Priceless

As value rose, so did theft.

In the 1960s, thieves started swiping Impressionist works from the walls of museums along the French Riviera and from cultural sites in Italy. The greatest was the 1969 theft in Palermo of Caravaggio’s painting Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco. Such heists continued into the ’70s, but they spiked after the stunning van Gogh sales in the ’80s and ’90s.

The audacious 1990 Gardner theft—eleven stolen masterworks, including pieces by Vermeer and Rembrandt—marked the beginning of a bolder era. Thieves began striking museums across the globe, stealing more than $1 billion worth of paintings from 1990 to 2005. From the Louvre, they removed a Corot during a busy Sunday afternoon. At Oxford, they swiped a Cezanne in the midst of a New Year’s Eve celebration. In Rio, they took a Matisse, a Monet, and a Dali. Bandits in Scotland posing as tourists stole a da Vinci masterpiece from a museum- castle. The Van Gogh Museum was hit twice in eleven years.

Feeling the swirl of jet lag, I drained my Scotch and headed up to my room.

The next morning, I arrived in time to get a decent seat for the opening remarks in the hotel conference center. Cradling my program and a cup of thick Italian coffee, I listened to the translation of the first speaker through wireless headphones. Stefano Manacorda of the Seconda Universita di Napoli, a prominent Italian law professor with wild black hair and a wide purple tie, shuffled his notes and cleared his throat. He began with a blunt assessment that set the stage for the weekend meeting.

“Art crime is a problem of epidemic proportions.”

He’s right, of course. The $6-billion-a-year figure is probably low, the professor said, because it includes statistics supplied by only a third of the 192 member countries of the United Nations. Art and antiquities theft ranks fourth in transnational crime, after drugs, money laundering, and illegal arms shipments. The scope of art and antiquity crime varies from country to country, but it’s safe to say that art crime is on the rise, easily outpacing efforts to police it. Everything fueling the legitimate global economic revolution—the Internet, efficient shipping, mobile phones, and customs reforms, particularly within the European Union—makes it easier for criminals to smuggle and sell stolen art and antiquities.

Like many international crimes, the illegal art and antiquity trade depends on close ties between the legitimate and the illegitimate worlds. The global market for legitimate art tops tens of billions of dollars annually, with roughly 40 percent sold in the United States. With so much money at stake, hot art and antiquities attract money launderers, shady gallery owners and art brokers, drug dealers, shipping companies, unscrupulous collectors, and the occasional terrorist. Criminals use paintings, sculptures, and statues as collateral to finance arms, drug, and money-laundering deals. Art and antiquities, particularly pieces as small as a carry-on suitcase, are easier to smuggle than cash or drugs and their value easily converts in any currency. Stolen art is tough for customs agents to spot because art and antiquities moving across international borders don’t scream contraband the way drugs, guns, or bundles of cash do. Most stolen and looted pieces are quickly smuggled over borders, in search of new markets. Half the art and antiquities recovered by law enforcement is recaptured in another country.

Museum heists may grab the big headlines, but they represent only a tenth of all art crime. Statistics presented by the Art Loss Register in Courmayeur showed that 52 percent of all pilfered works are taken from private homes and organizations with little or no fanfare. Ten percent are stolen from galleries and 8 percent from churches. Most of the rest is spirited away from archaeological sites.

As another diplomat droned on about a rarely used codicil in some fifty-year-old treaty, I studied the Interpol figures in my conference packet. When I reached a chart on the geographic distribution of art thefts, I did a double take and took off my translation headphones: Interpol’s statistics asserted that 74 percent of the world’s art crime occurs in Europe. Seventy-four percent! That’s not likely, by a long shot. In reality, the numbers demonstrate only which nations keep good statistics—and this in turn may reveal the extent to which some nations truly care about policing art crime. The disparity between national art crime teams can be staggering. The French national art crime squad employs thirty dedicated officers in Paris and is led by a full colonel of the Gendarmerie Nationale. Scotland Yard deploys a dozen officers full-time and has deputized professors of art and anthropologists, partnering them with detectives investigating cases. Italy probably does the most. It maintains a three-hundred-person art and antiquity squad, a highly regarded, aggressive unit run by Giovanni Nistri, a general of the Carabinieri. In Courmayeur, General Nistri disclosed that Italy fights art crime using some of the same resources our DEA uses to fight drugs—it deploys helicopters, cybersleuths, and even submarines.

