It was a watch so beautiful, so elegant, so precise, that it could only have been meant for royalty. Then it vanished without a trace. | Photo: David Silberman/Getty Images
The tiny Simca 1000 Sedan puttered through the winding streets of a tony enclave near Israel's presidential residence. The spring evening was warm, and the scent of flowers filled the air. The neighborhood was a calm oasis, away from the dust and tumult of the Old City. The streets were particularly empty after the Sabbath began on Friday, April 15, 1983.
The Simca drove along HaPalmach Street and stopped in front of a pale three-story building: the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. The car idled. Broad stairs led up to the front door. White light flickered through a window in the front of the building—the guards were settling down to read and sleep.
The museum was famous for its collection of Islamic artifacts, but it was also home to a cache of rare timepieces, an assortment of pocket watches and mechanical ephemera so fine that many scholars considered it a mother lode of horology. The collection was kept in a gallery at the back of the building, and there, resting in a glass case unconnected to any alarm, lay what was likely the most expensive watch in the world: a priceless gold pocket watch designed for Marie Antoinette by legendary Swiss watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet. At the time of its commission in 1783, nobody had ever made a timepiece so complex and beautiful. In the intervening centuries, few had ever approached its artistry. The watch was known as the Queen.
The driver parked and approached a heavy iron gate. He ran a hand idly over the metal, listening and looking for guards or passersby. He was whippet-thin, with brown hair and a sharp, angular face. He had spent months preparing for this moment, training himself to work quickly and quietly.
When he was sure nobody was around, the man pulled a hydraulic jack from the back of his car. He fitted the jack between the metal bars and began cranking them far enough apart so that he could slip through. Using a rope ladder and hooks, he climbed about 10 feet up the side of the building and through an 18-inch-tall window that he opened with a screwdriver. Over the course of the night, he would steal valuable art objects and more than half the watch collection—including Marie Antoinette's storied gold watch, the Queen.
Sometime before 10:30 am on April 16, 1983, after the trim thief had shuttled the last watch from the museum into his car, he slipped behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and vanished into the Jerusalem night, leaving behind only a mystery.
In the wake of the robbery, after the assessors tallied up all of the losses, the true scope of the theft became clear. For insurance purposes, they valued the collection at around $700,000, but the watches were each one of a kind. Desperate, the estate of the museum's founder hired an investigator named Samuel Nahmias to search for the Queen. Nahmias was uniquely qualified for the position. A former Israeli army intelligence officer turned private investigator, he had already successfully recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in gems and cash for his clients in the jewelry world.
Nahmias' usual approach was to start with a suspect's inner circle—family, close associates, lovers—in the hope that someone would have seen the loot and would buckle under the pressure and turn the perpetrator in. In this case, however, there was no solid suspect. So Nahmias checked auction houses and kept tabs on antiques dealers and collectors from Tel Aviv to Moscow to see if anyone had worked with the thief. He sent associates to Switzerland multiple times on tips that the watches had surfaced. But every lead hit a dead end.
The watches themselves were too well known to sell on the open market. Most were made by Breguet in the late 1700s and 1800s and were well documented—especially the Queen. Commissioned for Marie Antoinette allegedly by the man rumored to be her lover, Count Hans Axel von Fersen, the watch was to have all conceivable features in it, according to Breguet's paperwork. Gold was to replace brass wherever possible. No limit was imposed on price or time of manufacturing. The name of the commissioner was left off the order.
The watch ultimately took 44 years to complete. In the interim, the French Revolution and the resulting European upheaval led to the death of both the man who likely commissioned the watch and its intended owner. (Marie Antoinette, of course, fell under the guillotine. Seventeen years after her death, an incensed crowd, convinced that von Fersen had conspired to assassinate Sweden's would-be king, beat him to death in a Stockholm square.) Breguet died in September 1823. His son, a talented horologer in his own right, finished the masterpiece in 1827. It traveled in the coat pockets of a French nobleman and later ended up in the collection of Sir David Lionel Salomons, a British polymath who brought the first car shows to England and patented an idea for buoyant soap. Salomons left his watch collection to his daughter Vera, a globe-trotting nurse who settled in Jerusalem after World War I and later used her father's money to build the museum—and to house his collection of watches.
