Original subtitles

In August 2006,

Norwegian police recovered The Scream,

one of the most famous and powerful images in art history.

In the past 12 years,

it has been the target of thieves not once, but twice.

Edvard Munch painted the image many times.

One version, stolen in 1994, was recovered.

But a decade later, another Scream vanished

when thieves walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo

and ripped it from the walls,

along with a second Munch masterpiece, The Madonna.

This is the story of the police search

for the missing paintings.

And the gang of ruthless and dangerous criminals

behind the robbery.

(dramatic music)

The world's media are gathering

in an Oslo courtroom to hear the verdict

on six defendants for their part

in one of the most notorious heists in art history.

Two of Norway's best known paintings

had simply been snatched by armed thieves in broad daylight.

The theft of Edvard Munch's The Scream

and The Madonna two years earlier shocked

not only Norwegians but art lovers across the globe.

Many of the key players in the drama that unfolded

in the previous years are here to witness the climax.

Johnny Brenna, the undercover Norwegian detective.

Jorun Christoffersen, a senior official

at the Munch Museum, where the paintings were stolen.

Morten Hojem Ervik, the police prosecutor

who had pieced together the evidence.

And Thomas Nataas, one of the defendants

who claimed all along he was the victim

of the ruthless gang which carried out the raid.

The prosecution have asked for sentences

of up to 12 years in prison.

The defendants have throughout protested their innocence.

As the judge enters to deliver the verdict,

there's an expectation that the thieves

who carried out the audacious daylight raid

to steal The Scream will finally be known.

It was a warm summer Sunday morning in 2004,

shortly after opening time at the Munch Museum in Oslo.

There were about 70 people in the gallery.

(dramatic music)

At 11:05, a car pulled up alongside the main building.

Two men got out and ran toward the entrance of the museum.

They were wearing gloves and hooded sweatshirts.

One was carrying a gun.

The two armed thieves burst into the museum,

shouting and screaming at terrified gallery goers.

They forced guards to the floor at gunpoint.

As they made their way to the far side of the gallery,

they threatened visitors,

yelling and waving the gun as they went.

When they reached their targets,

The Scream and The Madonna, Munch's most famous works,

they brutally snatched them from the walls.

The two thieves ran out of the museum

and across the lawn to their getaway car.

As they drove off,

they had in the back of their car $100,000,000 worth

of some of the most important art of the last two centuries.

The whole robbery had taken less than five minutes.

News of the robbery spread quickly.

But what puzzled the people of Oslo was

why had The Scream been targeted once again

and how on earth did the thieves imagine

they were going to sell the world's most famous image?

One of the first to hear about the loss

of the Munch masterpieces was

the museum's head of public relations.

I was called up by a friend.

I was at home, it was a Sunday.

And she said "I heard something on the radio.

"There was a robbery on the Munch Museum."

The Scream and The Madonna were gone.

As Jorun Christoffersen rushed to the museum,

Oslo police arrived at the scene.

One of the first officers there was Lasse Alver,

a patrolman on duty in the city at the time.

I arrived on the crime scene approximately 11:20 a.m.

When I arrived, the first police unit

had already cordoned off the area.

Scenes like this,

there is a lot of chaos and confusion in store.

What we had to do was try to separate all the witnesses.

I guess it was approximately 60 or 70.

They were told to go into the cafeteria

and we had to try to find out who had seen something

and who hadn't.

When I came to the museum,

there was ambulances, police, cars,

lots of people, press.

I found a museum in shock.

The girls at the ticket counter,

the girls in the restaurants,

they had been the first one to see this robbers.

This was a violent, frightening robbery

and a lot of people including children were witness

to this crime.

Maybe they will carry around this

for the rest of their lives.

At the museum,

police began interviewing stunned eyewitnesses

and museum staff in an effort to reconstruct precisely

how the thieves had carried out the raid.

To avoid the guards at the main doors,

the thieves entered the building

through the cafeteria side entrance.

Robbers came in the side door in the cafeteria

and probably they had parked the car behind the building.

One holding a revolver.

