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Why Is Stolen Art So Hard to Find?
Cross posted in GD...
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist has gone unsolved for 25 years. That makes it very, very typical.
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Twenty-five years ago, two thieves dressed as police officers bluffed their way into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made away with $500 million of artwork by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and others. The thieves didn’t cover their faces, and they apparently didn’t know much about what they were stealing: They roughly cut the paintings from their frames and left more valuable works hanging on the walls. Despite the thieves’ apparent inexpertise and the ensuing media attention, no suspects were ever arrested and the art was never recovered. Authorities believe the robbers were regional gangsters, but nobody really knows where the art has been stashed, or if it’s even still intact. The Gardner robbery is the biggest and most frustrating art heist in American history—and it’s as cold as cold cases come.
Last week the FBI released to the public some previously unseen evidence in the Gardner case: a low-resolution security video that shows an unannounced visitor coming into the museum about 1 a.m. the night before the heist in what analysts have speculated might have been a “dry run” for the following evening. With a case as cold as the Gardner heist, any new information is welcome, and the FBI has already fielded tips about the possible identity of the unknown visitor. But far from inspiring confidence that the mystery will soon be solved and the art soon recovered, this new evidence just seems to underscore how little investigators have had to work with over the years, and how little they’ve done with what little they’ve had.
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The Gardner heist isn’t the only art crime that has stymied investigators. Art crime is reportedly a $6 billion problem every year, and that figure is probably too low, since it accounts only for the crimes that are reported, and many are not. When thieves are caught, it is often through sting operations in which undercover agents pretend to be black-market buyers; this, for example, is how Scotland Yard snared some of the men responsible for heisting Edvard Munch’s The Scream from a Norwegian museum in 1994. At other times, old-fashioned police work can crack a case open; the man who stole a Cellini sculpture from a Vienna museum in 2003 surrendered three years later after police distributed surveillance photos of him buying a cellphone he used to call the sculpture’s insurers and demand a ransom payment. But investigative triumphs like these are not the norm. In his book Crimes of the Art World, Thomas D. Bazley wrote that 90 percent of stolen art objects go unrecovered. To a layman, this statistic seems really surprising. Art is conspicuous, after all. Why are art crimes so difficult to solve?
It’s certainly not because most art thieves are criminal masterminds. In fact, it’s the noningenious nature of most of these crimes that can make them so difficult to solve. Popular culture has given art thieves an unwarranted good name. In movies and television programs, they are traditionally portrayed as gentleman burglars, gallant charmers in turtlenecks whose elaborately planned capers usually involve grappling hooks, acrobatics, and seduction. In his 2010 book Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, former FBI art theft investigator Robert Wittman called this depiction “uniformly bogus.” Rich, multilingual aesthetes don’t rob museums; they pay $25,000 to attend gala dinners hosted inside of them.
[center]
[/center]
Twenty-five years ago, two thieves dressed as police officers bluffed their way into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and made away with $500 million of artwork by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, and others. The thieves didn’t cover their faces, and they apparently didn’t know much about what they were stealing: They roughly cut the paintings from their frames and left more valuable works hanging on the walls. Despite the thieves’ apparent inexpertise and the ensuing media attention, no suspects were ever arrested and the art was never recovered. Authorities believe the robbers were regional gangsters, but nobody really knows where the art has been stashed, or if it’s even still intact. The Gardner robbery is the biggest and most frustrating art heist in American history—and it’s as cold as cold cases come.
Last week the FBI released to the public some previously unseen evidence in the Gardner case: a low-resolution security video that shows an unannounced visitor coming into the museum about 1 a.m. the night before the heist in what analysts have speculated might have been a “dry run” for the following evening. With a case as cold as the Gardner heist, any new information is welcome, and the FBI has already fielded tips about the possible identity of the unknown visitor. But far from inspiring confidence that the mystery will soon be solved and the art soon recovered, this new evidence just seems to underscore how little investigators have had to work with over the years, and how little they’ve done with what little they’ve had.
[center][/center]
The Gardner heist isn’t the only art crime that has stymied investigators. Art crime is reportedly a $6 billion problem every year, and that figure is probably too low, since it accounts only for the crimes that are reported, and many are not. When thieves are caught, it is often through sting operations in which undercover agents pretend to be black-market buyers; this, for example, is how Scotland Yard snared some of the men responsible for heisting Edvard Munch’s The Scream from a Norwegian museum in 1994. At other times, old-fashioned police work can crack a case open; the man who stole a Cellini sculpture from a Vienna museum in 2003 surrendered three years later after police distributed surveillance photos of him buying a cellphone he used to call the sculpture’s insurers and demand a ransom payment. But investigative triumphs like these are not the norm. In his book Crimes of the Art World, Thomas D. Bazley wrote that 90 percent of stolen art objects go unrecovered. To a layman, this statistic seems really surprising. Art is conspicuous, after all. Why are art crimes so difficult to solve?
It’s certainly not because most art thieves are criminal masterminds. In fact, it’s the noningenious nature of most of these crimes that can make them so difficult to solve. Popular culture has given art thieves an unwarranted good name. In movies and television programs, they are traditionally portrayed as gentleman burglars, gallant charmers in turtlenecks whose elaborately planned capers usually involve grappling hooks, acrobatics, and seduction. In his 2010 book Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, former FBI art theft investigator Robert Wittman called this depiction “uniformly bogus.” Rich, multilingual aesthetes don’t rob museums; they pay $25,000 to attend gala dinners hosted inside of them.
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