Miami, 2007.
THE PLATINUM ROLLS-ROYCE WITH BULLETPROOF windows glided east onto the Palmetto Expressway toward Miami Beach, six stolen paintings stashed in its armor-plated trunk.
Great works by Degas, Dalí, Klimt, O’Keeffe, Soutine, and Chagall were piled rudely in the rear, wrapped individually in thin brown paper and clear packing tape. In the driver’s seat, a Parisian millionaire named Laurenz Cogniat pushed the three-ton beast hard. He entered the left lane approaching eighty, then ninety miles an hour, the vehicle’s menacing stainless-steel grille leading the way.
At Interstate 95, the glimmering Rolls turned south, hurtling down the raised concrete ribbon, the Miami skyline rising ahead. Laurenz took the Martin Luther King Boulevard exit, made a sharp U-turn, and jumped back on to the interstate, still southbound. His cold green eyes flicked from the road to the rearview mirror and back again. He craned his neck and searched a cobalt Florida sky. Every few minutes, Laurenz stabbed the brakes, dropping down to forty or fifty miles an hour and slipping into the right lane, then abruptly punched the gas again. In the passenger seat, a plump shaggy-haired fellow with a warm round face, a Frenchman who called himself Sunny, sat stoically, an unlit Marlboro between his lips. He, too, searched for suspicious vehicles.
In the backseat, I glanced at my borrowed Rolex and watched with amusement as Laurenz’s domed head bobbed and weaved with the traffic. At this rate, we were going to arrive early, assuming Laurenz didn’t attract a traffic cop or get us killed first. He shifted lanes again, and I gripped the handle above the door. Laurenz was an amateur. A bored real-estate magnate in a V-neck T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and sandals, he longed for adventure and assumed that this was how criminals ought to act on the way to a big deal—drive erratically to make sure no one is tailing them. Just like in the movies.
Behind black-mirrored shades, I rolled my eyes. “Relax,” I said. “Slow down.”
Laurenz pursed his lips and pressed a sandal on the accelerator.
I tried again. “Um, it’s kind of hard to be inconspicuous to the police when you’re driving ninety miles an hour down I-95 in a platinum Rolls-Royce Phantom.”
Laurenz pushed on. A self-made man, he didn’t take orders from anyone. Sunny, still pouting because I wouldn’t let him carry a gun, ignored me as well. He ran a stubby hand through his thick mane and quietly stared out the window. I knew he was nervous. He fretted that Laurenz was too temperamental—a whiner and ultimately a coward, a guy who might appear bold and buff, but couldn’t be counted on if things turned violent. Sunny didn’t speak much English and I didn’t speak much French, but whenever we talked about Laurenz, we agreed on one thing: We needed his connections. I tugged my seat belt tighter and kept my mouth shut.
The two Frenchmen in the front seat knew me as Bob Clay. In using my true first name, I was following a cardinal rule of working undercover: Keep the lies to a minimum. The more lies you tell, the more you have to remember.
Sunny and Laurenz believed I was some sort of shady American art dealer, a guy who worked both sides of the legal and illicit art markets, an international broker comfortable with multimillion-dollar deals. They didn’t know my true identity: Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and senior investigator of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. They didn’t know that the European criminal who’d vouched for me in Paris was in fact a police informant.
Most important, Sunny and Laurenz viewed today’s sale of six paintings as a mere prelude to the Big One.
