Pay ransom or the Caravaggio gets it
Priest tells how Mafia sliced off a piece of £16m artwork it held ‘hostage’
A MASTERPIECE missing for 50 years was treated like a kidnap victim by the Mafia who sliced off a fragment in an attempt to get a ransom, an Italian priest revealed.
Caravaggio’s Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence dating from 1609 was cut from its frame in 1969 as it hung in a church in Sicily.
The £16million painting has been one of the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ stolen artworks ever since and investigators have discovered it ended up in the home of a powerful Mafia don.
But the Sicilian Mafia initially tried to get a ransom and even sent a tiny piece to a local Catholic priest with instructions on how to ‘make a deal’.
In newly unearthed interviews from 2001, Monsignor Rocco Benedetto said: ‘A few months after the theft, a letter arrived at my home. In the letter, the thieves declared: “We have the painting. If you want to make a deal, you have to submit this advert in the Giornale di Sicilia [Sicily’s daily newspaper]”.’
Church officials played along then a second letter arrived, Mr Benedetto told documentary maker Massimo D’Anolfi in a film which will be screened for the first time next month.
‘The letter was accompanied by a piece of the painting, a tiny piece of the canvas, which was intended to make clear to me that they really had the Caravaggio,’ said the priest.
Mr D’Anolfi told The Guardian: ‘The Mafia was doing with the painting what they normally do with kidnapping victims.
‘They had sent a piece of the painting just like they normally send a finger or an ear.’ A request for a second advert was refused by local officials. Then Mr Benedetto was accused of organising the theft before being ruled out of inquiries.
The priest, who died in 2003, also told how the painting was proudly put on display during meetings of crime bosses.
‘[The police] had known for years the location,’ he said in the film. ‘It was in the province of Palermo. The Mafiosi would use it to flaunt their power.’
Last year, a Mob killer under arrest said the work had hung in the home of boss Gaetano Badalamenti. After his death in 2004, it was reportedly moved through a Swiss art dealer.