Priceless (2 page)

As I approached the yacht, I took in the scene—the hearty welcome, the bikini babes, the thundering calypso music, and it struck
me as slightly off key. I wondered if we weren’t trying too hard. Sunny and Laurenz weren’t stupid. They were good crooks.

We shoved off and cruised Miami Harbor for a good hour. We ate, we sipped bubbly, we soaked up the vista. It was a party. Two of the women cooed over Sunny while Laurenz and I chatted with the lead Colombian dealer. Once we were well under way, a third woman took it up a notch. She grabbed a champagne glass and a bowl of fruit and yelled “Strawberry-eating contest!” She raced out to the deck, laid a blanket down and got on her knees. Dangling a strawberry over her face, she covered it in whipped cream and lowered it lasciviously between her well-glossed lips. She sucked it slowly, and the other undercover female FBI agents took their turns. I guess it was all good drug-dealer bimbo fun until the undercover women made a dumb mistake. They crowned Sunny as judge of their contest, making him the center of attention. It didn’t play right—the chubby, lowest-ranking guy in our gang getting the royal treatment. Sunny fidgeted uncomfortably. I shoved my hands in my pockets and glared at the women.

Once again, our investigation was veering dangerously off course—yet another instance of too many people too eager to play a role. And there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I hated this helpless feeling. As the FBI’s only undercover agent who worked art crime cases, I was used to calling the shots. True, I carried a reputation for taking risks, but I also got results. In eighteen years with the bureau, I’d already recovered $225 million worth of stolen artworks and antiquities—icons of American history, European classics, and artifacts from ancient civilizations. I’d built a career catching art thieves, scammers, and black-market traders in nearly every art venue, going undercover in places as distant as Philadelphia, Warsaw, Santa Fe, and Madrid. I’d rescued works of art by Rodin, Rembrandt, and Rockwell, and pieces of history as varied as Geronimo’s headdress and a long-lost copy of the Bill of Rights. I was months away from recovering the original manuscript for Pearl Buck’s
The Good Earth
.

I understood that art crime cases couldn’t be handled like your garden-variety Miami cocaine deal or strong-arm Boston robbery. We weren’t chasing common criminal commodities like cocaine, heroin, and laundered cash. We were in pursuit of the priceless—irreplaceable art, snapshots of human history. And this was the biggest unsolved case of them all.

No one else on the boat had ever worked an art crime investigation. Few FBI agents ever have. Most American law-enforcement agencies, the FBI included, don’t give much thought to saving stolen art. They’re much more comfortable doing what they do best, busting criminals for robbing banks, dealing drugs, or fleecing investors. Today’s FBI is so focused on preventing another terrorist attack that nearly a third of the bureau’s thirteen thousand agents now spend their time chasing the ghost of Bin Laden. There has long been no interest in art crime. For many years after 9/11, this worked to my advantage. I got to call the shots on my cases and remain in the shadows. Generally, my FBI supervisors were competent, or at least tolerable. They trusted me to do my job, and let me operate autonomously from Philadelphia.

Operation Masterpiece, the name another agent gave the Gardner case, was different. Agents on both sides of the Atlantic were hungry to share a chunk of this grand prize. Supervisors in almost every office involved—Miami, Boston, Washington, Paris, Madrid—demanded a major role. For when the case was solved, they all wanted a stake in the glory, their picture in the paper, their name in the press release.

The FBI is a giant bureaucracy. By protocol, the bureau generally assigns cases to the appropriate squad in the city where the crime occurred, regardless of expertise. Most art crime investigations are run by the same local FBI unit that handles routine property theft—the bank robbery/violent crime squad. Once assigned, the cases are rarely transferred afterward. For most middle managers, the priority isn’t cases, it’s careers. No supervisor wants to make a controversial decision, such as transferring a big case to headquarters or to an elite
unit like the Art Crime Team, because it might insult or embarrass another supervisor, potentially crippling someone’s career. So the Gardner investigation—the biggest property crime
of any kind
in the history of the United States and the world’s highest-profile art crime—was spearheaded not by the FBI Art Crime Team, but by the chief of the local bank robbery/violent crime squad in Boston.