Together, with their French underworld connections and my money, we were negotiating to buy a long-lost Vermeer, a couple of Rembrandts, and five sketches by Degas. This collection of art was worth $500 million, and far more significant, it was infamous. These were the very masterpieces stolen seventeen years ago during the greatest unsolved art crime in history, the 1990 theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
The Gardner heist had long haunted the art world and the many investigators who failed to run the thieves to ground and recover the stolen paintings. The Boston police and local FBI office had chased hundreds of dead-end leads, checking every lousy tip, wild rumor, and spurious sighting. They’d debunked theories floated by con men and gadflies angling for the $5 million reward. As years passed, new suspects surfaced and old ones died, some under mysterious circumstances. This spawned countless conspiracy theories: It was the mob; it was the IRA; it was a made-to-order heist by a foreign tycoon. The thieves didn’t know what they were doing; they knew exactly what they were doing. The burglars were long dead; they were alive, living in Polynesia. It was an inside job; the police were involved. The paintings were buried in Ireland; they were hidden in a Maine farmhouse; they hung on the walls of a Saudi prince’s palace; they were burned shortly after the crime. Journalists and authors investigated and wrote speculative and scandalous takeouts. Filmmakers produced documentaries. Each year, the legend of the Gardner heist grew. It became the holy grail of art crime.
Now I believed I was weeks away from solving it.
I’d spent nine painstaking months undercover luring Sunny and Laurenz, ingratiating myself with them to win their trust, and today’s entire ruse on a leased yacht was a near-final step in that process, designed to prove to them beyond a doubt that I was a serious player. The six paintings in the trunk were rank forgeries, copies I’d picked out at a government warehouse, yet good enough to fool Laurenz and Sunny. The FBI script called for the three of us to go for a short cruise aboard the rented boat, The Pelican. There, we would meet a Colombian drug dealer and his entourage, and sell him the paintings for $1.2 million—to be paid with a mix of bank wire transfers, gold coins, and diamonds. Of course, the drug dealer and everyone else on the yacht—his henchmen, the hot women, the captain and stewards—were fellow FBI undercover agents.
As we rolled toward our exit, the script reeled through my head and I visualized last-minute preparations aboard The Pelican: the Colombian dealer opening a shipboard safe, withdrawing a handful of Krugerrands and a sack of diamonds; the four brunette babes, hard bodies in their late twenties, stashing their Glocks and slipping into bikinis; the stewards in white linen uniforms laying out tortilla chips, salsa, rare roast beef, shoving two magnums of champagne into ice buckets; a sullen Irishman alone on a curved cream sofa, hunching over text messages on a silver BlackBerry; the captain flipping on hidden surveillance cameras and hitting “record.”
The Rolls sped east onto the MacArthur Causeway, the majestic link between downtown and Miami Beach. We were five minutes out.
I thought about the phone call I’d made to my wife earlier that morning. I always called Donna in the last moments before an undercover deal. I’d say I love you, and she’d say the same. I’d ask about her day and she’d talk about the kids. We always kept it short, a minute or two. I never said where I was or what I was about to do, and she knew better than to ask. The call not only calmed me, it reminded me not to play hero.
We pulled off the causeway and Laurenz eased into the marina parking lot. He stopped the Rolls in front of the blue-and-white-canopied dock house. He pushed a five-dollar bill into the valet’s hand, took the ticket, and turned toward the yacht. Of the three of us, Laurenz was the youngest and in the best shape, but he marched straight to the great white boat, leaving Sunny and me to unload the paintings. Sunny didn’t care. He was a connected guy in France, close to one of five Marseilles mob families known as La Brise de Mer, an organization whose signature hit is carried out by motorcycle assassins. But Sunny was no leader; he was a soldier, and one with mixed success. He didn’t like to talk about his background, but I knew his history of theft and violence in southern France stretched back to the late 1960s. He’d spent the 1990s in harsh French prisons, then had been busted twice for aggravated assault before slipping off to South Florida.
Laurenz’s story was a quintessential Florida immigrant tale: A former accountant and money changer for wiseguys in Paris, he had fled France a wanted man. Laurenz arrived in Miami with $350,000 in the mid-1990s, at the dawn of the last real estate boom. He smartly parlayed a combination of no-interest loans and a keen eye for distressed properties—plus a few well-timed bribes to the right lenders—into the American dream. Most of what Laurenz told me checked out, and on paper, he was probably worth $100 million. He lived in a gated $2 million house with a pool and Jet Skis docked on a private canal that fed into Miami Bay. He wore monogrammed shirts and rarely went a week without a manicure. Laurenz drove the Rolls everywhere, unless he needed to ferry his dogs. For that, he used the Porsche.
