In search of lost time

Forty years ago, on a spring night in April 1983, a thief bypassed security at the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, entering the building under the cover of darkness. The burglar stole 106 rare clocks worth tens of millions of dollars, then vanished without a trace.

The crime had all the elements of a high-stakes drama: a mysterious theft, befuddled investigators, a romance that spanned decades and outlasted a prison sentence, and two bequeathments of valuable timepieces (among them a pocket watch commissioned for Marie Antoinette).

In the two decades following the theft, authorities made little progress on the investigation. The heist seemed like a mystery that would never be solved—until a deathbed confession by a career criminal led to the recovery of almost all of the missing timepieces. Fern Reiss, Smithsonian

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