Priceless (28 page)

Gone, or so it seemed, were the days when the FBI would get by with one or two agents who expressed an interest in art crime—
when an agent like Bob Bazin would handle cases, then informally pass the mantle to someone like me. Historically speaking, I knew of only two other FBI art crime experts beside Bazin and both had worked in New York. In the sixties and seventies, it was Donald Mason, probably best known for his recovery of a stolen Kandinsky, and in the seventies and eighties, Thomas McShane, who once recovered a stolen van Gogh in the carport of a New York gas station.

To bolster the new Art Crime Team, the Department of Justice provided a team of prosecutors—one of whom was Bob Goldman. They were granted special authority to prosecute art crime cases anywhere in the country. With great fanfare and a series of public events, the FBI unveiled an Art Crime Team website, a logo, and even created special souvenir coins. The press exposure and the accolades kept piling up. Just before the Art Crime Team was officially launched, I was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s highest honor for the protection of cultural property, the Robert Burke Memorial Award. Two years later, Goldman won the same honor. While we welcomed media coverage, I was careful to keep my identity secret so I could continue to work undercover. I never let photographers take my picture and I always remained in the back of the room, out of view, during press conferences. Whenever I appeared on television, I did so with my face blacked out.

In the months after the Art Crime Team’s formation, we kept busy with smaller cases, using each to raise our profile. In Pennsylvania, I recovered eight Babylonian stone signature seals purchased by a U.S. marine as souvenirs at a flea market near Baghdad, the first such FBI case of recovered Iraqi artifacts in the United States. In a St. Louis hotel-room sting, I arrested a fake Arab sheik who tried to sell me a forged Rembrandt for $1 million. In a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, Goldman and I squared off against two antiques dealers who defrauded a wealthy collector during the sale of historic Colt revolvers.

Perhaps most important to our cause, we gained two earnest
and well-placed advocates at Headquarters in Washington. The first was Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, a veteran State Department cultural property analyst with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology. She became the Art Crime Team’s program manager. Magness-Gardiner was well-versed in the ways of Washington and international diplomacy and, as it happened, was the spouse of an accomplished artist. She ably spearheaded our public outreach and education efforts and played an advisory role during investigations.

The second boost came when Eric Ives, a forward-thinking supervisor with a strong background in a wide range of property crimes, was named chief of the Major Theft Unit, the section that supervised the Art Crime Team. Ives asked me to visit him in Washington his first week as unit chief. I met him in a windowless office on the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and in minutes I knew we would become good partners, despite the differences in age and experience. He was a former U.S. Marine with close-cropped sandy hair and intense green eyes, eager for action. Before Ives joined the FBI, he had worked for the Target retail store chain, chasing thieves who targeted bulk shipments. As an FBI agent in Los Angeles, he went after the same kind of thief, and came up with a marketing gimmick that helped catch a few. To solve the crimes, he posted pictures of wanted thieves on highway billboards, figuring this was a great way to get the photos in front of the most likely witnesses, truckers. Ives and I soon found that we shared a passion for property theft and a knack for taking chances that paid off.

In Washington, Ives came up with another novel approach. He proposed to aggressively promote—in effect, market—the Art Crime Team, raising awareness inside and outside the FBI. “The Bureau has thirteen thousand agents and we have fewer than a dozen working part-time on art crime,” he said to me. “We need to exploit two things we have working to our advantage—one, the notion that the FBI was founded in 1908 to stop the interstate transport of stolen property, and two, this romantic allure of art crime, the Hollywood view, as projected by
The Thomas Crown Affair
and
National Treasure.”
He knew that the Hollywood version was a caricature, but believed we could leverage the misconception to our advantage. In our first marketing venture, Ives, Magness-Gardiner, and I drew up a Top Ten Art Crimes list. Written in the style of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, our list generated a nice, moderate wave of publicity. I liked Ives’s style; for a supervisor, he didn’t think like a bureaucrat. All the better, my new boss was a fellow salesman.

Ives and I spoke nearly every other day, and he traveled as my handler on my undercover cases, watching my back, a rare role for such a senior supervisor. Traditionally, unit chiefs at Headquarters stuck to administrative and supervisory duties and rarely ventured into the field. But Ives took a special interest in art crime. My direct supervisor in Philadelphia, Michael Carbonell, was wise and secure enough to let me work independently and with Ives. It wasn’t always easy for Carbo—his bosses in Philadelphia, who paid my salary, were always pestering him to ask where I was and what I was doing, and how the hell art crime was relevant to the local division’s mission. A legendary fugitive hunter and no-bullshit supervisor, Carbo shared my work credo: Just get the job done and the office politics will take care of itself.

