Norwegian former football player and notorious art thief Pål Enger has died at the age of 57. Enger was famous for stealing an Edvard Munch painting in 1994. The ScreamEngel, who played for the club as a teenager, died Saturday night, a press officer for the club told The Associated Press. The cause of Engel’s death was not immediately clear, but the Norwegian newspaper Daily newspaper He reportedly died in Oslo.
Obsessed with the Mafia, Engel was first jailed when he was 19, having just made his professional football debut for Valerenga. In 1988, he embarked on a series of art and jewellery thefts, including a semi-failed heist The Scream From the National Gallery, Oslo. Having miscalculated the painting’s location in the museum, Engel stole another of Munch’s paintings, Love and pain (1895), erroneously referred to as vampire.
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In a 2023 documentary about Engel’s life, The one who stole the screamHe said the misjudgment led to “disappointment [that] It went on for days.” But the dangers involved and the process of hiding the work from the police “started to get interesting.”
Engel was sentenced to four years in prison for the theft—but that wasn’t enough to disabuse him of the idea of becoming a world-famous art thief.
His most famous theft occurred on the opening day of the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, when he stole The Scream From the National Gallery in Oslo. The painting, then valued at $55 million, was recovered intact after Engel admitted to hiding it in a secret compartment in his home.
Over the years, Engel has been convicted of numerous thefts of art and drugs and continues to attract media attention. In 1999, he escaped from a minimum security prison and gave interviews to news and television stations while on the run, much to the chagrin of police. He was later arrested again for “wearing sunglasses late at night to attract attention.” He began painting while in prison in 2007 and made his debut in 2011 with a series of abstract paintings that were exhibited at a gallery in Norway.
Despite his passion for art, Engel continued his criminal activities. In 2015, he was arrested and charged with stealing 17 paintings from an Oslo gallery after leaving his wallet and ID card at the crime scene. His former lawyer, Nils Christian Nordhu, described his Daily newspaper He will be missed as a “gentleman” thief. (Engle, who never married, claimed to have four children with four women in four different countries.)
According to the Associated Press, Svein Graff of Valerenga football team reflected on Engel’s potential as a football player and recalled that Engel once said: “Although he is not the best football player, he is the best criminal, so this is the path he chose.”
