Baltimore, 1963.
“JAP!” I’d heard it before, but the slur from the large white woman with an armful of groceries hit me with such force, I stumbled. I squeezed my mother’s hand and dropped my eyes to the sidewalk. As the woman brushed past, she hissed again.
“Nip!”
I was seven years old.
My mother, Yachiyo Akaishi Wittman, did not flinch. She kept her gaze level and her face taut, and I knew that she expected me to do the same. She was thirty-eight years old and, as far as I knew, the only Japanese woman in our working-class neighborhood of two-story brick starter homes. We were newcomers, having moved from my mother’s native Tokyo to my father’s Baltimore a few years earlier. My parents had met in Japan during the last months of the Korean War, while Dad was stationed at the Tachikawa U.S. air base, where Mom was a clerk. They married in 1953 and my older brother, Bill, was born the same year. I was born in Tokyo two years later. We inherited my mom’s almond eyes and thin build, and my father’s Caucasian complexion and wide smile.
Mom didn’t speak English well, and this isolated her, slowing her assimilation in the United States. She remained mystified by basic American customs, such as the birthday cake. But she certainly recognized and understood the racial slurs. With memories of World War II still raw, we had neighbors who’d fought in the Pacific or lost family there. During the war my American dad and my Japanese mom’s brothers had served in opposing armies. Dad dodged kamikazes driving a landing craft that ferried Marines to Pacific beaches; one of Mom’s older brothers died fighting Americans in the Philippines.
My parents sent my brother and me to proper Catholic schools in Baltimore, but surrounded us with all things Japanese. Our cabinets and shelves overflowed with Japanese ceramics and antiques. The walls were covered with woodblocks by Hiroshige, Toyokuni, and Utamaro, the Japanese masters who inspired van Gogh and Monet. We ate dinner on a table crafted from dark Japanese mahogany and sat on funky curved bamboo chairs.
The overt racism that we encountered enraged my father, but his anger rarely flared in front of me. Dad didn’t talk about it much and I knew he’d faced far greater hardship as a kid. When he was three or four years old, his parents died one after the other, and he and his older brother, Jack, became wards of Catholic Charities. At St. Patrick’s Orphanage, my dad learned to fend for himself. When forced to participate in chorus, he sang loudly off key. When unjustly persecuted by a brutal male teacher, he socked the man in the nose. Dad quickly became too much for the nuns to handle, and they shipped him to a foster home, separating him from his brother. Dad bounced from family to family, more than a dozen in all, until he turned seventeen, old enough to join the U.S. Navy, in 1944.
As I moved through elementary school and junior high in the 1960s, I followed the daily struggles of the civil rights movement in the papers and on television. The FBI and its special agents always seemed involved. They protected victims of racism and prosecuted the bigots and bullies. I asked my mother about the FBI agents and she said they sounded like honorable men. On Sunday nights in the late 1960s, my mom, dad, brother, and I gathered by our new color television to watch episodes of The F.B.I., the no-nonsense series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., with scripts personally approved by J. Edgar Hoover. On TV, the FBI always got its man, and the agents were noble protectors of justice and the American way. At the end of some shows, Zimbalist asked for the public’s help to solve a crime, a sort of precursor to America’s Most Wanted. I loved it. We rarely missed an episode.
One of our neighbors, Walter Gordon, was a special agent in the FBI’s Baltimore division. When I was ten years old, he was the coolest man I knew. Mr. Gordon wore a fine suit, shined shoes, and crisp white shirt every day. He drove the nicest car on the block, a bureau-issue late-model green two-door Buick Skylark. People looked up to him. I knew that he carried a gun, but I never saw it, only deepening his G-man mystique. I hung out with three of his sons, Jeff, Dennis, and Donald, playing stoopball in their front yard and trading baseball cards in their basement. The Gordons were genuinely kind people who embraced our struggling family without making it feel like charity. When I turned eleven, Mrs. Gordon heard that I had never had a birthday cake. So she baked one for me, layered with dark chocolate. Years later, when Mr. Gordon heard that my dad had opened a new seafood restaurant, he began to bring fellow agents there for lunch, even though it was out of the way, in a sketchy part of town near the Pimlico racetrack. I knew Mr. Gordon didn’t come for the food. He came to bring paying customers to help a neighbor.
The restaurant, a short-lived enterprise called Neptune’s Galley, was only one of my dad’s many start-up businesses. Whatever the venture, Dad was always boss-owner and a gregarious guy, never cheap, but we struggled to build savings and financial stability. He opened a home-remodeling company, raced second-tier Thoroughbreds, created a college catalog business, and wrote a book on how to win the lottery. He ran unsuccessfully for city council and opened an antiques storefront on Howard Street called Wittman’s Oriental Gallery. That business was among his most successful and satisfying. My dad figured I’d join him in his business ventures and my mom hoped I would become a professional classical pianist. (I was accomplished in high school, but I soon discovered I wasn’t good enough to make a career of it.)
By the time I entered Towson University in 1973—as a part-time night student, taking classes as I could afford them—I knew what I wanted to be: an FBI agent. I kept these plans to myself. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to talk much about what he’s going to do until he does it. I guess the trait comes from my mom’s Japanese heritage. Besides, I didn’t want to disappoint my parents.
Still, my view of the FBI had matured. The job now seemed not only interesting but sensible, responsible yet thrilling. I liked the notion of protecting the innocent, investigating cases, working as a policeman whose main weapon is his brain, not his gun. I also liked the idea of serving my country, and still felt guilty that the Vietnam draft lottery had ended the year before I turned eighteen. And after years of watching my dad struggle as a small businessman, I also could not ignore the promise of a stable government job with guaranteed benefits. Another allure was an agent’s sense of honor, or gedi in Japanese. The little I knew about FBI agents came mostly from watching Mr. Gordon and from television. But it seemed like an honorable profession and a good way to serve my country. After I graduated from Towson, I called the FBI and asked for a job.
I excitedly told the agent who took my call that I met each of the FBI’s requirements. I was twenty-four years old, a college graduate, a U.S. citizen, and had no criminal record.
That’s nice, kid, the agent said as kindly as he could. “But we like our applicants to get three years’ real-world work experience first. Give us a call then.” Discouraged, I moved to Plan B: the Foreign Service, figuring I could work for the State Department and travel for three years, then transfer to the FBI. I took the exam, but didn’t get the job. Apparently, I didn’t have enough political juice.
The same year, my brother Bill and I joined my dad in a new business, a monthly agricultural newspaper called The Maryland Farmer. Neither my dad nor I knew anything about journalism or farming, but the paper was 75 percent ads anyway—for fertilizer, seed, dairy products, tractors, anything a farmer might need. Our advertisers were as big as Monsanto and as small as a local general store. I had never set type or written a headline, and I couldn’t tell the difference between an Angus and a Holstein. But I quickly learned how to do all of those things. I also learned the art of listening. I met with farmers, judged farm show contests, wooed corporate executives, and got to know career bureaucrats. I wrote stories, edited them, sold ads, designed headlines, supervised copy as it was punched into the big Compugraphic machine, and used an X-Acto knife to paste it all onto the page. We did fairly well, and by 1982, Wittman Publications had expanded to four states. I traveled extensively, perhaps a hundred thousand miles a year, learning how to sell a product, and more important, to sell myself, a skill that would become essential years later when I worked undercover. I mastered the most important lesson of sales: If someone likes the product, but doesn’t like you, they won’t buy it; if, on the other hand, they’re not crazy about the product, yet they like you, well, they may buy it anyway. In business, you have to sell yourself first. It’s all about impressions.
On the road, I learned how to manipulate—how to make cattlemen, peanut farmers, tobacco growers, and lobbyists believe this city boy cared about their issues. But I didn’t really care. I still longed to join the FBI. And after eight years of constant deadlines, weekly scrambles to find advertisers, and managing banal disputes between reporters and advertising salesmen, the job got old.
One October evening, after another frantic day at the office, I headed out to blow off some steam and grab a good dinner. I made my way to a trendy new restaurant in the city, a place where I knew I could grab a great bowl of lobster bisque and catch Game Four of the American League Championship Series, the Orioles versus the Angels. My bisque arrived and hit the spot; I’d been so busy that day I’d missed lunch. The Orioles jumped out to a three-run lead in the fourth inning, but at the bar, a blond woman kept bobbing up and down, blocking my view of the television. I found it irritating. But during the fifth inning, she turned slightly and I caught her profile. Wow. This woman was a radiant beauty with a smile that made me forget the game. I introduced myself, tried to stay cool. We spoke for an hour and she finally agreed to give me her number. Her name was Donna Goodhand, and she was twenty-five years old, a dental office manager with a bright sense of humor. On the rear of her white 1977 Malibu Classic was a bumper sticker that said, IGNORE YOUR TEETH AND THEY WILL GO AWAY. I liked her style, and I thought I’d acted suavely during our first encounter. Later, she would confide that she hadn’t seen it that way—she originally found me pushy, obnoxious. By her account, I rescued myself on our third date, when I took her to my parents’ home and serenaded her with “Unchained Melody” on the piano. We married two and a half years later.
