where banks were seen as a necessary evil. I was a kid of 15 when in the spring of 1967 Diller began to dig his way to the safe of a bank two streets from my home in Tel Aviv. Dressed in a postal worker's overall, he dug through backyards, excavating a ditch from his van towards the bank. He was a one-man gang, both the brain and the burglar. From a visit to England, he had brought back break-in tools and a book about welding that included in it a method for cracking steel.

Patiently, he laid copper tubing through the yards to carry soldering gas. The Six Day War short-circuited his plan. Diller covered up his excavation and joined the fighters. When he returned from the war he immediately went back to the bank. Half a year after he had begun to act, he cut through the strong-room door, slipped through it and reached the treasure. He felt, as he said later, "that thrill a man feels at the side of a beautiful woman when he knows that suddenly she is his." He gathered up 97,000 Israeli pounds, $8,000 in American notes, diamonds and jewelry - a haul worth a quarter of a million Israeli pounds. This was a huge take, at a time when the first prize in the National Lottery was 100,000 pounds. Alas for him, neighbours had heard the noise he'd made and had called the police: Diller was caught just as his robbery had reached its triumphal climax. He was tried, imprisoned for 4 years. Let out, he burgled again and was jailed once more. He was finally released in 1982 - whereupon he disappeared.

A lone wolf, Diller almost became an air force pilot but was thrown out of the service because he took an airplane and flew over his kibbutz. It was a savage blow, and he remained bitter, seeking vengeance, crime and, apparently, punishment - after every burglary he was caught, seemingly of his own volition. Until, that is, the spring of 1983, when he carried out the greatest of his capers. This time he took its secret with him to the grave.

During the years after the robbery, as a seemingly reformed citizen he frequently flew to Europe, where he disposed of a few of the timepieces. Others, among them the Queen's watch, he kept in safes, in storehouses and in his apartment. Only after his death, when the woman later described as his wife tried to sell the timepieces to a watchmaker in August, 2006, was the mystery solved. And only this week it was announced that another 43 of the missing clocks had been found in safes in France. Now only 10 remain to be found.

In January, 2009, an exhibition of about half of the timepieces that have been returned to the museum will open to the public. At its dazzling heart will be the 'Mona Lisa of timepieces', as the precious pocket watch has been called - a kind of miniature mechanical computer made of gold and crystal that sets itself, commissioned for a Queen who was beheaded before the precious bauble was completed.