Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  Very, very clever, we all thought. And how agile this thief was. With just that little rectangular hole in the waffle grid he was able to reach down, somehow, to snatch the Peach Bloom Vase and its label, and then rearrange all the other Chinese works to fill the void, and their labels, too, so that the installed case looked perfect. Wow! And since no one’s arm could possibly be long enough to reach all the way down from that opening to the bottom of the case, there must have been some sort of mechanical pincer or tweezers brought into play. And the thief must have the hand-eye coordination of a brain surgeon to be able to pick up, move, and rearrange the little labels, which were, in those days, smaller than a credit card and typed on thin stationary stock. It was hard enough to pick up those flimsy little things with your fingers.

  This was definitely the work of a real pro. And now the Peach Bloom Vase was gone, off to or already in Japan. We were all thinking, but not saying, that we must be the dumbest bunch of museum staff in the world. What will the newspapers say? And what will the Holy Image, Holy Space Greeks back in Athens say? (We had been dealing directly with the Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, and with her look-alike but bearded brother, Spyros.) We knew we had to tell them, and we did. I don’t recall that they had much to say. I took this to be an indication of what Greek museums were like at the time.

  Because we were told by the registrar that some Chinese snuff bottles were missing, we made our way, a dozen of us, all in a daze, over to that area of the Asian galleries where we displayed our Chinese snuff bottles. They were in a tall, narrow, 19th-century glass and brass case that was elegant and beautiful, but very inefficient. The case had adjustable glass shelves, all ¼-inch thick, and there were about a half-dozen such shelves. Snuff bottles have small bases, so they must be held down with bits of wax. So each level of the case had to be installed separately, back to front, since only the front panel of glass could be swung open. And it was very tricky and tedious work, because you could easily knock over a snuff bottle or even a whole shelf of snuff bottles.

  Like the much larger Guenschel case that had been the home to the Peach Bloom Vase, this smaller and older case looked perfect. We pondered this together, silently, focusing our collective intelligence on something we know nothing about: art theft. There were no graduate seminars on this topic at Princeton, where Bob and I had met two decades earlier. As we were all just standing there looking at these twenty or so snuff bottles, I noticed what seemed to be a pile of sawdust at my feet. It was an odd little pile, and it seemed to be shiny. So I licked my finger and daubed some up, and ouch: fine metal shavings.

  The door on that snuff bottle case had a little square bronze handle next to the lock; it was beautifully made. I reached over and pulled on that bronze handle and the door opened. Yikes! The ¼ × ¼-inch brass bolt that had secured the front glass panel of the case had been sawn through. That simple. So there was someone with time, who was gifted with mechanical things, and who was very smart. And someone who had access. Just maybe, I began to think, that someone had even considered the vacation schedule of Woody Woodward, and how no one else but Woody might miss the Peach Bloom Vase and the rest of the pieces. An inside job, perhaps. Someone we knew. This was a novel and very disturbing epiphany that I suspect others in our anxious little group experienced at some point that Tuesday afternoon, but none among us mentioned it since, after all, that someone could be one of us.

  The next several days were a cascading public relations disaster for the Walters. The tone was set at Thursday’s press conference announcing the news, where Bob Bergman was at once defensive and combative and pretty much bereft of good answers to any number of questions. How many works of art were stolen? We think 81 works were stolen, but the inventory is on-going. (The real number turned out to be 145.) What is the approximate value of the works stolen, we asked, and we understood from Larry Leeson, spokesman for the Baltimore City Police, that it “could reach $1 million.” To which Director Bergman responded “that’s not our guess.” Guess? (It was at least $1 million, and Bob was guessing $500,000.)

  When were the works taken? Sometime between July 22nd and August 13th, the dates that our Curator of Asian Art was on vacation. But how is it possible for the famous Peach Bloom Vase to be gone from its display case in a public gallery that is supposedly monitored daily by your security guards and, presumably, by other museum personnel, for as long as three weeks and no one noticed that it was gone? This time the answer came back from the Walters head of PR, Howard White. The cases, he said, were “rearranged” to make the theft less noticeable. So what is that supposed to mean, that it was an inside job by someone with museum skills who was monitoring the vacation plans of the Asian curator?

