The scene sounds like something out of a crime novel. Surrounded by piles of rotten food stacked up on homemade furniture, missing art works worth around €1 billion ($1.35 billion) have been discovered in a grubby Munich apartment. And it appears that the story, broken by German news magazine Focus on Sunday, has only just begun.
The suspect in the bizarre case is an 80-year-old man who Focus reports first caught the attention of law enforcement in 2010, when customs officials searched his bags on the border between Germany and Switzerland to find €9,000 ($12,200) in cash.
Even though the man was not legally required to declare it and did not behave suspiciously, police opted to keep him under surveillance. In the spring of 2011, a court granted investigators permission to search his apartment.
What they found was extreme squalor, according to Focus. But nestled between dirty plates and cans of food with sell-by dates from the last century were some 1,500 paintings, drawings and etchings by famous artists including Pablo Picasso, Emil Nolde, Carl Spitzweg and Henri Matisse.
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