COOPER CITY.- A French citizen who lives in Cooper City has been accused of trying to broker the multimillion-dollar sale of four stolen masterpieces from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, France, the U.S. Attorney's Office said today.

Federal prosecutors say the man, Bernard Ternus, was indicted by a Florida grand jury on a single count of conspiring to sell the paintings stolen last August from a French museum. Ternus and others, authorities said, tried to peddle the paintings to undercover French and U.S. law enforcement agents for $4.7 million.

Wearing jumpsuits, the robbers ordered guards to lie on the floor at gunpoint as accomplices fanned through the galleries stealing French impressionist Claude Monet's "Cliffs Near Dieppe" while others snagged the bucolic "Lane of Poplars at Moret" by another impressionist, Alfred Sisley, and two evocative oil paintings by Flemish Baroque-era artist Jan Bruegel the Elder, according to Interpol, the international police agency.

The paintings were recovered earlier this month in France and others involved in the theft arrested.

Ternus was already in U.S. custody on a visa fraud charge.