And they were screaming and making a lot of noise

to scare people.

They came to the ticket desk.

The alarm under the desk was then pressed

by one of the girls.

They understood that something terrible was happening

because they were already waving with a gun.

As the alarm button was pushed,

an alert went through to the police

and to the home of the museum's head of security.

I didn't believe what I was hearing at once,

so it took some time before I understood that it's real.

They ran into the museum

but they hadn't checked exactly which way the door went,

so they banged into the door here.

Because this one you have to pull

(laughs) and then they run into the museum

and met the first guards about here.

There were just four security guards

on duty inside the small museum at the time of the robbery.

One of the guards working there were commanded

onto his knees, pointing with a gun.

He was very shocked and he thought it was some joke

or some fight between youngsters or whatever,

so he ran after them again and tried to stop them

but was knocked to the ground

and pointed at with a gun.

The museum was open plan

around a central meeting room.

The thieves ran the long way around,

stripping the guards of their communication radios,

until they finally arrived at their target.

And The Scream was hanging here

and The Madonna was about here.

They were hung by steel wire from the ceiling and down.

They just tore it.

They had to use strength of course, but they tore it.

And then they dropped The Madonna.

But the thieves had an unexpected problem.

The two paintings were protected

by thick heavy security glass.

The paintings were so heavy

that both paintings couldn't be carried by one man.

So the one with a gun also had to carry a painting.

Outside the museum,

50 yards from the entrance,

the getaway car had been waiting.

But it didn't go unnoticed.

One eyewitness got sight of the driver.

It was probably one driver in that car.

And they said it was probably a black Audi,

probably an A4 and A6.

We had the letters in the registration number,

so that was what we started to search for.

But as they made their escape,

the thieves panicked.

They thought the frames of the paintings

might contain some sort of tracking device,

so as they sped through the city,

they began breaking up the frames,

discarding them out of the car window.

We think they thought there were technical instruments

in those frames.

There were not.

So they had to get rid of the frames quickly.

It left an unusual trail

along the Oslo streets.

Actually met some of the, you know, the frames

around the paintings when I was driving

at full speed to work along the roads.

As the police followed the tracks

of the thieves, they also seized closed circuit TV footage

of the armed men taken during the raid.

But the quality of the images was poor.

The cameras in the building were not very good

and didn't give us a lot at all.

There should have been better pictures,

particularly inside the museum.

Meanwhile at the museum,

people were still coping with the trauma caused

by the robbery.

I had to take care of the staff, the guards,

and the staff around,

because I could see they have traumatic moment

in their lives.

Everybody who was working that day didn't imagine

it would happen.

Indeed, the Norwegian public was shocked

by the loss of the Munch masterpieces.

The museum itself came under attack

for the lack of security.

Why hadn't more been done

to protect these national treasures?

I think most people were astonished

that this valuable paintings weren't secured better.

The museum thought

that criticism of its security was unfair.

When it comes to armed robbery,

it is not so very much you can do.

The newspapers wrote that it was only to go in

and take the paintings off the wall, but it wasn't.

You had to have a gun.

I don't think it was fair because we are running

on a budget and the budget didn't say we had the money

to install any more systems.

We were a little bit hurt and annoyed by the criticism

because we thought that we had done the best we could

under the circumstances.

However unfair the criticism,

the museum was closed

while a new security system was installed

to protect the Munch masterpieces.

A leading security company was called in to help.

With the Munch Museum, that's a difficult task

because it's a small museum.

So the distances are very short and there are no stairs,

so it will be quite easy to run through the building.

I think most Norwegian felt that someone was taken

that belonged to all of them.

We feel that these pictures, they belongs to us

and they belong to the next generation.

We can't allow something like that happening again.

But interest in the fate of The Scream

spread rapidly around the world.

Of course it was a very media friendly story.

With an armed robbery, you know, violence, art.

It was dramatic.

I was not surprised that people,

that the press from England and the States

and Germany and France and Italy were interested.

I was not surprised by that.

But I got telephones from the Philippines

and from China and from Australia and from Peru

and everywhere, and that surprised me.

