Hot Art

by Joshua Knelman

  Wittman’s other desk sat in a large office he occupied alone. On the wall hung a few photographs of him shaking hands with dignitaries, and posters with motivational phrases. One read, “When You Think You Can’t You Must.” The office was substantial, with a couch, chairs, coffee table, bookshelves, and a wide-angled window in front of the desk with a stunning view of the Liberty Bell, Constitution Hall, and Independence Hall, inscribed with “We the People.” The Benjamin Franklin Bridge floated in the distance.

  He sat down at his desk, near the window. Wittman looked out this window every day, but often, the agent suggested, he was looking beyond, to the world. He had a prime view of art theft in the United States and as a global phenomenon. The U.S. business of fine art is worth an estimated $200 billion annually. “That’s everything—antique markets, art fairs, auction-house revenue, gallery sales. It’s a ballpark number, like most in the art world,” he said. “That market is totally unregulated.”

  Figures for the black market were murkier: “$80 million in the U.S., annually,” he estimated. Over sixteen thousand works of art, antiques, and collectables were listed that year on the Art Loss Register as stolen in the United States. Over half of it had been stolen from private homes. The rest had been drained from art galleries and dealers, with 18 per cent from museums and other public institutions, such as libraries (rare books and maps are a constant target). Wittman said museum thefts were usually inside jobs, because it was the employees who held the “keys to the kingdom.” There was a lesson to be learned from the way the pyramids were looted thousands of years ago; experience had taught Wittman that usually it was the people who helped care for or build an institution who knew best how to steal from it.

  “Art theft is an international industry,” he said. “It knows no boundaries.” Over the previous decade and a half, in his quest to understand how that black market worked, Wittman had been making friends all over the global village. “Fifteen years ago, when I started doing this, there was no Internet or speedy communication. You had to make personal contacts.”

  Destinations Wittman had visited on business included Brazil, Peru, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, France, Hungary, England, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and Kenya. Many of those countries were not centres of the art market but were instead source countries, or end points for stolen work that had been sold, or a great place to hide the art for a few years until everyone simply forgot about it. His passport was more cia than FBI.

  Still, for such an international citizen he had the most American of names—Bob. Many people, of course, got to know the agent by a completely different name, or names. They usually figured out the “Special Agent” part too late. These were the criminals he hunted—the growing group of thieves and middlemen who had discovered that art taken off the wall had value beyond its aesthetic beauty and historical importance. The pattern was spreading and could quickly move out of range, too difficult for almost any other U.S. authority to follow. But Wittman had the budget, the reputation, and the skills to go hunting far beyond the borders of the United States, and he didn’t often come back empty-handed.

  Wittman’s résumé of recoveries is supersized: about $215 million of stolen artwork, give or take a few million. These include an original copy of the Bill of Rights, three Norman Rockwell paintings, two Francisco Goyas, and one Rembrandt self-portrait.

  The Rembrandt alone was worth over $36 million and became the largest notch on Wittman’s big belt of missions accomplished. Some other interesting catches: three paintings by German painter Heinrich Bürkel, stolen near the end of World War II and found for sale in 2005 at an auction house in Philadelphia; rare books that had never been officially checked out from the library at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky—one of them a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

  Accolades and rewards have followed. In 2000 Wittman received the Peruvian Order of Merit for Distinguished Service, which was presented to him personally by the president of Peru. A year later U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft handed him the Executive Office for United States Attorneys’ Outstanding Contributions in Law Enforcement Award. In 2003, the Spanish police force thanked him with the White Cross of Law Enforcement Merit Medal. The Smithsonian Institution applauded his efforts in 2004 with the Robert Burke Memorial Award for Excellence in Cultural Property Protection, an honour he shares with Detective Donald Hrycyk.

  “I’ve investigated many types of federal violations, but the investigations that give me the most satisfaction are the ones that lead to the recovery of stolen artwork and cultural property,” he once said in an online chat with USA Today. “Whether they are owned by an individual, or a museum, they represent the world’s cultural heritage. That’s worth saving.”

