The Irish game

by Matthew Hart

"In the annals of art theft, no case has matched - for sheer criminal panache - the heist at Ireland's Russborough House in 1986." "The Irish police knew right away that the mastermind was a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder - including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two works by Rubens, and Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid - remained maddeningly at large for years. Cahill taunted the police with a string of other crimes, but in the end it was the paintings that brought him low. The challenge of disposing of such famous works forced him to reach outside his familiar world into the international arena, and when he did, his pursuers were waiting." "The movie-perfect sting that broke Cahill uncovered an astonishing maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that redefined the way police view art theft. As if that were not enough, the recovery of the Vermeer - by then worth two hundred million dollars - led to a remarkable discovery about the way Vermeer ac