Time, Lost And Found.(International Edition; INTERNATIONAL)(Marie Antoinette watch)

Byline: Joanna Chen

A priceless watch, a daring heist--now on view in Israel.

Marie Antoinette must have turned in her grave to see her pocket watchataken apart and wrappedain old newspaper. But that was its fate after an agile thief lifted it and others from a Jerusalem museum in 1983 and hid the evidence by taking them apart, wrapping them up and stashing them around the globe. The trail lay cold for two decades, until the burglar made a deathbed confession to his wife. In 2006, she tried to sell some of the watches back to the museum; administrators sent the police. This summer, the spectacular Marie Antoinette watch, valued at about $30 million, will be the star of a show in Jerusalem. In a setting more worthy of a queen, the collection will go on view for the first time since its recovery.

The collection includes more than 100 rareaworks by Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823), who fashioned Marie Antoinette's piece, and other leading watchmakers. It was originally the property of Sir David Lionel Salomons, a London mayor and avid art enthusiast. In 1974, his daughter bequeathed it to Jerusalem's L.A. Mayer Museumafor Islamic Art. Then, in 1983, a lean cat burglar managed to remove the bars from one of the museum's narrow back windows and shimmy inside. He proceeded to help himself to a range of clocks, watches and music boxes, methodically prising open glass cases and dropping the booty into cardboard boxes. By morning, all that was left was an empty Coke bottle and a half-eaten sandwich. "I was shocked, like someone had died," recalls the museum's director, Rachel Hasson, who is responsible for the new show. The police were more impressed--in fact, they were stumped. Oded Shamah, one of six investigators on the case, says the heist was the work of a "perfectionist" who had staked out the premises and knew the alarm wasn't working. "It was such a simple plan; it was pure genius," he said.

Such genius, in fact, it would be years before the case was solved. First Naaman Diller, an ex-kibbutz member and known antiquities thief, confessed the crime to his wife just before his death. Then, in 2006, she tried to sell some of the treasures back to the museum. This led the police to her home in Los Angeles, where the ...