Sunny and Laurenz had not known each other in France. They’d met in Miami. But they knew some of the same people back home, wiseguys with access to the people holding the stolen Vermeer and Rembrandts in Europe. The French police wiretaps confirmed that Sunny and Laurenz spoke regularly with known European art thieves, and on the calls, they talked about selling a Vermeer. There was only one missing Vermeer in the world, the one from the Gardner.
As I approached the yacht, I took in the scene—the hearty welcome, the bikini babes, the thundering calypso music, and it struck me as slightly off key. I wondered if we weren’t trying too hard. Sunny and Laurenz weren’t stupid. They were good crooks.
We shoved off and cruised Miami Harbor for a good hour. We ate, we sipped bubbly, we soaked up the vista. It was a party. Two of the women cooed over Sunny while Laurenz and I chatted with the lead Colombian dealer. Once we were well under way, a third woman took it up a notch. She grabbed a champagne glass and a bowl of fruit and yelled “Strawberry-eating contest!” She raced out to the deck, laid a blanket down and got on her knees. Dangling a strawberry over her face, she covered it in whipped cream and lowered it lasciviously between her well-glossed lips. She sucked it slowly, and the other undercover female FBI agents took their turns. I guess it was all good drug-dealer bimbo fun until the undercover women made a dumb mistake. They crowned Sunny as judge of their contest, making him the center of attention. It didn’t play right—the chubby, lowest-ranking guy in our gang getting the royal treatment. Sunny fidgeted uncomfortably. I shoved my hands in my pockets and glared at the women.
Once again, our investigation was veering dangerously off course—yet another instance of too many people too eager to play a role. And there wasn’t much I could do about it.
I hated this helpless feeling. As the FBI’s only undercover agent who worked art crime cases, I was used to calling the shots. True, I carried a reputation for taking risks, but I also got results. In eighteen years with the bureau, I’d already recovered $225 million worth of stolen artworks and antiquities—icons of American history, European classics, and artifacts from ancient civilizations. I’d built a career catching art thieves, scammers, and black-market traders in nearly every art venue, going undercover in places as distant as Philadelphia, Warsaw, Santa Fe, and Madrid. I’d rescued works of art by Rodin, Rembrandt, and Rockwell, and pieces of history as varied as Geronimo’s headdress and a long-lost copy of the Bill of Rights. I was months away from recovering the original manuscript for Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth.
I understood that art crime cases couldn’t be handled like your garden-variety Miami cocaine deal or strong-arm Boston robbery. We weren’t chasing common criminal commodities like cocaine, heroin, and laundered cash. We were in pursuit of the priceless—irreplaceable art, snapshots of human history. And this was the biggest unsolved case of them all.
No one else on the boat had ever worked an art crime investigation. Few FBI agents ever have. Most American law-enforcement agencies, the FBI included, don’t give much thought to saving stolen art. They’re much more comfortable doing what they do best, busting criminals for robbing banks, dealing drugs, or fleecing investors. Today’s FBI is so focused on preventing another terrorist attack that nearly a third of the bureau’s thirteen thousand agents now spend their time chasing the ghost of Bin Laden. There has long been no interest in art crime. For many years after 9/11, this worked to my advantage. I got to call the shots on my cases and remain in the shadows. Generally, my FBI supervisors were competent, or at least tolerable. They trusted me to do my job, and let me operate autonomously from Philadelphia.
Operation Masterpiece, the name another agent gave the Gardner case, was different. Agents on both sides of the Atlantic were hungry to share a chunk of this grand prize. Supervisors in almost every office involved—Miami, Boston, Washington, Paris, Madrid—demanded a major role. For when the case was solved, they all wanted a stake in the glory, their picture in the paper, their name in the press release.
