Peruggia’s fingerprints were in the files. He had been arrested briefly for an earlier offense in Paris and had been fingerprinted. His name appeared on a list of workers who had been in the museum for maintenance work in the period before the theft. He was included in the initial round of police interviews.
He was questioned. His apartment was searched.
The painting was not found.
The search of his apartment was apparently cursory or incomplete. Peruggia later said — and this claim has been accepted by most accounts of the case — that he had hidden the Mona Lisa inside a specially constructed false-bottom trunk in his apartment, and that this concealment defeated the police search. Whether the police missed it because the concealment was effective or because the search was inadequate has been a subject of historical commentary, but the outcome was the same: Peruggia was questioned, not seriously suspected, and released.
He was not formally cleared. His name remained on lists. His fingerprints remained in comparison — but his record was filed under a name variation that apparently did not produce a match to the print on the glass. The administrative gap between the print evidence and the name on the suspect list was one of the more remarkable near-misses in the history of the investigation.
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## Suspects Who Were Not the Thief
The absence of a quick arrest, combined with the enormous public interest in the case, created space for the investigation to expand in directions that had nothing to do with Vincenzo Peruggia.