The Breguet Marie-Antoinette & Horology’s Most Notorious Heist

There have been a plethora of news stories about high-profile watch thefts. In July alone, F1 Driver Lando Norris was relieved of his Richard Mille at Wembley Stadium. Meanwhile, in New York, the police arrested a pair of alleged criminals behind a months-long armed robbery spree that netted more than $2 million in high-end timepieces from brands like Rolex, Richard Mille, Audemars Piguet, and Patek Philippe.

These cases are alarming in their brazenness. First of all, as any kindergarten teacher will tell you, violence is bad. Secondly, the idea of expertly crafted timepieces being taken to a horological chop shop to be sold disassembled and for parts or disguised for resale makes us sad (and a little nauseous). But we can take some satisfaction in the fact that these criminals almost always get caught.

There are many reasons why this is. For example, Richard Mille pieces are instantly recognizable as expensive. Moreover, the watches are difficult enough to get your hands on that, when a Richard Mille comes up for sale, it commands a lot of attention. Thus, trying to flip a hot watch is like me, Rhonda Riche, showing up in the Hampton’s driving a flaming red McLaren. In other words, it’s going to raise so many questions.

Speaking of questions, we asked ourselves if anybody has ever gotten away with such a high-profile heist? It brought us back to the story of Marie Antoinette’s Breguet, which was stolen from a museum in Israel and hidden away for almost 25 years.

And they almost got away with it until, you guessed it, somebody tried to sell it.

The Breguet timepiece No. 160, a.k.a. the “Marie-Antoinette” a.k.a. the “Queen,” has also been called the Mona Lisa of watches because it is the most important watch ever produced for technological, aesthetic, and historical reasons.

It is the 160th clockwork made by the legendary Abraham Louis Breguet (1747-1823). A genius of horology, Breguet was only 28 when, in 1775, he established his watchmaking firm in the Île de la Cité in Paris. In 1783 Breguet was commissioned to create a special timepiece for the Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette.
 

If you remember your history, you’ll know that the court of Marie Antoinette’s husband, King Louis XVI, was one of the most opulent ruling governments in history and came to a bloody end during the French Revolution. Before that, however, Breguet was secretly commissioned to make a pocket watch that met the excesses of the day. Specifically, it had to incorporate every complication and function known at the time, with gold used to replace brass wherever possible.

From its inception, the No. 160 was also surrounded by scandal and intrigue. The identity of the person who commissioned it was steeped in mystery. Rumor had it that it was ordered by Marie-Antoinette’s supposed secret lover and Hans Axel von Fersen, a Swedish count.
 

Regardless of who commissioned this exquisite timepiece, the instructions Breguet received were to take his time and spare no expense for the No. 160. That meant the Queen and the Count never got to see the finished piece – she carted off to the guillotine on October 16, 1793. Seventeen years later, von Fersen would be lynched by a Stockholm lynch mob who suspected him of conspiring to assassinate Crown Prince Charles August.

Even Breguet got marked for execution. Luckily, his friend Jean-Paul Marat helped him (and the still unfinished No. 160) flee to Switzerland and eventually England until French society stabilized. By the time he returned to Paris, his original client base was long gone, but he was still committed to completing the No. 160. The allure of this masterpiece was so magnetic that even after Abraham-Louis died of natural causes in 1823, his son Louis-Antoine Breguet dedicated himself to finishing the project.
 

Upon his death, Salomons’ watch collection passed to his daughter Vera, a nurse who settled in Jerusalem after World War I. There, she used her inheritance to build the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in memory of her professor, Leo Aryeh Mayer, a scholar of Islamic art who died in 1969. Now known simply as the Museum of Islamic Art, it houses Mayer’s private collection of antique chess pieces, dominoes and playing cards, daggers, swords, helmets, textiles, jewelry, glassware, pottery and metalware, and Salomons’ collection of watches.

Around the same time, in the 1960s and ’70s, a skinny and disgraced pilot in the Israeli Air Force named Na’aman Diller was emerging as a sort of Robin Hood figure in Israel.
 

Diller was skilled in forgery and break-ins. His slight frame allowed him to scale walls and slip through small windows with ease. And he was able to create fake travel documents to make it look like he was out of the country at the time of any given robbery.

He was most famous for a 1967 bank job in Tel Aviv. Diller planned the robbery meticulously. Five months before the heist, he told the bank’s neighbors that he was an engineer and began digging a trench to the back of the bank. Along this trench, Diller buried a 300-foot length of pipe and then covered it. When the time finally came to carry out the caper, he spent days cutting through the bank vault and systematically cracking each safe deposit box. But his patience had it limits. In the end, Diller got caught after becoming so frustrated with a stubbornly secure safe deposit box that he banged on its door loudly enough to draw the attention of a neighbor and the police.
 

Despite his ultimate failure at the bank, Diller learned an important lesson after that arrest: Be quiet.

Thus, after he got out of jail, Diller led a reclusive life in Tel Aviv and then in the US. But that didn’t mean his cat burglar days were over.

On the night of April 15, 1983, someone broke into the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art and relieved the institution of its horological collection, including the priceless “Queen.” It was the costliest history theft in Israeli history, and while the authorities rounded up the usual suspects (including Diller), the case went cold.
 

That brings us back around to my original point: Crime doesn’t pay. Certainly, thieves can have a myriad of excuses for why they steal, but usually, it boils down to money. But in the case of watch thieves, the minute they try to sell their horological haul, their eventual capture is all but assured.

In the case of the “Marie-Antoinette,” the motive behind the heist was less clear. It was not held for ransom. Nor did anyone try and sell it. Decades passed, and the case remained unsolved.