The media hype was understandable.

The Scream was, after all, one of the most famous images

in modern art.

It's an icon and it's the most copied and used motif

of all artwork, more than the Mona Lisa.

So it must speak to us in a certain way.

This was how Munch himself described

the painting in his own diary.

(speaking in foreign language)

I was walking along a path with two friends.

The sun was setting.

I felt a breath of melancholy.

Suddenly the sky turned blood red.

I stood there trembling with anxiety

and I felt a great infinite scream pass through nature.

It's small wonder that the theft of such a masterpiece

by a national hero should traumatize the people of Norway.

Edvard Munch was, after all, Norway's most acclaimed artist.

He was born in 1863

and during his lifetime developed a unique

and powerful style that foreshadowed the anguish

and anxieties of the 20th century.

The Scream, above all, captured these concerns.

Munch was highly prolific and when he died in 1944,

he left his artwork to the city of Oslo

and the Munch Museum was created.

We have a collection here of 1,100 paintings,

about 18,000 prints,

and three to 4,000 sketches and watercolors and so on.

Everything was in Munch's possession when he died.

But The Scream held by the museum

was not the only one painted by Munch.

He used different mediums to create a series of paintings

of the same image.

There are four Screams but they are not alike.

The one we have here and the one in the National Gallery

are the most similar, but they're not quite identical.

Of course, we like ours best

so we hope that we will get it back.

The pressure on the police

to find the missing masterpieces was intense.

In the hours immediately after the raid,

officers traced the escape route taken by the thieves,

thanks to the pieces of broken frames.

We could follow this car up to a place

not far from the museum.

Found it a couple of hours after the armed robbery

next to (mumbles).

It was here that the gang almost certainly had

a second vehicle waiting for them.

Once they had parked the car here,

they were picked up by one or two other vehicles

or they had one or two other vehicles already parked here.

Where they went after they picked up the new cars here,

we don't really know.

The thieves and the paintings

had simply disappeared.

Even the abandoned car provided few clues

as to who they were or where the paintings might have gone.

It was very difficult to find anything in that car.

The interior had been sprayed

with a dry fire extinguisher.

The reason was clear to the police forensic team.

So it should be difficult to find traces of human DNA,

hair, fingerprints, whatever.

But in their haste to get away

from the abandoned car,

the thieves left behind what police hoped

might become a vital piece of evidence.

In the car, we found the gun.

The gun was sent off for forensic examination.

But with so little evidence to go on,

many wondered if the 2004 robbery was linked

to the dramatic theft of another different version

of The Scream in 1994.

A decade earlier, two thieves had made an extraordinary raid

on Norway's National Gallery.

The heist could not have been simpler.

Under cover of darkness, they put up a ladder

against the walls of the gallery in central Oslo

and climbed up to a second floor window,

broke it, jumped in, removed The Scream from the walls,

and fled the way they'd come.

The man who was convicted for the robbery

served five years in prison.

Now, seven years after his release,

he denies he was involved in the notorious heist at all.

I never did it.

He says he knows who did carry out the robbery

but refuses to name them.

You can't talk on people.

You get out of trouble for yourself.

That's rule number one.

You have to keep shut anyway,

even I will stay in prison for nothing.

But I'm proud of that today even.

It's not surprising

that the police picked up Pal Enger.

A few weeks earlier, he had been spotted

in the closed circuit TV footage

inside the National Gallery.

That was not correct to put me in prison for that.

They have no evidence.

My interest for Munch that time also ready in 1994

was very big.

I start to go to the museum to look at his art

but also one of the things they used against me.

That I was in the National Gallery one week before,

looked at the paintings.

In fact, Pal Enger was obsessed

by the power of Munch's images.

To satisfy this obsession,

he had stolen another painting by Munch

as long ago as 1988.

He simply sneaked through the back of the Munch Museum,

took the painting, and walked out.

Special to have something, you know, he had done

over 100 years ago on the wall.

So Pal Enger had stolen a Munch painting

in the 1980s.

He had been convicted of stealing one of Munch's Screams

in the 1990s.

