curator, shortly after the arrests. We were cataloging each of the nearly two hundred stolen antiques, one by one, and carefully wrapping them for storage—precisely as I had done at my father’s Baltimore antique shop after his death.
My dad had opened Wittman’s Oriental Gallery in 1986, two years before I left the
Dad had spent his final years among the antiques, and I think he took as much pleasure giving customers tours of the gallery, stopping to explain the significance of a Burmese textile or a Japanese figurine, as he did actually selling anything, probably more so. His collection had filled the floors and walls of the narrow shop and it nearly rivaled the holdings at Baltimore’s best public galleries. Whenever I’d visit the shop with Donna and the kids, he’d dig out a piece from his collection and delight Kevin, Jeff, and Kristin with a quick lesson about Japanese culture. I always listened in and learned something new. Already, I missed that.
Now in the FBI evidence room, my eyes lingered on a stolen antique watch and I thought about how Dad might describe the piece, what history lesson it might reveal.
WE CHARGED CSIZMAZIA and Medford under a new law that made it a federal crime to steal anything worth more than $5,000 from a museum. Previously, thieves who had never crossed state lines, as was the case here, could only be charged in state court. But Congress had recently created a new federal art-crime law, largely in response to the 1990 Gardner heist in Boston, and in 1995 Goldman and I had been the first to use the law, employing it during the case of the theft from William Penn’s home.
In the HSP case, Csizmazia and Medford entered plea agreements, presuming this would lead to light sentences. But the case did not end neatly.
The judge assigned to the case was a World War II veteran who did not look kindly on the theft of military artifacts. United States District Judge Clarence C. Newcomer, seventy-five years old, had a reputation for toughness at sentencing. He had presided over several celebrated mob and police corruption cases, and issued several rulings that belied his conservative bent, including one close to my heart—he was the judge who broke up the Topps baseball card monopoly, paving the way for competitors. If the judge needed a reminder of American history, his wide-windowed chambers office overlooked Independence Hall, the nation’s birthplace.
A few minutes before the HSP sentencing hearing began on July 16, 1998, I settled into a seat at the prosecution table, next to Goldman. Following routine preliminaries, the judge read aloud the recommendation of the probation office—a sentence in the range of twenty to thirty months for each man. The prosecution, citing the plea agreement, asked for a twenty-month term; the defense lawyers didn’t suggest a specific sentence, just something considerably less than twenty months.
Before he imposed the sentence, the judge held aloft a stack of fifteen letters from museum directors across the nation, each imploring him to impose a stiff sentence. What made art theft different from most financial and property crimes, many museum directors told the judge, is the harm to society. Such artifacts not only fill museums, they serve as the raw material for historians and scholars. Most are irreplaceable. “Any theft from any museum goes beyond the crime itself—such a destructive act robs the entire community of its history, its cultural heritage,” wrote Anne Hawley, the Gardner Museum director. The president of the American Association of Museums, Edward Able, called “theft by insiders the most serious of all, involving as it does a betrayal by those charged with guarding property held in the public trust.” He cited a Latin phrase whispered by wise security professionals,
To my delight, the judge shared the museum directors’ outrage. The thefts were not, as the defense claimed, some relatively minor and isolated indiscretion, an anomaly committed by two men who led otherwise productive lives. The defendants carried out their scheme in a systematic way, pilfering more than two hundred times, month after month for eight years. Worse, these thieves were not common thugs; by virtue of their positions in society as museum employee and serious collector, Medford and Csizmazia, more than most, understood the value and significance of what they took. And the harm they caused.
“The conduct you engaged in is an assault and affront to our culture, to our society, and must be dealt with accordingly,” the judge said. “Therefore, it is the judgment of this court that you be sentenced to forty months….”
Forty months! Double the sentence we sought!
I wanted to smile but kept FBI cool, stoic. I stole a glance at the defense table. The lead lawyer stood, mouth agape, fingers squeezing an empty legal pad. Medford dropped into his chair and slumped. Csizmazia turned to the gallery, searching for a sympathetic face, blinking back tears.
I turned to Goldman and pumped his hand. Forty months! Maybe this marked the start of a trend for art crime cases.
Chapter 10
A BLOOD CLOTH
WHEN YOU WORK UNDERCOVER, IT’S ALWAYS A GOOD idea to greet an out-of-town target at the airport. A guy just getting off a plane is less likely to be carrying a weapon.
I met Civil War artifact collector Charlie Wilhite a few minutes after his flight landed from Kansas City. We ducked into a shuttle bus headed to the Embassy Suites near the Philadelphia airport. It was a brisk January afternoon in the mid-twenties, and in the bus Wilhite stayed bundled in a ski jacket and gloves, gripping a large black gym bag. He carried no other luggage. I knew he was booked on a return flight that evening, so I figured he had the merchandise in the satchel. Wilhite was a middle-aged, gangly man with a pale face and a bad blond comb-over. He wore cowboy boots and spoke with a Southern drawl.
When we got to the hotel room, I tried to make Wilhite comfortable. I poured a pair of Cokes and set them on a table with two chairs, in full view of the hidden surveillance camera. “Welcome to Philadelphia,” I said.
“Well thank you, bud.” He peeled off the jacket and gloves. “Thank you very much.”
“First visit?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Hopefully it’ll be a memorable one.”
“I hope so.”
We both laughed.
Wilhite unzipped his carry-on and I stiffened slightly. Though I’d picked him up at the airport, you never knew what a guy might be carrying. Working undercover, rip-offs are always a real threat. Years earlier, I’d nearly been attacked by a man during a hotel sting. He’d claimed to be working for the CIA and wanted to buy $15 million worth of loose diamonds to fund covert operations in Europe. Diamond merchants in Philadelphia alerted the FBI and I had gone undercover as a diamond courier to meet the man. On the phone I played along with his crazy story and agreed to meet at a nearby hotel, telling him I would be carrying the diamonds inside a briefcase attached to my arm with a handcuff. When I met the guy in the warm hotel lobby, he approached wearing dark sunglasses and a heavy overcoat. We turned toward the elevators, but the coat and the man gave me an odd feeling, and I gave the takedown signal right there in the lobby. It turned out he was carrying a gun and a hatchet—no money for diamonds. He planned to kill me, cut off my arm, and make off with the jewels.
So I breathed a sigh of relief when Wilhite pulled from his bag a neatly folded red, white, and blue cloth—a nineteenth-century American flag in fine condition.
He unfolded the flag roughly and draped it over a small round table, the edges spilling over the side, the frayed fringes dangling inches from the ground. My eyes fixed smartly on the thirty-five gold stars in the blue corner
