A few months later, we held a ceremony at the Penn archaeological museum, formally returning the piece to the Peruvian ambassador and Walter Alva, the Sipan tombs’ chief archaeologist and the author of the National Geographic stories. As I stood to the side, out of camera range, Alva convened his own press conference, explaining the significance of the day, straining in broken English to make a comparison the reporters could understand. Finally, he said, “It is a national treasure. For you, it would be as if someone had stolen the Liberty Bell.” The press fawned once more, again invoking the Indiana Jones theme.
Vizi and I were thrilled because our supervisors were thrilled. We were making the FBI look good all over the world. At the end of a lousy decade—Waco, Ruby Ridge, the crime lab scandal, the Boston mafia fiasco—the FBI was eager for any positive publicity. The FBI brass seemed to be beginning to realize that art recovery was good for the bureau, and not just in Philadelphia.
Chapter 9
HISTORY OUT THE BACK DOOR
Philadelphia, 1997.
THE SLEEPY, SOMEWHAT MUSTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY of Pennsylvania is largely unknown outside of Philadelphia. But the Federal-style building on Locust Street houses the nation’s second-largest repository of early Americana. Founded in 1824, the HSP holds thousands of important military and cultural pieces. The research library is stocked with more than 500,000 books, 300,000 graphic works, and 15 million manuscripts. Like most museums, the HSP displays only a fraction of its collection at any one time; the bulk of the collection remains in storage, where most artifacts sit for decades, untouched and largely ignored. The HSP had not conducted an inventory in a generation or more. It was simply too expensive and time-consuming.
In late October 1997, the HSP embarked on its first full inventory in decades.
Almost immediately, collections manager Kristen Froehlich found problems. Alarmed, she called me.
So far, her inventory had revealed that four items were missing—a Lancaster County long rifle and three Civil War presentation swords.
The rifle dated to the 1780s and probably had seen combat in the latter stages of the Revolutionary War. The rifle’s gold-tipped barrel extended forty-eight inches, longer than most sabers, and was handcrafted by the legendary Pennsylvania gunsmith Isaac Haines. The ceremonial presentation swords, made of gold, steel, silver, enamel, diamonds, rhinestones, and amethyst, were part of a military tradition that dated to Roman times. The missing swords and scabbards, Froelich said, were presented to the Union generals George Meade, David Birney, and Andrew Humphreys following great victories. The swords would be easy to identify because each included a unique, engraved inscription and was crammed with lavish, if not gaudy, decoration. Luckily, the curator said, she had pictures and a good written description of each one. For instance, the counter guard of the hilt on Meade’s sword, presented at Gettysburg, included thirty diamonds that formed two stars and the letter M across a blue enamel shield. I knew such swords could command $200,000 or more on the open market.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Well, there could be more—I don’t know,” she said. “We think we’ve got twelve thousand pieces to inventory. And like I said, we’re just starting.”
I told Froehlich I’d come right over, and asked her to prepare a list of all HSP employees. I said I would need to interview everyone.
I didn’t mention that every museum employee, including Froehlich, would be a suspect.
In art crime, 90 percent of museum thefts are inside jobs.
ARMED DAYLIGHT MUSEUM robberies, like my Rodin case, are anomalies. Most museum thefts are committed or aided by insiders, people with access who know how to exploit a building’s vulnerabilities. An insider could be a ticket taker, a docent, a guide, an executive, a security guard, a custodian, an academic, even a trustee or wealthy patron—anyone tempted to use his or her access to walk away with a piece of art or history worth millions. The insider might be a temporary employee, perhaps part of a construction crew hired to perform a renovation, even a summer intern. This thief steals for any number of reasons, though greed, love, and revenge top the list of motives.
Cultural institutions are loath to suspect one of their own; they like to think of themselves as families, colleagues engaged in a noble profession. Many museums don’t bother to run criminal background checks on employees or contractors. But they should. As terrible as it sounds, a museum’s biggest vulnerability is its employees.
Insider thieves are everywhere: In Illinois, a shipping clerk arranged the theft of three Cézanne paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, then threatened to kill the museum president’s child if his demands were not met. In Baltimore, a night watchman stole 145 pieces from the Walters Art Museum, taking the pieces one by one over eight months—each night, while making his rounds, he pried open a display case, pinched an Asian artifact or two, then rearranged the rest of the pieces so the display wouldn’t look suspicious. In Russia, a veteran curator in Saint Petersburg systematically looted the world-renowned Hermitage, removing more than $5 million worth of czarist treasures over fifteen years, a crime not discovered until long after she’d died, when the museum conducted its first inventory in decades. A legendary Ohio professor of medieval literature embarked on an audacious serial crime wave, secreting pages from rare book manuscripts at libraries across the world, from the Library of Congress to the Vatican.
The biggest art crime in history was an inside job.
On a sultry midsummer morning in 1911, Mona Lisa vanished from her vaunted perch in the Louvre, between a Correggio and a Titian. The theft occurred on a Monday, the only day of the week the museum was closed to the public, but it was not confirmed until late that afternoon because listless guards dickered over whether the most famous painting in the world had been stolen, or merely temporarily moved as part of a Louvre cataloging project. French detectives immediately interviewed more than a hundred members of the museum staff and contractors, including a simple-minded Italian glazer named Vincenzo Peruggia. The Parisian authorities botched a chance to catch Peruggia in the early days of the investigation when they mistakenly compared a left-thumb fingerprint found on Mona Lisa’s abandoned protective box to Peruggia’s right thumb.
The heist garnered page-one news across the globe, and for a few weeks it became a bigger story than the looming world war. As the investigation foundered, the stories even briefly merged and sensational allegations appeared in the French media. Anti-German newspapers implied that the kaiser had played a role in the theft; opposition papers accused the struggling French government of stealing Mona Lisa as part of a wild Wag the Dog conspiracy to distract, outrage, and unite the French people against foreign aggressors. The Mona Lisa investigation took an awkward turn early on, when two radical modernists were wrongly detained under the theory that they’d stolen an icon of Old World art as some sort of artistic/political protest. One of the arrested radicals was a young artist named Pablo Picasso.