But despite this, police soon decided

he was not a prime suspect for the armed robbery in 2004.

As he said, it's not my style.

(laughs) I don't do it like this.

Pal Enger is now back in prison

for an unconnected offense.

After getting a five year sentence

for the first theft of The Scream,

he's wary about helping the authorities this time.

The first time, I say okay, I can help you.

(claps) Bang, they think of course

that I have something to do with it.

And I don't want to be in prison for nine years

for this painting.

But he believes he has contacts

in the Norwegian underworld

who could now help find the missing Scream and Madonna.

I think I am the man to also get it back

because Norway's very little

and the people who doing crime in Norway

is very small group.

And recently be in contact with

and they trust me.

The authorities did not take up

Pal Enger's offer to help find the missing paintings.

But the problem for the Norwegian police was

that they were no nearer themselves

to getting The Scream and Madonna back.

But there was someone who knew precisely where they were.

(upbeat music)

Thomas Nataas is a mechanic

with a passion for drag car racing.

It's an interest he shares with some members

of the Oslo underworld

and which would bring him face to face with The Scream.

They're always coming to the racetrack

and watch me racing, the times we normally interact.

And I see them drop by the shop sometimes

to see what kind of cars we got

and basically interested in cars.

Thomas Nataas is such a fanatic

that he travels around Europe to drag car race events

and he once used an old bus and trailer

to transport his cars.

That bus is now dumped next to his workshop

on a farm outside Oslo.

But someone had a use for it.

His name was Petter Tharaldsen.

And at a drag race not far away,

he approached the unsuspecting Thomas Nataas.

He contacted me at the race track

and just wondered if my bus is still where it used to be.

Because I haven't used the bus for three years

so it's basically parked there all year round.

He asked me if he could put something in the bus.

I told him no and he didn't say

that he's gonna put anything.

I just said yes, the bus is there,

but he's not going to put anything in it.

Thomas Nataas thought nothing more about it

until he got a call on his cell phone while he was away,

racing again, this time in Germany.

Suddenly he called.

Where are you and what are you doing?

Yeah, I'm in Germany.

Basically (mumbles) said.

I didn't think much about it until Sunday night

when I watch the news on the TV in the hotel room

of the big robbery in Norway.

The problem for the thieves was

what to do with the paintings.

The problem for Thomas Nataas was who was using his old bus

and what were they using it for?

When he returned to Oslo,

he went to see Petter Tharaldsen,

the man who had asked him about the bus.

He wanted reassurance.

I found him and asked him is it something

that I have to worry about?

He said no, it's been taken care of or something.

So I don't have to worry about anything, he said.

But of course

there was something to worry about,

as Thomas Nataas was about to discover.

Johnny Brenna is a plainclothes policeman working

for the Oslo organized crime unit.

On the day of the raid, he received a call

from one of his trusted informants in the Oslo underworld,

Petter Rosenvinge.

A couple hours after this armed robbery

at the Munch Museum, informant called me.

Brenna's informant had seen reports

of the robbery on the television news

and wanted to know whether he had any more details

about the getaway car.

Rosenvinge had a special interest.

He told me if he could check out the car,

he might suspect that the car that he has been repairing

has been used as this car in these armed robberies.

Then I phone into my colleagues

and asked how is the car and how was it looking,

like if it was identic with the car he has been repairing.

Rosenvinge's story was

that he had prepared a car for a criminal associate.

But he had no idea that the theft of The Scream

was what the gang had in mind.

Rosenvinge claimed he was furious the car was now the center

of a major police investigation.

He was quite angry with this man.

He told me was the, what he called a ringleader

that organized the whole thing,

because this car shouldn't used for this purpose,

so he was quite angry.

To save his own skin,

Rosenvinge was prepared to talk.

He gave me some names, yeah.

The names he gave Johnny Brenna

were all well known criminals like Bjorn Hoen

and Petter Tharaldsen,

the man who had asked Thomas Nataas at the racetrack

about the bus.

Rosenvinge's information made sense

to the undercover detective.

He's quite good skills in mechanics.