In the mid-1980s, Donna and I had two young sons, Kevin and Jeffrey. We lived in a tiny townhouse and, because my newspaper business was too small to provide medical benefits, Donna worked full-time for the Union Carbide Corporation.
One day in 1988, Donna showed me a newspaper ad that said the FBI was hiring. I played it cool and shrugged, careful not to raise expectations, still embarrassed by the post-graduation call. But my mind drifted back to the notions of service, honor, independence, Mr. Gordon and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. I also knew I didn’t have much more time. I was thirty-two years old. The FBI stopped taking new agents at age thirty-five. Without telling Donna, I took the aptitude test at the FBI offices in Baltimore. I figured if I failed, I wouldn’t tell anyone and that would be it. A few months later, an FBI agent showed up at the newspaper and asked to see me. I took him into my private office and we sat down. He was thin, tall, and wore large round glasses with thick lenses. He wore a cheap light-brown sport coat and blue trousers. The agent was there to check my background, but we also talked a lot about what it was like to be an agent. He was a good salesman. Then again, I was an easy sell.
“… And so, in just a few months, if you became a special agent, you could find yourself driving a high-powered car with a shotgun on the side of a mountain or on an Indian reservation, and you might be the only law around for thirty miles…”
That sounded pretty cool. Working alone, supervising no one. Carrying a shotgun. Representing the U.S. government. Protecting the innocent, prosecuting evil. The only law around for miles.
The agent looked me over once more. “Let me ask you something.” He pointed through the door to my newspaper employees scurrying to put out the next edition. “Why do you want to leave all this? You make $65,000 and you’re the boss, the owner. In the FBI, you’ll start at $25,000 and be told what to do, where to live.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Easy choice. I’ve always wanted to be an FBI agent.”
We shook hands.
There was one more test—the FBI’s physical training test, a complexly scored series of exercises—running, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups. I was thirty-two years old, and had to train to pass. That summer, every evening after work, I hit the local track. The whole family joined me, Donna pushing baby Jeffrey in an umbrella stroller as toddler Kevin ran behind her. I passed and won entrance to the FBI Academy. On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend 1988, we drove to Donna’s parents’ home on the Chesapeake Bay to celebrate Kevin’s fourth birthday and my entrance into the FBI. We lined six picnic tables side by side—sixty friends, neighbors, and family members munching burgers and hot dogs, cracking large steamed crabs, sipping chilled Budweiser by the bay. There were toasts, hugs, and family photos. It was bittersweet. The next day, I piled into Donna’s aging Malibu, left my family, and headed to Quantico, Virginia, to report for the fourteen-week FBI Academy.
From the first day, I was struck by how much each of my fifty classmates had in common. We were mostly conservative, roughly thirty years old, patriotic, clean-cut. I was also struck by the fact that unlike me, most recruits came to the Academy with a law-enforcement background. They were ex-soldiers and former policemen, people who embraced military bearing and physical contact. They enjoyed boxing, wrestling, kicking, handcuffing and firing weapons, taking pepper spray in the face as part of a manly rite of passage. I didn’t share their macho creed. While I understood that my job might be dangerous, and I stood willing to sacrifice myself to save a civilian or a fellow agent, that didn’t mean I would do something stupid. I always scored well on FBI written tests because I knew the correct answer in most scenarios was to call for backup, not to play hero. Question: Two armed men rob a bank, fire at a police officer, and duck into a home. What do you do? Answer: Call for backup and the SWAT team. The military might be willing to accept some losses, but in law enforcement there is no such thing as an acceptable loss. The physical training at the academy was necessary, but I found it something to endure, not embrace. Thankfully, my dorm roommate, Larry Wenko, shared my view. Larry came up with a mantra that helped us get through the hellish fourteen weeks: Here to Leave.
In our final weeks at the academy, we received our postings. Donna and I had hoped for Honolulu. We got Philly.
It was not a choice assignment. In 1988, Philadelphia was grimy, expensive, and a decade away from making its great comeback. I tried to make the best of it, lamely reminding Donna that Philadelphia was only ninety minutes from our relatives in Baltimore. She laughed and bit her tongue. We both knew we weren’t moving to Philadelphia for its location or quality of life. We moved to Philadelphia so I could pursue my dream.
We didn’t realize how fortuitous the FBI’s choice would be. Philadelphia is home to two of the nation’s best art museums and one of the country’s largest archaeology collections.
The month I reported for duty, two of them were robbed.
Philadelphia, 1988.
THE FIRST THIEF HIT THE RODIN MUSEUM, AN ELEGANT building dedicated to the French artist who sparked the Impressionist movement in sculpture.
The museum holds the largest collection of Rodin’s work outside of Paris and sits prominently on the northwestern edge of Philadelphia’s grand boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The Rodin is managed by its sprawling neighbor, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which boasts paintings by Dalí, Monet, van Gogh, Rubens, Eakins, and Cézanne. In pop culture, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is better known as the spot where Sylvester Stallone jogged up seventy-two steps in the movie Rocky. It’s an exhausting climb. The flat terrain in front of the Rodin Museum, on the other hand, is far more hospitable. The only barrier between the museum and the parkway is a lovely courtyard anchored by a six-and-a-half-foot-tall cast of the artist’s most famous work, The Thinker.
On November 23, 1988, a troubled young man entered the Rodin Museum at 4:55 p.m., five minutes before closing time. The winter sun had already set, and the museum was nearly empty. The man wore blue jeans, white sneakers, a dark T-shirt, and a long gray tweed overcoat. His dirty blond hair fell below his shoulders, and the guards at the door figured he was an art student. The lone cashier at the tiny gift shop did not notice the man until he spoke.
“This is business!” the bandit announced as he drew a .25-caliber Raven pistol, a Saturday night special with a worn wooden grip. “On the floor, I say!” He pointed the shiny silver barrel at the guards, but the weapon was so small and the man spoke so theatrically that the guards hesitated. Was this an act? A prank? Was this guy unhinged? He spoke with the lilt of a British accent, but was clearly American. With his hair slicked back and his high cheekbones, he looked a little like James Dean. When no one moved, the man fired a shot into the wall.
The guards dropped to the floor.
The thief kneeled down, the weapon trembling in his left hand, and handcuffed each guard. He moved to the Rodin sculpture closest to the front door, Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, a ten-inch-high bronze of a bearded middle-aged man with a weathered face, and snapped it from its marble podium. He turned and dashed out the front door, cradling the sculpture like a football, through the museum courtyard and past The Thinker. When the thief reached the edge of the museum grounds at the Ben Franklin Parkway, he turned west toward the art museum, disappearing into the maze of rush-hour traffic.
It was my first month as an FBI agent.
On its face the heist seemed like a simple, stupid, uncivil act. How ironic that my work on the investigation would open worlds I had never considered—the struggles of one of Impressionism’s most significant artists, the dream of a Roaring Twenties tycoon who sought to share an artist’s extraordinary beauty with his fellow Philadelphians, and the hopeful, often hapless mind of the art thief. Looking back, I see now that it sparked an interest I would turn into a career. But during my first month on the job, I was focused on more basic tasks, like remembering to take my radio with me on stakeouts.
Back then, the FBI didn’t have full-time art crime investigators. In fact, the theft of art and antiquities from museums wouldn’t become a federal crime until 1995. The theft of an object of art or cultural significance was treated like the theft of any valuable piece of property. The property-theft squad handled it. Usually, the FBI didn’t become involved in art crime cases unless there was evidence that a stolen piece was carried across a state line, a federal crime. But in Philadelphia, there was one guy, a respected agent named Bob Bazin, who liked to work museum cases. He worked closely with the Philadelphia police, and they often consulted with him on thefts. I got lucky. When I graduated from the Academy and reported for duty, I was assigned to partner with Bazin.
Not that Bazin wanted me, or any other rookie. Veteran agents called us “Blue Flamers” because in our first months we were so eager to please that we were said to have blue flames shooting from our asses. Bazin liked to work alone and, at least on the surface, acted as if he couldn’t be bothered to train a neophyte. I suspected he was suspicious of my background. My brief years in the Japanese antiques business with my dad hardly qualified me as an art expert. Worse, most FBI rookies are former cops, soldiers, or state troopers. I was a geeky former ag-journalist. Bazin was a bear of a man, not tall, but burly, and a no-nonsense investigator who’d spent years on the street hunting bank robbers and fugitives. He had an unfailing, enduring loyalty to the FBI and worked diligently on any assignment. That included taking me on.
