THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF BREGUET’S ‘MARIE-ANTOINETTE’ NO. 160
Breguet ‘Marie-Antoinette’ no. 160
The famous Breguet no. 160, otherwise known as the ‘Marie-Antoinette’, was stolen from the L.A. Mayer Institute of Islamic Art in 1983. It was recovered only 24 years later in 2007. What follows is the story of how the 200-hundred-year-old pocket watch was recovered and returned after 24 years of absence.
The ‘Marie-Antoinette’ was owned by Breguet, eventually ending up in the collection of a notable Breguet collector, Sir David Lionel Salomons in the 1920s. Salomons donated his Breguet collection to the L.A. Mayer Institute for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, from where it was stolen on April 15th, 1983.
That night, thieves used a rope ladder to climb up the wall of the museum and entered through a 20-inch window, taking advantage of a broken alarm system and vanishing with over 100 timepieces and music boxes; items valued at over $30 million. The guards were none the wiser. As rumors began to circulate and the media was in an uproar. One dedicated investigator reportedly invited known thieves in for interrogations, he would leave them alone in his wiretapped garden before inviting them into his office, hoping to goad them into divulging secrets about the robbery. Unfortunately, all efforts failed, and the investigation went cold. That is, until 2006, when the museum reported to Israeli authorities that someone had tried to sell the missing items, which would have included the Breguet. It turns out that that woman was an American, the widow of Israeli thief Naaman Diller who died in 2004.
Diller was a known thief in his earlier years, notably having robbed a Tel Aviv bank in 1967. The woman’s husband apparently told her about the museum robbery on his deathbed. Police were made aware of the missing goods and were eventually able to track down the storage facility in which they were being held and recover the stolen goods, returning them to the Mayer Museum. To this day, the ‘Marie-Antoinette’ watch heist remains the greatest in horology history.
By: Andres Ibarguen