He's very good skills at weapons,

so he knew very much about the cars and weapons

and he's not a man doing armed robberies himself

but he knew those guys.

As police began to digest this new information,

curiosity finally got the better of Thomas Nataas.

He drove up to the farm where his bus was kept.

His worst fears were about to be confirmed.

This one is always unlocked, it's always open.

I went in inside here

and I was supposed to pick up something

that was on this bench.

I could see that somebody been there.

So I went in here and the mattress was bulging

and underneath one of,

under that mattress and the one down there,

there was a painting in each bed.

Didn't know what to do actually.

(laughs) I saw Scream and Madonna.

Paintings that valuable in an open bus on a farm.

I also thought about call the police.

Probably 1,000 reasons why I should call in the thing

but there's one reason and that is the safety

of my life and my family's life.

Perhaps Thomas Nataas had good reason

to be afraid.

The question as to why The Scream

and Madonna had been stolen was still unanswered.

If such famous paintings were impossible to sell,

what could have been the motive for the theft?

Police thought the answer might lie in a violent robbery

that had been carried out

by some of the most dangerous gangsters in the country

four months before the theft of the Munch paintings.

(calm music)

Stavanger is a quiet fishing port

on the Atlantic coast of Norway,

150 miles from the capitol Oslo.

But one spring day in 2004,

it was the scene of a bank raid

involving a scale of violence more reminiscent

of Chicago or Detroit.

11 men dressed in full bulletproof uniforms and masks

arrived in the town center.

We're talking many guys heavily armed.

It's like a commander riot,

it's like a military action really.

It was like the whole city has been taken, you know?

The target of the armed gang was this building.

At the time, it was the headquarters

of a company called Nokas, Norway's Central Cash Services.

As this closed circuit TV footage shows,

they destroyed the thick specialized security glass

protecting the pile of money.

With terrified staff locked in a different part

of the building, the thieves loaded $2 1/2 million

into bags.

The robbery lasted just 15 minutes.

It seemed like a ruthless but perfectly planned raid

but it was all about to go tragically wrong.

Local police were alerted to the robbery

while it was still in progress.

The thieves were inside the building

when the police arrived outside.

What followed was a bloody shootout in the town center.

(guns firing)

And then the police got there

and a policeman was shot and killed.

It was a quite shocking experience for Stavanger

but also Norway as a country

that someone could do that at the daylight time.

This was the biggest

and most violent bank robbery Norway had ever seen.

With one officer dead,

a huge police operation swung into action

to track down his killers

and find the missing $2 1/2 million.

The police investigation focused on a criminal network

that over a period of little more than a decade

had graduated from petty crime to armed robbery.

The gang started to do more things in the 80s.

In Oslo, they were starting with car thefts

and they were doing burglaries,

organized big burglaries

and they were smashing, bursting up (mumbles) as well,

and this was in 80, 90s.

90s, started to do this armed robbery.

Police believed this criminal group

may have up to 100 members

and they suspect that this man, David Toska,

is at the heart of the organization.

He's one of the central leaders

in this criminal environment dealing with armed robberies.

As the police investigation

into the Nokas armed robbery in Stavanger continued

into the summer of 2004,

the search for the suspected ringleader,

David Toska, intensified.

And then, the thieves struck at the Munch Museum in Oslo.

Police became convinced

that the two armed robberies were connected.

During that Munch investigation,

there were several statements saying

that Mr. Toska was the one that asked for the robbery.

And the reason for it was that he wanted

to have attention away from the robbery in Stavanger

and over to this Munch robbery.

The theory is that they did the Munch robbery

to take the police resources away from the Nokas case

because we had like 200 policemen or something

bound up in the Nokas case.

But we can't prove that for certain.

But we think that's the most likely theory.

There was plenty of circumstantial evidence

to support the police theory.

Petter Tharaldsen, the man at the drag race,

was known to be an associate of David Toska.

As was Petter Rosenvinge, the police informant.

But there was more.

The gun that was found in the dumped getaway car

was traced to another robbery

from a private villa in the town of Sarpsborg.

Guns were taken.

One of them was used for the robbery at the museum.

