The Art of the Steal

Early in the morning of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as Boston police officers arrived at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, informing the security guard they were responding to a call. The guard lead them through two sets of locked security doors and to the front desk manned by another guard. One officer asked the man behind the desk to step away from his post, citing the outstanding warrant for the his arrest. As he did so, he left the museum’s only alarm button unattended.

The phony officers then handcuffed both guards, brought them down to the basement and duct taped them to pipes forty feet away from each other. The pair then removed 13 paintings from the museum’s gallery, including two Rembrandt’s, a Vermeer and five Degas’s, in under 90 minutes. It wasn’t until the morning shift of guards arrived that the theft was discovered and the real Boston Police Department was notified.

Twenty years later, the frames still hang empty.

The Gardner heist, though the most infamous theft in recent history, is only a microcosm for the intricate subculture of art theft. According to the FBI, $6 billion of art is stolen every year internationally, making it the third largest form of crime behind drug trafficking and black market arms dealing.

“Art has become very expensive,” says Milton Esterow, editor of ArtNews magazine and author of the book The Art Stealers (MacMillan, 1973). “Newspapers and magazines and radio and TV and Twitter and everything else are filled with stories about the incredible paintings and the incredible amounts of money being paid for these paintings. Thugs read this and say maybe we can make some money off this.”

Art theft is no new trend. Vincenzo Peruggia’s theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 brought worldwide attention to art theft. Nazis routinely plundered works of art from Jewish homes during World War II. Several Pablo Picasso paintings were taken from a traveling exhibit at the University of Michigan in 1967. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” has been stolen and returned three times—1994, 2004 and 2005. And in September of 2009, eleven commissioned Warhol paintings were taken from the home of Los Angeles investment banker Richard Weisman and have still not been found.

“Art stealing is as old as art itself,” Esterow writes in his book. “Art thieves are a wildly assorted breed, from urbane, debonair professional thieves to connoisseurs of Braque and Brueghel to illiterates.”

Detective Don Hrycyk (pronounced her-RIS-sick) has been profiling and catching these crooks for more than 15 years as part of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Art Theft Detail. “For each one of these [cases],” he says, “you can really do a psychological profile and find out that a lot more is going on that just simple greed.”

Generally, Hrycyk says that art theft is a crime of opportunity. “A lot of these people come upon something or a person of means that has something and they’ve been invited into the home or they’re a worker who is at the house,” he says. They are also common criminals who discover valuable works of art in the midst of a robbery. These are the type who would just as soon steal a TV as a Degas, mostly for greed but often to cover a drug or gambling addiction.

Problem is, once these thieves have the art in their possession, they realize every option to dispose of them ends in a mousetrap poised to snap shut. “Thieves invest a lot of their time into taking the object and once they have it, for the first time the think how am I going to profit from this?” says Hrycyk as he is seated in the Art Theft Detail’s file cabinet-lined interrogation room. “At that point, they don’t realize that selling a painting isn’t like selling a gold bar or a diamond ring.”

That’s where a majority of thieves get sloppy—and get caught. When that happens, undercover FBI agents like Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team, are there to catch them. In one case, criminals attempted to sell a Rembrandt painting worth $36 million $250,000 to him while undercover. “The hardest part was creating a trust between the thieves and myself,” says Wittman, who also wrote the book Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures (Crown, 2010). “It’s gaining confidence with them, creating a situation where they believe who you are and having them believe that you are who you are supposed to be.”

That’s also how Britain’s Scotland Yard Detective Charley Hill eventually caught the thieves who stole Munch’s “The Scream” the first time in 1994. Hill, posing as Sid Walker, an art buyer for the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, agreed to meet the two men at his room in the Plaza Hotel in Oslo, Norway. At one point in the meeting, he said he had to go to the bathroom, a diversion which allowed the crooks time to dig through Hill’s things and confirm his false identity.