The FBI is a giant bureaucracy. By protocol, the bureau generally assigns cases to the appropriate squad in the city where the crime occurred, regardless of expertise. Most art crime investigations are run by the same local FBI unit that handles routine property theft—the bank robbery/violent crime squad. Once assigned, the cases are rarely transferred afterward. For most middle managers, the priority isn’t cases, it’s careers. No supervisor wants to make a controversial decision, such as transferring a big case to headquarters or to an elite unit like the Art Crime Team, because it might insult or embarrass another supervisor, potentially crippling someone’s career. So the Gardner investigation—the biggest property crime of any kind in the history of the United States and the world’s highest-profile art crime—was spearheaded not by the FBI Art Crime Team, but by the chief of the local bank robbery/violent crime squad in Boston.
It was, of course, the case of this supervisor’s career, and he spent a great deal of time making sure no one took it away. He didn’t like me, probably because of my reputation for taking chances, moving swiftly, doing things without waiting for written approval, risks that might jeopardize his career. He’d already tried to throw me off the case, writing a lengthy and outrageous memo questioning my integrity, a memo that he’d since withdrawn. Although I was back on the case, the supervisor had still insisted on inserting one of his Boston-based undercover agents into the mix. This was the hard-boiled sullen Irish American on the boat camped on the curved couch, fixated on his text messages. I found his odd presence a distraction, an unnecessary ingredient that threatened to spook the savvy Sunny and Laurenz.
The FBI supervisors in Miami and Paris were better than the one in Boston, but not by much. The Miami agents seemed more comfortable chasing kilos of cocaine than a bunch of fancy paintings, and dreamed of enticing Sunny into a drug deal, creating yet another distraction. The FBI’s liaison in Paris was too focused on keeping his French police counterparts satisfied, and knew they would be happy only if the arrests occurred in France, where they could make a big splash. The French commander had even called me the day before the yacht sting to ask if I could cancel the meeting. He needed time, he said, to insert a French undercover agent on the boat, and asked me to play down my role as the primary art expert. I’d stifled the impulse to ask why I should take orders from a French cop about an American operation in Florida. Instead, I simply told him we couldn’t wait.
Undercover stings are stressful enough without meddling from people who are supposed to have your back. You never know if the bad guys have bought in to your rap, or are laying an ambush. One slipup, one off-key comment, and a case can be lost. In the world of high-end art crime, where you are buying paintings worth ten or twenty or a hundred million dollars, the seller expects the buyer to be a true expert. You have to project an image of expertise and sophistication that comes with years and years of training. It can’t be faked. In this case, we were dealing with people with Mediterranean mob connections, humorless wiseguys who didn’t just kill snitches and undercover cops. They murdered their families, too.
After the strawberry-eating contest wound down and I “sold” the paintings to the Colombian in a drawn-out dog-and-pony show, the yacht began a slow return to the dock. I strolled out to the stern, alone with half a glass of champagne, and turned to face the brisk sea air. I needed it. I’m generally a mellow, optimistic guy—I never let the little stuff get to me—but lately I’d been irritable. For the first time an undercover case was keeping me awake at night. Why was I risking my life and my hard-won reputation? I had little left to prove and a great deal to lose. I knew Donna and our three kids could feel the stress. We were all watching the calendar. In sixteen months, I’d be eligible for retirement with a full government pension. My supervisor in Philadelphia was an old buddy who’d look the other way if I coasted through that final stretch. I could teach undercover school, hang out with the family, sketch out a consulting career, groom a young FBI agent as my replacement.
The Pelican slowed as it neared the causeway, and I could just make out the dock, the Rolls waiting by the canopy.
My thoughts skipped back to the missing masterpieces and their intricate empty frames, still hanging in place at the Gardner, some seventeen years after the foggy March night in 1990 when two men dressed as policemen had outwitted a pair of hapless guards.
I studied Sunny and Laurenz, chatting by the bow. They were looking out across the Miami skyline at the dark afternoon clouds and the thunder boomers closing in from the Everglades. The fat Frenchman and his finicky rich friend presented the FBI’s best break in the Gardner case in a decade. Our negotiations had moved beyond the exploratory phase. We appeared close on price and we were already discussing the delicate logistics of a discreet cash-for-paintings exchange in a foreign capital.
