April is the month when area hotels begin winding things down for the summer and happily count their profits from a busy tourist season. But The Breakers Palm Beach management wasn’t able to relax and enjoy their seasonal success so much in April 2001 because two 500-year-old Flemish tapestries worth $55,000 had mysteriously disappeared.
The news broke on April 1, and the situation was so ludicrous that, at first, I thought it was an April Fools’ Day prank. Even though the tapestries were prominently displayed in the Gold Room, they weren’t discovered missing immediately and the time of theft couldn’t be narrowed down to less than a 32-hour period.
One tapestry, portraying Antony and Cleopatra, was larger than 11 feet by 8 feet and the other, depicting country scenes, measured nearly 10 feet by 7 feet. Have you ever had to move a large rug? Imagine being able to sneak two of them past several hotel security cameras and staff. The Palm Beach police were highly skeptical of how this was accomplished — especially the staff’s notion that the burglars had staged their raid from a boat at night.
It struck me as a scenario worthy of a Pink Panther movie. So when The Breakers announced that they were offering a $5,000 reward for the recovery of the tapestries, I knew that Inspector Clouseau was the right person for the job in my April 8 cartoon.
But wait. Within a matter of days, things took an even stranger turn. A man and a woman, posing as a Saudi prince and his girlfriend, managed to make off with two $500,000 rings from the Diamont Noir jewelry shop in The Breakers retail area. The rings were stolen right out from under the noses of the store manager and a salesperson.
Thinking that a second Pink Panther gag would be repetitive, I focused on the level of security at The Breakers, which was beginning to remind me a little of Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, for my April 22 cartoon.
All right, so I may have been guilty of piling on The Breakers management a little too much. But I certainly had fun drawing caricatures of Peter Sellers and Don Knots.
I have not been able to find any mention of whether the tapestries were ever recovered, but notorious French jewel thief Nordine Herrina was caught in Milan in 2002 and later pled guilty to stealing the rings at The Breakers.
David Willson has been the Palm Beach Daily News editorial cartoonist for 20 years. His new book, Billionaires and Butterfly Ballots, A 20-Year Palm Beach ‘Cartoonspective,’ is available at palmbeachcartoons.com
Join David Willson at his Palm Beach Daily News Editorial Cartoon Page on Facebook for more stories, regularly posted cartoons from the archives and cartooning news.