What made Breguet's work so significant was his skill as both a watchmaker and a designer. His creations have pristine faces, delicate hands that end in apple-shaped tips, and movements that appear as complex as a computer circuit. The Queen was at once immensely complicated—it had all the features of a cathedral clock in the space of a pocket watch—and beguilingly elegant. Breguet even made a clear crystal face that allowed the owner to see the movement of the gears underneath.
Breguet cased the Queen in gold. It featured a full perpetual calendar, a jumping hour hand that flicked from hour to hour instead of slowly rotating around the face, and an independent second hand that could be stopped or started at will. The watch even contained a metallic thermometer and a mechanism that chimed the time. Sapphires were used to reduce friction.
But the beautiful watch had vanished, and the investigation was going nowhere. Nahmias would invite convicted burglars with tips about the case for questioning and leave them in his lush garden for a few minutes. Unbeknownst to the crooks, Nahmias had bugged his garden with small microphones to a recorder, hoping they'd let something slip when he was out of earshot. He worked hard, but his ingenuity and his efforts were fruitless. Inviting convicted thieves was a clever tactic but could backfire, as prisoners would lie to get a meeting with Nahmias.
After a few years, Nahmias moved on. The trail was cold. The police had cataloged all possible suspects leaving Israel by air after the theft, hunted high and low in the criminal quarters, and Nahmias himself ticked off lead after lead with no results. Even museum employees originally suspected of having been in on the theft had easily passed lie detector tests. The museum slowly recovered.
More than two decades after the theft, in August 2006, a noticeably pregnant woman named Hila Efron-Gabai called the little Tel Aviv antiques shop run by Zion Yakubov. Efron-Gabai, a lawyer by trade, wanted Yakubov to evaluate some items for her. Earlier that month, a woman living in the US had hired her over the phone to help return some objects to the L. A. Mayer Museum. The client’s only stipulation was that the transaction be anonymous. The American told the lawyer that her late husband had owned a few boxes of clocks and watches that were now hers. The boxes were hidden in Tel Aviv at this moment, she explained. Her husband had only told her about the boxes at the end of his life, while he battled cancer, revealing something that took her breath away: The timepieces belonged to the Mayer Museum, and he had stolen them two decades earlier.
The client said that she had seen the objects with her own eyes while visiting Israel, and she knew not only that they were beautiful but that they didn’t belong to her. “Whatever happens, these things have to be returned to the museum,” the client said. She asked Efron-Gabai to take care of them and to help her return them to their rightful owner. Shortly after, Yakubov went to Efron-Gabai’s Tel Aviv law office to examine these treasures, which the lawyer had procured with the help of her client. As he scrutinized the brilliant objects, Yakubov immediately understood their value; there, wrapped in yellowed newsprint like a forgotten tchotchke from a garage sale, lay the gleaming Queen.
With Yakubov’s analysis in hand, Efron-Gabai contacted the museum’s artistic director, a woman named Rachel Hasson, and Eli Kahan, chair of the museum board. The pair visited the lawyer’s office, and with little fanfare they began looking through the old boxes that held some of the greatest treasures of the horological world. “I opened them and identified them from their numbers. Most were in good shape. Some were damaged,” Hasson told a newspaper in 2009. “When I came to the Marie Antoinette, I couldn’t help crying. It was so moving and exciting to see it after so many years.”
Hasson and Kahan took a taxi home to Jerusalem—Kahan was too afraid to drive with the valuables in the car. But as excited as they were, they were also unsure how to proceed. They had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the lawyer and were sworn to secrecy about how the treasures had resurfaced. In fact, they were nervous about the prospect of displaying the artifacts at all—the museum had already taken an insurance payout when they thought the objects were lost for good.
The watches came home in August and remained hidden at the museum until the next November, when rumors of a massive discovery at the L. A. Mayer Museum began circulating among the police and the press. The museum had kept the discovery a secret as long as it could. Then someone talked.
The Central Investigation Unit of the Jerusalem Police sits north of Jaffa Road in a historic district called the Russian Compound. On the morning of November 11, 2007, officers were just gearing up for the day when they saw the headline in Haaretz, a national newspaper: “Hickory, Dickory, Dock: Stolen Museum Loot Found." The 790-word story told the tale of the Queen’s return.