By the fall of 2005, with support from Carbo, Ives and I were ready to cut our ambitions loose.

And we aimed high.

Copenhagen, 2005
.

“I
S IT ALL THERE?”

The Iraqi counting stacks of $100 bills on the narrow Danish hotel bed didn’t answer or even look up. So I asked again. “All there?”

Baha Kadhum grunted. He didn’t lift his eyes. He just kept flipping through the inch-high piles of cash I’d brought him, $245,000 neatly arrayed on a rumpled white bed sheet. In exchange, Kadhum had promised to bring me a stolen Rembrandt worth $35 million. Presumably, one of his colleagues held it downstairs or just outside the hotel. It was always possible the thug would offer a forgery—or worse, rob me. I kept my eyes on his hands.

Kadhum looked younger than his twenty-seven years, certainly younger than I had expected. Olive-skinned, with an aquiline nose and a mound of tousled black hair, he wore tight jeans, a pink polo shirt, black buckled leather shoes, and a gold chain around his neck. I doubted he was armed, but I took him for an amateur—desperate, and worse, unpredictable.

Kadhum believed that I was an American mobster, or at least some sort of art expert working for the mob. As a vouch, the father of one of his good friends had introduced us. The father, Kadhum believed,
could be trusted because he’d hidden a stolen Renoir painting for their gang near Los Angeles for several years. But Kadhum remained wary, and for this reason I could not take the precautions I had taken in Madrid, insisting that I meet the bad guy with three “bodyguards.” On the Copenhagen job, I was working alone and unarmed.

The missing masterpiece was tiny, a four-by-eight-inch Rembrandt self-portrait painted in 1630 at age twenty-four. One of the few the artist crafted on gilded copper, the painting glowed as if backlit. Still,
Self-Portrait
remains a sober piece. Young Rembrandt wears a dark cloak, a brown beret, and a half-smile as inviting and mysterious as the
Mona Lisa’s
. Once a centerpiece of the collection at the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm,
Self-Portrait
had vanished five years earlier, during one of the largest and most spectacular art heists in history.

T
HE WELL
-
EXECUTED THEFT
began three days before Christmas, 2000.

About a half hour before the 5 p.m. closing time, a gang of six, possibly eight, Middle Eastern men spread out across Stockholm. It was already dark, the winter Scandinavian sun having set by mid-afternoon; sub-freezing temperatures kept most roads and sidewalks slick with packed snow and ice. The museum lies at the end of a short peninsula accessible only by three central Stockholm streets, and the thieves used this to their advantage, creating a set of barriers to cut it off from the rest of the city. On the first of the three streets, a gang member set a parked Ford on fire, creating a scene that drew the police, the fire department, and dozens of curious residents. On the second street, a gang member set a Mazda afire, drawing more fire trucks. To block the third road, the thieves laid spiked tire strips. Along the river at the museum’s edge, two gang members quietly docked an orange fifteen-foot getaway boat.

A few minutes before closing, three men wearing hoodies—one carrying a machine gun, the others pistols—burst through the
gallery’s double glass-door entrance. They ordered guards and patrons to the floor.

“Stay calm,” the man with the machine gun said in Swedish. “Stay quiet and you won’t be hurt.”

As one gunman held a handful of tourists, guards, and docents at bay, the others vaulted up the museum’s grand marble staircase to the second floor. The thieves turned right and pushed through a set of double doors, past marble sculptures and oil-on-canvas paintings. One headed straight for the Dutch Room and Rembrandt’s postcard-sized
Self-Portrait
. The other hit the French room and selected two Renoirs from 1878—
Conversation with a Gardener
and
Young Parisian
.

Each thief pulled clippers from his pocket, snipped wires holding the frames to the walls, and stuffed the paintings into large black duffel bags. The three paintings were among the smallest in the museum—and that made them among the easiest to carry away. Together, they were worth an estimated $40 million. The men scurried back down to the lobby, rejoined their colleague, and ran out the front door. The entire robbery took just two and a half minutes. The three men, each carrying a stolen treasure across the icy street, turned left and ran for the waterfront, where they met their moored boat and roared away. The police, stuck in traffic caused by the diversion, didn’t arrive until 5:35 p.m., a good half an hour after the thieves left the dock.

