It was a few minutes before closing time at Sweden’s National Museum when three men entered, one pointing an automatic weapon at a guard while the others directed all the visitors into a lobby area.
Outside, police were rushing to a scene on the other side of Stockholm, where the museum robbers had set two cars on fire to distract the authorities. In a matter of minutes, the thieves walked through the museum, taking three paintings off the walls and spiriting into a small speedboat nearby, escaping before anyone was hurt.
Just like that, two works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a 1630 self-portrait by Rembrandt worth a combined total of roughly $35 million were gone.
Naturally, the incident sparked global media attention, with a police spokesman telling the Associated Press that such a thing had never happened in Sweden. Weeks later the gang demanded a ransom of several million Swedish kroner in exchange for the art, signaling to investigators how difficult it would be for the bandits to sell the stolen goods on the black market.
Within months, Swedish narcotics officers recovered one of the Renoirs during a drug raid. Police seized the other, called The Young Parisian, in 2005 after tapping the phone of an alleged Bulgarian organized crime figure in Los Angeles as part of a separate drug trafficking investigation. An interrogation of that suspect yielded clues that the missing Rembrandt was stashed somewhere in Denmark.
Ultimately, the FBI set up a sting operation with Danish and Swedish police to recover the nearly 400-year-old painting, relying on an undercover agent to negotiate a purchase.
“We were there for two weeks, meeting back and forth in hotels and cafes and all kinds of places,” the undercover agent, Robert Wittman, told me during a recent phone call.
Posing as a professional authenticator, Wittman fielded meetings with members of the Bulgarian crime syndicate who were apparently so desperate to monetize the piece, then worth more than $10 million, for $100,000. Upon handing over the work, Wittman says now, four suspects were arrested and extradited to Sweden to stand trial.
“They’re good at stealing but bad at business,” he added.
Now a consultant who recovers art on behalf of private collectors, Wittman was one of the founding members of the FBI’s art crime team. The unit helped retrieve a copy of the Bill of Rights belonging to the state of North Carolina that was stolen during the Civil War, a war bonnet from the Apache leader Geronimo and Normal Rockwell paintings that were hidden in a Brazilian farmhouse.
It’s hard to quantify the size of the market for stolen art, forged works and illicit antiquities like mummified remains or ancient tools. The FBI pegged the number at between $6 billion and $8 billion in 2009, a figure that’s likely grown amid higher art prices at auction, NFTs and digital art. It’s clear, though, that generating revenue from an illicit piece is as much of a challenge as acquiring it in the first place.
“The idea of networks of professional art thieves operating around the world is fiction,” he said. “Most of the groups that I’ve investigated were already involved in drug running, money laundering and robbery, so they dig into an art heist, too. It always just goes back to trying to make money.”
In 1972, a thief stole a painting hanging on the wall of a Honolulu dentist’s office. The portrait featured seven children, featuring the daughter of the dentist prominently in the middle of the scene. Rather than the usual decoration in a dentist’s office, though, Eyes Upon You was the creation of Margaret Keane, now a popular American artist (played by Amy Adams in the 2014 Tim Burton biopic Big Eyes).
Exactly what happened to Eyes Upon You remains unclear. An auction house in New Jersey had somehow acquired the work by the 1980s, selling it to a family. From there, it landed under the control of a Dallas-based auction house, which valued the painting at $35,000 in December.
The family of the dentist again owns the artwork in question, Wittman said, adding that the case is a typical example of a painting disappearing without fanfare, only to surface again years later. Someone, either a thief or an unwitting buyer, handed over the physical canvas to an investigator, allowing the public to view an example of “human genius” in person.
After talking all of this through, Wittman hinted more than once that he needed to end our phone conversation. He was balancing multiple other clients who hired him to recover their own lost items. Just one more question, I said: What’s it like to be sitting in a cafe, holding an internationally known piece of work by an artist like Rembrant?
“It’s the same as holding a Renoir or Picasso,” he said. “It’s just great.”
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[via @scottlistfield]
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