This gun comes from a break in in a house

close to Mr. Rosenvinge's home.

Another of the weapons stolen in the robbery

at the villa was matched to one spotted

on the closed circuit TV footage

of the Nokas robbery in Stavanger.

It suggested the same gang at work.

There was further evidence

that made the connection between the two robberies clearer.

When the security window was blown out

during the Stavanger robbery,

glass particles sprayed across the room

and onto the stolen cash.

Petter Tharaldsen was arrested in September

for another unconnected offense.

But when police searched his home,

they found a stash of money.

We found that he had some money in his home

that we could connect to the Nokas robbery.

We could identify those bills

because there were dust of glass.

Norway's a small country

and this organized crime environment is not very big,

so we think these people know each other

and that this money is gone from Stavanger to Tharaldsen,

it's quite likely that he's paid

for his role in the Munch robbery.

A month after the theft of The Scream,

police had under surveillance a number of suspects

implicated in both the Stevanger

and the Munch Museum robberies.

Central to the Museum investigation was Petter Rosenvinge,

Johnny Brenna's trusted informant.

Rosenvinge had always maintained that although he had worked

on the getaway car, he knew nothing about the robbery.

But perhaps he was not as innocent as he claimed.

He prepared the car for this robbery

and then he handed it over

to the robbers the actual morning.

Those officers who were dealing with the investigation

told me that he was deeper in it,

so that was quite difficult for me to do

to have him as an informer at that time,

so I had to quit him, like an informer,

and said I can't talk to you.

It would be wrong.

He knew that his name was quite hot at that time.

While police were now on the brink

of arresting key members of the gang,

they seemed no nearer to finding the paintings.

But they were soon to get very close.

The Scream and The Madonna were still hidden away

in an unlocked derelict bus

on a farm 15 miles from Oslo.

Thomas Nataas, the man who owned the bus,

began getting calls from the gang,

now anxious to move the masterpieces

to a safer hiding place.

Another guy contacted me and said they're gonna move it.

He sounded really distressed

and he said that the painting should be moved

a long time ago but something went wrong,

I don't know what.

He wanted me to help him with it, that's all.

I don't want to help you with moving the things,

I told him I just want them out of here, gone.

The question now

was whether the thieves could move the paintings

before the police got to them.

The police were already tapping the telephones

of some key suspects.

On September 23rd, 2004,

the surveillance of the gang reached a crucial stage.

We identified these guys only the day before

and we started to tap their phone the day before.

At that time, we weren't sure

that they were talking about pictures

because of course they didn't talk about pictures,

they were talking about other things.

It could have been drugs, it could have been everything.

Thomas Nataas had been told by the gang

that they were about to remove the paintings from his bus.

And after phone calls backwards and forwards,

he finally did the arrangement to come and pick them up.

As evening fell,

a police surveillance unit followed a car

belonging to one of the suspects.

They trailed it along the quiet country road

leading to the farm where Thomas Nataas had parked his bus.

This area is quite open.

It's difficult to follow a car.

So they had to stay behind and follow from a distance.

The car disappeared into the farm

and the police kept watch.

Then a second car arrived.

And within minutes,

the two stolen paintings were on the move.

Police were within a few feet of the Munch masterpieces

but they had no idea.

The policemen were meters away

but they didn't have an arrest team there

and they said that it was difficult not to be discovered

so they didn't actually see what was going on.

The police didn't put two and two together,

so they made bad judgment, you know?

Had we knew that the paintings changed hands that day,

of course we had been there, but we didn't know.

We got hold of that information afterwards.

The surveillance team had a problem.

There were now two cars to follow

and the police chose the wrong one.

The Mercedes containing The Scream and The Madonna

simply drove off into the night.

They said that they couldn't get too close to it

because it was dark.

It wasn't dark.

As I checked out,

that day the sun went down a quarter to seven.

They were here seven o'clock, is not dark then.

They said that there's only one road to that farm

and it isn't, it's two.

You can go the other way also.

That's what the cars did,

they split up and go like that.

They could have had it then.

We were quite close, yes.

