The clocks taken from the L. A. Mayer Museum

On the morning of Sunday 17 April 1983, staff at the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem found that 106 clocks and watches had gone. Police say the thief broke in on the night of 15 April. According to the Guardian, he forced the bars of a back window with a crowbar and used a ladder, while a parked lorry hid him from view. The alarm was broken and the guard was at the front of the building. Breguet, the watch house, dates the raid to Saturday 16 April, so the sources differ by one day.

The clocks did not belong to the museum’s field of Islamic art. They came from the collection of Sir David Lionel Salomons, and his daughter Vera Bryce Salomons showed them there. She had founded the museum in memory of Professor L. A. Mayer. About 55 of the pieces were by Abraham-Louis Breguet, a watchmaker who lived from 1747 to 1823. The best known was No. 160, called the Marie Antoinette. It is made of gold, rock crystal and sapphire, and it winds itself. Breguet says an officer of the queen’s guard ordered it around 1783, and that the queen never saw it. That account rests on an oral tradition. Breguet gives 1827 as the year its maker’s son finished it. The museum gives 1820.

Museum officials told the press that the watch was worth more than 30 million dollars and that this was the costliest theft in Israeli history. Rachel Hasson, the museum’s artistic director, called it “the Mona Lisa of the clock world”. The Guardian reports that police thought of Na’aman Diller in 1983 but found nothing to link him to the crime. The case stayed open for more than twenty years.

In August 2006, a Tel Aviv dealer told the museum that a Tel Aviv lawyer had old clocks to value for a client. The lawyer said the client lived abroad, had inherited the clocks from a dead husband, and wanted money, secrecy and no police. The California Department of Insurance reports that the museum’s board saw three boxes of clocks wrapped in newspaper the next day. The museum paid and took them back. Sources give 39 or 40 pieces, and a payment of about 35,000 or 40,000 dollars. The museum names no sum. The batch included No. 160. The Independent reported in 2007 that five pieces were damaged beyond repair.

Police announced on 29 October 2008 that Diller, working alone, was the thief. He was never charged. He died of cancer in 2004. Police and the museum say, as the Associated Press reports, that he told his wife about the theft shortly before he died. The sources show no other witness to that account. His widow, Nili Shamrat, lived in Tarzana, California. In May 2008, California investigators and two Israeli police officers searched her home. The California Department of Insurance reports that they found antique objects, three 18th-century oil paintings and a Latin manuscript, and that more pieces lay in a Paris bank safe-deposit box. In all, 96 of the 106 items came back. About ten are still missing.

On 23 February 2010, a Los Angeles court convicted Shamrat of receiving stolen property. She was sentenced to five years’ probation and 300 hours of community service. Haaretz calls it a suspended sentence. Her lawyer said she had borne only a small part of her husband’s act.

The museum’s watchmaker, Boris Sankov, restored the pieces. The Salomons clock gallery reopened in July 2009, and No. 160 is shown there.