The three agreed upon a $450,000 price for the painting—much less than Hill’s $750,000 limit. The next morning, Hill met the two crooks to collect the painting, which had been stored in the cellar of their summer house. Once Hill confirmed it was the original—Munch had spattered wax on the lower right corner of the painting when blowing out a candle—the two were arrested. Eventually, both men were released on technicalities, but the painting was returned to Oslo’s National Museum of Art.

As the captors of “The Scream” prove, the obvious motive remains money. But documentary filmmaker Joseph Medeiros’s 33-year investigation into Vincenzo Peruggia’s theft of the Mona Lisa turned up a variety of other plausible explanations. “In life, it’s never really just one thing,” he says. “It’s always a bunch of little things building up, and then there’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the thing that makes you pull the trigger.”

Historians and journalists theorize that Peruggia, who had been a worker at the Lourve at the time he stole it, did it either for money or patriotism. Freelance writer Karl Dekker even described an elaborate plot hatched by an Argentinean, Marquis Eduardo de Valfierno, to hire Peruggia to steal the Mona Lisa so that he could sell six copies to six different American millionaires—a story Medeiros and his team have largely debunked.

Medeiros didn’t just want supposition or conspiracy theories; he wanted the truth. So he took his documentary team to Peruggia’s hometown of Dumenza, Italy, to interview Peruggia’s daughter, Celestina. But when Medeiros found out that he knew more than Celestina, who was only a year and a half old when her father died, he set out to dig through decades of archives to discover the missing piece—Peruggia’s true motive.

Because Peruggia was the oldest son of a poor Italian household, he took it upon himself to leave home and provide for his relatives. “I think he felt really obligated to his family to do well,” says Medeiros. “One of the things he said when he left home was, ‘Today I leave on foot, but I’m coming back in an automobile.’”

Paris turned out to be a more hostile city than he had expected, and though Peruggia was capable of more skilled work, as an immigrant, he was only able to find odd jobs around the city.

“I think he wanted to prove himself,” Medeiros says, “and when he couldn’t, he saw this [stealing the Mona Lisa] as his lottery ticket. It was his way out.”

Medeiros also uncovered Peruggia’s hidden rage against the French as another piece of the puzzle. “The Italians were so poorly treated [in France]. The French called them ‘macaroni’ as an insult. So he said I’m going to show you guys what a macaroni can do.”

Peruggia was also partly motivated by patriotism. “When he went to the Louvre and saw all this great art work there and found out that Napoleon did steal a lot of art from Italy,” says Medeiros, “he thought since the paintings were stolen, it wasn’t a crime to steal something that was already stolen.”

Eventually, Medeiros and his team were able to find and translate letters from Peruggia to his family. These letters contain his deeper motive—“This is my secret,” he writes. But unfortunately, Medeiros won’t yet disclose exactly what he found in the letters, instead encouraging people to discover the answer when his documentary, “The Missing Piece,” is released sometime next year to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the theft.

“The only people that know the truth, well one’s dead and the other one is a painting that doesn’t talk,” says Medeiros. “No one’s every really going to know for sure, but I hope to get as close as I possibly can by using the documents that I found.”

Secrecy seems to be a recurring theme in art theft, especially in high-profile cases like the Gardner and Weisman cases. As internet databases of stolen art works grow and more media attention is placed on these thefts, thieves are forced more and more to resort to craftier methods of evading capture. “Stolen paintings sometimes go a long circuitous route through the underworld,” says Esterow. “No reputable dealer with sell a stolen work.”

So thieves bide their time, waiting for the exact right moment when they can safely sell the art and collect their reward. “One assumption we are allowed to make is that it will surface” Hrycyk says. “How long will somebody sit on the art before they will try to sell it? Sometimes it takes 50 years for them to surface.”

Until then, police and the FBI must work on what leads they do have—often only unreliable tips from hotlines—until something turns up. Sometimes, though, the culprits can’t be arrested—either because the investigation went on so long that the thief died or the painting was returned with no sign of the thief. “Even if aren’t able to identify who the suspect is,” says Hrycyk, “it’s nice to return property with historical and cultural value.”