In the early afternoon, one of the top U.N. officials at the summit, Alessandro Calvani, urged other nations to follow Italy’s example, suggesting a worldwide public relations campaign to educate people about the loss of history and culture art crime causes. He pointed to the successes of public education campaigns that focused attention on tobacco, land mines, HIV, and the human rights abuses associated with the diamond trade. “Governments were finally forced to act because of strong public opinion,” he said. “A lot of people don’t think art crime is a crime, and without that feeling you can’t generate a groundswell.”

That’s certainly the case in the United States. Nationwide, only a handful of detectives work art crime. Despite the front-page play and prominent television coverage each large art heist triggers, most police agencies don’t dedicate proper resources to investigate. The LAPD is the only American police department with a full-time art crime investigator. In most cities, general purpose theft-squad detectives simply offer a reward and hope thieves are tempted. The FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have jurisdiction over art crime but expend few resources to police it. The FBI’s art crime team, created in 2004, employed only one full-time undercover agent—me. Now that I’ve retired, there is no one. The art crime team still exists—it’s managed by a trained archaeologist, not an FBI agent—but turnover is rampant. Almost all of the eight art crime team members I trained in 2005 had by 2008 already moved to other jobs, eager to advance their careers. I didn’t begrudge them that, but it made it impossible to create a trained cohesive unit or build institutional memory.

The United States wasn’t the only country at the conference that was urged to do more. With a few notable exceptions, art crime simply isn’t a priority for most nations. As one of the Italians told the summit: “What we have is a paradigm of collective delinquency.”

After lunch—turkey scaloppine, zuppa di formaggio, a light rose—we heard from a pair of Australian academics who provided an overview on looting. The subject matter wasn’t new to me, but I was pleased to see them offer a non-Western perspective at this Eurocentric gathering. It’s folly to try to address a global problem without taking into consideration cultural differences. In some Third World countries, the illicit art and antiquities trade is quietly accepted as a way to boost the economy. Semi-lawless, war-torn regions have long been vulnerable. In Iraq, antiquities are one of the few indigenous, valuable commodities (and easier to steal than oil). In less dangerous but developing countries like Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Peru, where looters have turned archaeology sites into moonscapes, local governments don’t view every excavation as a crime against history and culture. Many view it as an economic stimulus. As the professors noted, the diggers are indigenous and unemployed, desperate to convert rubble from dead ancestors’ graves to food for starving families. At the conference, this perspective triggered hand-wringing from politically correct diplomats, bemoaning corrupt local officials who take bribes. So much so that I had to snicker when Kenyan National Museum director George Okello Abungu rightly rose to chastise the group. “Don’t be so quick to judge the corrupt customs man,” he said. “Remember who bribes him: the Westerner.”

Art and antiquity crime is tolerated, in part, because it is considered a victimless crime. Having personally rescued national treasures on three continents, I know firsthand that this is foolishly nearsighted. Most stolen works are worth far more than their dollar value. They document reflections of our collective human culture. Ownership of a particular piece may change over decades and centuries, but these great works belong to all of us, to our ancestors and to future generations. For some oppressed and endangered peoples, their art is often the only remaining expression of a culture. Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history.

Americans, in particular, are said to be uncultured when it comes to high art, more likely to go to a ballpark than a museum. But as I tell my foreign colleagues, the statistics belie that stereotype. Americans visit museums on a scale eclipsing sports. In 2007, more people visited the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington (24.2 million) than attended a game played by the National Basketball Association (21.8 million), the National Hockey League (21.2 million), or the National Football League (17 million). In Chicago, eight million people visit the city’s museums every year. That’s more than one season’s attendance for the Bears, Cubs, White Sox, and Bulls combined.

As the agenda inched toward my presentation, I realized that I could place each of the speakers into one of