In the annals of art theft, no case has matched-for sheer criminal panache—the heist at Ireland's Russborough House in 1986.

The Irish police knew right away that the mastermind was a seedy, rotund, and brazen Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder—including a Gainsborough, A Goya, two works by Rubens, and Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid—remained maddeningly at large for years. Cahill taunted the police with a string of other crimes, but in the end the paintings brought him low. The challenge of disposing of such famous works forced him to reach outside his familiar world into the international arena, and when he did, his pursuers were waiting.

The movie-perfect sting that broke Cahill uncovered a maze of banking and drug-dealing connections that redefined the way police view art theft. As if that were not enough, the recovery of the Vermeer—by then worth two hundred million dollars—led to a remarkable discovery about the way Vermeer achieved his photographic perspective.

The Irish Game places the great theft in the context of Ireland's troubled history and follows the thread that led, as a direct result of Cahill's desperate adventures with the Russborough art, to his assassination by the IRA. With the storytelling skill of a novelist and the nose of a detective, Matthew Hart follows the twists and turns of this celebrated case, linking it with two other world-famous thefts—of Vermeer's The Concert and other renowned paintings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and of Edvard Munch's The Scream at the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. Sharply observed, fully explored, The Irish Game is a masterpiece in the literature of true crime.

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Russborough

In Ireland lies a gray stone palace, in a valley by the Wicklow Mountains. The mountains themselves are dry and desolate, and an unfriendly wind picks its way across the heath. Little roads wind here and there in the hills, and criminals drive out from Dublin to make the place their haunt. It is a wonder that the house lay unmolested for so long in its park below the hills, tethered against the drenched green sward of Ireland.

The palace of Russborough House comes into view quite suddenly. At a bend in the N81 from Blessington, a high wall crumbles away, and there, a quarter mile up the pasture, spreads Russborough’s long facade. From end to end it runs for seven hundred feet. Sometimes the sun strikes the house, and the stone glows with a silvery light, and a kind of trumpet music seems to float in the air, proclaiming a world impossibly rapturous and remote.

The Leesons built Russborough. Their ancestor came from England as a sergeant in the army of the prince of Orange, who laid waste the Catholic armies of James Stuart in 1690 at a battle on the River Boyne. This defeat completed the destruction of Catholic power in Ireland. After the Battle of the Boyne a long period of minority rule ensued, known as the Protestant Ascendancy. The Leesons were part of this empowered group. They became brewers and Dublin property speculators, and prospered rapidly. They married well, applied for a patent of nobility, and after that passed promptly upward from the baronetage into the peerage, becoming earls of Milltown. All they needed was a decent house, and in 1741 they commissioned the foremost architect in Ireland, Richard Castle, to build it.

An army of laborers poured out of Dublin into County Wicklow and attacked the site. From the quarry at Golden Hill came ton upon ton of granite blocks, in carts that crept down the steep tracks and into the valley and along the muddy, rutted road. The stone was rich in mica, and it sparkled in the light. To the north of the rising house a horde of men slaved with shovels, carving the hillside into terraces. Even at a wage of a penny an hour, the years of spadework behind the mansion cost the Leesons thirty thousand pounds.

Russborough took eight years to build. One day, near its completion, the earl rode up and cast his eye around and ordered forty thousand trees. “About two miles from Ballymore Eustace,” wrote a visitor, “we came to a beautiful situation, where we found a noble mansion forming into perfection.” At last the Leesons moved in, and their aristocratic friends paraded out in droves. “I told you I was to see Russborough,” the Countess of Kildare scribbled to a friend. “The house is really fine, and the furniture magnificent; but a frightful place.”

Lady Kildare meant the view, the saturnine hills that scowled at Russborough from across the valley. It struck the Leesons’ contemporaries as a bleak and empty setting for so princely a house.

The mansion was a masterpiece of the Palladian style and established the Leesons among the highest families of the land. The architect Castle had also built Carton, the Kildares’ country seat, and Leinster House, the Dublin residence of the dukes of Leinster, where the Irish parliament now sits.