Yet I still found it tough to read Sunny and Laurenz. Did they believe our little act on the yacht? And even if they did, would they really follow through on the promise to lead me to the paintings? Or were Laurenz and Sunny plotting an elaborate sting of their own, one in which they would kill me once I flashed a suitcase of cash? And, assuming Sunny and Laurenz could produce the Vermeer and Rembrandts, would FBI and French supervisors really let me do my job? Would they let me solve the most spectacular art theft in history?
Sunny waved at me and I nodded. Laurenz went inside and Sunny came over, a nearly empty glass of champagne in his hand.
I put my arm around Sunny’s shoulder.
“Ça va, mon ami?” I said. “How’re you doing, buddy?”
“Très bien, Bob. Ver-r-r-ry good.”
I doubted it, so I lied too. “Moi aussi.”
Courmayeur, Italy, 2008.
FOR SECURITY, THE UNITED NATIONS MADE THE reservations as discreetly as possible—one hundred and six rooms in an affluent Italian ski resort at the foot of Western Europe’s tallest peak, Mont Blanc. The International Conference on Organized Crime in Art and Antiquities was timed to span a slow weekend in mid-December, between the Noir Film Festival and the traditional opening of ski season. The U.N. took care of everything. It arranged for flights from six continents, gourmet meals, and transport from airports in Geneva and Milan. By the time the buses left the airports early Friday afternoon, there was already a foot of fresh powder on the ground, and the drivers wrapped chains around thick tires before they climbed into the Alps. The buses arrived by dusk, bearing the world’s leading experts on art crime, jet-lagged but eager to convene the first such summit of its kind.
I arrived the night before the conference began, catching a ride from Milan to Courmayeur with a senior U.N. official who organized the meetings. She invited me to dine early with Afghanistan’s Oxford-trained deputy justice minister, and we sat by a table where we could overhear a senior Iranian judge holding forth with a Turkish cultural minister. After dinner, I made my way to the bar, in search of old friends.
I ordered a Chivas and dug into my pocket for a few euros. Through the growing crowd, I recognized Karl-Heinz Kind, the lanky German who leads Interpol’s art crime team. He cradled a milky cocktail and spoke with two young women I did not know. By the fireplace, I saw Julian Radcliffe, the prim Brit who runs the world’s largest private art crime database, the Art Loss Register. He had the ear of Neil Brodie, the famous Stanford archaeology professor. My drink arrived and I pulled a list of participants from my pocket. No surprise, the Europeans dominated, especially the Italians and Greeks. They always devote significant resources to art crime. I studied the less familiar, more interesting names and titles—an Argentine magistrate, the Iranian judge I’d seen earlier, a Spanish university president, Greece’s top archaeologist, a pair of Australian professors, the president of South Korea’s leading crime institute, and government officials from Ghana, Gambia, Mexico, Sweden, Japan, all over. A dozen Americans were on the list too, but reflecting our nation’s lukewarm commitment to art crime, almost all were academics. The U.S. government sent no one.
I’d just retired from the FBI and now ran an art-security business with Donna. The United Nations had invited me to speak at this conference because, unlike any of the other participants, I’d spent twenty years in the field as an art crime investigator. The other speakers would cite statistics and notions of international law and cooperation, presenting position papers on topics I knew well—like the oft-cited estimate that art crime is a $6-billion-a-year business. The United Nations had asked me to go beyond such academic and diplomatic talk—to explain what the shady art underworld is really like, to describe what kinds of people steal art and antiquities, how they do it, and how I get it back.
Hollywood has created a dashing, uniformly bogus portrait of the art thief. In movies, he is Thomas Crown—the clever connoisseur, a wealthy, well-tailored gentleman. He steals for sport, outfoxing, even seducing, those who pursue him. The Hollywood thief is Riviera cat burglar Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, or Dr. No in the first James Bond movie, Goya’s stolen The Duke of Wellington hanging in his secret underwater lair. The Hollywood art crime hero is Nicolas Cage, descendant of a Founding Father in National Treasure, solving riddles, recovering long-lost treasures. He is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones with fedora and bullwhip, deciphering hieroglyphics, saving the universe from Nazis and commies.