But it was worse than that.

The Mercedes with the paintings was seen later

by another surveillance team

investigating the Stavanger robbery,

outside the home of the fiancee of the prime suspect,

David Toska.

The whereabouts of Edvard Munch's Scream and The Madonna

were now a complete mystery.

Meanwhile, the criminal obsession

with the Norwegian artist continued.

Over the last 12 years,

seven paintings by Munch have been stolen.

In the spring of 2005, seven months after the theft

of The Scream and Madonna, it happened again.

On the night of March the eighth,

a car drove up to the luxury Refsnes Hotel,

30 miles south of Oslo.

The hotel is owned by an art collector

with a passion for Edvard Munch.

Shortly before the restaurant was due to close

for the night, the thieves walked into the dining room

and snatched three small works by Munch and fled.

But within days, police had arrested eight people

and the Munch pictures were back on the walls of the hotel,

unlike The Scream and Madonna.

Those masterpieces seemed simply to have vanished.

The search for The Scream and Madonna soon became

an international obsession.

The Norwegian police may have lost track of them

but there were plenty of people around the world

who thought they knew exactly where they were

and could help find them,

sometimes by the most bizarre methods.

We had psychics and witches from the Philippines,

wanted to help us.

They say they could tell us where the paintings were

but they needed another original work of Edvard Munch

so that they could touch and feel the vibrations and so on.

And then we had a man who was a psychic

and he had seen it in Denmark,

then he had lost contact with it for a long time,

but then he had discovered them in America again.

So they had been on water

and he couldn't feel the vibrations on water.

And you know, I listen to this,

I think it's interesting.

(laughs) Of course I asked him to go to the police with it.

The failure to find The Scream

and return it to the museum seemed only

to fuel public interest in the painting and the robbery.

In Norway, it even spawned a children's board game

in which art detectives go in search

of the missing masterpiece.

In the game, it's like the picture's already stolen.

It's not a game about how to steal a picture.

The catastrophe has already happened

so it's a game that we try to get it back,

so I thought that was a sort of,

that's the best I could do for the picture.

But some people thought

that making a children's game about the theft

of a national treasure was in bad taste.

It was a misunderstanding

because I think they believed it was a story

how to become an art robber.

The point of the game is really to retrieve the picture

and to get the robber.

Which was precisely

what Norwegian police were planning.

(calm music)

Eight months after the robbery,

police and prosecution began to make their move

against those they thought responsible

for the theft of The Scream and The Madonna.

We build up a case during months

and when we thought we had enough,

we look through the case and found out

that Mr. Rosenvinge was the first likely to be arrested.

But it was not as easy as they had hoped.

At the time, Rosenvinge was working at the building site

of Oslo's new opera house on the highest crane in the city.

So we had to wait until he went down for a break.

The arrest of Petter Rosenvinge

was the first of several which the police hoped

would not only break the gang of thieves

but also lead inevitably to the recovery

of the precious Scream.

We brought Mr. Tharaldsen into custody.

Tharaldsen was suspected of being the driver

of the getaway car.

He had been seen by an eyewitness.

He was also the man who contacted Thomas Nataas

at the drag car racing,

asking about the whereabouts of his bus.

Tharaldsen was already in custody

for another unconnected robbery.

So he was brought from custody,

from one case to another.

The police also arrested a third man,

called Bjorn Hoen, as the suspected ringleader.

Fugitive David Toska was tracked down

and arrested in Spain.

He now faces charges related to the Stavanger armed robbery

but not yet for any role he may have had

in instigating the theft of Munch's Scream and Madonna.

Within weeks of the arrests,

the Munch Museum opened again to the public

after a security makeover costing $6 1/2 million.

It had been closed for nine months.

The museum is determined it will never again be the victim

of such a robbery.

What we wanted to do was to put in some gates

that were lockable so we could stop someone

in case they should run in.

And in addition, we wanted to make the museum less open

and that's the reason why there is a lot more walls

in the museum today.

Security at the museum

is now more like that found at international airports.

Visitors have to put their bags through a metal detector

to prevent guns and knives being taken into the museum.