  Bob Bergman’s answer to the inside job question pretty much summed things up. He said, simply: “I have no idea.” Bob’s claim was that any explanation (and there was none) from the director would “compromise” the investigation. This did not go over at all well with the Baltimore Sun arts reporter, John Dorsey, and in fact was not the truth. The truth was, none of us had any idea what was going on. So we got what we deserved. A cartoon in the Sun captured our profound ineptitude in the most painful way. It showed the Walters director putting the key to the museum’s huge bronze doors under the front doormat.

  But we had other, bigger problems inside the museum’s walls. The FBI had swept in and was conducting interviews and giving lie detector tests to staff members, seemingly at random. At the same time, I think we had all come to the conclusion—as had John Dorsey—that it was an inside job. And I think I was not the only one who had a single obvious candidate, namely, the head of night security, Greg Bartgis. Not only did Greg have private and leisurely access all night long to the whole museum, he was gifted with his hands. (He had started at the Walters eighteen months earlier as a contract employee who retrofitted cases in the woodshop.) And Greg was straight-out weird, and you knew that in an instant.

  He had an odd outfit that was his uniform, insofar as he wore it every day that summer, no matter what the weather. (Of course, he also had a guard’s uniform that he had to wear on the job.) He wore big, heavy workers’ boots, cut-off jeans, and a greenish T-shirt (or sometimes, no shirt at all). At age 30, Greg was living with his parents in Govans, a neighborhood near the north edge of Baltimore, about four miles from the museum. And he was a compulsive walker, so you would see Greg—everyone would see Greg—in that uniform of his walking along York Road to and from the Walters, and well beyond, I was told, since he walked as much as twenty-five miles a day. He was a camera nut, so swinging from his neck on any given day on any given walk might be two or more cameras. And Greg always carried a backpack with who knows what in it.

  Greg was also odd socially. He was the kind of person that I recall from college who knew a vast amount of what seemed to be worthless information. Like the total number of kilometers of such and such gauge of railroad track in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution. Greg knew that kind of stuff, seemingly volumes of it, and he would make it a point to corner you someplace around the museum and inflict yet another Bartgis monologue on you, totally oblivious to the fact that he was getting no verbal reaction or even gestures of acknowledgment. But Greg was clearly smart, and such people were hard to find and keep on our night security staff. So over a remarkably short period, just nine months, he was promoted to head of night security, a position in which he was pretty much all by himself with no one to talk at. (There was a second guard on duty that summer with Greg, who was totally the opposite of him, not so bright and all but mute. He was fired a few years later for falling asleep on the job.)

  From the beginning of this painful misadventure, I kept two images simultaneously in my mind. One was of someone like the white-glove Phantom, the suave David Niven, and other was of the weird Greg Bartgis. And the clincher for my Bartgis theory was that piece of Plexiglas that was glued to the rectangle of light-diffusing waffle grid that the thief had cut out of the Guenschel case we examined toget
her that first afternoon. That was not ordinary Plexiglas, it was ultraviolet-reducing Plexiglas, the kind that museums use to keep framed works on paper from fading through exposure to daylight. I was certain that piece of Plexiglas came out of our woodshop, and I knew that Greg had access to our woodshop because he would still help out there from time to time.

  But if we were right and if it was an inside job, and if it was Greg Bartigs, as I’m certain many of us came to believe, why had he not been arrested? And more to the point, why was he still on duty every night, alone, in those same Asian art galleries? And why were we being given the lie detector tests? So yes, let’s say it was an inside job, but maybe not Bartgis. Or maybe Bartgis working with someone else. But then, with whom? It was Friday, three days after we had discovered the theft. The tally of the loss was now up to 130 works, and still rising. We were being beaten up in the press and laughed at. Our minds were racing, we were paranoid, and conspiracy theories were being conjured up and shared—which was a very bad idea. To be above suspicion you needed to be dumb or rich. Otherwise it was open season for us all, on us all.