It was, of course, the case of this supervisor’s career, and he spent a great deal of time making sure no one took it away. He didn’t like me, probably because of my reputation for taking chances, moving swiftly, doing things without waiting for written approval, risks that might jeopardize his career. He’d already tried to throw me off the case, writing a lengthy and outrageous memo questioning my integrity, a memo that he’d since withdrawn. Although I was back on the case, the supervisor had still insisted on inserting one of his Boston-based undercover agents into the mix. This was the hard-boiled sullen Irish American on the boat camped on the curved couch, fixated on his text messages. I found his odd presence a distraction, an unnecessary ingredient that threatened to spook the savvy Sunny and Laurenz.

The FBI supervisors in Miami and Paris were better than the one in Boston, but not by much. The Miami agents seemed more comfortable chasing kilos of cocaine than a bunch of fancy paintings, and dreamed of enticing Sunny into a drug deal, creating yet another distraction. The FBI’s liaison in Paris was too focused on keeping his French police counterparts satisfied, and knew they would be happy only if the arrests occurred in France, where they could make a big splash. The French commander had even called me the day before the yacht sting to ask if I could cancel the meeting. He needed time, he said, to insert a French undercover agent on the boat, and asked me to play down my role as the primary art expert. I’d stifled the impulse to ask why I should take orders from a French cop about an American operation in Florida. Instead, I simply told him we couldn’t wait.

Undercover stings are stressful enough without meddling from
people who are supposed to have your back. You never know if the bad guys have bought in to your rap, or are laying an ambush. One slipup, one off-key comment, and a case can be lost. In the world of high-end art crime, where you are buying paintings worth ten or twenty or a hundred million dollars, the seller expects the buyer to be a true expert. You have to project an image of expertise and sophistication that comes with years and years of training. It can’t be faked. In this case, we were dealing with people with Mediterranean mob connections, humorless wiseguys who didn’t just kill snitches and undercover cops. They murdered their families, too.

After the strawberry-eating contest wound down and I “sold” the paintings to the Colombian in a drawn-out dog-and-pony show, the yacht began a slow return to the dock. I strolled out to the stern, alone with half a glass of champagne, and turned to face the brisk sea air. I needed it. I’m generally a mellow, optimistic guy—I
never
let the little stuff get to me—but lately I’d been irritable. For the first time an undercover case was keeping me awake at night. Why was I risking my life and my hard-won reputation? I had little left to prove and a great deal to lose. I knew Donna and our three kids could feel the stress. We were all watching the calendar. In sixteen months, I’d be eligible for retirement with a full government pension. My supervisor in Philadelphia was an old buddy who’d look the other way if I coasted through that final stretch. I could teach undercover school, hang out with the family, sketch out a consulting career, groom a young FBI agent as my replacement.

The Pelican
slowed as it neared the causeway, and I could just make out the dock, the Rolls waiting by the canopy.

My thoughts skipped back to the missing masterpieces and their intricate empty frames, still hanging in place at the Gardner, some seventeen years after the foggy March night in 1990 when two men dressed as policemen had outwitted a pair of hapless guards.

I studied Sunny and Laurenz, chatting by the bow. They were looking out across the Miami skyline at the dark afternoon clouds and the thunder boomers closing in from the Everglades. The fat
Frenchman and his finicky rich friend presented the FBI’s best break in the Gardner case in a decade. Our negotiations had moved beyond the exploratory phase. We appeared close on price and we were already discussing the delicate logistics of a discreet cash-for-paintings exchange in a foreign capital.

Yet I still found it tough to read Sunny and Laurenz. Did they believe our little act on the yacht? And even if they did, would they really follow through on the promise to lead me to the paintings? Or were Laurenz and Sunny plotting an elaborate sting of their own, one in which they would kill me once I flashed a suitcase of cash? And, assuming Sunny and Laurenz could produce the Vermeer and Rembrandts, would FBI and French supervisors really let me do my job? Would they let me solve the most spectacular art theft in history?

Sunny waved at me and I nodded. Laurenz went inside and Sunny came over, a nearly empty glass of champagne in his hand.

