The robbers had planned meticulously. The car bombs served as decoys, drawing emergency responders away from the museum during the crucial minutes. The getaway boat eliminated any possibility of a car chase through Stockholm's congested streets. The nails ensured no police vehicle could follow even if officers responded in time. Inside the museum, guards faced a man with a submachine gun and two accomplices with handguns. There was no resistance. The thieves grabbed a Rembrandt self-portrait from 1630, Renoir's Young Parisian from 1875, and Conversation by Renoir. These were not random selections. Someone knew exactly which walls to approach, which frames to lift. By 5:32 p.m., the boat had disappeared into Stockholm's archipelago, carrying nearly fifty million dollars in canvas and oil paint.

Justice moved faster than recovery. In January 2001, police received a ransom demand for several million kronor, accompanied by photographs proving the thieves possessed the paintings. They refused to pay. That same month, investigators arrested the masterminds: Alexander Petrov and Stefan Nordstrom, along with the lawyer who had brokered the ransom negotiation and several accomplices. By July 2001, Petrov, Nordstrom, and three others were convicted. Yet the paintings remained missing. Two months after the arrests, Conversation surfaced unexpectedly during an unrelated drug raid. An official police statement captured the moment perfectly: 'We weren't looking for the painting so it was a bonus when we found it.' Two masterworks still remained in the wind.

The trail went cold until September 2005, when the FBI in Los Angeles began investigating a Bulgarian criminal syndicate for drug trafficking. During surveillance, agents heard talk of the Young Parisian. They arrested Boris Kostov, one of the syndicate's leaders, and under interrogation he produced the Renoir. He also revealed that the Rembrandt was in Denmark. The FBI contacted Danish authorities, and together they orchestrated a sting operation in Copenhagen. Agent Robert K. Wittman posed as a buyer. The sellers, unable to move the painting for five years, had grown desperate. They offered the $42 million Rembrandt for just $100,000. When they arrived to complete the sale, Danish police arrested four men, who were subsequently extradited to Sweden.

All three paintings eventually returned to the Nationalmuseum. The Rembrandt self-portrait, painted when the artist was just 24, once again hangs where it had for generations. The Renoir and the Ottini occupy their original places on the gallery walls. The heist had exposed vulnerabilities that museums worldwide subsequently addressed. The coordinated distraction, the waterborne escape, the international movement of stolen art through criminal networks all became case studies in museum security and art crime investigation. The December darkness that swallowed the speedboat eventually yielded its secrets across Stockholm, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen. The paintings' journey ended where it began, on the walls of a museum that had stood on Stockholm's waterfront since 1866, its collection once again complete.