Robert K. Wittman
The pinnacle of Robert Wittman's career unfolded in 2005, in a small hotel room in Copenhagen, where he arrived with a bag filled with $250,000 in cash. The veteran Federal Bureau of Investigation undercover agent was there to trade it for a Rembrandt self-portrait stolen from the Swedish National Museum in 2000, in a Hollywood-worthy armed robbery that involved guns, grenades and a getaway boat. At the hotel, when Wittman gave the signal, a Danish SWAT team rushed into the room while the agent cradled the stolen Rembrandt. He said it was like recovering a lost child.
By the time he retired in the fall of 2008, Wittman was an international legend. I visited him in Philadelphia a few months before his exit from the bureau. He picked me up in a black, unmarked Grand Prix at a Holiday Inn and we drove to the Eastern Field Division of the FBI. At that time, there were no published photographs of Wittman, because of the nature of his work. He was tanned, with silver hair and a smoky voice. And he was charming. I asked him why it was so important to recover these stolen artworks, and he answered, "The Rembrandt I recovered was 400 years old. Do you know anyone who is 400 years old? Cultural property is permanent. We are fleeting."
Robert Wittman always dreamed of being an FBI agent. He was born in Baltimore, where his father owned an antique store that specialized in Oriental art and furniture. Wittman first applied to the bureau in his early 20s and was rejected. He spent the next decade slogging it out in agricultural trade publications, fell in love, married, had kids and became bored with life.
Wittman was 32 when he spied a want ad in the newspaper: the FBI. He applied again, was accepted, went through a four-month training program, and then was dispatched with badge and gun to Philadelphia. That random geographical assignment was key to his transformation into one of the world's most revered, and feared, detectives of stolen art.
At the Philly office, Wittman trained under Bob Bazin, an experienced agent working property crimes and dealing with two high-profile art thefts in 1988: the second-largest crystal ball in the world, stolen from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, and a Rodin sculpture, stolen at gunpoint from Philadelphia's Rodin Museum, the largest collection of the sculptor's work outside Paris. The two Bobs solved both cases, but the Rodin theft was particularly instructive.
The agents tracked the 1860s bronze to a man who had previously robbed liquor stores - that is, until a friend who worked at an auction house told him how much fine art was worth. But the thief didn't know what to do with the Rodin. He stashed it under a water pipe in a paper bag. It was a lesson to Wittman: Stealing art is easier than selling stolen art. Then, in 1990, 13 works were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, including a Vermeer. Art theft was big news. It was the largest property crime in U.S. history.
Wittman followed up by enrolling in a course at the Barnes Foundation, where he "learned how to tell the difference between works by Renoir and Manet, or Gauguin and Cézanne." He was developing a niche expertise. Wittman also honed his undercover skill set. He was a natural at diving into the underworld - smart, charming, handsome, relaxed - and he treated these new relationships like a chess game. "You need to master your subject and stay one or two moves ahead of your opponent. … Forget what you've seen on television." His objective: "Winning a person's trust and then taking advantage of it."
At one point, Wittman is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., entertaining a criminal on a yacht filled with undercover FBI agents. It's high-pressure, precise work requiring maximum cool at all times. These are the rushes in Priceless: being there and sweating with him while he draws criminals into the open to get to the art. He often posed as a corrupt art collector or dealer, offering cash for hot art, and then busting his new "friends."
He did this with grace. One of his prey, a corrupt Santa Fe, N.M., dealer in native American artifacts, sent Wittman a note after being arrested: "Dear Bob: I don't know what to say. Well done? Nice work? You sure had me fooled? We're devastated, and I guess that's the idea. But even though we're devastated, we enjoyed the times we spent with you. Thanks for being a gentleman, and for letting us have a pleasant Christmas and New Year's. If you hadn't done what you did, they would have brought in someone else to do it, and I don't think we would have found him as personable as we found you. So there's no blame involved."
Over two decades, Wittman clawed back an astounding number of stolen artworks from the black market, including a Peruvian "backflap," a piece of body armour once worn by an ancient South American king; an original copy of the Bill of Rights; works by Goya and Norman Rockwell, and a Rembrandt self-portrait. Wittman often had to travel the world to find them. In fact, other countries began requesting his help, so his passport seemed more CIA than FBI. Over his career, he recovered more than $200-million in stolen art.
The FBI, though, didn't consider artwork a priority, but its leaders loved the press coverage. "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." By 2005, Wittman was promoted to senior investigator in the bureau's newly formed Art Crime Team. He received a manager, a portion of the FBI website, and was training a dozen agents on how to infiltrate the close-knit and secretive world of art. Still, he knew these efforts were drops in an expanding bucket.
Wittman came to understand that the legitimate business of fine art is one of the last unregulated multibillion-dollar industries left in North America, and almost impossible to patrol. And as his career matured, so did the black market for stolen art: "With so much money at stake, hot art and antiquities attract money launderers, shady gallery owners and art brokers, drug dealers, shipping companies, unscrupulous collectors, and the occasional terrorist. Criminals use paintings, sculptures, and statues as collateral to finance arms, drug, and money-laundering deals." It became almost routine for famous paintings to be stolen in violent raids on museums, while thousands of lesser-known works were also disappearing. Interpol lists art theft as the fourth-largest criminal enterprise in the world.
When I visited him, I asked Wittman if the FBI had trained a replacement. His answer came swiftly: "No." Earlier this year, in a spectacular theft from the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, five paintings were stolen, valued at more than $200-million. As usual, there was a torrent of news headlines, stories full of speculation and guesswork. Then, silence. In fact, there are only a handful of detectives in the Western world trained to investigate these specialized crimes. Of those, Wittman is the undisputed leader. Whoever stole those works in Paris can take comfort knowing that Wittman is not out there hunting. In fact, any enterprising art thief has probably already stolen a copy of this book.
Joshua Knelman is writing Hot Art, an investigation into the global trade in stolen art.