Two men approached Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum in the dark of night on October 16, 2012, bypassed the deactivated security system and silently opened the emergency door. Within two minutes, seven works by the world's best-respected artists were lost forever.

“A small percentage of what is stolen in the art world is ever recovered,” says Richard Nicholson, executive director of Willis's Fine Art Jewelry and Specie (FAJS) practice. “The art loss register (ALR) reports that 5 to 15 percent of stolen objects are recovered, but this is a very generic statement, as it probably includes anything with an 'art flavor': not only pure fine art objects but antiques, antiquities, ceramics, furniture; perhaps jewelry and other objects that have a relatively low value.”

The pieces that were stolen from the Kunsthal exhibit, which was donated by the Triton Foundation, included paintings by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin. Their whereabouts were eventually reported by the mother of suspected perpetrator Radu Dogaru—after she initially said she had burned them in a sauna in order to destroy evidence that could confirm her son's guilt in the scheme (Dogaru claims he had hidden the paintings, wrapped in plastic, at his mother's house in the tiny Romanian village of Carcaliu).