For a long time, with bank robberies and drug cartels taking priority, the FBI was not interested in art crimes. After all, it was not until the 1970s that the first painting sold for a million dollars. Now art crime is a $6 billion dollar industry, and Robert Wittman knows all about it.
The retired FBI undercover agent founded the agency’s art crime team, the ACT (his original idea for a name — the Federal Art Recovery Team — was rejected for acronymic reasons, Wittman said).
Wittman shared stories from his career with his talk, “USA vs Art Thieves: True Tales from the FBI’s Real Indiana Jones,” at the McFaddin-Ward House, May 17. Despite being hastily rescheduled from the previous evening because of severe storms, the mid-morning lecture attracted a packed house. Wittman was both informative and charismatic, and one suspects his personality was an asset for his undercover work.
The numbers for art-related crimes are staggering. The art industry generates $200 billion worldwide annually, with the United States being the largest market, representing around 40% of works bought and sold with a value of $80 billion, Wittman said. Paintings, prints and sculptures represent around $60 billion, with the other $20 billion accounting for collectibles, including comic books and baseball cards (a Mickey Mantle rookie card recently sold for $12 million).
This wide range of property is classed as “cultural heritage,” and also includes antiques and toys, anything that is considered to be representative of a society’s culture. There are several laws relating to crimes, including the Theft of Major Artwork statute that was passed in 1995. It means that anyone who steals an object of cultural heritage from a museum that is worth at least $5,000 and more than100 years old, or worth $10,000 of any age, is committing a federal crime.
As a word of caution, Wittman said there are 18 countries that have treaty agreements with the U.S. that makes it illegal to transport artifacts of cultural heritage. For example, one can buy old Roman coins legally in England, but if one tries to bring them back to the U.S., they can be confiscated as being part of the cultural heritage of Italy. It’s hard being a tourist nowadays.
So why are criminals getting involved with the illicit cultural property market, Wittman asked. He quoted Willy Sutton’s response to being asked why he robbed banks; because that’s where the money is.
Wittman said he estimates that the value of arts related crime is around $6 billion annually. With those kinds of numbers, what was once considered not worth investigator’s time suddenly has more importance.
Wittman started at the FBI in 1989 and the ACT is 2005 with eight agents. The team now numbers 20 and Wittman said they have currently recovered $700 million — “Three hundred of that is mine,” Wittman quipped.
Wittman flashed a slide of what Hollywood think are typical art thieves: Sean Connery from “Entrapment,” Pierce Brosnan from “The Thomas Crown Affair,” and Cary Grant from “To Catch a Thief.” Then he put up a slide of some real art thieves, drawing a huge laugh from the audience as the motley looking mugshots were a far cry from the debonair gentleman thieves of the movies.
Wittman told a story of three men who stole objects from a house museum on the Delaware River where William Penn lived from 1683 to 1700. It is now a National Historic site. The trio were friends from grade school who made a living picking and selling objects at antique auctions. They remembered a school trip to the house from a fifth-grade school trip. They broke in and stole around40 items. However, once the theft was discovered, there was such an uproar they knew they couldn’t sell any of it and stored it in trash bags at one of their girlfriend’s house. When they told her to get rid of it, she, thinking it was trash, threw it in the Delaware River.
The police were able to recover the pewter and metal objects that had sunk, but lighter objects, including a carved wooden jewelry casket owned by Mrs. Penn was lost on the tides.
“It’s not what they did, because we did recover a lot, but what’s lost forever,” Wittman said. “That’s our history, our cultural heritage. In some respects, although we did recover all those other items, we failed our grandchildren because they saw our grandparents save this for us for 300 years. Right? We lost them on our watch. It’s our loss.”
Wittman shared stories of his various successful undercover operations, even sharing covert videos from his recovery of the Rembrandt self-portrait valued at $35 million which was stolen in 2000 in Stockholm, Sweden. For more details on his work, it is worth reading his book “Priceless.” There are a lot of fascinating details and stories that give real insight into the investigative process.
When he retired, Wittman started his own company that assists with art recovery, establishing provenance, collection management, museum security and other art-related security issues.
Wittman reminded everyone that the famous theft of Vermeer’s “The Concert” and Rembrandt’s only landscape from the Boston’s Gardner Museum in 1990 remains unsolved. There’s $10 million reward as the works are valued at $500 million.
Ironically, stolen art like the Vermeer is effectively a Schrödinger’s cat of painting. It is both priceless and worthless at the same time, as it can never be sold for its appraised value without being seized and forfeited.
Wittman said his lecture is one of five talks he presents, with others on forgeries, antiquities and books. Here’s hoping we see him in Southeast Texas again.
Wittman’s lecture is available to view on the McFaddin-Ward House YouTube page.https://youtu.be/thIPGtjL62k
This story first ran in the June 3, 2024 edition of The Beaumont Enterprise.
English with a bit of Texas 