Big-time Israeli heist solved 25 years later

JERUSALEM - It took time, but Israeli detectives have cracked one of the country's greatest crimes: the heist of a clock collection from a Jerusalem museum a quarter century ago.

The 1983 theft, the costliest in Israel's history, saw 106 timepieces worth millions of dollars disappear from the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art. Among them was a pocket watch made for Marie Antoinette that museum officials value at more than $30 million.

Although the stolen clocks had no connection to Islamic culture, they were displayed in the museum because they originally belonged to the father of the museum's founder.

Detectives now blame Naaman Diller, a notorious Israeli thief who fled to Europe and died in the United States in 2004.

Investigators got their first break two years ago, when the museum informed them it paid about $40,000 to an anonymous American woman to buy back 40 of the items, including the Marie Antoinette timepiece made by famed watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Rachel Hasson, the museum's artistic director, calls the gold and rock-crystal watch "the Mona Lisa of the clock world."

Police forensics experts were allowed to examine the clocks, and detectives questioned the lawyer who negotiated the sale. The trail led to an Israeli woman in Los Angeles named Nili Shamrat, whom police identified as the widow of Diller, a notorious criminal in Israel after a string of bold thefts in the 1960s and '70s.

Then the mystery began to unravel. Diller apparently confessed to his wife on his deathbed. When Israeli police and U.S. law-enforcement officials arrived at her home in May to question her, they found more of the stolen clocks.

Diller's widow declined to answer questions when contacted Saturday, and she did not answer her phone Sunday or yesterday.

Oded Yaniv, one of the investigators who broke the case, said that about 40 clocks were missing but that police were pursuing tips on where Diller scattered the goods.

"He was a legendary robber," Yaniv said. "We are all disappointed that we don't have the chance to sit and talk to him and investigate him. We feel like we missed out on that."