Plenty of art thefts are spectacular, the stuff of movies. In the Boston heist, the Gardner thieves tricked the night watchmen with a ruse and bound them eyes to ankles with silver duct tape. In Italy, a young man dropped a fishing line down a museum skylight, hooked a $4 million Klimt painting, and reeled it up and away. In Venezuela, thieves slipped into a museum at night and replaced three Matisse works with forgeries so fine they were not discovered for sixty days.
But art theft is rarely about the love of art or the cleverness of the crime, and the thief is rarely the Hollywood caricature—the reclusive millionaire with the stunning collection, accessible only by pressing the concealed button on the bust of Shakespeare, opening the steel door that reveals the private, climate-controlled gallery. The art thieves I met in my career ran the gamut—rich, poor, smart, foolish, attractive, grotesque. Yet nearly all of them had one thing in common: brute greed. They stole for money, not beauty.
As I said in every newspaper interview I ever gave, most art thieves quickly discover that the art in art crime isn’t in the theft, it’s in the sale. On the black market, stolen art usually fetches just 10 percent of open-market value. The more famous the painting, the harder it is to sell. As the years pass, thieves get desperate, anxious to unload an albatross no one wants to buy. In the early 1980s, a drug dealer who couldn’t find anyone to buy a stolen Rembrandt worth $1 million sold it to an undercover FBI agent for a mere $23,000. When undercover police in Norway sought to buy back The Scream, Edvard Munch’s stolen masterpiece known around the world, the thieves agreed to a deal for $750,000. The painting is worth $75 million.
Master paintings and great art have always been considered “priceless,” but it wasn’t until the mid twentieth century that their dollar value began a steep climb. The era opened with the 1958 sale of a Cézanne, Boy in Red Vest, for $616,000 at a Sotheby’s black-tie auction in London. The previous record for a single painting had been $360,000, and so the sale drew widespread press coverage. By the 1980s, when paintings began selling for seven figures or more, almost every record sale drew front-page headlines, imparting celebrity status to long-dead artists, particularly the Impressionists. Prices continued to spiral upward, approaching nine figures. In 1989, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles paid a then-shocking $49 million for van Gogh’s Irises. The following year Christie’s auctioned another van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, for $82 million, and by 2004, Sotheby’s was auctioning Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe for a jaw-dropping $104 million. The record was shattered again in 2006 by the music mogul David Geffen, who sold Pollock’s No. 5, 1948 for $149 million and de Kooning’s Woman III for $137.5 million.
As value rose, so did theft.
In the 1960s, thieves started swiping Impressionist works from the walls of museums along the French Riviera and from cultural sites in Italy. The greatest was the 1969 theft in Palermo of Caravaggio’s painting Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco. Such heists continued into the ’70s, but they spiked after the stunning van Gogh sales in the ’80s and ’90s.
The audacious 1990 Gardner theft—eleven stolen masterworks, including pieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt—marked the beginning of a bolder era. Thieves began striking museums across the globe, stealing more than $1 billion worth of paintings from 1990 to 2005. From the Louvre, they removed a Corot during a busy Sunday afternoon. At Oxford, they swiped a Cézanne in the midst of a New Year’s Eve celebration. In Rio, they took a Matisse, a Monet, and a Dalí. Bandits in Scotland posing as tourists stole a da Vinci masterpiece from a museum-castle. The Van Gogh Museum was hit twice in eleven years.
Feeling the swirl of jet lag, I drained my Scotch and headed up to my room.
The next morning, I arrived in time to get a decent seat for the opening remarks in the hotel conference center. Cradling my program and a cup of thick Italian coffee, I listened to the translation of the first speaker through wireless headphones. Stefano Manacorda of the Seconda Università di Napoli, a prominent Italian law professor with wild black hair and a wide purple tie, shuffled his notes and cleared his throat. He began with a blunt assessment that set the stage for the weekend meeting.