  Strewn across his desk this day were piles of papers, files, and dozens of audio tapes. He slipped a tape into a recorder and pressed play. We both hunched over the little machine and listened to the tape hiss. First came the sounds of muffled voices talking, then a loud crash, followed by men shouting urgently. Finally, chaos. He pressed stop. “That’s from a sting operation I worked in Spain,” he said. “When I work in other countries, I’m a civilian. I have no official authority.” The police in the background were Spanish, not FBI. Wittman had been posing as the crooked collector again.

  “Going undercover is a technique that is used by law enforcement to gather information. It’s another tool in the box, like a hammer,” he said. “There are certain parameters. In these cases, hopefully you know something about art.”

  When I asked him about having to lie while working, he shrugged. “I lie when I’m told to do so in the service of my government. It’s that simple,” he answered. “Undercover work is all about being yourself,” he continued. What the agent meant was that using a fabricated identity didn’t mean veering too far from his own manner. His personality mostly remains intact. “If you pretend to be someone else while you’re undercover, you’ll slip up. It’s harder to remember a lie.” He added, “A sense of humour helps. It’s all about making people feel comfortable.” He paused. “Also, a little bit of nervousness goes a long way.”

  Wittman’s preferred fabricated identity was a crooked art dealer or collector who offers to pay large sums of money in cash for stolen art. He would show the money, and the artwork would appear. Sometimes that could happen right after a work of art had been stolen, but often a stolen piece showed up on the radar years later, usually in a different city, state, or country. The agent was gifted at luring criminals who wanted to sell that art into a trap. He would work his way into the community, earn people’s trust, and wait for the painting to materialize. Wittman could spend months infiltrating an organization, befriending its members, and waiting for the right moment to strike. He was a natural at diving into the underworld—smart, charming, handsome, relaxed—and he treated these new relationships like a chess game. “You need to master your subject and stay one or two moves ahead of your opponent . . . Forget what you’ve seen on television.” His objective: “Winning a person’s trust and then taking advantage of it.”

  He did this with grace. One of his prey, a corrupt Santa Fe, New Mexico, dealer in Native American artifacts, sent Wittman a note after being arrested, which the agent quoted in the book he wrote once he retired:

  Dear Bob: I don’t know what to say. Well done? Nice work? You sure had me fooled? We’re devastated, and I guess that’s the idea. But even though we’re devastated, we enjoyed the times we spent with you. Thanks for being a gentleman, and for letting us have a pleasant Christmas and New Year’s. If you hadn’t done what you did, they would have brought in someone else to do it, and I don’t think we would have found him as personable as we found you. So there’s no blame involved.

  Wittman knew better than anyone that art theft cases were some of the most difficult to crack, because of the distance at which art could travel quickly and almost invisibly. Paintings were easy to transport and easy to hid
e, so investigations could be long-term affairs.

  One month after our meeting, one of Wittman’s longer sting operations came to an end. On that mission, the agent was hunting million-dollar artworks by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Jan Brueghel the Elder that had been stolen at gunpoint from Nice’s Musée des Beaux-Arts in August 2007.

  A few months after the French theft, the FBI desk in Miami received a tip: someone was trying to sell those paintings in Florida. Wittman jumped on a flight to Fort Lauderdale. He passed himself off as an art collector with money to spend, and spread the word that he didn’t care where the paintings came from.

  Bernard Ternus was pulled to Wittman by the undercover agent’s offer of $4.6 million in cash. Still, Ternus wanted to spend some time with the buyer before he delivered the goods. He invited Wittman onto a yacht, where they sipped champagne, just a couple of gangsters on the sea. That went so well that in January 2008 Wittman flew to Barcelona to hook up with Ternus again. They shared a lifestyle, Ternus thought.