I settled into an empty desk next to Bazin. The FBI occupied two floors in the central federal building in Philadelphia, part of a redbrick judicial complex two blocks from Independence Hall. The property-theft squad worked in a bullpen in a corner of the eighth floor. On my first day, I went to the supply closet and grabbed a couple of pads, pens, and a handful of blank forms. Bazin patiently watched me arrange them on my desk. When I finished, he caught my eye. “How do you plan to carry all that on the street?”
I didn’t know. “They didn’t tell us at the Academy,” I said lamely.
Bazin growled. “Forget all that shit. The Academy is Disneyland.”
He reached behind his desk, pulled out a weathered tan briefcase, and threw it at me. He told me to fill the case with the essential FBI forms I would need to conduct investigations—forms to execute search warrants, read people their rights, make hidden audio recordings, and seize property.
“Take it with you everywhere you go, every day, every case,” Bazin said. My new partner stood. “C’mon, we’re not going to solve any crimes sitting around here,” he said. “We’ll start after lunch.”
After a couple of hoagies, we drove fifteen blocks to the Rodin Museum. Bazin asked all the questions, and I took detailed notes. We didn’t learn much more than the city police detectives had, and I couldn’t tell what Bazin was thinking as we drove back to the squad room. I wondered—but did not dare ask—why the thief had chosen The Man with the Broken Nose. Perhaps he picked it because it was located so close to the front door. Maybe he was attracted by the sculpture’s shiny nose—for years, curators had allowed museum patrons to rub it for good luck, and the bronze had acquired a bright patina. With few leads to investigate, I tried to make myself useful. I quietly read up on Auguste Rodin and The Man with the Broken Nose, or L’Homme au Nez Cassé.
Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose was Rodin’s first important work, and it is not an overstatement to say that it was revolutionary, as it led him to redefine the world of sculpture, moving it beyond photographic realism, much as fellow Impressionist Claude Monet transformed painting. In many ways, Rodin’s task was tougher. Painters like Monet expressed themselves by deft use of color and light. A sculptor like Rodin worked in monotones on a three-dimensional surface, manipulating light and expression with lumps and creases in plaster and terra-cotta molds. The turning point for Rodin, and indeed for art history, began in 1863, when he was twenty-four, the year his beloved sister died.
Distraught over Maria Rodin’s death, Rodin abandoned his fledgling career as an artist. He turned away from family and friends and toward the church. He even took to calling himself Brother Augustin. Fortunately, a priest recognized that Rodin’s true calling was art, not religion, and he put him to work on church projects. This led to design jobs for Parisian general contractors and the sculptor and painter Albert-Earnest Carrier-Belleuse, known for his sculpture of figures from Greek mythology. On the side, Rodin resumed his own work.
He rented his first studio, a horse stable on the Rue Le Brun, for ten francs a month. The place was raw, one hundred square feet of workspace, a slate floor with a poorly capped well in a corner. “It was ice cold,” he wrote years later, “and penetratingly damp at all seasons of the year.” In a rare photograph from this formative period, Rodin wears a top hat, frock coat, and scraggly goatee, his unkempt hair swept across his ears. He looks confident.
Rodin’s new pieces were not meant to be realistic; they were designed to impart deeper, sometimes multiple meanings. Before his sister’s death, Rodin sculpted people close to him—family, friends, women he dated. Now he turned outward, to sculpt the common man. He was too poor to afford to pay models, and he grabbed volunteers where he could, including the handyman who cleaned his stable-studio three days a week. Rodin described this handyman as “a terribly hideous man with a broken nose.” He was Italian and went by the nickname Bibi, which was the nineteenth-century French equivalent of Mac or Buddy. “At first I could hardly bear to do it, he seemed so dreadful to me. But while I was working, I discovered that his head really had a wonderful shape, that in his own way he was beautiful…. That man taught me many things.”
Rodin worked on the piece on and off for eighteen months. He stored it in the stable, which he could not afford to heat, and covered it only with a damp cloth to keep the terra-cotta from drying out. Rodin’s complex sculpture of a handyman came to resemble a Greek philosopher. It was at once a portrait of an everyman and a superman. It was a portrait of a man and of his times, and a portrait of humanity. It offered a new way for Rodin, a way toward the truth.
Then something extraordinary happened.
One winter night in 1863, the temperature plunged below freezing and the terra-cotta mold froze. The back of its head split off, fell, and shattered. Rodin studied the mask that remained. It seemed to accentuate the creases and the texture of Bibi’s face, his broken nose and the man’s inner agony. The half-finished nature of the work, Rodin concluded, added depth. He had discovered a new form of sculpture, one he would employ again and again.
“The mask determined all my future work,” Rodin recalled. “It was the first good piece of modeling I ever did.”
The Salon was not impressed. The state-sponsored umbrella organization of artists and critics who controlled the most sought-after exhibition space was a conservative crew. In 1864, they were not ready to accept Impressionist art of any kind. Rodin would not necessarily have cared, if the Salon were not so influential, at least economically. The wealthiest buyers, including the Republic of France, were reticent to purchase art not exhibited at the Salon. It would take eleven years before the Salon would accept work by Rodin, Monet, or any of their Impressionist colleagues.
In 1876, Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose made its American debut in Philadelphia, as part of a French exhibition in Fairmount Park celebrating the American centennial, a milestone cultural event that led to the founding of the city’s art museum. For Rodin, the show was a disappointment. He won no prizes, and his work apparently garnered no publicity.
A half century later, an American visionary brought Rodin back to Philadelphia in style.
Jules E. Mastbaum was a self-made movie tycoon who seized on the potential of the cinema-house business in the early 1900s. He turned the moviegoing experience into an entertainment venue that was at once glamorous and accessible. By the early 1920s, as Hollywood began to boom, Mastbaum owned more movie houses than anyone in the United States. Mastbaum named his business the Stanley Company of America in honor of his dead brother, and in scores of midsized cities and towns across America, the local Stanley Theaters, many with grand staircases and lavish decor, became a prime social spot. The most extravagant theater in the chain was built in Philadelphia; it was a 4,717-seat theater with room for a sixty-piece orchestra, a French Empire/Art Deco monstrosity adorned with marble, gold leaf, leaded glass, tapestries, paintings, statues, three balconies, a Wurlitzer organ, and the largest crystal chandelier in the city.
In 1923, some six years after Rodin’s death, Mastbaum visited Paris on an extended vacation and became entranced with the French sculptor. He began to buy up bronze castings, plaster studies, drawings, prints, letters, and books, and shipped them home to his beloved Philadelphia. His collection soon included pieces from every period of Rodin’s life. In addition to The Thinker and Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, Mastbaum brought back The Burghers of Calais, Eternal Springtime, and the complex piece Rodin spent the last thirty-seven years of his life crafting, the enormous sculpture The Gates of Hell. Mastbaum always intended to share his collection with the public, and three years after he began his collection he hired two prominent French neoclassical architects, Paul Cret and Jacques Gréber, to design a building and gardens on a citydonated plot of land on the parkway. In front of the museum courtyard, they erected a facade of the same French château that Rodin had created outside his country estate in his later years. Designed by Jacques Gréber as part of the museum’s overall plan, the Rodin Gardens have remained a calm respite from the clatter of the city, even as the Ben Franklin Parkway landscape morphed over the years.
Mastbaum died unexpectedly in 1926, but his widow finished the project and donated it to the city. The museum opened in 1929 to rave popular and critical reviews. “It is a jewel which shines on the breast of a woman called Philadelphia,” one newspaper gushed. Today, the museum seems small and subtle, especially given its big brother on the hill, the art museum. But its intimate size and wide scope make it unusually accessible. Visitors are encouraged to partake in the lone interactive exhibit—rubbing the nose of the Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, and wishing for the same kind of good luck the sculpture brought the artist.
In the months that followed the 1988 theft, Bazin and I could have used some of that luck.
With so few clues, we did what any cop does when he comes up empty: We offered a reward. The museum and its insurance company put up $15,000 and we got the local newspapers and television stations to publicize it. The tips flew in, and as always, almost all were wrong. We dug through each one anyway. About a month later, we received a call from a Philadelphia man who knew things about the crime that had not been publicized—like the thief’s flamboyant monologue. He also seemed to know a lot about the man he fingered, Stephen W. Shih. The suspect was twenty-four years old, slightly older than the college student described by the guards, but our informant insisted that he was our man. The rest of the physical appearance seemed to match, and—get this—Shih was working as a $400-a-day stripper to pay the rent. He was unusually handsome. And theatrical!
We figured we had our man, but we needed more than a tip to arrest Shih or search his home. We needed solid evidence, and Bazin moved cautiously. He explained that if we simply confronted Shih and tried to intimidate him into confessing, it might backfire. He might clam up and ditch or destroy the Rodin. This has happened several times in Europe as the police have closed in on thieves. In one infamous case, the mother of a Swiss man suspected of a dozen museum thefts dumped more than one hundred paintings in a lake, destroying not only the evidence but also irreplaceable works of art. Our primary goal, Bazin reminded me, was to recover the sculpture. Our job was to save fragments of history, messages from the past. If, in the process, we busted the bad guy, that would be a bonus.
