Priceless (12 page)

From that day forward, Vizi and I worked together to make sure she had as much historical background as possible before we announced one of my cases. (As an undercover agent, I couldn’t appear in front of cameras. I always stood in the back of the room,
well out of camera shot.) She kept the press conferences lively. Hardened journalists, weary of the FBI’s routine fare of violence, corruption, and bank robbery, seemed to perk up at the art crime press conferences. They were always on the prowl for something different, a legitimate good-news story, and art crime gave it to them.

The media reaction to the backflap case surpassed our expectations. Reporters fell in love with a story that offered easy comparison to
Raiders of the Lost Ark
—a case with an exotic location, grave robbers, a smuggled national treasure secreted into the United States in a diplomatic bag, the rescue of the seventeen-hundred-year-old relic at gunpoint. The story in the
Inquirer
was stripped across the front page. It began, “In a tale out of an Indiana Jones movie, the FBI has recovered an exquisite Peruvian antiquity.” The headline in the tabloid
Philadelphia Daily News
, stealing a line from the second Indy movie, blared, “That piece belongs in a museum!” The Associated Press version of the story was published in papers across North and South America. The president of Peru soon announced that Goldman and I would be awarded the Peruvian Order of Merit for Distinguished Service, a gold medallion with a blue ribbon, the country’s top honor for distinguished service to the arts. Goldman enjoyed the spotlight and I was glad to let him and others bask in it, deservedly so.

A few months later, we held a ceremony at the Penn archaeological museum, formally returning the piece to the Peruvian ambassador and Walter Alva, the Sipan tombs’ chief archaeologist and the author of the
National Geographic
stories. As I stood to the side, out of camera range, Alva convened his own press conference, explaining the significance of the day, straining in broken English to make a comparison the reporters could understand. Finally, he said, “It is a national treasure. For you, it would be as if someone had stolen the Liberty Bell.” The press fawned once more, again invoking the Indiana Jones theme.

Vizi and I were thrilled because our supervisors were thrilled.
We were making the FBI look good all over the world. At the end of a lousy decade—Waco, Ruby Ridge, the crime lab scandal, the Boston mafia fiasco—the FBI was eager for any positive publicity. The FBI brass seemed to be beginning to realize that art recovery was good for the bureau, and not just in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, 1997
.

T
HE SLEEPY
,
SOMEWHAT MUSTY
H
ISTORICAL
S
OCIETY
of Pennsylvania is largely unknown outside of Philadelphia. But the Federal-style building on Locust Street houses the nation’s second-largest repository of early Americana. Founded in 1824, the HSP holds thousands of important military and cultural pieces. The research library is stocked with more than 500,000 books, 300,000 graphic works, and 15 million manuscripts. Like most museums, the HSP displays only a fraction of its collection at any one time; the bulk of the collection remains in storage, where most artifacts sit for decades, untouched and largely ignored. The HSP had not conducted an inventory in a generation or more. It was simply too expensive and time-consuming.

In late October 1997, the HSP embarked on its first full inventory in decades.

Almost immediately, collections manager Kristen Froehlich found problems. Alarmed, she called me.

So far, her inventory had revealed that four items were missing—a Lancaster County long rifle and three Civil War presentation swords.

The rifle dated to the 1780s and probably had seen combat in the latter stages of the Revolutionary War. The rifle’s gold-tipped
barrel extended forty-eight inches, longer than most sabers, and was handcrafted by the legendary Pennsylvania gunsmith Isaac Haines. The ceremonial presentation swords, made of gold, steel, silver, enamel, diamonds, rhinestones, and amethyst, were part of a military tradition that dated to Roman times. The missing swords and scabbards, Froelich said, were presented to the Union generals George Meade, David Birney, and Andrew Humphreys following great victories. The swords would be easy to identify because each included a unique, engraved inscription and was crammed with lavish, if not gaudy, decoration. Luckily, the curator said, she had pictures and a good written description of each one. For instance, the counter guard of the hilt on Meade’s sword, presented at Gettysburg, included thirty diamonds that formed two stars and the letter
M
across a blue enamel shield. I knew such swords could command $200,000 or more on the open market.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Well, there could be more—I don’t know,” she said. “We think we’ve got twelve thousand pieces to inventory. And like I said, we’re just starting.”