  A few months later, Wittman introduced Ternus to a trusted friend from France, also a lover of art. Wittman’s friend was an undercover lawman with the Gendarmerie Nationale. The FBI agent let the two get comfortable with each other before making his exit—Wittman built the relationship, the French agent closed the deal. That French agent promised Ternus that he would pay up in Marseille, near where the paintings were being held. Wittman stayed at home for the bust. The paintings arrived in a van, and the French police moved in. The FBI agent confided to a wsj journalist that he celebrated the recovery with a mug of coffee on his back porch, alone. The museum in Nice reopened with the paintings hanging in place as if they had never been gone.

  ROBERT WITTMAN’S training began long before he joined the FBI. He grew up in Baltimore, where antiques were the family business. “My father would take me to flea markets. I would see how he bought and sold. When he opened up his Oriental Galleries, he had two different stores. One was in Baltimore, where I helped him out. So I knew how he dealt,” Wittman told me. That became an advantage later in life.

  “Let’s say you want to infiltrate an art convention. You have to know the terms, the language, and the ways of doing business, to be a part of the whole aura. It’s knowing how to do a con. Puffery. How to con a mark. How to identify a mooch,” he said. “Puffery is the exorbitant description of the times. There’s a way of doing it where it’s totally legal. And that raises the prices. Mooch is someone who has a lot of money and believes everything you tell them. Don’t be a mooch.”

  The young Wittman was restless and wanted to see the country. He first contacted the FBI at the age of twenty-three. “I always knew I wanted to be an FBI agent,” he said. The bureau rejected him: not enough work experience. Almost ten years later Wittman spotted an ad in the newspaper. The FBI was hiring. By that point Wittman was a Certified Public Accountant, had earned a degree in political science, and had published magazines and books for the agricultural sector. “I was always an entrepreneur,” he said. He applied again, and this time the bureau said yes. He was thirty-two. “I think they hired 350 agents that year.” Six months later, after a security and background check, Wittman arrived at Quantico, Virginia, for training: legal defensive tactics, physical training, and shooting. “It was a sixteen-week program,” he said. Art investigations were not taught at the academy when Wittman went through.

  After Quantico he was posted to Philadelphia, a city he’d never lived in. “The location had to do with the needs of the bureau,” he said. “When you join up, they tell you that you have no say where you’re going.”

  Wittman started working in the Philadelphia field office’s property-crimes squad, which dealt with a host of issues ranging from stolen goods to mail and wire fraud—violations of the Interstate Commerce Act, under federal jurisdiction. One of the specialties of the Philadelphia property-crimes squad was art theft, because of one agent, Bob Bazin.

  Bazin was to Wittman what Bill Martin was to Don Hrycyk. He was an older, more experienced agent who took Wittman under his wing and had an interest in stolen art cases. It was 1988 when Wittman walked into the Philadelphia office, and Bazin was dealing with two high-profile art theft cases. A large crystal ball had been stolen from the Asian wing of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the second largest crystal ball in the world. At the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, an 1860 sculpture, The Mask of the Man with a Broken Nose, had been stolen in an armed robbery, and Wittman told me it was the only one he could think of in which a Raven stainless-steel pistol was used to steal art. “That’s the gun that looks like a lighter,” he laughed.

  Bazin and Wittman worked those cases together. “By the time I got to Philadelphia, Bob was nineteen years in and was more traditional in his investigations. Back in those days you didn’t travel. He kept it local,” Wittman said. The Rodin theft had occurred about a month before Wittman landed in Philadelphia. The thief had ordered the guards to the floor, tied them up with wire, and fired a bullet into the wall. Then he tore the sculpture off its pedestal. The Rodin Museum has one of the largest collections of the French artist’s work outside of France. “The Gates of Hell is there,” said Wittman.

  A reward was posted for the sculpture, and someone called in a tip. “We had a person who came in as a co-operator,” Wittman remembered. The co-operator gave the FBI the name of a man. The Bureau did some surveillance, took photos of the suspect, and secured a search warrant. Bazin and Wittman found the Rodin sculpture, undamaged, wrapped in brown paper, hidden in the basement of a brownstone house on Pine Street.