  One leading candidate for the inside thief who was not Greg Bartgis was a sweetheart of a man named Ted Theodore. Ted was a contract employee that summer helping us get ready for Holy Image, Holy Space. And he was perfect for the job. Not only was Ted a skilled conservator, with lots of experience restoring icons, he was Greek-American, which meant that he could reign in, in their own language, those cigarette-smoking Greek conservators. So why was Ted a leading suspect in some of our feverish minds? For three reasons: one, he carried a backpack (which was then unusual); two, he wore the same clothes two days in a row and hadn’t shaved (which suggested he stayed overnight in the museum); and three, Ted had been working on contract at the Walters in 1974 when the Asian galleries were being installed. (I wore the same clothes for two days and didn’t shave and asked if anyone noticed anything interesting about me; nobody did.)

  Ted took his polygraph test on Friday morning, and I can still see him as he walked into the exhibition space afterwards (was he told he failed?). Ted was shaking, dripping sweat as if he had just gotten out of the shower with all his clothes on, and he had suddenly acquired a stutter he didn’t have before. Did I—did anyone—give Ted a hug? I don’t know if I even shook his hand, though I never bought into the theory that he was the thief. That was the strange and frightening mood at the time. It filled the entire museum and we were all in its grip.

  As for me? A person whom I took to be an FBI agent poked his head into my office, probably that Thursday, and said he would be back. But he never came back. This puzzled me, given that the Asian curator, the chief registrar, the installation crew, and Ted Theodore all worked for me, as initially did Greg. And I was one of only a handful of staff that had access to the key vault, which is where all the keys to all the exhibition cases were kept. I was disappointed. But then, I had rented a house for a week in Rehoboth on the Delaware shore for the Vikan family, and after the opening of Holy Image, Holy Space that Saturday I was gone and was following the case in The Baltimore Sun.

  Strangely, no one called me to give me the news when the case was broken on Tuesday, August 23rd, a week after the theft was discovered. I read all about it in Thursday’s paper, which I got out of one of those yellow boxes on the boardwalk. The headline read: “Walters guard held in theft of 145 objects.” And the subhead continued: “$100,000 bail set for night shift chief; 84 books also taken.” So it was Greg Bartgis after all. We were all sort of right from the beginning. And it seems that the FBI was on to him from the beginning, too.

  This is how it spun out after I took off for the beach. Tuesday was the all-staff picnic, and Bartgis played volleyball that day opposite Bergman. Then he was called in by the FBI for his third interview, and this time, they “went downtown.” A few hours later Greg confessed. It was the evening of Tuesday, August 23rd. Now, said the FBI, it is time to visit your house in Govans. The local TV stations picked up the Baltimore police radio squawking, and they were on their way. And in the meantime they got in touch with Director Bergman, who in turn got hold of two of his four trusted installation guys. So they converged on Rosebank Avenue in Govans with enormous klieg lights illuminating this tiny, dark block. There were cop cars and TV crews all around. And at that moment (as he recalls it), Ted Theodore, who happened to live on that very street just opposite Greg’s mother, turned the corner toward home; that was the nature of this bizarre ordeal for him.

  The group converged with 145 Walters works of art in the basement of Greg Bartgis’s mother’s house on Rosebank. Nearly everything was there and intact in newspaper wrapping. Almost all the works were Asian. But there were nine ancient gold pieces, rings and such, that Greg had melted into an ugly blob. Why? Because he needed cash to get out of the country, a country he had never left before and from which he had no passport. And those dueling pistols and the rifles? In case the escape idea didn’t work, he was going to kill himself. Forget the fact that these museum weapons didn’t have any bullets.

  The news conference was the next day, Wednesday, with the regional manager of our insurer, Lloyds of London, at the podium (he had offered a reward of $100,000 for what he estimated to be a $1 million claim). The insurance loss was $100,000 for that melted blob of gold and the museum’s loss, the deductible, was $25,000. Greg was looking at fifteen years for a single felony count, and his bail was set at $100,000, which after two weeks his mother covered with the title to her Govans house. Greg’s judge was John Prevas, a Greek-American of old Baltimore lineage and generally a tough guy in court.

