prove it was North Carolina’s stolen copy.
I never got the chance.
As Harmelin left the room to get Torsella, he bumped the door to the office where my colleagues waited. They took it as a signal to move in, positioning themselves between the Bill of Rights and everyone else. Thompson, our squad supervisor, handed Richardson the seizure warrant.
“Am I under arrest?” he said.
“Oh, no,” I said, trying to reassure him. I walked him quietly toward a corner.
“What’s this all about?” he said.
At that point, with my cover blown, I felt compelled to tell the truth. “We’re conducting a criminal investigation into an allegation of interstate transportation of stolen property,” I said. “The document is now evidence.”
As I feared, Richardson now refused to talk.
“Can I leave?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t have a reason to detain him. We had no evidence that he knew the Bill of Rights was stolen property. “But first I’ve got to give you a receipt for the document.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope,” I said. I took out a standard Department of Justice receipt for seized property, a form I’d filled out dozens of times in my career. As I wrote the words—“Description of item: Copy of United States Bill of Rights”—the history of the moment caught up with me. I thought back to my first day at the FBI Academy, when I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I’d always assumed I’d pledged to defend the ideals, not the actual documents.
Richardson was stammering at me, but I was lost in the moment and didn’t hear what he said.
I just handed him his receipt.
He straightened his tie and walked out the door.
WE RECEIVED SUCH great publicity when we announced the Bill of Rights rescue, Headquarters didn’t hesitate when we asked to use the FBI director’s jet to fly the parchment home.
The flight to Raleigh was scheduled for April 1. That it was April Fool’s Day was a coincidence, but it certainly made it easier to pull off our gag.
Before we left, I stopped by the touristy gift shop at the Independence Mall Visitor’s Center and bought a souvenir copy of the Bill of Rights for $2. Then I went to a drugstore and bought a two-by-two-foot piece of poster board and some superglue. Heine and I mounted the fake Bill of Rights onto the board and slipped it inside the custom three-by-three-foot box holding the real Bill of Rights, which was held inside a special protective plastic sleeve.
When we touched down in Raleigh, four local FBI agents met us at the airport and drove us to their suburban office. The conference room was already jammed with agents, prosecutors, and marshals. We teased our audience by making a show of the official paperwork documenting the transfer of evidence. People started getting impatient.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you want to see it first?”
Of course they did. Heine started to open the box and I shifted strategically in front of him to shield our sleight of hand. He took out the fake Bill of Rights, started to hold it up—and fumbled it to the floor.
“Oops,” I said as Heine bent over. “Geez.”
I heard a slight gasp, and as I looked up, Heine gave it his best Three Stooges stumble, clumsily stepping on the damn thing, twisting the cardboard.
On cue, I screamed, “Oh my God!”
We heard more gasps and saw a supervisor’s eyes bulge.
We waited a beat, then bust out laughing.
The Raleigh supervisor did not laugh with us.
Gingerly, we withdrew the real of Bill of Rights, laid it on the table, and signed it over to the U.S. marshal.
Chapter 16
ART CRIME TEAM
STANDING BEFORE A DOZEN FBI AGENTS AND SUPERVISORS in the expansive main gallery at the center of the Barnes Foundation’s museum, I pointed to a towering modern painting of a man and woman carrying flowers.
“This is
Fourteen years after my yearlong class at the Barnes, I was returning to help with a daylong training session designed for agents from the FBI’s newly formed Art Crime Team.
“Each gallery you’ll see today is a classroom,” I told my FBI colleagues. “The four walls in each gallery are your blackboards. They are the lesson plans. Each teaches us something about light, line, color, shape, and space. By the way, in this room alone, you’re probably looking at a billion dollars’ worth of art.”
My pupils looked overwhelmed. Few agents knew much about art, and the dollar figures could be unsettling. “Don’t be intimidated by what you see,” I said. “We’re not here to learn how to spot a forgery or know the value of this painting or that painting. You’ll learn that when or if you need to. We’re here today to learn the basics. We’re here to train your eye. To learn to see.”
The group crowded into the second gallery. I swept my arm toward a cluster of paintings and said, “What’s amazing here in this one gallery is that you look at this wall, and here’s a Cezanne, there’s a Cezanne, and another and another—Cezanne after Cezanne. They’ve got seventy of them in this museum, folks.”
I stepped in front of a Renoir portrait. “Look at the color. Look at the palette, the shape of the people, and how it’s done. See that? Now, look at the Cezanne. See how he paints the folds, the creases in the tablecloth? That’s one of the hardest things to do. Compare the palettes: Renoir is rose, bright blue, cream, flesh tones. Cezanne is dark green, purple, violet, muted tones.”
The group walked into the next gallery. “Now, in this room, can you tell which one is the Cezanne and which is the Renoir?”
The emboldened students began throwing out answers, and I could not have been prouder. I was no longer the sole FBI agent who cared about art crime.
THE FBI’S COMMITMENT to art crime was entering a new era. The creation of the Art Crime Team marked a great leap forward for the Bureau—and a natural progression from our successes following the high-profile Rockwell, Koplowitz,
The FBI had assigned eight agents scattered across the country to the Art Crime Team, and I was named senior investigator. The agents would not work art crime full-time as I did, but they would take cases as they developed in their regions, and would be prepared to deploy rapidly. The FBI’s new commitment did not compare to the Italian art crime effort—the Carabinieri force numbered three hundred. But it was a start.
Gone, or so it seemed, were the days when the FBI would get by with one or two agents who expressed an interest in art crime—when an agent like Bob Bazin would handle cases, then informally pass the mantle to someone like me. Historically speaking, I knew of only two other FBI art crime experts beside Bazin and both had worked in New York. In the sixties and seventies, it was Donald Mason, probably best known for his recovery of a stolen Kandinsky, and in the seventies and eighties, Thomas McShane, who once recovered a stolen van Gogh in the carport of a New York gas station.
To bolster the new Art Crime Team, the Department of Justice provided a team of prosecutors—one of whom was Bob Goldman. They were granted special authority to prosecute art crime cases anywhere in the
