PARIS, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) -- A French thief nicknamed "Spiderman" has been sentenced to eight years on Monday for stealing five masterpieces worth over 100 million euros (about 106 million U.S. dollars) from a top Paris museum.
Vjeran Tomic, a 49-year-old seasoned burlgar of Croatian origin, told investigators that he broke into the National Museum of Modern Art at the night of May 20, 2010, hoping to steal a work by French cubist painter Ferdinand Leger.
But after realizing the security surveillance system failed to work, he decided to take the other four paintings by Pable Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse and Georges Braque.
Inaugurated in 1961, the museum is home to more than 10,000 works from art movements of the 20th century.
Tomic, who already had 14 convictions for jewelry and arts, earned the nickname from some media due to his agility in scaling walls to break into apartments.
He and two accomplices were ordered to collectively pay an indemnification of 104 million euros (110 million dollars), which corresponds to the estimated value of the stolen artworks, to the City of Paris.
Jean-Michel Corvez, a 61-year-old antique dealer who admitted to ordering the theft of Leger on behalf of an anonymous buyer, and Yonathan Birn, a 40-year-old dealer of luxury watches who admitted to storing the paintings for a time, respectively got seven and six years in jail.
Besides the collective fine, the three criminals were also fined between 150,000 euros (159,000 dollars) and 200,000 euros (212,000 dollars) each.
Corvez also was banned from dealing in antiques or artworks for five years.
The paintings were still missing. Investigators said they have probably been smuggled out of France.