“Art crime is a problem of epidemic proportions.”
He’s right, of course. The $6-billion-a-year figure is probably low, the professor said, because it includes statistics supplied by only a third of the 192 member countries of the United Nations. Art and antiquities theft ranks fourth in transnational crime, after drugs, money laundering, and illegal arms shipments. The scope of art and antiquity crime varies from country to country, but it’s safe to say that art crime is on the rise, easily outpacing efforts to police it. Everything fueling the legitimate global economic revolution—the Internet, efficient shipping, mobile phones, and customs reforms, particularly within the European Union—makes it easier for criminals to smuggle and sell stolen art and antiquities.
Like many international crimes, the illegal art and antiquity trade depends on close ties between the legitimate and the illegitimate worlds. The global market for legitimate art tops tens of billions of dollars annually, with roughly 40 percent sold in the United States. With so much money at stake, hot art and antiquities attract money launderers, shady gallery owners and art brokers, drug dealers, shipping companies, unscrupulous collectors, and the occasional terrorist. Criminals use paintings, sculptures, and statues as collateral to finance arms, drug, and money-laundering deals. Art and antiquities, particularly pieces as small as a carry-on suitcase, are easier to smuggle than cash or drugs and their value easily converts in any currency. Stolen art is tough for customs agents to spot because art and antiquities moving across international borders don’t scream contraband the way drugs, guns, or bundles of cash do. Most stolen and looted pieces are quickly smuggled over borders, in search of new markets. Half the art and antiquities recovered by law enforcement is recaptured in another country.
Museum heists may grab the big headlines, but they represent only a tenth of all art crime. Statistics presented by the Art Loss Register in Courmayeur showed that 52 percent of all pilfered works are taken from private homes and organizations with little or no fanfare. Ten percent are stolen from galleries and 8 percent from churches. Most of the rest is spirited away from archaeological sites.
As another diplomat droned on about a rarely used codicil in some fifty-year-old treaty, I studied the Interpol figures in my conference packet. When I reached a chart on the geographic distribution of art thefts, I did a double take and took off my translation headphones: Interpol’s statistics asserted that 74 percent of the world’s art crime occurs in Europe. Seventy-four percent! That’s not likely, by a long shot. In reality, the numbers demonstrate only which nations keep good statistics—and this in turn may reveal the extent to which some nations truly care about policing art crime. The disparity between national art crime teams can be staggering. The French national art crime squad employs thirty dedicated officers in Paris and is led by a full colonel of the Gendarmerie Nationale. Scotland Yard deploys a dozen officers full-time and has deputized professors of art and anthropologists, partnering them with detectives investigating cases. Italy probably does the most. It maintains a three-hundred-person art and antiquity squad, a highly regarded, aggressive unit run by Giovanni Nistri, a general of the Carabinieri. In Courmayeur, General Nistri disclosed that Italy fights art crime using some of the same resources our DEA uses to fight drugs—it deploys helicopters, cybersleuths, and even submarines.
In the early afternoon, one of the top U.N. officials at the summit, Alessandro Calvani, urged other nations to follow Italy’s example, suggesting a worldwide public relations campaign to educate people about the loss of history and culture art crime causes. He pointed to the successes of public education campaigns that focused attention on tobacco, land mines, HIV, and the human rights abuses associated with the diamond trade. “Governments were finally forced to act because of strong public opinion,” he said. “A lot of people don’t think art crime is a crime, and without that feeling you can’t generate a groundswell.”