Bazin came up with a simple plan: Show the guards a photo lineup of Shih and seven guys who looked like him. If the guards ID’d him, we’d have enough to move in. First, we needed a photo of Shih. That was grunt work, and it fell to me. Bazin sent me out with the FBI photographer in the surveillance van. He instructed me to sit on Shih’s house, snap surreptitious pictures, and radio back when I had accomplished my mission.
I learned two painful lessons that week. First: Dress warmly in February in Philadelphia, even if you plan to spend the day inside an undercover van. To maintain cover on stakeout, you have to switch the engine off, and that means no heat. The chief FBI photographer who accompanied me arrived well bundled. After an hour, despite my rookie exuberance, I started shivering like a fool. The photographer’s breath floated through the sub-freezing air as he laughed. My second mistake was leaving my FBI radio on my desk, naively figuring I could use the one in the van dashboard. After a few mind-numbing hours, Shih came out and we got our picture. I flipped on the van radio to make the call, but the radio battery was dead. We drove around the block to the spot where Bazin was waiting for us with another agent, ready to move in if we radioed for backup. I knew he would let me have it for forgetting the handheld radio, and he did.
When we got back to the office, I saw my radio standing upright on his desk. Lesson learned. I’d never again be so casual or make an assumption about an undercover operation.
For comparison’s sake in the photo lineup, the FBI photographer and I set out again to find seven men who looked like Shih. We couldn’t use mug shots; the pictures had to be similar—candids shot from a distance. I figured the task would take a day. Like a lot of things in law enforcement, it took us a lot longer than it should have. To get it right—to find pictures so similar that no judge would ever throw the case out—it took two weeks. When we laid out the photos for the museum guards, each picked Shih. Bazin told me to open my briefcase and start the paperwork.
Because Shih was armed and might have the sculpture stashed in his house, we hoped to confront him elsewhere. We called our tipster back. Did he know when Shih might leave home? As a matter of fact, he said, he did: At 11 a.m. Thursday, the stripper-cum-art-thief would travel to a building at Twelfth and Walnut streets, a teeming downtown corner. It wasn’t ideal—an armed daylight takedown on a busy intersection three blocks from City Hall—but it was the best we had.
It was bitterly cold that March morning, which was fortunate because it made it easy for us to hide our vests and weapons under thick overcoats. Bazin, sitting in one of four undercover cars parked at the lip of the intersection, had “the eye”—he was closest and would give the order to move in. A handful of FBI agents strolled casually down each of the four streets. A dozen city cops were positioned a block away, ready to pounce or block all escape routes. I sat in a parked undercover car half a block away from Bazin, coordinating the radio traffic with a car unit (and a handheld backup radio in the glove box). The agent sitting next to me carried one of the world’s most powerful personal machine guns, an MP5.
Two minutes before eleven, Bazin’s voice came over the radio. “We think we have our suspect. He is not alone. With a female. I’m behind him.” The agent beside me turned the ignition and put the car in drive. Bazin gave the signal, calmly. “All units: Move in. Move in, now.” We lurched forward fifty feet and braked hard in front of Bazin, who already had Shih spread-eagled against the wall. I jumped out awkwardly, constricted by my vest, and held my gun in my best Quantico-style position. Bazin pulled the .25-caliber Raven from Shih’s pocket. He emptied the magazine. One round was missing.
We had Shih, but not the Rodin, and he wouldn’t talk. We searched his room and found an address book with the name of a well-known antiques dealer. The dealer suggested that we talk to Shih’s mother. We did, and she gave us permission to search her place. In the basement, wrapped in newspaper under a tarpaulin hidden beneath a pipe by the water heater, we found The Man with the Broken Nose, undamaged.
Shih was charged in state court, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to seven to fifteen years in prison. Although we solved the case, it was not yet a federal crime to steal something of value from a museum, reflecting Congress’s belief that art crime was not a priority. Within the FBI’s Philadelphia Division, Bazin’s interest in art theft was considered informal, an interesting sidelight, a hobby. It wasn’t that other agents denigrated what Bazin did. It was just that most didn’t care. They were too busy chasing bank robbers, mobsters, corrupt politicians, and drug dealers. Thefts from U.S. museums were treated as isolated cases—and, like the Rodin heist, one-piece jobs, pulled off by loners or losers. As the eighties drew to a close, art thefts made news as oddities, not as outrages.
In March 1990, all that changed. Thieves hit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and made off with a bounty that dwarfed every other art crime in American history.
I was not involved in the initial Gardner investigation.
I was too busy recuperating and mourning a loss. I was also looking for a good defense lawyer.
Cherry Hill, New Jersey, 1989.
“SIR? ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, SIR? SIR?”
The voice in my left ear sounded firm, polite. My eyes bolted open and I found myself staring at the gray seat belt across my chest. I lifted my chin and stared through a cracked windshield. I could see we’d hit a tree, and it had split the front bumper. Instinctively, I checked my hands for blood. Nothing. Wow, that wasn’t so bad. And… I’m alive! I switched off the ignition. I looked to my right to check on my partner and best friend, Denis Bozella. His seat was wedged backward and nearly flat. Denis was moaning.
“Sir? Sir?” It was that voice again. “Sir? What’s your name, sir?”
I turned slowly to my left. A Cherry Hill cop leaned in the window. “Bob,” I said. “I’m Bob. Bob Wittman.”
“OK, sit tight, Bob. We’re going to get you out,” the cop said, warming his hands on his breath. The paramedics and firefighters were only a few minutes away, he said. They were going to have to use the Jaws of Life to get us out. “We’re going to take the roof off and give you a convertible for free.”
I grunted and tried to get a better look at Denis. I started to unbuckle my seat belt and winced at the pain in my left side. I wheezed. I tried to lift the door handle, but it was jammed. Frozen air blew through the broken windows. I closed my eyes and thought about Donna. In the distance, I could hear a siren. Jesus, it was cold.
I heard Denis moan again. I turned but I couldn’t see his face. “Denis?… Denis? Can you hear me, buddy?”
He spoke weakly. “What happened?”
“A car cut us off.”
“My chest hurts. I’m not going to die, am I?”
“No!” I caught the panic in my voice and calmed myself. “We’ll both be fine, partner. We’re gonna be fine.”
I held his hand. I heard more sirens and closed my eyes.
The day had begun with such promise.
IT HAD BEGUN an hour before dawn, as I drew myself out of bed, careful not to disturb Donna or our two sons, nursery-schoolers obsessed with counting the final days until Christmas. Overnight, a light snow had laid a fresh thin layer across the frozen remnants of a week-old storm. I showered, made coffee, and put on my uniform—dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, leather holster, and .357 Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver. As I walked toward the front door I smelled the piney evergreen of the Christmas tree. I plugged in the white tree lights.
I was my happiest in years. I had a dynamic wife, two healthy boys, and a dream job with civil service protection and benefits. Donna loved our three-bedroom home nestled in the Pine Barrens, the burnt orange Southwestern decor, the half-hour drive to the Jersey shore. We’d just celebrated the first anniversary of my first FBI post. Like most rookies, I’d been shifted between squads every few months to get a feel for different work. In the summer, I’d moved from the property theft squad, where I’d partnered with Bazin, to the public corruption squad, where I was paired with Denis. A rising star with brown curly hair and piercing green eyes, he was an extrovert from the hills of western Pennsylvania. His rakish charm easily won over fellow agents, supervisors, prosecutors, witnesses, and the ladies. We bonded when we spent several months prepping for a high-profile police corruption trial, sometimes babysitting witnesses in hotel rooms. It was nearly 24/7 work. You drove the witnesses everywhere, took them to breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to prosecutors’ offices and the courthouse. Denis and I both liked to play piano, and sometimes after work I’d give him an informal lesson. Lately, I was teaching him Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out/Stay.”
At 7:30 a.m., I kissed Donna, promised to be home for dinner, and stepped carefully out onto our frozen driveway. Balancing a second cup of coffee and Bazin’s old briefcase in one hand, I ducked into my bureau car, a 1989 silver Ford Probe. I flipped on the defroster and rock station WMMR.
That morning, I was headed to Denis’s house to give him a ride to work—his FBI car was in the repair shop again. It was great to spend time with him, even if it meant inching through South Jersey traffic. Denis had recently been promoted to Washington to serve on the U.S. Attorney General’s protective detail and I would miss him when he left in January.
When I got to Denis’s house, he slipped into the front seat as the first chords of the song “Panama” by Van Halen began to jam on the radio, and he cranked it up. I recall this vividly, because it was the day that the United States invaded Panama. We both enjoyed the joke. I sang and drove. Denis played air guitar.