I told Froehlich I’d come right over, and asked her to prepare a list of all HSP employees. I said I would need to interview everyone.

I didn’t mention that every museum employee, including Froehlich, would be a suspect.

In art crime, 90 percent of museum thefts are inside jobs.

A
RMED DAYLIGHT MUSEUM
robberies, like my Rodin case, are anomalies. Most museum thefts are committed or aided by insiders, people with access who know how to exploit a building’s vulnerabilities. An insider could be a ticket taker, a docent, a guide, an executive, a security guard, a custodian, an academic, even a trustee or wealthy patron—anyone tempted to use his or her access to walk away with a piece of art or history worth millions. The insider might be a temporary employee, perhaps part of a construction
crew hired to perform a renovation, even a summer intern. This thief steals for any number of reasons, though greed, love, and revenge top the list of motives.

Cultural institutions are loath to suspect one of their own; they like to think of themselves as families, colleagues engaged in a noble profession. Many museums don’t bother to run criminal background checks on employees or contractors. But they should. As terrible as it sounds, a museum’s biggest vulnerability is its employees.

Insider thieves are everywhere: In Illinois, a shipping clerk arranged the theft of three Cézanne paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, then threatened to kill the museum president’s child if his demands were not met. In Baltimore, a night watchman stole 145 pieces from the Walters Art Museum, taking the pieces one by one over eight months—each night, while making his rounds, he pried open a display case, pinched an Asian artifact or two, then rearranged the rest of the pieces so the display wouldn’t look suspicious. In Russia, a veteran curator in Saint Petersburg systematically looted the world-renowned Hermitage, removing more than $5 million worth of czarist treasures over fifteen years, a crime not discovered until long after she’d died, when the museum conducted its first inventory in decades. A legendary Ohio professor of medieval literature embarked on an audacious serial crime wave, secreting pages from rare book manuscripts at libraries across the world, from the Library of Congress to the Vatican.

The biggest art crime in history was an inside job.

On a sultry midsummer morning in 1911,
Mona Lisa
vanished from her vaunted perch in the Louvre, between a Correggio and a Titian. The theft occurred on a Monday, the only day of the week the museum was closed to the public, but it was not confirmed until late that afternoon because listless guards dickered over whether the most famous painting in the world had been stolen, or merely temporarily moved as part of a Louvre cataloging project. French detectives immediately interviewed more than a hundred members of the
museum staff and contractors, including a simple-minded Italian glazer named Vincenzo Peruggia. The Parisian authorities botched a chance to catch Peruggia in the early days of the investigation when they mistakenly compared a left-thumb fingerprint found on
Mona Lisa
’s abandoned protective box to Peruggia’s right thumb.

The heist garnered page-one news across the globe, and for a few weeks it became a bigger story than the looming world war. As the investigation foundered, the stories even briefly merged and sensational allegations appeared in the French media. Anti-German newspapers implied that the kaiser had played a role in the theft; opposition papers accused the struggling French government of stealing
Mona Lisa
as part of a wild
Wag the Dog
conspiracy to distract, outrage, and unite the French people against foreign aggressors. The
Mona Lisa
investigation took an awkward turn early on, when two radical modernists were wrongly detained under the theory that they’d stolen an icon of Old World art as some sort of artistic/political protest. One of the arrested radicals was a young artist named Pablo Picasso.

The real thief, Peruggia, should have been a suspect from the outset. He had the means, motive, and opportunity. A craftsman who helped build the wood and glass box that protected
Mona Lisa
, he was privy to a fateful museum secret—Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was secured to the wall by little more than four metal hooks and guarded only by a lone and drowsy military pensioner. The Louvre was so cavernous and in such a state of constant renovation that Peruggia, with his white workman’s blouse and smock, drew little attention when he waltzed into the Salon Carré shortly after sunrise that Monday morning.

