Fast Focus
	The FBI goes undercover to catch art thieves.
	The Art Loss Register has more than 169,000 works of art in its database of stolen art.
	Insured pieces demand better security.

It Takes a Sophisticated Thief

Divesting of stolen masterpieces may be more difficult than stealing them.

By  Leslie Werstein Hann

Robert Wittman found himself in an upscale Copenhagen hotel room checking the authenticity of a $36 million self-portrait painted by Rembrandt in 1630. It was September 2005. The Philadelphia-based FBI agent was posing as an art professor hired to authenticate the painting for a potential buyer, a leader in an Eastern European organized crime gang.

The seller had already painstakingly counted out the bundles of $100 bills, finding all $250,000 present and accounted for. Now it was Wittman’s turn. Inspecting the painting under a black light for the telltale copper backing, Wittman confirmed that, yes, indeed, this was the real thing. The son of an antiques dealer who retired last month as head of the FBI’s art crime team, Wittman was struck by how well the painting had been cared for in the five years since it was stolen in an audacious heist from the Swedish National Museum.

Back on Dec. 23, 2000, just a few minutes before the museum’s closing time, three robbers armed with automatic weapons ordered the guards to the floor and ran off with the Rembrandt and two Renoirs. While accomplices set off two diversionary explosions to delay the arrival of police, the thieves escaped in a motorboat. One of the Renoirs was recovered in a raid a year after the theft. Early in 2005, a drug bust in Los Angeles yielded the second Renoir and the lead that investigators needed to set up an international sting operation to recover the Rembrandt. It was a little beauty, just 6-by-4¾ inches without its frame. Wittman noted that the painting had been kept just as it was when it was stolen.

“When I was inspecting the piece, I looked at the 27-year-old guy in front of me, and I said, ‘It’s in the same frame,’” Wittman recalled in a recent interview. “He said, ‘Of course. It’s a Rembrandt.’”

Perhaps the man was insulted by the implication that he might harm such an important work of art. And, yes, sometimes art thieves are connoisseurs. But as sleuths like Wittman and art insurers will tell you, more often they’re common criminals.

“The cliché of the billionaire collector trying to decorate his lair with stolen works just doesn’t happen,” says Natasha Fekula, fine art claims supervisor for XL Insurance.

Whether or not thieves know the value of the art they steal, they soon find there’s no easy way to turn it into cash. In July, Bernard Jean Ternus, a French national who lives in South Florida, pleaded guilty to trying to sell four paintings stolen in August 2007 from the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Nice, France. The paintings included Monet’s “Cliffs Near Dieppe,” Alfred Sisley’s “The Lane of Poplars at Moret” and two others by the 17th-century Flemish painter Brueghel the Elder. Ternus thought he had a buyer, a Philadelphia art dealer willing to pay $4.6 million. Their courtship lasted months. The men drank champagne together aboard a yacht. Unfortunately for Ternus, however, his buyer was none other than Wittman, the undercover FBI agent.

“The true art in art theft is not in the stealing,” Wittman likes to say, “it’s in the selling.”

Tempting Targets

The economy may be dampening the art sales hysteria of several years ago but not by much. While sales of artwork in the $300,000 to $2 million range seem to be slowing, big-ticket items are still hot, according to Hiscox, a specialty insurer that tracks art values for its customers with the Hiscox Art Market Research Index. In June, Hiscox reported that 19th century European art had seen a 13% rise in value from March 2007 to March 2008 and modern art values rose 29.7% in the same period. Sotheby’s spring contemporary art auction brought in its largest take ever, with $362 million in sales, including $86.3 million for a 1976 Francis Bacon triptych. In recent years, a rare painting by Picasso and a famous portrait by Gustav Klimt have fetched more than $100 million each.

Look at it through criminal eyes and it’s easy to see the appeal of stealing art.