The corruption squad’s annual Christmas party was that afternoon at a bar in Pennsauken, New Jersey. We would drive into Philly, then after work head to the party. It would be a good day. At the office, we squeezed in a day’s worth of paperwork in time to make it to the party by 2 p.m. We met everyone at a place called The Pub, a sprawling South Jersey landmark at the foot of a triangle of busy highway ramps and arteries. A former speakeasy, The Pub had evolved into a large restaurant, an oversized Swiss chalet with medieval flair—swords and shields on the walls, burgundy carpet, simple brown wooden chairs and tables. The Pub’s size, location, and bland grub made it a perfect place for an office party. We spent two hours exchanging gifts and talking shop. There was typical ribbing, but this was the corruption squad, a buttoned-down crew, so they kept it light. When we finally paid the bill, most of us wandered over to the bar for a beer. Denis was up for more and he tried to move the party to a bar called Taylor’s for a drink or two. He was single and tried to hit free happy-hour buffets whenever he could. It was nearly 7 p.m. and I wanted to go home, but I figured this might be the last time I could hang out with Denis before he moved. I found a pay phone and let Donna know I would be late.
Taylor’s Bar and Grille isn’t much—a suburban sports bar in a strip mall near the edge of the abandoned Garden State Race Track. But it was packed. I forced my way to the bar, grabbed my second beer of the evening, and found a table. Denis and a fellow agent hit the buffet. Soon, Denis was talking up a cute woman named Pamela. I felt like a third wheel.
By 9:30 p.m., Denis was still dancing with Pamela and I was way overdue at home. I pulled Denis aside. “Buddy, I gotta get back. You ready to go?”
“Look, not yet,” he said. He pointed to Pamela with his eyes. “If that works out, I won’t need a ride. I need to find out, so I need you to stick around.”
We went back and forth like this for another hour. Denis was having fun, dancing, drinking shots of tequila with Pamela. He brought me another beer and shot me a grin. I gave him a look that said, “Let’s go.” Around 11 p.m., I’d had enough. I grabbed our coats, took Denis by the arm, led him off the dance floor to the car. He didn’t resist.
It was only one hundred yards from Taylor’s to Race Track Circle, but this was South Jersey, land of jug-handles, no left turns, and Jersey barriers, so you could only get there by going in the opposite direction and making a series of winding right turns. By the time we reached the circle, Denis was asleep. I slowed as I approached the circle, and as I did, a bright white light flashed in my rearview mirror. There was a two-inch-high concrete curb at the foot of the circle, channeling traffic to the right, but I was distracted by the light and didn’t see this curb. The car hit the curb at about thirty-five miles an hour, and the steering wheel vibrated violently, throwing my hands into the air. When I regained the wheel a second later and tried to turn into the circle, I got no response. We were airborne.
We landed just before the edge of the circle, hurtled into the oval interior, skidded sideways, and flipped, left wheels over right. When the car’s roof slammed down on my head, everything went black.
At Cooper University Hospital, Denis and I were rolled into the same trauma room and a surgeon drew blood from our shoulders. The doctor asked me if I had had anything to drink. It was important, she said, for me to tell the truth, because they were going to administer pain medication. I thought back to my first beer at The Pub early in the afternoon. “Probably four or five beers over eight hours.” She nodded.
I looked over at Denis. There was a little blood on his cheek, but he didn’t look too bad. Denis caught my eye. “Am I going to be OK?” he mumbled.
I really didn’t know. “It’s OK, buddy. You’re going to be fine, partner.”
They wheeled Denis away.
The nurse told me I had four broken ribs, a concussion, and a punctured lung. The doctors performed a thoracostomy, cracking open my chest and inserting a tube into my damaged lung, draining fluid from my chest. About an hour later, I found myself lying in a recovery room, a plastic tube in my left side, surrounded by nurses, a doctor, and my FBI supervisor. I asked about Denis and they said he was still in surgery.
“You guys are lucky,” the doctor said. “Your injuries aren’t life threatening.” He pointed to the bed next to mine. “Your friend will be back soon.”
Medicated, I drifted off.
Three hours later, I woke with the hard winter sun. I felt foggy, sore, confused. I reached up to my head and felt small pieces of windshield glass matted in my hair, a walnut-sized lump on the right side of my skull. I saw a nurse chatting with a female FBI agent and my wife by the door. Donna turned her bloodshot blue eyes to mine. She offered a nervous smile. The bed beside me was empty.
I winced as I spoke. “Where’s Denis?”
The ladies glanced at the floor.
“Where’s Denis?”
“He’s not here,” the nurse said.
“When is he coming up? He’s still in the OR?”
The nurse hesitated and the agent stepped forward. “Denis didn’t make it. He died.”
“What… what?…” My chest burned. My throat constricted. I coughed and the nurse stepped toward me. They’d told me he was going to make it! What was it the doctor had said? “The injuries are not life threatening.” Yes, those were his exact words. Not life threatening.
Donna crossed to my side. She held me and we cried.
“He had a ruptured aorta,” the nurse said, carefully. “He came back from surgery and then it ruptured around 4 a.m. We couldn’t stop the bleeding.” I sat mute for a few seconds and stared into her eyes. I think she felt compelled to fill the silence. “It’s common in this kind of accident,” the nurse said. I suppose she thought she was being helpful. I felt devastated.
I floated through eight days in the hospital, trying to lose the pain. Denis was buried while I was there. Fellow agents called with updates describing the funeral, but it was hard to focus. I thought about Denis’s family.
Before I left, a psychiatrist came to see me. I don’t remember the conversation, but years later I came across his handwritten notes: “Patient has feelings of guilt, anguish, chagrin, and humiliation. He feels solidly supported by wife, staff here, coworkers, and bosses…. Acute posttraumatic stress disorder… acute grief.”
A few days later, a reporter called me in my hospital room. She wanted to know if I had any comment on the investigation, or about the blood-alcohol results.
“What are you talking about?”
She told me the local county prosecutor was considering drunk-driving manslaughter charges against me. The prosecutor claimed that my blood alcohol level was .21, more than twice the legal limit. I told the reporter I had no comment. I hung up and tried to digest what she’d said. The blood test results sounded absurd. A beer every two hours over eight hours didn’t get you to .21. It probably didn’t even get you to .04. My mind raced for an explanation. Obviously, there was a mistake in the blood test. But where? And how? More important, could I prove it?
Five months later, the grand jury filed formal charges. While my FBI colleagues and supervisors appeared sympathetic, I figured my career was over. Worse, I agonized over Denis’s death. Why was I the one who survived? My driving error meant the death of my best friend. Now it threatened to tear away my job and my freedom. What would Donna and the kids do if I was sent to prison?
Facing a hard five-year sentence, I resolved to fight. I drew strength from the comforting familiar in my life—my family and my fledgling career, everything good I knew. Friends and colleagues were supportive, but a few urged me to consider a plea bargain. I couldn’t do it. As difficult as it was to accept that Denis died when my hands were on the wheel, my tortured heart told me he would want me to be forgiven—and his parents made it clear they didn’t hold me responsible, even urging authorities to drop the charges. But the prosecutor’s position was clear, so I hired a top-shelf criminal defense lawyer, Mike Pinsky, and he put his private investigators to work. Pinsky had a reputation for winning tough cases at trial. He was probably best known for winning not-guilty verdicts for a mobster accused of murder and a county clerk facing a bribery rap. Like me, Pinksy also had a reputation for being brutally frank. During our first meeting, we laid our cards on the table.
I asked him how he could represent mobsters, people he knew had done terrible things, including murder. How could he be so friendly with them?
Pinsky moved from behind his desk and took the chair beside me. He smiled.
“Bobby, let me tell you a little secret,” he said. “Appearances can be deceiving. It’s really all about perceptions, not friendships. These wiseguys call me all the time and say, ‘Mike, I got a parking ticket. Mike, I got a speeding ticket. Take care of it, will you?’ And I say, ‘Sure, no problem, I’ll take care of it.’ And you know what I do? I take the tickets and I pay them with my own money! Then later, much later, I bill them for it from some other case. They think I’ve got some sort of power and can fix their tickets. And I let them think that. It’s legal and it’s good for business.”
He leaned close.
“Bobby, I want to be clear about something in your case,” he said. “Before we proceed I want to make sure you understand exactly what’s at stake. If we go to trial, it may take years. It will certainly cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and investigative expenses. There is no way to prepare for the strain this will put on your family, your marriage, and your job. And in the end, you could still lose and go to prison. You’re an FBI agent. You know that if you go to trial and are convicted, instead of pleading guilty at the beginning, the judge will give you a much longer sentence.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Mike, I’m innocent.”
Merion, Pennsylvania, 1991.