“The room was deserted,” Peruggia recalled years later. “There hung the painting that is one of our great works.
Mona Lisa
smiled down on me. In a moment, I had snatched her from the wall. I carried her to the staircase, took off the frame, slipped the painting under my blouse, and left with the greatest nonchalance. It was all done in a few seconds.”

Peruggia hid
Mona Lisa
in his tiny Paris apartment for two years. He was careful, of course, but like most art thieves, he became frustrated when he could not sell the painting to a legitimate dealer. In 1913, he smuggled the painting to Italy, and offered to sell it to a dealer who was close to the director of Uffizi Gallery, the most famous museum in Florence. The dealer and museum director met Peruggia in a hotel room and promised to pay 500,000 Italian lire on the condition that he bring
Mona Lisa
to the Uffizi for a final examination. They tipped the police, and officers arrested Peruggia when he arrived with the painting. Afterward, Peruggia claimed to be a patriot, insisting that he stole the
Mona Lisa
to return her to her native Italy. The story appealed to many Italians, but it fell flat in court. As prosecutors noted, da Vinci himself brought
Mona Lisa
to France during the sixteenth century, and they presented a letter Peruggia wrote to his family after the theft in which he boasted, “I have finally obtained my fortune!” At trial, Peruggia’s own testimony proved his motives were not pure. He expected to claim a reward for “rescuing”
Mona Lisa
.

“I heard talk of millions,” he testified.

Convicted in 1914, Peruggia spent less than a year in prison, an appalling sentence for so serious a crime, yet a trend that would haunt art crime cases throughout the century. By the time he was released, a world war raged across Europe and he was largely forgotten.

I
T TOOK ME
the better part of a week to interview the HSP staff. I met with thirty-seven of the thirty-eight employees—a custodian named Ernest Medford called in sick. The supervisors insisted that talking to Medford would be a waste of time. “Ernie’s been here seventeen years,” Froehlich said. “When we have a problem, he’s our go-to guy.”

We turned next to the public, and helped the museum publicize a $50,000 reward, blasting faxes to a long list of media outlets, from National Public Radio to
The Inquirer
to
Antiques and The
Arts Weekly
. This generated a quick splash of publicity, but the reward tactic that had worked so well in the Rodin case brought dubious results this time, clogging our confidential tip line with useless crap. “Caller reports suspicious man eyeing a display case. No further information,” an operator scribbled in her notes. “Caller saw a sword in the backseat of a car at a parking lot on Essington Avenue near Seventy-fourth Street in a Chevrolet. Two weeks ago.” And my favorite: “Caller is psychic, will volunteer time, notes a Capricorn moon day of robbery.”

I turned the hunt to a more familiar and likely venue.

As it happened, one of the nation’s largest Civil War shows, the Great Southern Weapons Fair in Richmond, Virginia, was scheduled for the week after we began our investigation. As a collector, I’d attended the sprawling show three or four times over the years and knew nearly every serious dealer on the East Coast would be there. I drove down with Special Agent Michael Thompson, and sure enough, we ran into prominent Pennsylvania historian and dealer Bruce Bazelon, author of a book on presentation swords. I told him about the HSP swords. Funny you should mention it, Bazelon said, and he related a story he’d heard from a Poconos dealer. According to the dealer, a customer came into his shop and showed him a picture of a presentation sword that he had for sale. The dealer had called Bazelon because he believed the sword was supposed to be in the HSP collection.

When I called the dealer, he confirmed the story. He dug into an old address book and came up with a name for the Philadelphia history buff peddling the sword—George Csizmazia.

We showed up unannounced at Csizmazia’s office on a chilly morning two days before Christmas. He was an electrical contractor, fifty-six years old, with weathered white skin, thick jowls, and narrow brown eyes. He parted his silver hair on the left and wore a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache. His boss retrieved him from a job and he met us brightly.