Few in Israel had thought about the watches in more than two decades. Nahmias had moved on, and the Israeli police had relegated the cold case to its files. But now the confused authorities realized they needed to dig further—the watch may have returned, but there was still the mystery of who took it in the first place. The Central Investigation Unit, which looked into crimes like murders and major thefts, had conducted the original hunt in 1983. Now the unit assigned two young detectives, Oded Shamah and Oded Janiv, to the case. Together with a team that included a muscular Russian-Israeli investigator named Ely Zarkov and two female investigators, Revital Zaraf and Na’ama Mai, they began piecing together the 24-year-old puzzle.
The group visited museum artistic director Rachel Hasson. They meticulously reviewed the negotiations that led to the return of the objects. Hasson said very little, citing her promise of confidentiality to the lawyer and her mysterious client.
Yakubov didn’t know much either, but he could give the police some details about the storage facility where the watches were kept, and the team was able to track it down. At the warehouse, in Ramla, the police discovered a document with the name of a woman in Los Angeles: Nili Shamrat.
Shamrat’s name didn’t turn up anything in police records. But Mai did find a record of her marriage to a notorious thief. A May 2004 Haaretz story, headlined “Eagle's Wings Clipped,” detailed the death of Na’aman Diller, a burglar who lived quietly in Tel Aviv at the end of his life. Above Diller’s photo, a skinny man with a buzz cut lying in a hospital bed, the story read: “Diller’s 59-year-old wife, Nili Shamrat—who flew in from the United States—tearfully eulogized him.”
The police had found their thief.
Na’aman Diller was a Robin Hood figure in 1960s and '70s Israel. A disgraced air force pilot, the reclusive criminal was a repeat offender who specialized in forgery and break-ins. He could scale walls and slip through small windows, and he boasted a wealth of odd tactics that would become his calling card. He had an airtight alibi for the museum heist—he had forged exit documents to make it look like he was out of the country at the time of the robbery.
Diller’s most famous heist was the 1967 robbery of a Tel Aviv bank. He began preparation five months before the operation, telling bank neighbors he was an engineer as he dug a trench to the back of the bank. He buried a 300-foot length of pipe along the trench and then covered it, once taking an extended break so he could fight in the Six-Day War. When his excavation was complete, he parked a van containing oxygen canisters at the end of his pipeline.
The pipe carried oxygen to a portable cutting torch that he used to break into the bank. This way he didn’t have to lug huge gas tanks through an exposed field. Then, over the course of a few days, he burned through the bank vault and began to systematically open each safe-deposit box. Once he had as much loot as he could carry, he took it home, took a shower, then returned to get more. He was caught only when he grew frustrated after hours of safecracking and started banging on a safe door. He was so loud that a nearby homeowner called the police.
Diller met Shamrat in the 1960s. They eventually separated. Shamrat moved to the US and married someone else. But Shamrat and Diller rekindled a long-distance romance in the 1980s, and after he’d fallen ill with cancer they were finally married in Jerusalem on April 15, 2003. It was, coincidentally, the 20th anniversary of the L. A. Mayer theft. Shamrat had to return to the US shortly after the wedding to work, but the two kept in touch by phone. “He did things that were definitely criminal, but he was really very positive in so many instances,” she says.
Diller died of cancer in May 2004, but not before Shamrat visited him one last time in Tel Aviv, and together they put some of the stolen pieces in a safe deposit box. For decades the unsolved theft of the Queen, a masterpiece of horology that once rode in the coats of nobles, was Diller’s own secret masterpiece.
Today the Queen, valued at $30 million, hangs in a bulletproof case in the basement of the L. A. Mayer museum. The watch is well secured now, thanks to a nimble thief, long gone but not forgotten. The Queen is polished and gleams under the museum-grade LED lamps. It’s a testament to Marie Antoinette, her admirer, and the genius watchmaker who embodied their love in gold, crystal, and endlessly ticking gears.
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How the Queen Was Stolen
The thief used a hydraulic jack to make an opening in the fence at the L. A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art.
Then he used a rope ladder to reach a museum window.
He pried the window open with a screwdriver.
The thief made off with the Queen, plus 105 other objects.
Illustrations: Steve Sanford
