The Great Rikers Island Art Heist

For forty years, an original Salvador Dalí painting went unnoticed inside New York City’s massive jail complex. Then a gang of thieves decided it might be worth something. [ view in [browser](. add esquire@newsletter.esquire.com to your address book ] [Esquire]( [Sunday Reads] FOLLOW US [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Pinterest]( [Instagram]( [You Tube]( [Google Plus]( [The Great Rikers Island Art Heist]( On February 26, 1965, Salvador Dalí woke up with a temperature of 101 and realized his day wasn’t going to go as planned. The surrealist master had agreed to visit Rikers Island—the New York City jail complex located off the shores of Queens and the Bronx—that afternoon to paint alongside the prisoners. He was a sucker for a good media stunt, and the New York City Department of Correction had already heralded the visit with great fanfare in a press release. Dalí was due to arrive ceremoniously by boat, with his wife, pet ocelot, and a gaggle of reporters in tow. Earlier in the year, Department of Correction Commissioner Anna Moscowitz Kross met Dalí’s business associate Nico Yperifanos at a dinner party, where they hatched the plan for Dalí’s visit. Kross, the first female commissioner of the jail system, believed in rehabilitating prisoners with art, including painting sessions and theater productions. It didn’t take much for Yperifanos to persuade Dalí. As long as the city’s newspapers would be there to capture his magnanimous act, he was game. But now, feverish and ill, Dalí needed to bow out. There was no way he could make the trip. From his suite at the gilded St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan, he quickly slapped together a painting as an apology and summoned Yperifanos to take it to the island in his absence. News photos from that day show Yperifanos presenting Kross with the untitled work, a five-by-three-foot slapdash of brushstrokes depicting Christ on the cross. Dalí, whose paintings would later command as much as $21.7 million at auctions, signed and dated the work in the lower righthand corner. But the spectacle didn’t make a lasting impression, and over time the painting’s remarkable provenance faded from the memories of the wardens who ran the jail system. For nearly two decades, it hung in the prisoners’ mess hall. In 1981, after an inmate lobbed a coffee cup at the painting, breaking its glass casing and leaving a stain, the Dalí was taken down. A warden sent it off to a dealer to authenticate and appraise it; the painting was then shipped to a Virginia gallery for temporary display in a prison art exhibit. After its return, the Dalí was boxed up in a storage crate, forgotten again. At one point it made its way to a trash bin, where a guard saved it from being thrown out. Then it found its way to the wall of a warden’s office and, finally, to the lobby of Eric M. Taylor Center, one of Rikers’s ten jails. There it hung under the lobby’s fluorescent lights, within a few steps of a humming Pepsi-Cola vending machine. The work barely registered with the Department of Correction officers and visitors who passed it. But a plaque next to the painting proclaimed that it was worth an estimated one million dollars. To the island's residents, it screamed easy money. On March 1, 2003, the painting was stolen. Three men were later convicted in the heist. A fourth got off. But the painting remains missing. [READ MORE]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE] [Esquire]( [Mensch At Work]( The rules of comedy have changed quite a bit in the last half decade, even in the last year. Jokes and characters that once seemed harmless might now generate social-media outrage, if not boycotts and involuntary sabbaticals. 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