When the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre in 1911, French detectives were so baffled that their top suspect was none other than a young Pablo Picasso.

On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished off the wall of the Louvre, leaving behind four empty wall hooks and an international public relations catastrophe. French police sealed the borders, checked passenger luggage at train stations, and faced public ridicule as weeks passed without a suspect. The pressure on the prefecture was immense, but the investigation did not simply pull avant-garde artists out of Montmartre cafés on a hunch.

The real link was a petty con artist named Honoré Joseph Géry-Pieret, who worked as an occasional secretary for Picasso's close friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Géry-Pieret discovered that security at the Louvre was practically nonexistent. In 1907 and again in 1911, he casually walked out of the museum with ancient Iberian stone heads tucked under his jacket. Picasso bought them for roughly fifty francs each, kept them in his wardrobe, and used the carvings as anatomical inspiration for his breakthrough masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

When the Mona Lisa disappeared, Géry-Pieret panicked, walked into a newspaper office, and anonymously surrendered another stolen Louvre statuette to prove how pathetic the museum's security was. The stunt backfired immediately. Police traced the stolen sculpture back to Apollinaire, arrested the poet, and discovered that Picasso was sitting on a private stash of stolen state antiquities.

Picasso and Apollinaire reportedly considered throwing the stone heads into the Seine in a suitcase before panicking and trying to return them quietly. Instead, Picasso was hauled into the chambers of magistrate Henri Drioux in September 1911. Confronted on the witness stand, a terrified Picasso wept and famously claimed he had never seen Apollinaire before in his life. Judge Drioux concluded both men were foolish bohemian collectors rather than master art thieves and dismissed the charges.

The actual painting remained missing for over two years until former Louvre glazier Vincenzo Peruggia was arrested trying to sell it in Florence. Picasso kept making art, Apollinaire never quite forgave him for the courtroom betrayal, and the Louvre finally decided to hire actual guards.