I put my arm around Sunny’s shoulder.

“Ça va, mon ami?”
I said. “How’re you doing, buddy?”

“Très bien
, Bob. Ver-r-r-ry good.”

I doubted it, so I lied too.
“Moi aussi.”

Courmayeur, Italy, 2008
.

F
OR SECURITY
,
THE
U
NITED
N
ATIONS MADE THE
reservations as discreetly as possible—one hundred and six rooms in an affluent Italian ski resort at the foot of Western Europe’s tallest peak, Mont Blanc. The International Conference on Organized Crime in Art and Antiquities was timed to span a slow weekend in mid-December, between the Noir Film Festival and the traditional opening of ski season. The U.N. took care of everything. It arranged for flights from six continents, gourmet meals, and transport from airports in Geneva and Milan. By the time the buses left the airports early Friday afternoon, there was already a foot of fresh powder on the ground, and the drivers wrapped chains around thick tires before they climbed into the Alps. The buses arrived by dusk, bearing the world’s leading experts on art crime, jet-lagged but eager to convene the first such summit of its kind.

I arrived the night before the conference began, catching a ride from Milan to Courmayeur with a senior U.N. official who organized the meetings. She invited me to dine early with Afghanistan’s Oxford-trained deputy justice minister, and we sat by a table where we could overhear a senior Iranian judge holding forth with a Turkish
cultural minister. After dinner, I made my way to the bar, in search of old friends.

I ordered a Chivas and dug into my pocket for a few euros. Through the growing crowd, I recognized Karl-Heinz Kind, the lanky German who leads Interpol’s art crime team. He cradled a milky cocktail and spoke with two young women I did not know. By the fireplace, I saw Julian Radcliffe, the prim Brit who runs the world’s largest private art crime database, the Art Loss Register. He had the ear of Neil Brodie, the famous Stanford archaeology professor. My drink arrived and I pulled a list of participants from my pocket. No surprise, the Europeans dominated, especially the Italians and Greeks. They always devote significant resources to art crime. I studied the less familiar, more interesting names and titles—an Argentine magistrate, the Iranian judge I’d seen earlier, a Spanish university president, Greece’s top archaeologist, a pair of Australian professors, the president of South Korea’s leading crime institute, and government officials from Ghana, Gambia, Mexico, Sweden, Japan, all over. A dozen Americans were on the list too, but reflecting our nation’s lukewarm commitment to art crime, almost all were academics. The U.S. government sent no one.

I’d just retired from the FBI and now ran an art-security business with Donna. The United Nations had invited me to speak at this conference because, unlike any of the other participants, I’d spent twenty years in the field as an art crime investigator. The other speakers would cite statistics and notions of international law and cooperation, presenting position papers on topics I knew well—like the oft-cited estimate that art crime is a $6-billion-a-year business. The United Nations had asked me to go beyond such academic and diplomatic talk—to explain what the shady art underworld is really like, to describe what kinds of people steal art and antiquities, how they do it, and how I get it back.

Hollywood has created a dashing, uniformly bogus portrait of the art thief. In movies, he is Thomas Crown—the clever connoisseur, a
wealthy, well-tailored gentleman. He steals for sport, outfoxing, even seducing, those who pursue him. The Hollywood thief is Riviera cat burglar Cary Grant in
To Catch a Thief
, or Dr. No in the first James Bond movie, Goya’s stolen
The Duke of Wellington
hanging in his secret underwater lair. The Hollywood art crime hero is Nicolas Cage, descendant of a Founding Father in
National Treasure
, solving riddles, recovering long-lost treasures. He is Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones with fedora and bullwhip, deciphering hieroglyphics, saving the universe from Nazis and commies.

Plenty of art thefts
are
spectacular, the stuff of movies. In the Boston heist, the Gardner thieves tricked the night watchmen with a ruse and bound them eyes to ankles with silver duct tape. In Italy, a young man dropped a fishing line down a museum skylight, hooked a $4 million Klimt painting, and reeled it up and away. In Venezuela, thieves slipped into a museum at night and replaced three Matisse works with forgeries so fine they were not discovered for sixty days.