The Art of the Heist
It's not The Thomas Crown Affair, but theft of artwork is a big-bucks business
You know the story: A nefarious art collector sends a band of acrobatic thieves dressed in black turtlenecks to steal a rare and priceless piece of art. They pull hundreds of thousands of dollars in rappelling equipment out of their backpacks and perform death-defying stunts to retrieve the artwork from a museum that has cutting-edge security (usually involving laser beams). The cat burglars then deliver the stolen painting to the lair of their unscrupulous benefactor, who hangs it in his private quarters and savors it in solitude (usually with a bottle of French wine).
But the reality of art crime is a much more banal--and tragic--tale. It is an underground business driven by common criminals and petty thieves who walk into museums in broad daylight and steal from churches and libraries and people's homes. Much of what is stolen is damaged or destroyed in the hands of rough amateurs, and in the United States only an estimated 5 percent is ever recovered. The rest--stolen paintings and icons, looted antiquities, and rare books--is a $4 billion to $6 billion industry estimated to be the third-largest black market in the world, after illegal drugs and illicit arms.
A stolen painting or first-edition baseball card is worth only one tenth its value on the street, but to a burglar, it still could be more valuable than a stolen stereo and may be just as easy to obtain. "Petty thieves have come on to the fact that stealing art is more profitable than conventional crime," says FBI Special Agent Robert Wittman, who has been on the art beat for over 15 years. "An average bank robbery is less than a thousand dollars, and one Rembrandt is worth at least a million, so one art theft is like a thousand bank burglaries."
Easy money. Stealing a painting, it seems, is sometimes easier than robbing a bank. Many museums have small security budgets and spend more money on acquiring new art than on securing it. Then there is the Catch-22 of putting art on display: If the public has access to the paintings, so do the thieves. When two masked thieves sauntered into the Munch Museum in Oslo in August 2004, they did so in broad daylight. Brandishing pistols, they yanked two of Munch's most famous paintings-- The Madonna and The Scream -- right off the walls in front of stunned museumgoers and security guards. The thieves walked out, shoved the paintings into the back of a black Audi, and drove off. They are still at large.
The biggest art heist in America happened in an equally prosaic fashion. Fifteen years ago, two thieves masquerading as cops were ushered into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston by a sleepy security guard on night duty. The thieves quickly overpowered the museum's two guards, handcuffed them, and spent the next hour and a half plucking some of the world's most valuable artwork from the walls. The stash of art they made off with--now estimated to be worth at least $300 million--included Rembrandt's only known seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, an oil work by Jan Vermeer, five drawings by Degas, and a bronze Chinese beaker, thought to have originated in 1200-1100 B.C. "All of this artwork is part of a cultural history," says Anne Hawley, director of the Gardner Museum. "When these materials are removed, it's as if Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is removed. It's more than a monetary theft--it's a cultural theft, which makes it so heinous." The Gardner case also remains unsolved.
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