  No one doubted the story that came from both Greg and his mother—that he had been brutally abused by his father. And as Judge Prevas believed, Greg would die in jail by his own hand. So the deal, which to many of us at the time seemed like cheating, was time served (just two weeks) plus seven weeks of house arrest in a half-way house, plus community service with a local nonprofit. It involved door-knocking around town all day, perfect for a walker. Greg had to pay off that $25,000 deductible to the Walters. What was supposed to happen in five years took fifteen years. But it did happen. In the meantime, Greg Bartgis was “banned” from the Walters, whatever that means. And so when he suggested to the museum’s ex-Marine head of operations that he come back on staff in order to efficiently pay off his debt, he was sent on his way.

  END OF STORY? SORT OF. We beefed up security on the Guenschel cases, for a while took pictures of the case installations, and, most important, we eventually installed video cameras in nearly every gallery. That not only put an end to thievery, which was very rare, but also to staff-driven vandalism, which up until that time was surprisingly common. Then in July 2014, after twenty-six years, I looked up Greg Bartgis on the Internet. It turns out he lives half a mile from me, and his email address indicates his talents and profession: “gregthemachinist.” Among other things, Greg helps fancy eye surgeons at Johns Hopkins design precise cameras to photograph the retinas of frogs. So I got in touch, and we shared a glass of wine on a beautiful sunny July afternoon in Charles Village. Greg was then 57 and looked older, but I recognized him immediately. He has no front teeth from an accident some time ago and long, scraggly, brownish-gray hair bound in a tangled ponytail, and he wore a slightly tamed version of his 1988 uniform. But he was still the Greg I knew: a smart guy, an articulate guy, a compulsive guy, and a guy still totally enraptured with Asian art.

  I learned that Greg Bartgis, with no professional help and no ameliorative medications, understands himself to be not only afflicted with OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) but also with Bipolar II Disorder. And I think he’s probably right. The events of the summer of 1988 at the Walters are unique in Greg’s life—no stealing of any sort before or since. The problem, as Greg recounts it, was being alone all night and not being able to sleep during the day. He got on a bad mood swing. And yes, he did love Asian art and yes, he did pay attention to Woody Woodward’s vacation schedule.

 
; His first theft was unplanned and occurred in late July shortly after Woody left on vacation. It comprised four Chinese jades taken from a Guenschel case. And he was all but caught by the guard with whom he worked the night shift. Greg had the jades on a tray and was carrying them down from the fourth floor toward the wood shop on the first floor to wrap them when he met his coworker coming up the stairs. “Woody asked me to take them to photography,” is what Greg said, and it worked. The other security guard seemed not to consider this an odd task at 2:00 a.m.

  And so it continued, for more than two weeks. He started by cutting bolts, but realizing that one of those now boltless glass fronts just might fall off one day, Greg got into waffle grid cutting. Amazingly, he did reach all the way down to snatch the Peach Bloom Vase. That, he said, was among the last cases he violated. Greg carried all the loot out himself, mostly in his backpack. As for the rifle, the one with which he might shoot himself, he built a long travel box out of scrap wood, with a void in the middle, and put the rifle in there. He took it out past Walters security and walked four miles home with it over his shoulder.

  Greg says he was almost caught a second time, by the guard who manned the security desk at the loading dock where the staff left, and their bags and purses were (in theory at least) probed. It seems that on that particular morning Greg had really packed his backpack to the top with Chinese porcelains wrapped in newspaper. And suddenly there was this security-desk guard poking around in his wrapped-up booty. But then the guard said fine, be on your way. After all, Greg was head of night security. Greg claimed he had stopped stealing a week or so before Woody came back, and he said he understood his own sickness at the time. He wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t talking to anyone, and he got really excited when he stole Asian things. A real high.