That’s certainly the case in the United States. Nationwide, only a handful of detectives work art crime. Despite the front-page play and prominent television coverage each large art heist triggers, most police agencies don’t dedicate proper resources to investigate. The LAPD is the only American police department with a full-time art crime investigator. In most cities, general purpose theft-squad detectives simply offer a reward and hope thieves are tempted. The FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have jurisdiction over art crime but expend few resources to police it. The FBI’s art crime team, created in 2004, employed only one full-time undercover agent—me. Now that I’ve retired, there is no one. The art crime team still exists—it’s managed by a trained archaeologist, not an FBI agent—but turnover is rampant. Almost all of the eight art crime team members I trained in 2005 had by 2008 already moved to other jobs, eager to advance their careers. I didn’t begrudge them that, but it made it impossible to create a trained cohesive unit or build institutional memory.
The United States wasn’t the only country at the conference that was urged to do more. With a few notable exceptions, art crime simply isn’t a priority for most nations. As one of the Italians told the summit: “What we have is a paradigm of collective delinquency.”
After lunch—turkey scaloppine, zuppa di formaggio, a light rosé—we heard from a pair of Australian academics who provided an overview on looting. The subject matter wasn’t new to me, but I was pleased to see them offer a non-Western perspective at this Eurocentric gathering. It’s folly to try to address a global problem without taking into consideration cultural differences. In some Third World countries, the illicit art and antiquities trade is quietly accepted as a way to boost the economy. Semi-lawless, war-torn regions have long been vulnerable. In Iraq, antiquities are one of the few indigenous, valuable commodities (and easier to steal than oil). In less dangerous but developing countries like Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Peru, where looters have turned archaeology sites into moonscapes, local governments don’t view every excavation as a crime against history and culture. Many view it as an economic stimulus. As the professors noted, the diggers are indigenous and unemployed, desperate to convert rubble from dead ancestors’ graves to food for starving families. At the conference, this perspective triggered hand-wringing from politically correct diplomats, bemoaning corrupt local officials who take bribes. So much so that I had to snicker when Kenyan National Museum director George Okello Abungu rightly rose to chastise the group. “Don’t be so quick to judge the corrupt customs man,” he said. “Remember who bribes him: the Westerner.”
Art and antiquity crime is tolerated, in part, because it is considered a victimless crime. Having personally rescued national treasures on three continents, I know firsthand that this is foolishly nearsighted. Most stolen works are worth far more than their dollar value. They document reflections of our collective human culture. Ownership of a particular piece may change over decades and centuries, but these great works belong to all of us, to our ancestors and to future generations. For some oppressed and endangered peoples, their art is often the only remaining expression of a culture. Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history.
Americans, in particular, are said to be uncultured when it comes to high art, more likely to go to a ballpark than a museum. But as I tell my foreign colleagues, the statistics belie that stereotype. Americans visit museums on a scale eclipsing sports. In 2007, more people visited the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington (24.2 million) than attended a game played by the National Basketball Association (21.8 million), the National Hockey League (21.2 million), or the National Football League (17 million). In Chicago, eight million people visit the city’s museums every year. That’s more than one season’s attendance for the Bears, Cubs, White Sox, and Bulls combined.
As the agenda inched toward my presentation, I realized that I could place each of the speakers into one of three boxes—academic, lawyer, or diplomat. The academics spouted the statistics and theory diagrams. The lawyers offered deathly dull, law review-style histories of international treaties related to art theft. The diplomats were completely useless. They seemed harmless enough, encouraging genteel cooperation. Yet they seemed to have two true goals. One: offend no one. Two: craft a bland statement for submission to a U.N. committee. In other words, no action.
Where was the passion?
We love art because it strikes a visceral chord in everyone, from the eight-year-old kid to the octogenarian. The simple act of putting paint on canvas or transforming iron into sculpture, whether by a French master or a first-grader, is a marvel of the human mind and creates a universal connection. All art elicits emotion. All art makes you feel.
This is why, when a work of art is stolen or an ancient city is stripped of its artifacts and its soul, we feel violated.
As I waited for the Interpol chief to wrap up so I could begin my presentation, I looked out across the room at all the dignitaries. The heavy snow was now piled as high as the windows. I began to daydream. How, I wondered, did the son of a Baltimore orphan and a Japanese clerk wind up here, as his country’s top art crime sleuth?