When you picture the greatest art heist of the 20th century, you imagine a criminal mastermind, laser grids, and a getaway helicopter. The reality? A five-foot-three handyman in a white work smock who got stuck at a locked door because he couldn’t figure out the doorknob, and a passing plumber who kindly let him out.

This episode follows Vincenzo Peruggia, who walked the Mona Lisa straight out of the Louvre in 1911. We explore how a bungled inside job, combined with catastrophic police incompetence and a media frenzy, transformed a respected Renaissance portrait into the most famous face on the planet, and why society keeps inventing a phantom mastermind to explain it.

• How Peruggia knew the security because he had personally built the protective glass case around the painting
• Why the smock myth is physically impossible and how he actually carried the rigid wooden panel out under his arm
• The police chasing ocean liners and interrogating Picasso while a detective used the hidden painting as a writing desk
• The debunked Valfierno forgery theory and why there’s zero evidence the supposed mastermind ever existed
• The bizarre bird riddle psychiatric test and the lenient seven-month sentence after Italians hailed him a folk hero