The police of Rio de Janeiro found a stolen painting with a value of 300 million reais (more than 57 million euros) on Wednesday under the bed of a crook, reports The Guardian. Work, Sol Punte (Setting Sun) from 1929 by Tarsila do Amaral, was stolen from the widow of an art dealer and collector.
A gang of scammers stole from the 82-year-old woman sixteen paintings with an estimated value of 135 million euros and also stole a collection of jewelry worth more than a million euros. Police arrested four suspects, including the victim’s daughter.
The criminals organized the art theft around fake predictions from a false psychic. According to police, in 2020 the victim’s daughter gave this so-called clairvoyant order to approach her mother when she got out of a bank in Copacabana.
The charlatan convinced the woman that her daughter was dying and took her to a fortune teller and a Brazilian priestess who confirmed this false prediction. The trio then offered to intervene spiritually for a fee. In the weeks that followed, the woman paid them hundreds of thousands of euros for their services.
When the widow became suspicious and refused to pay further, she was forcibly locked up in her home in Ipanema, a beach district of Rio de Janeiro. There she was threatened, beaten and gradually robbed of the art collection she had inherited from her late husband.
The loot also included Di Cavalcanti’s Mascarada and two other paintings by Amaral: Pont-Neuf and O Sono. Some works appear to have been sold to collectors overseas. Two paintings ended up in a museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while three other paintings were recovered at an art gallery in São Paulo.