I PILOTED MY DINKY BUREAU PONTIAC SLOWLY DOWN North Latches Lane, a wide side street framed by graceful oak trees and gated stone mansions in the heart of Philadelphia’s upper-crust Main Line. I checked my hand-scrawled directions and followed North Latches until I arrived at a black wrought-iron gate with a discreet sign that said THE BARNES FOUNDATION. I pulled to the guardhouse and rolled down my passenger window.
The guard carried a clipboard. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. Bob Wittman. I’m here for the class.”
He checked his list and waved me in.
I was early and when I found a parking spot I sat in the car for a few moments. I gripped the steering wheel and exhaled. It was a crisp fall afternoon, almost two years after the accident, and I was still awaiting trial on the manslaughter charges. Pinsky wasn’t worried about delays, because it gave us time to get to the bottom of the screwy blood-alcohol test. Every few weeks, the lawyer would mail me a stack of documents related to the case—a pleading, a medical record, a private investigator’s witness interview. I’d quickly scan whatever Pinsky sent me, but I found it incredibly stressful to read investigative records about myself. It was even harder to read the cold, clinical medical assessments about Denis. Sometimes, I would open the long legal envelope from Pinsky, stack the papers on the kitchen table, and just stare at them.
Thank God I was working. The FBI, following an internal investigation, cleared me and put me back on the street. For a while, I worked with the drug squad. We seized cash, cocaine, and Corvettes, and locked up some pretty dangerous guys. I backed up undercover agents who risked their lives in hotel-room stings. I ducked gunfire from a couple of thugs during my first shoot-out. But drug cases weren’t for me. I doubted we were making a big difference. Most people I met on the streets sold drugs because they couldn’t make it any other way; they did it to survive. The way I saw it, drugs were a social problem, not a law-enforcement problem. I asked to return to the property theft squad, and soon I was working art crime again with Bazin. It was good to be back.
Within a few months, Bazin and I recovered a set of two-foot-high tomes by eighteenth-century British wildlife artist Mark Catesby, books of sketches worth $250,000 and as impressive as any by John James Audubon. Rescuing such beautiful books meant so much more to me than busting some sad sack in a crack house. Bazin told me that if I was serious about making art crime a career, I should consider taking a class at the Barnes, an appointment-only museum in the suburbs I knew only by its reputation as a treasure trove of Impressionist art. I said OK and Bazin set it up.
As I got out of my car and headed to my first class that afternoon, I didn’t know what to expect.
I made my way to the intimidating grand entrance—six marble steps, four Doric columns, and two large wooden doors framed by a remarkable wall of rust-colored Enfield ceramic tiles, each centered with a relief of a tribal mask and crocodile by the Akan peoples of the Ivory Coast and Ghana. As I would soon learn, every arrangement at the Barnes carried meaning. The entrance theme represented the debt modern Western art owes tribal Africa.
I stepped inside, signed in at the security desk, and stepped into the first gallery, an outrageous room jammed with a collection of masterpieces unrivaled by any one room in any gallery in Europe. On the wall in front of me, surrounding a thirty-foot window, hung three works with a combined worth of half a billion dollars. To the right was Picasso’s heroic Composition: The Peasants, a striking rendering of a man and a woman with flowers presented in deep hues of rust and persimmon, accented with a splash of carmine. To the left was Matisse’s Seated Riffian, a larger-than-life oil on canvas. It depicted a fierce-looking young man from the mountains of Morocco, his face rendered in bold Mediterranean hues. Rising above it all, reaching for the ceiling, was the Matisse masterpiece The Dance, a forty-six-foot-long mural with lithe figures in salmon, blue, and black, dancing joyously. I looked to my right and the room continued to overload my senses. The Card Players, a Cézanne in muted denim hues highlighted by the artist’s signature folds in the players’ overcoats, hung below Seurat’s much larger Models, which depicted demure nudes in a firework of color, the figures formed by millions of dots in the pointillist style.
A set of twelve folding chairs was arranged on a parquet floor in the center of the great room. Each student received writing paper, a pencil, and a copy of a thick book with a canary cover, The Art in Painting, by our benefactor, Dr. Albert C. Barnes. As we were warned in our letter of invitation, the museum doors were locked at precisely 2:25 p.m. The lecture began promptly at 2:30 p.m.
Our teacher, Harry Sefarbi, was an elderly gentleman with large round glasses and short wisps of white hair behind his ears. He was entering his fourth decade teaching art at the Barnes, having been trained by Barnes himself in a class just like mine in the late 1940s. Mr. Sefarbi, as he liked to be called, began with a little history lesson about Barnes.
Born to working-class parents in Philadelphia in 1872, Barnes excelled in public high school and had earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania by age twenty. He developed a wide range of interests, and became a student of the pragmatist movement, which later served as a foundation for his commonsense, everyman philosophy about art. Barnes studied chemistry and pharmacology at the University of Berlin, and returned with a German colleague at the turn of the century to open a lab in Philadelphia. Together, they invented a new antiseptic silver compound called Argyrol, a treatment for eye inflammation. The medicine dominated the medical market for the next forty years, making Barnes a millionaire many times over. He began to travel extensively and soon became an art collector, joining the legion of rich and cultured Americans, including Jules E. Mastbaum and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who sailed to Europe to snap up Old Master and Impressionist works at relatively bargain prices. By any measure, public or private, national or international, the number and quality of Impressionist and Modern paintings Barnes acquired was astonishing: 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 69 by Paul Cézanne, 59 by Henri Matisse, 46 by Pablo Picasso, 21 by Chaim Soutine, 18 by Henri Rousseau, 11 by Edgar Degas, 7 by Vincent van Gogh, and 4 by Claude Monet.
Barnes sought to bring his love of high art to others. He began with his employees, hanging valuable works in his factory and offering free art and philosophy classes. When he decided to build himself a new home on a twelve-acre plot just outside the city limits, he hired Paul Cret, the Frenchman who had laid out the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and designed Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, and instructed him to build an art gallery beside the house.
This would not be a museum, Barnes declared, but a laboratory for learning. Each of the twenty-three galleries would be a classroom, and each of the four walls in each gallery would be a blackboard with a lesson plan. It was central to Barnes’s plan to make art accessible and understandable to the masses.
Barnes believed that one could only come to appreciate and understand art by viewing it firsthand. Most Americans began at a disadvantage, he believed, because they held preconceived Western notions of art, likely learned (subconsciously or not) from ivory tower academics. The best way to understand art was to look at a painting, compare it to what you saw next to it, and come to your own conclusions. Which is why Barnes arranged his galleries like no other—masterpieces beside the mediocre, Old Masters next to Impressionists, African near European, tribal juxtaposed with Modernists. To emphasize shapes, he arranged three-dimensional objects—often simple metalwork and basic kitchen utensils beside paintings. On the floor along the walls, Barnes set up furniture, candles, teapots, and vases. He called these unorthodox and controversial layouts “wall ensembles,” and they were designed to help students see patterns, shapes, and trends you can’t teach in books. He wanted classes to be democratic, a place where free discussion was encouraged.
Study the overstuffed walls and discover two chairs that match the female derriere in a set of Renoirs, or an African mask that matches the shape of a man’s face in a Picasso painting. Notice a wooden trunk that mimics shapes in Prendergast and Gauguin paintings. Ponder the significance of a set of soup ladles straddling a series of Old Master paintings, or a pair of ox shoes hanging over a pair of Soutines. Chuckle when you realize the theme of a corner gallery is elbows.
Barnes always kept you guessing, thinking. He hung Matisse’s iconic The Joy of Life, considered the first painting of the Modern art era (and the one a conservative French critic famously labeled “beastly”) in a stairwell.
I got a kick out of Barnes’s life story, his egalitarian values and eclectic galleries, each filled with jaw-dropping art. But I dreaded my first homework assignment: the first few chapters of The Art in Painting, the 521-page treatise Barnes wrote in 1925. The canary-covered book felt as heavy as a brick and I feared the words would be as dense and intimidating. But when I cracked the first chapter, I was pleasantly surprised. The writing was, as I suspected, erudite, but Barnes’s unpretentious, workmanlike philosophy struck a chord. He wrote that his method for studying art presented “something basically objective to replace the sentimentalism, the antiquarianism, sheltered under the cloak of academic prestige, which make futile the present courses in art universities and colleges.” In other words, Barnes devised a method for his students to think for themselves, to resist the urge to simply accept the prevailing and often pretentious sentiments of so-called experts. Barnes seemed like my kind of guy.
“People often suppose that there is some secret about art, some password which must be divulged before they can discover its purpose or meaning,” Barnes wrote. “Absurd as such an idea is, it contains the important truth that seeing is something which must be learned, and not something which we all do as naturally as we breathe.” He called this “learning to see.”