T
HE THEFT OF
Self-Portrait
and the Renoirs bruised not only the international art world, but also Swedish pride. The National Museum, a city landmark and model of Florentine and Venetian architecture that opened in 1866, held four centuries’ worth of European treasures, many of them collected by the enlightened King Gustav III.

The Swedish police began their investigation with one big clue: During the robbery, another boater saw the three thieves dart down the dock and jump into their getaway boat. Their hurry, particularly in such icy conditions, caught the boater’s curiosity. Quietly, the
witness followed the getaway boat as it sped across the Norrström River and snaked into a canal about a mile away. He found the orange boat abandoned by a small dock, still rocking in its own wake.

The witness called police, and a picture of the boat was published in the next day’s newspapers. Within twenty-four hours, a man came forward to say he’d sold the orange boat for cash a few days earlier. The buyer had used a fake name but made the mistake of giving the seller his real cell phone number. Police traced the cell phone’s logs and this led them to a crew of small-time suburban crooks.

Using phone wiretaps and surveillance, Swedish police were able to identify most members of the gang. In a quick sweep, they arrested a native Swede, a Russian, a Bulgarian, and three Iraqi brothers. In a search, police found Polaroid pictures of the missing works—blackmail-style photographs of the paintings next to recent newspapers. They did not find the actual paintings. Although a Swedish court convicted one man and sentenced him to several years in prison, the paintings remained at large.

A year later, underworld sources in Sweden tipped police that someone seemed to be trying to sell one of the Renoirs on the black market. The police set up a sting in a Swedish coffee shop and recovered
Conversation with a Gardener
. From my base in Philadelphia, I was pleased to read of the arrest. But for the next four years, no one in law enforcement heard a word about the other Renoir or the Rembrandt.

Then, in March 2005, I got a call from the FBI art crime investigator in Los Angeles, Chris Calarco.

“I’m not sure what we have yet, or if this is anything, but I wanted to give you a heads-up,” he said. “A couple of guys on a wire out here heard something.”

“Yeah?”

“They think the subject might be trying to sell a Renoir.”

“What do we know about him?”

“Bulgarian. Here illegally since at least the 1990s. Moved here from Sweden, I think.”

Sweden. “I’ll be damned,” I muttered to myself, and then I asked Calarco, “Is the painting he’s trying to sell
Young Parisian?”

Calarco said he would check and I filled him in on the 2000 Stockholm heist. He called back a week later. Yes, he said. It was
Young Parisian
. The target not only mentioned the painting by name, but he also seemed to speak regularly with a son still living in Stockholm. The target’s name was Igor Kostov, and he was suspected of dealing drugs and fencing stolen goods. He was sixty-six years old, an illegal East European immigrant living near Hollywood, worked at a pawnshop, and almost always wore a Members Only windbreaker that covered his sagging stomach. Kostov was a former boxer, an occupation confirmed by his flat nose and forehead scars.

On the wire, Kostov spoke in rapid-fire, staccato sentences laced with his thick Bulgarian accent, and the agents found his incessant bragging amusing. I asked Calarco to thank the agents for their patience on the wire, for being smart enough to recognize the clues that suddenly transformed their case from a run-of-the-mill drug investigation into an international art rescue.

This can’t be overstated. Most people don’t realize that working a wire is grunt work. Wiretaps can provide phenomenal tips and evidence, but the reality is that recording them is a tedious task, far less glamorous than portrayed in the movies or hour-long episodes of
The Wire
or
The Sopranos
. Wiretaps require hours, weeks, and often months of patience, waiting for calls, staring at a computer screen, typing notes, trying to string together snippets of conversations, interpreting code words, waiting for the bad guys to slip up and say something stupid. In the United States, unlike most other countries, the job is incredibly time-consuming because agents can’t simply record every call, then retrieve them all at the end of the day. To protect civil liberties, agents must listen to all calls
live
and record only those portions of a call that are relevant to the case. Thankfully, the case agents, Gary Bennett and Sean Sterle, had been paying attention when Kostov began talking about the Renoir.