Russborough became a great house of the Protestant Ascendancy. The estates of the Leesons’ friends spread across that county as across the whole of Ireland. The earl paved his floors with marble and had his ceilings stuccoed by the Italian masters the Lafrancini brothers. The River Liffey was drawn from its course and made to drowse in fountains in view of the house before being released to resume its journey down to Dublin. Beyond the fountains rose the gloomy, swollen masses of the Wicklow hills, with dark clouds pouring over.

In a few generations the Leesons declined, until in 1902 the last of them to live at Russborough, the dowager Countess Geraldine, crated up most of the furnishings and silver, the pictures and the books, and sent them down to Dublin to the National Gallery of Ireland. When the countess died, Russborough passed to the family’s heirs in England, who offered it to the Irish state, which declined the offer. The house sat empty until 1929, when Captain Denis Daly, a squire from Galway, bought it. Daly was a Catholic, and this affiliation soon brought the old, Protestant mansion to the attention of the world from which it had stood apart.

At the front of Russborough a pair of colonnades join the main house to the wings. The colonnades are set with niches, and the earls of Milltown had filled them with Italian marbles. Carved for a different time and place than rural, Catholic Ireland, the white statues gazed in naked nonchalance down across the pastures to the Liffey ponds. For two hundred years no one had thought to remark on this garmentless condition, or anyway, not to the Leesons; by 1930, things had changed. To protect its young republic from “noxious and corrupting influences,” the Irish government established a board of censors. Heartened by this, the priest at Ballymore Eustace, whose parish included Russborough, waited until he had the miscreant Daly in the pews, then climbed into his pulpit and thundered against the statues. “The grass would grown in the door” of Russborough if the statues were not removed, Bernard Teevans, a gardener on the estate, remembered the priest telling Daly as the landowner sat in the congregation. In those days, Teevans added, the people of Ireland were “never up off their knees, praying day and night.” Of Daly, Teevans said: “He was a very religious man, considering going for the priesthood. He came home from Mass and told some of the workmen to ‘get those things out of here.’” Teevans recalled the wrecking party: “I had great fun knocking the heads, legs and arms off [the statues]. It was the best day’s sport I had for a long time.” They dumped the pieces in a shed.

Happily, the lavish interiors of Russborough escaped the censure of the parish, and it was these interiors that attracted Sir Alfred Beit, baronet, heir to a nineteenth-century South African diamond fortune. Sir Alfred had been leafing through Country Life looking for ways to decorate his London house, an enormous place in Kensington Palace Gardens, a stone’s throw from Kensington Palace. He came across a picture of one of Russborough’s fireplaces and commissioned a copy. Then, in 1952, while scouting around for a suitable home for their art collection, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit discovered that Russborough itself was up for sale, and bought it.

It would be hard to overstate the value and importance of the art collection that was now destined to move to Ireland. Sir Alfred’s uncle and namesake had been a partner in Wernher, Beit & Company, diamond financiers. It was Julius Wernher and the first Alfred Beit who bankrolled the young Ernest Oppenheimer, the man who ended up with control of De Beers Consolidated Mines, and through it, the entire diamond world. Wernher and Beit took for themselves huge stock positions in De Beers.

The two financiers began collecting paintings at the same time, matching each other Rembrandt for Rembrandt, Goya for Goya, Rubens for Rubens. They demanded the best and hired as their adviser the director of the German national gallery in Berlin. The Wernher collection passed down through the female line into the Phillips family, whose daughters married, respectively, the dukes of Westminster, Abercorn, and Roxburghe. In London the duchesses all kept house in the same mansion in Eton Square, stacked companionably one above the other in three enormous flats. The Wernher collection eventually went to their brother, who sold it. The Beit collection passed from Alfred to his brother Sir Otto, and from Sir Otto to Sir Alfred, who crated it up and shipped it across the Irish Sea.

Along with it went a treasure in silver, bronze sculpture, and antique furniture. This lode arrived in Ireland, was wedged into fleets of trucks, passed through Dublin, and threaded its way out into the lanes of Wicklow until it came to Russborough. There the Beits unpacked it all, moved in, and settled down. In terms of today’s money, the treasure was worth more than two hundred million dollars, and there it was, in a drafty old house in the country. Not only that, the Beits were English—historically, reviled by the Irish as oppressors. One would have thought thieves would be parked along the road with their engines running. Yet Sir Alfred and Lady Beit lived peacefully at Russborough for twenty-two years before people started robbing them.