“This is business!” the bandit announced as he drew a .25-caliber Raven pistol, a Saturday night special with a worn wooden grip. “On the floor, I say!” He pointed the shiny silver barrel at the guards, but the weapon was so small and the man spoke so theatrically that the guards hesitated. Was this an act? A prank? Was this guy unhinged? He spoke with the lilt of a British accent, but was clearly American. With his hair slicked back and his high cheekbones, he looked a little like James Dean. When no one moved, the man fired a shot into the wall.
The guards dropped to the floor.
The thief kneeled down, the weapon trembling in his left hand, and handcuffed each guard. He moved to the Rodin sculpture closest to the front door, Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, a ten-inch-high bronze of a bearded middle-aged man with a weathered face, and snapped it from its marble podium. He turned and dashed out the front door, cradling the sculpture like a football, through the museum courtyard and past The Thinker. When the thief reached the edge of the museum grounds at the Ben Franklin Parkway, he turned west toward the art museum, disappearing into the maze of rush-hour traffic.
It was my first month as an FBI agent.
On its face the heist seemed like a simple, stupid, uncivil act. How ironic that my work on the investigation would open worlds I had never considered—the struggles of one of Impressionism’s most significant artists, the dream of a Roaring Twenties tycoon who sought to share an artist’s extraordinary beauty with his fellow Philadelphians, and the hopeful, often hapless mind of the art thief. Looking back, I see now that it sparked an interest I would turn into a career. But during my first month on the job, I was focused on more basic tasks, like remembering to take my radio with me on stakeouts.
Back then, the FBI didn’t have full-time art crime investigators. In fact, the theft of art and antiquities from museums wouldn’t become a federal crime until 1995. The theft of an object of art or cultural significance was treated like the theft of any valuable piece of property. The property-theft squad handled it. Usually, the FBI didn’t become involved in art crime cases unless there was evidence that a stolen piece was carried across a state line, a federal crime. But in Philadelphia, there was one guy, a respected agent named Bob Bazin, who liked to work museum cases. He worked closely with the Philadelphia police, and they often consulted with him on thefts. I got lucky. When I graduated from the Academy and reported for duty, I was assigned to partner with Bazin.
Not that Bazin wanted me, or any other rookie. Veteran agents called us “Blue Flamers” because in our first months we were so eager to please that we were said to have blue flames shooting from our asses. Bazin liked to work alone and, at least on the surface, acted as if he couldn’t be bothered to train a neophyte. I suspected he was suspicious of my background. My brief years in the Japanese antiques business with my dad hardly qualified me as an art expert. Worse, most FBI rookies are former cops, soldiers, or state troopers. I was a geeky former ag-journalist. Bazin was a bear of a man, not tall, but burly, and a no-nonsense investigator who’d spent years on the street hunting bank robbers and fugitives. He had an unfailing, enduring loyalty to the FBI and worked diligently on any assignment. That included taking me on.
I settled into an empty desk next to Bazin. The FBI occupied two floors in the central federal building in Philadelphia, part of a redbrick judicial complex two blocks from Independence Hall. The property-theft squad worked in a bullpen in a corner of the eighth floor. On my first day, I went to the supply closet and grabbed a couple of pads, pens, and a handful of blank forms. Bazin patiently watched me arrange them on my desk. When I finished, he caught my eye. “How do you plan to carry all that on the street?”
I didn’t know. “They didn’t tell us at the Academy,” I said lamely.
Bazin growled. “Forget all that shit. The Academy is Disneyland.”
He reached behind his desk, pulled out a weathered tan briefcase, and threw it at me. He told me to fill the case with the essential FBI forms I would need to conduct investigations—forms to execute search warrants, read people their rights, make hidden audio recordings, and seize property.
“Take it with you everywhere you go, every day, every case,” Bazin said. My new partner stood. “C’mon, we’re not going to solve any crimes sitting around here,” he said. “We’ll start after lunch.”
After a couple of hoagies, we drove fifteen blocks to the Rodin Museum. Bazin asked all the questions, and I took detailed notes. We didn’t learn much more than the city police detectives had, and I couldn’t tell what Bazin was thinking as we drove back to the squad room. I wondered—but did not dare ask—why the thief had chosen The Man with the Broken Nose. Perhaps he picked it because it was located so close to the front door. Maybe he was attracted by the sculpture’s shiny nose—for years, curators had allowed museum patrons to rub it for good luck, and the bronze had acquired a bright patina. With few leads to investigate, I tried to make myself useful. I quietly read up on Auguste Rodin and The Man with the Broken Nose, or L’Homme au Nez Cassé.
Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose was Rodin’s first important work, and it is not an overstatement to say that it was revolutionary, as it led him to redefine the world of sculpture, moving it beyond photographic realism, much as fellow Impressionist Claude Monet transformed painting. In many ways, Rodin’s task was tougher. Painters like Monet expressed themselves by deft use of color and light. A sculptor like Rodin worked in monotones on a three-dimensional surface, manipulating light and expression with lumps and creases in plaster and terra-cotta molds. The turning point for Rodin, and indeed for art history, began in 1863, when he was twenty-four, the year his beloved sister died.
Distraught over Maria Rodin’s death, Rodin abandoned his fledgling career as an artist. He turned away from family and friends and toward the church. He even took to calling himself Brother Augustin. Fortunately, a priest recognized that Rodin’s true calling was art, not religion, and he put him to work on church projects. This led to design jobs for Parisian general contractors and the sculptor and painter Albert-Earnest Carrier-Belleuse, known for his sculpture of figures from Greek mythology. On the side, Rodin resumed his own work.
He rented his first studio, a horse stable on the Rue Le Brun, for ten francs a month. The place was raw, one hundred square feet of workspace, a slate floor with a poorly capped well in a corner. “It was ice cold,” he wrote years later, “and penetratingly damp at all seasons of the year.” In a rare photograph from this formative period, Rodin wears a top hat, frock coat, and scraggly goatee, his unkempt hair swept across his ears. He looks confident.
Rodin’s new pieces were not meant to be realistic; they were designed to impart deeper, sometimes multiple meanings. Before his sister’s death, Rodin sculpted people close to him—family, friends, women he dated. Now he turned outward, to sculpt the common man. He was too poor to afford to pay models, and he grabbed volunteers where he could, including the handyman who cleaned his stable-studio three days a week. Rodin described this handyman as “a terribly hideous man with a broken nose.” He was Italian and went by the nickname Bibi, which was the nineteenth-century French equivalent of Mac or Buddy. “At first I could hardly bear to do it, he seemed so dreadful to me. But while I was working, I discovered that his head really had a wonderful shape, that in his own way he was beautiful…. That man taught me many things.”
Rodin worked on the piece on and off for eighteen months. He stored it in the stable, which he could not afford to heat, and covered it only with a damp cloth to keep the terra-cotta from drying out. Rodin’s complex sculpture of a handyman came to resemble a Greek philosopher. It was at once a portrait of an everyman and a superman. It was a portrait of a man and of his times, and a portrait of humanity. It offered a new way for Rodin, a way toward the truth.