On Christmas Eve 1978, burglars stole tens of millions worth of paintings from the de Young Museum. This is their story, though the Rembrandt painting they stole ended up being worth little, because Rembrandt didn’t paint it.

When we think “theft” and "Christmas," our thoughts inevitably turn to the infamous French Laundry Christmas wine heist of 2014, where the famed Napa Valley restaurant was robbed of $550,000 worth of fine wine. Those thieves were eventually caught.

But a new KGO retrospective documentary looks back on the Christmas Eve art heist at the de Young Museum in 1978, where thieves made off with four priceless paintings, and got away with it  — though the Rembrandt painting they stole ended up not being worth much, because over the years, historians determined that Rembrandt hadn’t actually painted the thing.

The story is retold in this 23-minute video from KGO. The theft occurred sometime on Christmas Eve between 5 pm, and Christmas Day at 9:15 am, when staff noticed there were four paintings missing from the de Young’s Gallery 12. The burglars' great prize was Rembrandt’s "Portrait of a Rabbi," at the time worth about $1 million, but they also managed to steal "Interior of the Church of St. Lawrence in Rotterdam" by Anthonie de Lorme, "Harbor Scene" by Willem van de Velde, and "River Scene at Night" by Aert van der Neer.

"Security was inadequate, no question," then-deputy director with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Tom Seligman told the KGO documentary crew (de Young officials declined to comment for the documentary). "By today's standards, (it was) infantile."

Children of the 1970s may recall that this was the time of the traveling “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibit, a cultural craze that inspired the Steve Martin pop single “King Tut.” The de Young was covered with scaffolding at the time, in preparations for the exhibit visiting San Francisco.

"We created vulnerabilities with the construction, to be sure," Seligman told KGO. That scaffolding allowed the thieves both their entrance and escape routes.

The clever thieves then pulled seven paintings off the walls, but they only got away with four, because something made them leave much more quickly than planned. And they missed their big payday, leaving behind a real Rembrandt painting ("Portrait of Joris de Caullery") in favor of "Portrait of a Rabbi," which would end up being proven a glorified forgery.

"They're pulling all these paintings off the walls," Western Neighborhoods Project executive director and podcaster Nicole Meldahl said to KGO. “And in the process of removing these pieces, they jostle loose a reflector or a light bulb or something. It crashes, and it spooks them."

But the thieves made it out safely, by using a piece of art as part of their escape plan. A 600-pound 17th-century Dutch cabinet happened to be sitting in the de Young collection, the burglars stacked its shelves to create steps, and escape with their priceless paintings, hopefully to go on and get rich.

They never got caught, but this heist did not make them rich. Notably, the “Rembrandt" painting they stole was proven to not be a Rembrandt in the years after the theft.

And a November 1999 New York Times article covered that whoever had the paintings 21 years later simply decided to give up on them. After several failed restorations, the paintings were merely donated to a gallery in New York while in terrible condition.  

Then-Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco director Harry S. Parker III had a laugh when pointing out to the Times that the thieves stole a fake Rembrandt, and left a real one behind.  

"This reflects poorly on the thieves' connoisseurship," Parker told that paper.

Related: Massive Art Heist Hits Oakland Museum of California, More Than 1,000 Items Stolen [SFist]

Image: Walt Disney Pictures