SAO PAULO, Brazil — Armed with nothing more than a crow bar and a car jack, it took thieves just three minutes to steal paintings by Pablo Picasso and Candido Portinari, worth millions of dollars, from Brazil’s premier modern art museum.
Authorities said they hit the Sao Paulo Museum of Art just before dawn Thursday — a time when guards inside were going through their shift change.
Jumping over a partition, they climbed an open staircase leading up into the entrance of the two-story modernist building, which hovers over a large plaza on stilts of steel.
The thieves worked quickly. A few jabs of the crowbar, and they were able to slip a common car jack under the metal security gate. A few more cranks and they squeezed inside.
Hazy images from a security camera shows three men going in at 5:09 a.m. They smashed through two glass doors, ran to the museum’s top floor and grabbed the two framed paintings from different rooms, somehow avoiding guards.
The alarm never rang, and by 5:12 a.m., they were making their escape.
“It was a professional job; it was something they studied because the paintings were in different rooms,” police investigator Marcos Gomes de Moura said.
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