  “The thief had been counting on easy money,” Wittman said. “He had a friend who worked at an auction house and was hoping to turn it over quickly. He didn’t think it through,” said Wittman. “The Rodin theft had made world news. He thought it would be easier to move, but it ended up under the furnace.”

  The thief was Stephen Shih, an unemployed twenty-seven-year-old truck driver. Before the Rodin Museum robbery, he’d hit liquor stores for cash. He moved on to French art when he figured out how much money some of the Rodin sculptures were worth. “He thought it would be less risk, with higher reward,” said Wittman. The Rodin was the first art theft case Wittman helped solve. Wittman and Bazin got the giant crystal ball back as well.

  Two years later, in Boston, the Gardner Museum catapulted art theft into the U.S. media in a way it had never been before. Isabella Stewart Gardner was an eccentric Boston socialite who amassed her art after her son died. The paintings, in a way, were her children, according to those who knew her. When Gardner died she left an unbending will: not a single object could be moved or the entire museum would immediately be given to Harvard. The board of the museum was powerless to add to or subtract from the collection after the theft of thirteen works. They couldn’t even move a vase. So they came up with a clever solution: they hung an empty frame in place of Vermeer’s The Concert. When the empty frame went up on the wall, its image became almost as famous as the Vermeer itself—never allowing the public to forget the crime. The Gardner theft was never solved. Instead it has come to symbolize the perversity of art thefts everywhere. Scotland Yard, the FBI, and a private detective named Harold Smith, along with Richard Ellis and Paul, have all gone searching for the Vermeer, a quest chronicled in The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser. None has found it.

  The depth of the crime, the financial loss, the beauty of the paintings, and the heavy media attention culminated in Ted Kennedy’s introducing the Theft of Major Artwork (Theft from Museum) statute in the U.S. Senate in 1996. It passed. The new law made it a federal crime to steal from a museum or to steal a work of art worth over $5,000 or older than one hundred years. And if a piece of art was worth over $100,000, it didn’t matter how old it was, the FBI could step into the case. “Under federal law you can’t own stolen goods, but before that statute you could say, I’m a good-faith buyer. Not anymore. Now I can go seize it,” said Wittman. “You don’t have to give it to
me, but if you don’t, I can arrest you, put you in jail, and take the painting anyway. If you don’t turn it over, then every moment you have it makes you liable. The law doesn’t help with anyone’s home or gallery, just museums,” he added. “The definition of museum, by the way, includes universities and libraries. The new law gave us another weapon in the arsenal to recover stolen artwork and cultural property.” It also gave Wittman a niche position at the bureau.

  After the Gardner theft the FBI decided to invest in his art investigation training, and in 1991, Wittman enrolled in a class at the Barnes Foundation, for one day a week, over a period of a month. “I decided it would be better to know more about art. I didn’t have a good art history background,” Wittman said. “I was just another student.” But that was obviously not true. When I visited the Barnes, I mentioned to one of the staff that I was in Philadelphia to meet with Robert Wittman. She rushed away and came back with a picture of Wittman posing with staff at the Barnes. “We love Bob,” she said.

  “There were about twenty people in the class,” Wittman remembered, and, as he pointed out, the Barnes was not an art school. “It’s a foundation that teaches the ideas and theories of Dr. [Albert] Barnes. I didn’t think the theories were all that pertinent to theft investigations.” What was important: “You start to develop an eye for art, to speak knowledgeably,” he said, sounding very much like Hrycyk. “Renoir made over a thousand paintings of women. How do I know for sure that the painting being sold by a criminal is the same one that was stolen? I’ve seen 150 Renoirs come up, and there are often no photographs of the work.” Wittman paused for a moment, then started on Monet. “Do you know how many boat scenes Monet painted, or water lilies, or river scenes? How about Warhol? How many different versions of Marilyn are there? And the difference, in those cases, might be that one work has a dot of yellow and one has a dot of purple.”