Brazilian police make arrests in Matisse library heist probe

Police in Brazil arrested a woman and served arrest warrants on two jailed suspects Friday in an investigation into the theft of works by Henri Matisse and Candido Portinari from the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo, authorities said.

The São Paulo Civil Police said in a video posted to social media that Operation Marchand included three temporary arrest warrants and 11 search-and-seizure warrants against people under investigation.

Officers carried out searches in São Paulo, São Bernardo do Campo, Diadema, and Rio de Janeiro, the São Paulo State Secretariat of Public Security said in a separate news release.

The secretariat said the targets included the alleged mastermind of the theft and other members of a suspected criminal organization accused of appraising, hiding, brokering and possibly selling the stolen works, including through shipments abroad.

Police seized artworks without provenance and cellphones during the searches, according to captions in the Civil Police video. The state security secretariat did not state whether the stolen works had been recovered.

Two main suspects were already in preventive custody after being arrested by Federal Police in Rio de Janeiro in April for allegedly trying to bribe a security guard at a federal institute to steal artworks, the state security secretariat said. The Civil Police said investigators would ask that the two remain jailed.

Investigators found evidence of a structured operation with prior planning and divided roles tied to the theft, receipt, and illegal placement of cultural property on the black market.

The state security secretariat did not name the suspects in its public release. The Brazilian newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, known as Estadão, identified the alleged mastermind as Laéssio Rodrigues and reported he was already jailed in the Rio de Janeiro case.

“He himself calls himself that — ‘the biggest art thief in Brazil,’” Ronald Quene, the Cerco police official leading the investigation, told Estadão. “He has a long, extensive record, with a history of occurrences in several states in the country.”

Estadão identified the other two arrest targets as Carlos Leandro Ferreira and Regiane Rodrigues da Silva. The newspaper reported Ferreira was already jailed in the same case as Rodrigues and that da Silva was arrested Friday in Vila Maria, northern São Paulo.

“The seized cellphones will help us provide more information about the dynamics of the group,” Quene told Estadão.

The theft happened on December 7 when two armed men entered the library, held a security guard and three visitors at gunpoint, and fled toward the Anhangabaú subway station with 13 artworks and historical documents.

The works were on view on the final day of “From Book to Museum,” a joint exhibition between the Mário de Andrade Library and the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo.

The stolen works included eight prints from Matisse’s “Jazz” series and five prints by Portinari from the “Menino de Engenho” series, all of which belonged to the library. The São Paulo Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy previously told Urgent Matter the works were insured.

São Paulo officials notified Interpol after the theft and released images of the missing works to prevent them from leaving Brazil. City officials also said footage from Smart Sampa, a facial-recognition surveillance program, showed two men carrying the works to a nearby car.

Urgent Matter later confirmed one suspect arrested in the case was Felipe dos Santos Fernandes Quadra. Authorities had said he was identified through Smart Sampa in partnership with Muralha Paulista.

Estadão identified the two men accused of carrying out the heist as Quadra and Gabriel Pereira Rodrigues de Mello, who remains at large.

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