Priceless

paintings into large black duffel bags. The three paintings were among the smallest in the museum—and that made them among the easiest to carry away. Together, they were worth an estimated $40 million. The men scurried back down to the lobby, rejoined their colleague, and ran out the front door. The entire robbery took just two and a half minutes. The three men, each carrying a stolen treasure across the icy street, turned left and ran for the waterfront, where they met their moored boat and roared away. The police, stuck in traffic caused by the diversion, didn’t arrive until 5:35 p.m., a good half an hour after the thieves left the dock.

THE THEFT OF Self-Portrait and the Renoirs bruised not only the international art world, but also Swedish pride. The National Museum, a city landmark and model of Florentine and Venetian architecture that opened in 1866, held four centuries’ worth of European treasures, many of them collected by the enlightened King Gustav III.

The Swedish police began their investigation with one big clue: During the robbery, another boater saw the three thieves dart down the dock and jump into their getaway boat. Their hurry, particularly in such icy conditions, caught the boater’s curiosity. Quietly, the witness followed the getaway boat as it sped across the Norrstrom River and snaked into a canal about a mile away. He found the orange boat abandoned by a small dock, still rocking in its own wake.

The witness called police, and a picture of the boat was published in the next day’s newspapers. Within twenty-four hours, a man came forward to say he’d sold the orange boat for cash a few days earlier. The buyer had used a fake name but made the mistake of giving the seller his real cell phone number. Police traced the cell phone’s logs and this led them to a crew of small-time suburban crooks.

Using phone wiretaps and surveillance, Swedish police were able to identify most members of the gang. In a quick sweep, they arrested a native Swede, a Russian, a Bulgarian, and three Iraqi brothers. In a search, police found Polaroid pictures of the missing works—blackmail-style photographs of the paintings next to recent newspapers. They did not find the actual paintings. Although a Swedish court convicted one man and sentenced him to several years in prison, the paintings remained at large.

A year later, underworld sources in Sweden tipped police that someone seemed to be trying to sell one of the Renoirs on the black market. The police set up a sting in a Swedish coffee shop and recovered Conversation with a Gardener. From my base in Philadelphia, I was pleased to read of the arrest. But for the next four years, no one in law enforcement heard a word about the other Renoir or the Rembrandt.

Then, in March 2005, I got a call from the FBI art crime investigator in Los Angeles, Chris Calarco.

“I’m not sure what we have yet, or if this is anything, but I wanted to give you a heads-up,” he said. “A couple of guys on a wire out here heard something.”

“Yeah?”

“They think the subject might be trying to sell a Renoir.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Bulgarian. Here illegally since at least the 1990s. Moved here from Sweden, I think.”

Sweden. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered to myself, and then I asked Calarco, “Is the painting he’s trying to sell Young Parisian?”

Calarco said he would check and I filled him in on the 2000 Stockholm heist. He called back a week later. Yes, he said. It was Young Parisian. The target not only mentioned the painting by name, but he also seemed to speak regularly with a son still living in Stockholm. The target’s name was Igor Kostov, and he was suspected of dealing drugs and fencing stolen goods. He was sixty-six years old, an illegal East European immigrant living near Hollywood, worked at a pawnshop, and almost always wore a Members Only windbreaker that covered his sagging stomach. Kostov was a former boxer, an occupation confirmed by his flat nose and forehead scars.

On the wire, Kostov spoke in rapid-fire, staccato sentences laced with his thick Bulgarian accent, and the agents found his incessant bragging amusing. I asked Calarco to thank the agents for their patience on the wire, for being smart enough to recognize the clues that suddenly transformed their case from a run-of-the-mill drug investigation into an international art rescue.

This can’t be overstated. Most people don’t realize that working a wire is grunt work. Wiretaps can provide phenomenal tips and evidence, but the reality is that recording them is a tedious task, far less glamorous than portrayed in the movies or hour-long episodes of The Wire or The Sopranos. Wiretaps require hours, weeks, and often months of patience, waiting for calls, staring at a computer screen, typing notes, trying to string together snippets of conversations, interpreting code words, waiting for the bad guys to slip up and say something stupid. In the United States, unlike most other countries, the job is incredibly time-consuming because agents can’t simply record every call, then retrieve them all at the end of the day. To protect civil liberties, agents must listen to all calls live and record only those portions of a call that are relevant to the case. Thankfully, the case agents, Gary Bennett and Sean Sterle, had been paying attention when Kostov began talking about the Renoir.

Bennett and Sterle reported that Kostov was offering to sell the painting for $300,000 and a sale appeared imminent. The FBI faced a swift decision: Keep the drug investigation going or save the painting. It was not a difficult decision.

The agents rushed to stake out his house. A few hours later, Kostov came out carrying a square package about the size of the Renoir and put it in his trunk. As he walked to the car door, the agents moved. They cut Kostov off and ordered him to the ground. They asked to see the package in the trunk. Sure, he said. The excited agents popped the trunk and pulled the package out. Inside, they found dry cleaning. Kostov laughed.

Unamused, the agents took Kostov back to the FBI office for questioning. They sat him down in a windowless room and latched one of his handcuffs to a ring bolted to the top of the Formica interrogation table. They grilled him about the drugs, the stolen goods, and the painting.

The Bulgarian professed innocence and played tough guy. Sterle and Bennett persisted: They calmly explained that they had hours of wiretaps. They told Kostov he faced ten years in prison. He’d get out when he was seventy-seven, if he lived that long. Once they had him sweating, the agents used a standard police interrogation tactic—they gave him an “out,” a way to stay out of prison. They promised that if he helped the FBI find the painting, they would urge the judge to go easy on him. The first step is yours, the agents told Kostov. Tell us where the painting is.

Kostov melted slowly, like an ice sculpture in the L.A. heat. Ultimately, he admitted that his son had smuggled the Renoir to him from Sweden to sell on the American black market. Kostov sent the agents to a pawnshop, where they found Young Parisian hidden against a dusty wall, wrapped in towels and grocery shopping bags. The Renoir had a slight superficial scratch but otherwise looked OK.

We were thrilled but kept the recovery secret. We planned to use Kostov as our vouch to try to rescue the remaining missing painting, the Rembrandt.

We asked Kostov to call his son and say that he’d found a buyer willing to purchase the Renoir and the Rembrandt. Kostov agreed, promising to betray his son to save his own skin.

Throughout the summer, I received updates on Kostov’s negotiations. I winced as I read the transcripts of calls with his son, the middleman in the talks with the thieves.

“These guys are crazy,” the son warned from Stockholm.

The father in Los Angeles seemed unimpressed, heartless even. “What are they going to do, kill you?” he said sarcastically. “Will they shoot you?”

The son sounded resigned. “I don’t know. I don’t give a shit anymore.”

Kostov did a nice job haggling the sellers down from $1.2 million to $600,000. Although we’d be getting the cash back, we had to negotiate as if real money was at stake. We agreed to pay $245,000 in cash up front and provide the balance once the paintings were sold. Kostov told them he would fly to Stockholm with an American art broker and the cash in September.

Everything seemed lined up—until we contacted the Swedish authorities. International police operations are never easy. Every country has its own laws and procedures, of course, and they have to be respected. Whenever you work overseas, you have to remind yourself that you’re a guest of a foreign country. You can negotiate diplomatically but you can’t dictate terms. You’ve got to play by the host nation’s rules.