First and foremost, Barnes taught that all art is based on the work of previous generations. “A person who professes to understand and appreciate Titian and Michelangelo and who fails to recognize the same traditions in the moderns, Renoir and Cézanne, is practicing self-deception,” Barnes wrote. “An understanding of early Oriental art and of El Greco carries with it an appreciation of the contemporary work of Matisse and Picasso. The best of the modern painters use the same means, to the same ends, as did the great Florentines, Venetians, Dutchmen, and Spaniards.”
The purpose of art is not to create a literal, documentary-style reproduction of a scene from real life. “The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see, and in order to do so he often needs to modify the familiar appearance of things and so make something which is, in the photographic sense, a bad likeness.” The greatest artists teach us how to perceive through the use of expression and decoration. They are scientists, manipulating color, line, light, space, and mass in ways that reveal human nature. “The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing far more clearly than we could see for ourselves.”
A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with a scientist’s eye. This was an important point. As an art crime investigator, or an undercover agent posing as a collector, I would have to evaluate and expound upon a wide variety of art, regardless of whether I liked a particular piece.
For the next year, I spent four hours a week in class with ten other students. Each week, we gathered in one of the Barnes’s twenty-three galleries, just a few feet from the three or four masterpieces we would study that day. As our teacher outlined the finer points of composition, palette, makeup, and light, I drank it in. I wasn’t only listening to the teacher—sometimes I learned more by tuning out and just staring at a wall ensemble. At the Barnes, I didn’t learn how to identify a fake or a forgery, but I trained my eye to discern a good painting from a bad one. I learned how to tell the difference between works by Renoir and Manet, or Gauguin and Cézanne—and more important, how to confidently explain in detail these differences and patterns. It’s not as hard as you might think, certainly not for a trained art historian or curator. But it’s not the kind of thing most police officers know. As I would learn years later, it’s not even the kind of thing most art thieves know.
My Barnes experience couldn’t have come at a better time, personally or professionally. I remember walking through the second-floor gallery one day, depressed about the indictment, stressed about lawyer bills and the thought of leaving Donna and the kids for prison, when I came upon Renoir’s Mussel Fishers at Berneval. The painting stopped me. A young mother and children along a sienna seashore. Smiling sisters holding hands. A boy with a basket of mussels. An indigo sky. I moved closer. I cocked my head and followed a brushstroke out to sea. The painting felt warm, soothing. It evoked images of a quieter, simpler time, when playing on the shoreline coupled with picking mussels for a fresh dinner were enough to bring joie de vivre.
Young kids and a mom at the shore. A family. My family.
I found a bench, sat down, and exhaled.
THE BARNES CLASSES only deepened my interest and appreciation for art, and I couldn’t help but approach my art crime cases with new enthusiasm and perspective. While I was still enrolled at the Barnes, Bazin and I got a break on an old case, a 1988 heist from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Inside its ninety-foot rotunda, the Penn Museum showcases one of the nation’s foremost collections of Chinese antiquities. Late one winter evening, thieves lifted the Chinese exhibition’s most significant piece, a fifty-pound crystal ball from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, from its place of honor in the center of the rotunda. The perfect sphere, which projects a person’s image upside down, once belonged to the Dowager Empress Cixi, and is the second largest such orb in the world. Handcrafted during the nineteenth century, the crystal ball represented a triumph of skill and patience, a year’s worth of an artist’s labor with emery and garnet powder and water. The burglars who took the orb also swiped a five-thousand-year-old bronze statue of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. Museum officials figured it was the work of amateurs, but the pieces seemed to vanish without a trace.
Now, three years later, a museum official was calling Bazin to say a former curator had spotted the Osiris statue for sale at one of the jumble of eclectic shops on Philadelphia’s South Street. We rushed over and pressed the proprietor for details. He told us that he’d bought the $500,000 bronze statue for $30 from “Al the Trash Picker,” a homeless man who trawled the streets with a shopping cart, looking for junk. We found Al and he quickly told us that he’d gotten the statue from a man named Larry, who happened to live a few blocks from the store. Bazin and I went to see “Larry.”
Larry was a compact man with a South Philly attitude and a flimsy story. “I dunno, man, it just showed up in my mudroom a few years ago,” Larry offered, lamely suggesting that a friend probably dropped it off and forgot about it. We countered with the textbook good-cop, bad-cop routine. Bazin stomped, glowered, and threatened to arrest him if he didn’t tell us “the truth.” When Bazin stormed out, I spoke softly to Larry, confiding that we wouldn’t charge him if he helped us out. When that didn’t work, I went out to tell Bazin.
“Why did you walk out so quickly?” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m hungry, I want to get lunch.”
I kept a straight face, and we went back inside to see Larry. I tried the direct approach.
“Was there anything else that you just happened to find when you found the statue?”
“Anything else, like what?”
“A glass ball.”
“A glass ball? Yeah, yeah. It was a big heavy thing, but I thought it was one of those lawn globe things. It was pretty ugly, so I just left it in the garage for about a year. Then I gave it away.”
As nonchalantly as I could, I uncapped my pen and drew my notebook. “Gave it away?” I said. “To whom?”
“Kim Beckles. My housekeeper. For her birthday, September 1989. She was into crystals and pyramids and stuff like that. She joked that she was a good witch.”
I told Larry to call Beckles, to say that he’d just learned that the crystal might be valuable, and that he was sending a couple of appraisers over to take a look. “Tell her that if you sell it, you’ll split the money, OK?”
Larry made the call and we headed for the witch’s house in Trenton, New Jersey. As soon as we arrived, we dropped the ruse. I banged on the door and yelled, “Police!” She answered quickly. From Larry’s description we were expecting a hag, but Beckles was a lithe beauty, twenty-nine years old, blond curly hair. We showed our badges, explained what we were looking for, and she seemed genuinely surprised. She told us she kept the orb in her bedroom. We followed her upstairs.
I’ll never forget the anticipation I felt climbing those stairs. It was the same kind of nervous anticipation I got whenever I went on a drug raid, or helped collar a fleeing suspect—but better. I felt my heart pound. I wasn’t searching for common drugs or guns. I was searching for lost treasure.
We found the Dowager’s crystal ball on the witch’s dresser, under a ball cap.
When Bazin and I returned the orb to its rightful place under the rotunda at the Penn museum, I felt as proud of myself as an agent as I ever had, even though no one was charged with a crime. These art cases offered a different kind of satisfaction. And because Bazin and I were the only ones working them, we won a degree of independence rare in the by-the-book world of the FBI.
It didn’t hurt, either, that the case made big headlines. The day before the scheduled FBI press conference, someone leaked the story to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the paper put its exclusive on the front page. After the press conference, the story made all the evening news programs and appeared in four other papers the next morning. A few years later, when Bazin and I recovered a long-lost painting stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the story landed on the front page again. Fellow agents who pursued the more traditional FBI crimes, like drugs and robbery, might not seem too interested, but journalists appeared eager to write about art crime and give the stories good play. Each art crime inevitably carried a “hook,” a bit of intrigue, and the public ate it up. The attention was nice, but most important was that it made our local bosses look good, making it easier for them to green-light our next art crime case.
I led one other significant investigation while awaiting my trial in the early 1990s. Violent gangs were hitting high-end jewelry stores in smash-and-grab heists, bolting into the likes of Tiffany, Black, Starr and Frost, and Bailey Banks and Biddle in broad daylight, taking hammers and tire irons to display cases, and dashing off with fistfuls of diamonds and Rolex watches worth tens of thousands of dollars. The hoods came from Philadelphia but had hit more than one hundred stores in five states. I created and led a special task force that not only won federal indictments against thirty gang members but also snared the ringleaders who fenced the stolen loot—two corrupt merchants from Philly’s Jewelers’ Row. Our work made the front page again and I developed long-term sources on Jewelers’ Row.
The successes at work were gratifying, but the accident continued to haunt my life. No matter how hard we tried, Donna and I couldn’t escape it. It always lingered in the background. Neighbors and friends followed developments regularly in the Inquirer and the Camden Courier-Post. Most people meant well, but they asked about the case whenever they saw us, and it was awkward—we didn’t want to be rude, but we wanted to talk about anything else. Meanwhile, the legal bills and delays piled up. Court hearings were scheduled, then postponed, scheduled, then postponed again. I wanted it all to end, but I feared the result. I was driving myself nuts. I needed an escape, something to occupy my mind.
“I gotta find something to do,” I told Donna. “I gotta find a hobby.”
“Yes, you do.”
