‘Sleight of Hand’: how a museum heist became a piece of art
The reality of crime is not like how it plays out in our favourite stories. These often aren’t gallant, intelligent rogues making a stand against an unjust system; they’re desperate people willing to sacrifice their morals and risk everything for the sake of financial security.
Even then, that’s a very optimistic way of looking at it. A lot of the time, it’s for the sake of satisfying their own greed dressed up as financial security. Yet sometimes, you stumble across a story of a crime so spectacular you half suspect you’re being played yourself. One that makes you believe there’s a con at the heart of this story, a great big twist in the tale that would ruin everything that is being kept out of sight. Yet no, the more you look, the more you realise this is the real deal. Specifically, because its perpetrator captured the entire heist on camera.
Ilê Sartuzi was a Brazilian artist studying for his master’s degree at Goldsmiths University in 2023. His studies took him to the British Museum on many occasions, an institute that is, of course, built on a legacy of theft from other countries. The more Sartuzi visited the museum, the more he saw that actual British history wasn’t on display. When one of the actually British exhibits, a silver coin from the 17th Century, was handed to a guest by one of the volunteer guides, an idea popped into his mind.
He spent the next year planning his grand theft. He would give the British Museum a taste of its own medicine, stealing a part of its own culture and see how they liked it. What’s more, he decided to work it into his studies too, documenting the planning procedure as part of his master’s degree, before setting off to complete the heist one year after conceiving the idea.
Sartuzi then totally blew it.
Why did this museum heist nearly fall apart?
Sartuzi’s idea was to pose as a tourist and ask to be shown the coin. Then, when it was handed to him by the guide, he would hand a fake version of the coin back while pocketing the original. Despite spending a year working on his sleight of hand tricks, the ruse failed. The guide spotted the ruse and immediately asked Sartuzi to leave. Thankfully, he had a backup plan that involved another thing he’d spent the last year cultivating, a large beard.
Sartuzi went home, shaved and hoped that this would be enough to get him past security the next day. Despite this Herculean hubris, it worked. Sartuzi got past security, got another guide to show him the coin, and, by creating a slight diversion thanks to one of the three friends he had filming him, successfully replaced the coin with his high-quality fake. The guide replaced the fake and Sartuzi went on his way. Yet that wasn’t the prestige of Sartuzi’s little magic trick.
Hilariously, the museum didn’t even realise that their coin had been pinched until after Sartuzi posted about his stunt on Instagram. However, there was no legal action that the museum could take against the young artist. Because the coin, which could be handled by visitors any way they wished, hadn’t actually left the museum. No, rather than make off with it to sell on the black market, Sartuzi had dropped it into their donations box, and they would have been none the wiser had he not pointed this out to them.
Sartuzi submitted this whole saga as his final project at Goldsmiths. According to a spokesperson from the university, it received “a very high mark”. Deservedly so, too.