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A review by mburnamfink
Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman
5.0
I am a sucker for a good memoir of crime and justice, and this is one of the best. In his early 30s, Robert Wittman quit a career as an advertising man for an agricultural newsletter to try a hand at his dream job of being an FBI agent. A few chance accidents, like working the 1988 burglary of Rodin's "The Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose" from a Philadelphia museum, lead to his true calling as an art theft expert.
As Wittman writes, art theft thrills us in ways that more ordinary crime (drugs, bank robbery, fraud), does not. Art is immensely, insanely valuable. A Leonard da Vinci painting sold for a cool $450 million last year, and while that is an outlier, anything by an artist that you've heard of is probably worth a few million dollars at least. Museums and private collections are ludicrously poorly secured compared to banks and other hard targets. Yet artwork is the furthest thing from fungible. A piece is only as good as its provenance. A famous stolen artwork is impossible to display and very difficult to sell. They must be ransomed back to the legitimate world.
As such, the best move is the undercover sting, a long con played on a thief looking to sell to Wittman's undercover alter-ego, elite gray-market broker Bob Clay. Wittman moves through his career breezily, describing how he took down a New Mexico dealer in Native American artifacts with eagle feathers (illegal to sell in the US, legal to possess in Europe), a Panamanian diplomat selling ancient Peruvian artifacts, and the hosts of Antiques Roadshow. The standard template involved a delicate game to get the mark to bring the goods to a hotel room, where Wittman would confirm authenticity and then signal SWAT to bust down the door. He was good at it, closing dozens of tricky cases and recovering perhaps $500 million in artwork.
Art and artifact theft is the fourth largest crime by financial value, after drugs, weapons, and financial fraud, but you wouldn't know it from how the FBI handles it. Italy has a 300 officer special detachment, the best in the world. France is in second place, and Europe in general well-organized to combat art theft. The FBI's squad never exceeded eight people, and was dissolved with Wittman's retirement. His last case, the appropriately named Operation Masterpiece to recover the paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum, was almost a fiasco due to bureaucratic turf struggles within the FBI.
If Wittmann fails at anythings, it's his stated goal of removing the glamour from art theft. Too often we think of its perpetrators as a Thomas Crown or Sophie Devereaux, a sophisticated and worldly criminal. In real life, they're mostly dumb thugs and dishonest brokers, with the occasional unscrupulous insider. Art theft is a crime against our common soul, a defacement of the human aesthetic legacy. And yet, as ugly as it is, Wittman can't help but take joy in his job. More than justice, it's about winning a game.
And hey, I'm putting together a crew for a job. Going to need a hacker, hitter, grifter, and thief. You in, or you out?
As Wittman writes, art theft thrills us in ways that more ordinary crime (drugs, bank robbery, fraud), does not. Art is immensely, insanely valuable. A Leonard da Vinci painting sold for a cool $450 million last year, and while that is an outlier, anything by an artist that you've heard of is probably worth a few million dollars at least. Museums and private collections are ludicrously poorly secured compared to banks and other hard targets. Yet artwork is the furthest thing from fungible. A piece is only as good as its provenance. A famous stolen artwork is impossible to display and very difficult to sell. They must be ransomed back to the legitimate world.
As such, the best move is the undercover sting, a long con played on a thief looking to sell to Wittman's undercover alter-ego, elite gray-market broker Bob Clay. Wittman moves through his career breezily, describing how he took down a New Mexico dealer in Native American artifacts with eagle feathers (illegal to sell in the US, legal to possess in Europe), a Panamanian diplomat selling ancient Peruvian artifacts, and the hosts of Antiques Roadshow. The standard template involved a delicate game to get the mark to bring the goods to a hotel room, where Wittman would confirm authenticity and then signal SWAT to bust down the door. He was good at it, closing dozens of tricky cases and recovering perhaps $500 million in artwork.
Art and artifact theft is the fourth largest crime by financial value, after drugs, weapons, and financial fraud, but you wouldn't know it from how the FBI handles it. Italy has a 300 officer special detachment, the best in the world. France is in second place, and Europe in general well-organized to combat art theft. The FBI's squad never exceeded eight people, and was dissolved with Wittman's retirement. His last case, the appropriately named Operation Masterpiece to recover the paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum, was almost a fiasco due to bureaucratic turf struggles within the FBI.
If Wittmann fails at anythings, it's his stated goal of removing the glamour from art theft. Too often we think of its perpetrators as a Thomas Crown or Sophie Devereaux, a sophisticated and worldly criminal. In real life, they're mostly dumb thugs and dishonest brokers, with the occasional unscrupulous insider. Art theft is a crime against our common soul, a defacement of the human aesthetic legacy. And yet, as ugly as it is, Wittman can't help but take joy in his job. More than justice, it's about winning a game.
And hey, I'm putting together a crew for a job. Going to need a hacker, hitter, grifter, and thief. You in, or you out?