An alleged art thief suspected of stealing a Salvador Dali painting right off the wall of an Upper East Side art gallery during business hours has been arrested exactly eight months later. You may recall the high-profile caper: On June 19th of last year, a man posing as a potential art customer at the Venus Over Manhattan gallery on Madison Avenue was seen on surveillance camera swiping the 11-inch watercolor, worth an estimated $150,000. He then casually slipped the painting ("Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio") into a shopping bag and walked nonchalantly out of the gallery like Thomas Freaking Crown.
Salvador Dalí’s “Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio,” 1949
The Manhattan DA announced tonight that they've arrested the man allegedly responsible, one Phivos Istavrioglou, 29. Prosecutors say that in the midst of the widespread media attention in the wake of the theft, Istavrioglou (Twitter?) sent the painting back to the gallery from Greece. It was intercepted by the NYPD in a cardboard shipping tube at JFK, en route to the gallery. But investigators weren't about to just let the matter drop, oh no.
A previous shoplifting bust was the key to Istavrioglou's undoing. In a statement, Ray Kelly said, "More than ‘persistence of memory’ helped solve this case. I commend detectives for matching a fingerprint in the Dali theft to a shoplifting last year in which Blueprint juice was taken from a Manhattan Whole Foods, resulting in Istavrioglou’s identification." As we've warned in the past, shoplifting from Whole Foods is not a risk-free endeavor.
The finger prints on the bottle were linked to to prints on the poster tube that Istavrioglou allegedly sent with the poster. Over the next several months, an undercover NYPD detective posing as a business manager for an art gallery successfully lured him back to NYC on the pretense of some sort of art-related transaction. On February 16th, Istavrioglou was detained by federal Homeland Security agents at Kennedy Airport and taken into custody by NYPD detectives.
Istavrioglou was finally arraigned today on a charge of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree. Manhattan DA Cy Vance said, "It was almost surreal how this theft was committed - a thief is accused of putting a valuable Salvador Dalí drawing into a shopping bag in the middle of the afternoon, in full view of surveillance cameras. This brazen heist from a Manhattan gallery is the latest in a string of cases involving theft or fraud in the art world that my Office has prosecuted. Today’s indictment brings us one step closer to bringing an international art caper to a close."
