Guilty plea in French art theft
A Frenchman pleaded guilty in Miami on Thursday to attempting to sell four valuable paintings that were stolen last year from a French art museum in a brazen robbery by masked, armed thieves.
Bernard Jean Ternus, 56, admitted conspiring to sell the paintings for about $4.7 million to buyers who turned out to be undercover FBI and French police agents. Four of their meetings were videotaped and dozens of conversations were recorded, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Christopher Hunter.
The paintings, stolen last August from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Nice, France, include two well-known Impressionist works: “Cliffs Near Dieppe” by Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley’s “The Lane of Poplars at Moret.”
Ternus, a French citizen who had been living in the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., suburb of Cooper City, faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
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