(beeping)

To get into the gallery itself,

visitors must pass first through a barrier

which will only open

by scanning a bar coded entrance ticket.

Then visitors must go through a one way set

of lockable double glass doors,

between which security staff can trap any suspected thief.

The inside of the building has been completely redesigned

to thwart any attacks similar

to the disastrous armed raid in 2004.

One of the most important changes

to improve security at the museum

has been the layout of the galleries.

Visitors now have to wind their way

through a series of separate rooms.

Gone is the old open plan design,

which allowed the thieves to run unimpeded

through the museum.

This used to be a wide open area

and what we have done is that we have created a labyrinth

that makes it much less easy to run through the building

and you have a feeling of not being in control

because you don't know what's behind the wall.

There may be a guard there.

And then to get out of the museum,

there is another barrier to slow the exit of a thief.

The robbery itself took approximately one minute.

The security measures,

the physical barriers we see today,

shall partly expand the time it takes to go into the museum,

take a picture down from the wall,

and be able to leave the museum.

So it's possible for the police to come

before they leave the building.

In May 2006, the trial finally started

of the six defendants accused of having a role

in the theft of Munch's Scream and Madonna.

It was not an easy case for the police and prosecution.

It's a difficult case to take to court

because there is nothing here from the forensic.

No evidence that could prove that some of these people

were at the spot where the robbery from place.

So we have to build up this case

with the telephone tapping, interviews, witnesses,

so it's a complicated case.

With much

of the police evidence circumstantial,

a key figure in the trial

became undercover detective Johnny Brenna.

He had to give evidence

against his one time informant, Petter Rosenvinge.

It's unpleasant to give evidence

against a man who you've been talking to in eight years,

so it's an unpleasant thing.

It is, really.

Normally we try to cover up

that people are giving the police information.

But the court, supreme court,

have also given the defense the right

to see all the evidence that the police have.

The trial lasted seven weeks.

Then nearly two years after the theft

of the Munch masterpieces,

the judge was ready to give his verdict

and hand down the sentences to the six accused.

Only three of the six were found guilty.

Petter Rosenvinge was sentenced to four years in prison

for preparing the getaway car.

Petter Tharaldsen was sentenced to eight years

for his part as the driver of the getaway car.

Bjorn Hoen was given seven years in jail

for acquiring the car from Rosenvinge

for the purpose of robbing the museum.

Among those acquitted was a very relieved Thomas Nataas,

the owner of the bus where the paintings were stored

in the weeks after the robbery.

They did something wrong to me

and the people who did that, they are going to jail

and I like that.

They can stay there forever, if it was up to me.

All three of the men found guilty

were charged with crimes involving the getaway car.

All are appealing.

Neither of the two men

who actually carried out the armed robbery has been found

or convicted.

How long they will be kept in prison

and what the sentence was is not interesting,

it's not important for us.

The important thing is that the paintings are still missing.

The police may have found some

of the gang responsible for the theft.

Others are still at large.

But finding the paintings seems as far away as ever.

We think these paintings still are in the country

and we think we will be able to bring them back.

But only time will show.

To encourage the gang

to return The Scream and Madonna to the people of Oslo,

two of the accused have been fined

a staggering 750,000,000 Norwegian krone, $124 million,

the estimated value of the missing paintings.

It's a large sum of money.

Maybe this could be a burden

that would make people talk more

than they have done until now.

They will not be able to have one day's honest work

in their life before the money is taken away from them,

so it's sort of a lifelong slavery they are sentenced to.

750 Norwegian krone can't compensate

for the loss of those paintings, that's only money.

This collection and these paintings can't be replaced

by money, you know.

But perhaps in the end,

the police and prosecution tactics worked

and the $120 million fine concentrated minds.

In a dramatic development

that took the art world by surprise,

on August 31st, 2006, Norwegian police announced

that The Scream and Madonna had been found.

How, they would not say.

At last, the painting inspired by a Norwegian sunset

is back where it belongs,

on the walls of the museum dedicated

to the nation's most famous son.

(dramatic jazz music)