NEW YORK – An Italian citizen wsa indicted in New York City for allegedly stealing Salvador Dalí’s Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio from an art gallery on the Upper East Side. After surveillance images of a suspect were released to the public, the drawing — worth approximately $150,000 — was anonymously mailed back to the gallery from Greece. A subsequent investigation led to the arrest and indictment of the defendant, who is charged in New York State Supreme Court with grand larceny in the second degree.

According to documents filed in court and statements made on the record in court, on June 19, 2012, Phivos Istavrioglou, 29, of Milan, walked into the Venus Over Manhattan gallery on Madison Avenue and 77th Street, lifted a 1949 watercolor and gouache drawing by Salvador Dalí entitled Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio off the wall and put into a shopping bag. Within days of the theft, surveillance images of a possible suspect were broadcast to the public worldwide in print, television, and Internet-based news reports. On June 28, 2012, working with the United States Postal Inspection Service, the NYPD recovered the stolen artwork in a cardboard shipping tube at Kennedy International Airport, after it was intercepted en route to Venus Over Manhattan from Greece. 

On February 16, 2013, at the invitation of an undercover detective posing as a business manager for an art gallery, Istavrioglou flew to New York City, where he was detained by federal Homeland Security agents at Kennedy Airport and taken into custody by NYPD detectives.

“It was almost surreal how this theft was committed – a thief is accused of putting a valuable Salvador Dalí drawing into a shopping bag in the middle of the afternoon, in full view of surveillance cameras,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. “This brazen heist from a Manhattan gallery is the latest in a string of cases involving theft or fraud in the art world that my Office has prosecuted. Today’s indictment brings us one step closer to bringing an international art caper to a close.”