was organized, and the portrait disappeared amid preparation for it. Its broken frame was discovered on the gallery’s roof, leading investigators to believe that the work may have been removed from the wall and reeled on a line through an open skylight by someone connected to the gallery.

Upon its rediscovery in December 2019, Jonathan Papamerenghi, a member of the Piacenza council, told the Italian publication La Repubblica that it was “the most sought-after stolen painting in the world after Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.” It has been estimated to be worth around $70 million.

In March, the Italian publication Arts Culture & Style reported that prosecutors had dropped charges against three people who claimed to have been had been suspected of being involved in the 1997 theft. The suspects said that they had returned the painting to the gallery’s wall as a “gift” to the city, but prosecutors weren’t convinced by their story.

“They have been obscure about the details but have always maintained that the painting was not in the cavity all of that time,” Ermanno Mariani, an Italian journalist first contacted by the purported thieves, told the Guardian in January. “I’m not a technical expert, but it would have been damaged if it had been there for all those years.”

Raffaele Imperiale, thought by police to be a major organized crime figure, was arrested on August 4 and is being held in the United Arab Emirates awaiting extradition, Italy’s state police and financial crimes police organizations said in a joint statement. Imperiale has been sought by authorities since 2016 for alleged money laundering and international drug trafficking.

“He was able to construct an imposing network,’’ investigators said. Interior minister Luciana Lamorgese called Imperiale “a top exponent of international drug trafficking and money laundering, who accumulated huge amounts of illicit wealth thanks above all to cocaine sales.” Throughout his exploits, his ties to the influential Camorra families helped him survive various feuds among the Naples clans.

In 2016, Italian authorities recovered two van Gogh paintings stolen in 2002 from an Amsterdam museum devoted to the artist. The works, View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884–85), had been stashed in a farmhouse on land owned by Imperiale in the town of his birth, Castellammare di Stabia.

“The wealth illicitly accumulated allowed him to buy on the black market two Van Gogh paintings of unquantifiable value,” police said. Earlier this year, Imperiale gave an interview to the Neapolitan newspaper Il Mattino in which he denied any involvement in the theft, but admitted to having bought both works.

“I bought them directly from the thief, because the price was attractive. But most of all because I love art,’’ Imperiale told the publication.

In its statement on the heist, the Sussex Police said that the stolen objects were of “great historical significance.” Also taken during the theft were coronation cups given by Mary to the Earl Marshal.

The rosary beads were held by Mary on her execution day in 1587. The Sussex Police said that, while they were of “little intrinsic value as metal,” they are “irreplaceable” because of their importance to British history. They had long been on display in a cabinet at the castle, along with the other objects.

The heist took place at 10:30 p.m. on May 21, according to the Sussex Police. An alarm sounded after thieves broke in, and police said they arrived “within minutes.” Police are investigating whether an incident involving a saloon that was set on fire in the nearby town of Barlavington is related to the heist.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the trustees of Arundel Castle said, “The stolen items have significant monetary value, but as unique artefacts of the Duke of Norfolk’s collection have immeasurably greater and priceless historical importance. We therefore urge anyone with information to come forward to the police to assist them in returning these treasures back where they belong.”