I found one in baseball. I coached my sons, Kevin and Jeff, in Little League, and we liked to duck down to Baltimore to see my Orioles play at their new, throwback stadium, Camden Yards. On each trip, we fell into a routine: We arrived early for batting practice, got cheap seats, split a pack of baseball cards, and sometimes stayed late to try to snag autographs. Soon, we started attending baseball card shows, and I recognized a market in the Cal Ripken ’82 rookie cards (special Topps edition). The Oriole infielder was hugely popular in Baltimore, but not in Philadelphia. I started driving to card shows and strip mall storefronts near Philly, snapping up as many Ripken cards as possible. I got ’em for about $25 to $50 each. Then I’d drive to shows and events in Baltimore and sell them for $100 or $200 more. The year that Ripken broke the Iron Man record for most consecutive games, I sold the cards for $400. I was making a little extra cash doing something I liked. I thought, Who knows? If I lost my job and landed in prison, I’d need a new career when I got out. Inspired, I branched out, trying my hand at Civil War collectibles and antique firearms. I attended shows, scoured newsletters for bargains, and began to buy, barter, and sell. I even put my Barnes experience to work and dabbled in fine art. I bought a few Picasso prints, and spent weekend afternoons wandering through suburban galleries and flea markets. I daydreamed about finding a long-lost Monet and turning a $1,000 investment into $100,000.
Unbeknownst to me, Donna had other things on her mind. She wanted a third child. I wasn’t so sure. My future was so uncertain. Donna was adamant. “We have to stop putting our life on hold,” she said. Our boys were already four and six. Donna was thirty-five. If we were going to expand our family, now was the time. I nervously agreed. Kristin was born on Thanksgiving Day, and, as it turned out, having a little girl was the best decision we made during those stressful years.
Incredibly, the trial delays continued into 1993, 1994, and beyond. I kept myself as busy as I could with the kids and work, and with my new hobbies and interest in fine art, but every few hours, my thoughts returned to Denis and what lay ahead for me. Each day I crossed the Delaware River on the way to work, I passed New Jersey’s Riverfront State Prison at the foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge. It was the place I would be sent if convicted.
One day in 1995, a few weeks before my trial was set to begin, I ran into a member of the prosecution team on South Street in Philadelphia. We had to be careful. We weren’t supposed to talk outside of court.
We exchanged pleasantries and an awkward silence followed. We just stood there. Finally, the person said, “How are you holding up?”
How was I holding up? I kept my cool, and answered with a question of my own. As politely as I could, I said, “Why are you doing this?”
What the person said shook me. “Look, we know this is a bad case, but it’s just one we have to lose at trial.”
The comment shattered my assumption that prosecutors pursued fundamental fairness. As a defendant, I figured the truth, witnesses, and evidence were on my side. It didn’t occur to me that government officials would prosecute a case they did not believe in. We know this is a bad case, but it’s just one we have to lose at trial. I started to stammer a response, but thought better of it, and walked away.
I was forty years old and my hair was gray.
Camden, New Jersey, 1995.
“WILL THE DEFENDANT PLEASE RISE?”
The jurors shuffled into the courtroom, the forewoman gripping the verdict sheet. I tried to catch her eye. The jury had been out only forty-five minutes. The trial was in its ninth day, unbelievably long for a DUI case, but I thought it was going very well. I testified that I drank four or five beers over eight hours. My attorney, Mike Pinsky, ripped the government witnesses apart, and the paramedics who took the stand said I hadn’t looked drunk. Pamela, the woman Denis met at the bar, described me as sober, the guy who was clearly his friend’s designated driver. The prosecutor stuck to her best evidence—the hospital report showed that my blood alcohol count was .21, so high that I should have had trouble walking, let alone driving.
Fortunately, Pinsky’s experts had by then solved the mystery of the blood test. They explained to the jury that when they closely compared Denis’s medical records with mine, they found something odd: My alleged blood alcohol content, when calculated to the fifth decimal point, was .21232 and Denis’s reading was .21185. It was a difference of just .00047, less than the typical variation found when testing the same vial of blood. This was too close to be a coincidence, my experts testified. Someone at the hospital had mixed up the samples. The standard practice is to test every vial of blood twice—and it looked like someone had tested Denis’s blood twice, and assigned one of the readings to me. Our argument was bolstered when our experts discovered that the hospital didn’t have a method for securing each sample—there were no procedures to keep a proper chain of custody. One of our experts was the former head of the state police crime lab. On the stand, he spoke definitively: The government’s only evidence was worthless.
As the clerk handed the verdict sheet to the judge, my mind raced. Why the quick verdict? Did the jury even take the time to analyze the lab reports? Did they like my lawyer? The prosecutor? Me? A uniformed deputy quietly slipped behind me. What did that mean? Did he plan to take me into custody? Or was he there to protect me?
As the judge unfolded the verdict sheet, the street encounter with that member of the prosecution team flashed in my head—We know it’s a bad case, but it’s just one we have to lose at trial. What if? What if the jury didn’t get that?
The judge cleared his throat. “In the case of New Jersey versus Robert K. Wittman, we find the defendant… not guilty.”
I exhaled deeply and unclenched my fists. I hugged my lawyer. I hugged Donna. I even hugged the prosecutor. The news accounts said I “wept openly.” I wanted to hug the judge, too. For after the verdict, he took the unusual step of publicly stating that he agreed with the jury. He called the blood test evidence bogus, concluding: “He lost control and tragically there was an accident and his passenger lost his life. That’s an accident.”
Donna and I vowed to make a fresh start, and decided to move from suburban New Jersey to suburban Pennsylvania.
I thought about Denis every day.
I spent late nights on the porch, with a tall glass of iced tea, thinking about all I was learning from my ordeal. I had a choice: I could go into a funk of self-pity and ride a desk for the rest of my career—put in forty hours a week, earn a pension, make no waves—or I could come out swinging. Either way, the accident and trial would mark the turning point of my life and my career.
I never seriously considered quitting the FBI, but I did vow that I wouldn’t be the same kind of agent anymore. Most law officers I knew were honorable, but some were too focused on putting people away at any cost in order to close a case. It was a dangerous attitude. These guys might say, Well, maybe he didn’t commit the crime I busted him for, but it’s OK because this guy’s a dirtbag and I’m sure he got away with something else he did do. I never agreed with that philosophy. Innocence is innocence. I now knew what it felt like to be charged with a crime I hadn’t committed, what it did to families, how an innocent person facing trial can feel helpless, alone in the world. I could never knowingly put anyone through that.
I was now a member of a narrow class. Few FBI agents indicted on felony charges take the case to trial. Fewer still win acquittal, and only a handful of those choose to remain with the bureau. I brought a perspective few of my brethren could match. Most agents saw things in black and white; I started seeing shades of gray. I understood that just because someone made a mistake in judgment, it didn’t make him evil. Perhaps as important, I also now knew what most suspects, guilty or innocent, truly feared, and what they wanted to hear. My newfound ability to see both sides of a situation—to think and feel like the accused—was invaluable. I knew it would make me a better agent, especially undercover.
But what kind of agent did I want to be?
One evening, I sat alone at my piano and played a Chopin “Fantasie.” It was a favorite from my days as a piano performance major in college, but one I had not played in years. As I got lost in the piece, I thought about the rush I’d gotten when we recovered the Chinese orb and Rodin statue, what it felt like to hold history in your hands. My thoughts bounced with the music, and settled on the inspirational pianist Van Cliburn. He always impressed me, the way he came from such lowly roots, and used his insatiable drive and talent to win the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, showing unprecedented courage at a time when Americans had little hope of winning anything in Russia. I decided that, like him, I was going to take a chance and channel my energies toward making a difference in the world.
And finally it hit me: I was uniquely positioned to do something about art crime. Here I was, already an FBI agent with a track record of working art crime cases and, in the case of the jewelry-store robberies, leading a team effort that had solved a complex crime. What’s more, I’d worked on my own to become a bit of an expert in several fields. In the five-year period between the accident and my acquittal, I’d studied in classrooms as diverse as flea markets and the Barnes, mastering the nuances of everything from collectibles to fine art. While I specialized in baseball cards, Civil War relics, Japanese collectibles, antique guns, and Impressionist art, I knew the knowledge and skills I was honing could be used in almost any medium.
I could now walk into any collectibles, antiques, or fine art forum and mingle and barter with confidence. I knew that a mint condition Mickey Mantle rookie card was worth twice as much as a rookie Joe DiMaggio, that a Custer autograph was far more valuable than one from Robert E. Lee. I could spot a Soutine in a second and explain how his constructive use of color was influenced by Cézanne, and just as easily discuss Boucher’s eighteenth-century influences on Modigliani’s nineteenth-century nudes. I could explain the difference between provenance (the ownership history of a work of art) and provenience (information about the spot where an antiquity came out of the ground). I could credibly hold forth on the differences between the Colt revolver Texas Ranger Sam Walker carried into his final battle and the one Roosevelt carried up San Juan Hill. Along the East Coast, I knew most of the big players, which shows to attend and whom to trust.
My ad-hoc education was complete.
I was ready to go undercover, in pursuit of the priceless.
In the summer of 1997, I got my first chance.