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.
But while big heists of brand-name art make headlines, a steady trickle of valuable, albeit less famous, stolen collectibles makes up the bulk of the black market: Civil War-era swords and Americana, rare-edition books, B-list paintings. The Art Loss Register, the world's largest database of stolen cultural property, lists over 160,000 paintings, sculptures, and other antiquities, adding 10,000 to 15,000 new entries a year. (Among the items listed are the 13 items stolen from the Gardner Museum, some 300 works by Marc Chagall, and over 500 Picassos.) "My greatest regret is that there isn't a universal database," says Dorit Straus, a vice president at Chubb Insurance Group and one of the Art Loss Register's subscribers. "It's very difficult to match things up with their rightful owners, even if you have a good description, even if you think art is unique. How many reclining nudes did Picasso paint? There's just no way."
Meanwhile, the appetite for art in America is only growing, making it the biggest consumer market in the world for stolen art, experts say. "You have a lot more people who have money, who want status, and are looking to buy art," says Straus, throwing her arms into the air. "We're insatiable here! People build bigger and bigger houses. There isn't even enough inventory to fill the demand for art."
Straus says it is very difficult to sell a purloined painting in a business that runs on reputation, because no legitimate art dealer or auction house will want to trade in stolen property. The art of art theft lies in the ability to convert stolen property into hard currency. Though few good statistics from the criminal underworld are available, experts say that paintings, which are easier to transfer inconspicuously across international borders than large sums of money, are often used as collateral in drug trades.
No deals. Art thieves might also try to claim a ransom on a painting, which in the short term costs the insurer a fraction of the cost of paying out a policy. But "art-napping" is a practice insurance companies say they are loath to encourage. "It's the same as governments who don't negotiate with terrorists," says Straus. "If you're going to negotiate with thieves, you're going to encourage more of the same."
The more likely scenario is that a thief, having realized that a stolen van Gogh is not so easy to dispose of, will simply sit on the painting until he thinks it is safe for it to surface. "Thieves hold on to it until they either find a seller or die," says FBI agent Wittman. "Anytime I've ever seen paintings come back, it's through people trying to sell them." And Wittman has recovered a lot of cultural property--$140 million worth since 1999 alone, including an original copy of the Bill of Rights, missing since 1865, and five Norman Rockwells that were stolen in the 1970s. Wittman says he often recovers items in sting operations or when he gets wind of an upcoming sale.
Stolen art can pop up at thousands of auction houses, flea markets, and estate sales across America. In an industry where business is often done anonymously, by private contract or in backroom dealings, the auction is the most public and transparent forum, an unofficial system of checks and balances. "Everything we're going to sell is available online [and] from time to time, people will call in and say, 'Wait a minute! That's my property,' " says Jo Backer Laird, senior vice president and general counsel in Christie's New York office.
After the massive looting of archaeological sites in Iraq, the FBI expects stolen antiquities to soon flood the U.S. marketplace. "People don't even really know what's being stolen," says David Shillingford, who runs the Art Loss Register's New York office. "If something is being dug out of the ground, you don't even know it was stolen because the first person to see it for 6,000 years is the thief."
Partly in anticipation of an influx of Iraqi artifacts, the FBI fielded an art crime team last year (previously, art was lumped into the broad category of property theft). Wittman shepherded seven agents through a mini art school to teach them "the difference between a Rembrandt and a Picasso." Unlike the Italian carabinieri or the Spanish art theft squad, which boasts hundreds of art cops, Wittman remains the FBI's only full-time man on the job.
"Whoever would have heard of a baseball card going for $500,000?" asks Wittman, shaking his head. "It's become treasure, get-rich-quick stuff. [And] as the value goes up, so does the fraud."
View Of Auvers-Sur-Oise. This C e zanne was taken from the University of Oxford ' s Ashmolean Museum. Value: $3 million.
The Madonna. Thieves stole a version of this Munch work in Oslo. Value: $15 million.
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee. Rembrandt ' s seascape. Value: Unknown.
This story appears in the October 10, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.