Priceless

In art crime, 90 percent of museum thefts are inside jobs.

ARMED DAYLIGHT MUSEUM robberies, like my Rodin case, are anomalies. Most museum thefts are committed or aided by insiders, people with access who know how to exploit a building’s vulnerabilities. An insider could be a ticket taker, a docent, a guide, an executive, a security guard, a custodian, an academic, even a trustee or wealthy patron—anyone tempted to use his or her access to walk away with a piece of art or history worth millions. The insider might be a temporary employee, perhaps part of a construction crew hired to perform a renovation, even a summer intern. This thief steals for any number of reasons, though greed, love, and revenge top the list of motives.

Cultural institutions are loath to suspect one of their own; they like to think of themselves as families, colleagues engaged in a noble profession. Many museums don’t bother to run criminal background checks on employees or contractors. But they should. As terrible as it sounds, a museum’s biggest vulnerability is its employees.

Insider thieves are everywhere: In Illinois, a shipping clerk arranged the theft of three Cezanne paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, then threatened to kill the museum president’s child if his demands were not met. In Baltimore, a night watchman stole 145 pieces from the Walters Art Museum, taking the pieces one by one over eight months—each night, while making his rounds, he pried open a display case, pinched an Asian artifact or two, then rearranged the rest of the pieces so the display wouldn’t look suspicious. In Russia, a veteran curator in Saint Petersburg systematically looted the world-renowned Hermitage, removing more than $5 million worth of czarist treasures over fifteen years, a crime not discovered until long after she’d died, when the museum conducted its first inventory in decades. A legendary Ohio professor of medieval literature embarked on an audacious serial crime wave, secreting pages from rare book manuscripts at libraries across the world, from the Library of Congress to the Vatican.

The biggest art crime in history was an inside job.

On a sultry midsummer morning in 1911, Mona Lisa vanished from her vaunted perch in the Louvre, between a Correggio and a Titian. The theft occurred on a Monday, the only day of the week the museum was closed to the public, but it was not confirmed until late that afternoon because listless guards dickered over whether the most famous painting in the world had been stolen, or merely temporarily moved as part of a Louvre cataloging project. French detectives immediately interviewed more than a hundred members of the museum staff and contractors, including a simple-minded Italian glazer named Vincenzo Peruggia. The Parisian authorities botched a chance to catch Peruggia in the early days of the investigation when they mistakenly compared a left-thumb fingerprint found on Mona Lisa’s abandoned protective box to Peruggia’s right thumb.

The heist garnered page-one news across the globe, and for a few weeks it became a bigger story than the looming world war. As the investigation foundered, the stories even briefly merged and sensational allegations appeared in the French media. Anti-German newspapers implied that the kaiser had played a role in the theft; opposition papers accused the struggling French government of stealing Mona Lisa as part of a wild Wag the Dog conspiracy to distract, outrage, and unite the French people against foreign aggressors. The Mona Lisa investigation took an awkward turn early on, when two radical modernists were wrongly detained under the theory that they’d stolen an icon of Old World art as some sort of artistic/political protest. One of the arrested radicals was a young artist named Pablo Picasso.

The real thief, Peruggia, should have been a suspect from the outset. He had the means, motive, and opportunity. A craftsman who helped build the wood and glass box that protected Mona Lisa, he was privy to a fateful museum secret—Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was secured to the wall by little more than four metal hooks and guarded only by a lone and drowsy military pensioner. The Louvre was so cavernous and in such a state of constant renovation that Peruggia, with his white workman’s blouse and smock, drew little attention when he waltzed into the Salon Carre shortly after sunrise that Monday morning.

“The room was deserted,” Peruggia recalled years later. “There hung the painting that is one of our great works. Mona Lisa smiled down on me. In a moment, I had snatched her from the wall. I carried her to the staircase, took off the frame, slipped the painting under my blouse, and left with the greatest nonchalance. It was all done in a few seconds.”

Peruggia hid Mona Lisa in his tiny Paris apartment for two years. He was careful, of course, but like most art thieves, he became frustrated when he could not sell the painting to a legitimate dealer. In 1913, he smuggled the painting to Italy, and offered to sell it to a dealer who was close to the director of Uffizi Gallery, the most famous museum in Florence. The dealer and museum director met Peruggia in a hotel room and promised to pay 500,000 Italian lire on the condition that he bring Mona Lisa to the Uffizi for a final examination. They tipped the police, and officers arrested Peruggia when he arrived with the painting. Afterward, Peruggia claimed to be a patriot, insisting that he stole the Mona Lisa to return her to her native Italy. The story appealed to many Italians, but it fell flat in court. As prosecutors noted, da Vinci himself brought Mona Lisa to France during the sixteenth century, and they presented a letter Peruggia wrote to his family after the theft in which he boasted, “I have finally obtained my fortune!” At trial, Peruggia’s own testimony proved his motives were not pure. He expected to claim a reward for “rescuing” Mona Lisa.

“I heard talk of millions,” he testified.

Convicted in 1914, Peruggia spent less than a year in prison, an appalling sentence for so serious a crime, yet a trend that would haunt art crime cases throughout the century. By the time he was released, a world war raged across Europe and he was largely forgotten.

IT TOOK ME the better part of a week to interview the HSP staff. I met with thirty-seven of the thirty-eight employees—a custodian named Ernest Medford called in sick. The supervisors insisted that talking to Medford would be a waste of time. “Ernie’s been here seventeen years,” Froehlich said. “When we have a problem, he’s our go-to guy.”

We turned next to the public, and helped the museum publicize a $50,000 reward, blasting faxes to a long list of media outlets, from National Public Radio to The Inquirer to Antiques and The Arts Weekly. This generated a quick splash of publicity, but the reward tactic that had worked so well in the Rodin case brought dubious results this time, clogging our confidential tip line with useless crap. “Caller reports suspicious man eyeing a display case. No further information,” an operator scribbled in her notes. “Caller saw a sword in the backseat of a car at a parking lot on Essington Avenue near Seventy-fourth Street in a Chevrolet. Two weeks ago.” And my favorite: “Caller is psychic, will volunteer time, notes a Capricorn moon day of robbery.”

I turned the hunt to a more familiar and likely venue.

As it happened, one of the nation’s largest Civil War shows, the Great Southern Weapons Fair in Richmond, Virginia, was scheduled for the week after we began our investigation. As a collector, I’d attended the sprawling show three or four times over the years and knew nearly every serious dealer on the East Coast would be there. I drove down with Special Agent Michael Thompson, and sure enough, we ran into prominent Pennsylvania historian and dealer Bruce Bazelon, author of a book on presentation swords. I told him about the HSP swords. Funny you should mention it, Bazelon said, and he related a story he’d heard from a Poconos dealer. According to the dealer, a customer came into his shop and showed him a picture of a presentation sword that he had for sale. The dealer had called Bazelon because he believed the sword was supposed to be in the HSP collection.

When I called the dealer, he confirmed the story. He dug into an old address book and came up with a name for the Philadelphia history buff peddling the sword—George Csizmazia.

We showed up unannounced at Csizmazia’s office on a chilly morning two days before Christmas. He was an electrical contractor, fifty-six years old, with weathered white skin, thick jowls, and narrow brown eyes. He parted his silver hair on the left and wore a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache. His boss retrieved him from a job and he met us brightly.

“What can I do for you, fellas?”

“We need help with an investigation related to Civil War artifacts,” I said. “George, we want to talk to you about some swords.”

Csizmazia turned ashen. “Ernie told you, didn’t he?”