Hot Art (29 page)

In 1995, Bob Bazin retired. Wittman was now the primary art theft agent for the entire country. The education, the casework, and the experience started to add up. Wittman's reputation was spreading beyond Philadelphia—and beyond the borders of the United States. “In 1997, we got a case going involving a piece of gold in Peru, from the tomb of the Lord of Sipán. It was the largest piece of gold ever found, and it had been missing for ten years.” Wittman went undercover as a buyer of pre-Columbian gold and was offered the piece by two smugglers in Miami. That was a spectacular find, but it was followed by a case that eclipsed it.

In December 2000, a guard at Sweden's Nationalmuseum was about to finish his shift when a man approached him with a submachine gun. The guard surrendered. Inside the museum, two other men were already in place. They quickly removed three paintings: two Renoirs and a Rembrandt. Behind the museum is a small river, where the men had parked a boat. The boat was genius. No one expected it.

There was more. The thieves had spread tire spikes in front of the museum, just in case of a chase. They'd also set up bombs to explode in cars parked throughout the city. So while explosions rocked Stockholm and distracted the Swedish police, the thieves disappeared down river with the multimillion-dollar paintings.

A few days later they demanded a ransom, which the museum refused to pay.

Less than a year later there was a break in the case. Narcotics police stumbled onto Renoir's
Conversation
during a drug operation. “We weren't looking for the painting, so it was a bonus when we found it,” said a Swedish police spokesperson to the press. Three people were arrested, but two paintings were still missing. It seemed to be another link between headache art and organized crime.

Then Renoir's
Young Parisian
turned up in an unexpected location: Los Angeles. The Renoir was found during a joint task force investigation of the
FBI
, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the Copenhagen police, the Danish National Police, and the Stockholm County Police. An international crime syndicate had been trying to off-load the two remaining paintings but was having trouble. They had decided to export the second Renoir from Sweden to the United States. Maybe they would find a buyer in Los Angeles? Instead they found themselves overpowered by several agencies working in tandem. When the Renoir was recovered, there was no press release or party. Everyone kept quiet, and Wittman was called in. He set his eyes on the last stolen painting—the Rembrandt—and prepared to go undercover again. The information they'd received was that the Rembrandt was still in Sweden, and for sale.

In September 2005 Wittman flew to Sweden and met with a couple of Iraqi brothers, Baha and Dieya Kadhum, who had been caught in the initial police sweep after the museum armed robbery but released due to lack of evidence. The trio got along, of course, and agreed to meet again, in Denmark.

Wittman flew to Copenhagen, where the
FBI
agent promised them $250,000 U.S. in cash; they agreed to regroup at a hotel. Danish police moved in ahead of time and renovated the hotel room into a closed-circuit television studio. When Wittman showed up with the money, the brothers spent a long time counting it. They went through every bill. It was all there.

One of the brothers went out the door and came back with a bag. Inside was a package wrapped in blue cloth. And inside the blue cloth was the Rembrandt self-portrait. Wittman marvelled at the painting, then picked it up and walked into the washroom. He'd brought along a black light. Rembrandt painted the self-portrait on copper. If the painting he was holding was real, there'd be no glare under the black light. There wasn't.

“This is a done deal,” Wittman said. His voice was picked up on the microphone system by the dozens of officers waiting for the agent's signal. Danish swat rushed the room, and also surrounded two accomplices waiting downstairs. “It's like finding a lost child,” he told Simon Houpt in his book,
Museum of the Missing.

“Famous paintings are just a tiny proportion of what's stolen,” the
FBI
agent told me. He said that 99 per cent of what is sold back through legitimate channels is not a Monet—meaning it was not a famous or expensive painting. “Most material is stolen from people's homes, and most of it is valued at less than $10,000—but it's still very important to these people. A lot of material is stolen from private galleries, too. Famous paintings are just a pixel in the big picture.”

Near the end of our visit in Philadelphia, Wittman and I walked to a Starbucks around the corner from Independence Hall. Over a latte the agent discussed some of the frustrations he knew were felt by the larger arts community toward law enforcement.

“Everybody is afraid of artwork cases,” Wittman said, “because they don't understand how to work these cases. There are so many people who are buying, and they have so very little knowledge of what they are buying,” he explained. “Very few business models are based on a customer spending so much money on an unknown quantity. For now, it always goes back to the ‘buyer beware' clause. Caveat emptor is the law of the land.”

Wittman said that the only way to stop the wave of crime was through education: “Educate buyers not to become victims. When you stop that, you stop the criminal, and then the criminal moves on to other areas of crime.” Still, the experience of being the most famous federal agent in the country capable of prying back stolen art was sometimes overwhelming. At lectures he was often barraged by pleas from audience members who had had art stolen. “Sometimes I have to tell them, ‘I can't help you. I'm only one man.'”

One of the last undercover missions he took part in unfolded in Warsaw. On that trip he was staying at an expensive hotel. Wittman got into a car to go meet with criminal dealers; a Polish swat team followed close behind. He looked out the window at the crumbling Eastern European architecture and thought, “I don't know if I want to do this anymore. It's stressful. I'm getting old.” In the coffee shop he looked at me and said, “On that sting operation I just didn't feel the thrill.” Then his eyes sharpened. I didn't believe him.

As we walked back to the
FBI
Eastern Division office in the warm afternoon sun, surrounded by tourists wandering between Independence Hall and Constitution Hall, I asked Wittman why it was so important to continue to hunt these stolen paintings. Why did this matter so much to him? The special agent didn't hesitate with his answer, “The Rembrandt that I recovered was four hundred years old. Do you know anyone who is four hundred years old?” he asked. “Cultural property is permanent. We are fleeting.”

A few months later a small retirement ceremony was held in a Philadelphia banquet hall to celebrate Wittman's career. When I asked Wittman if he had trained a successor, his answer came swiftly, “No.”

He did, however, help spawn a new federal initiative: the
FBI
Art Crime Team, and there were now a dozen agents across the United States learning the basic techniques of art theft investigations. The genesis of that new
FBI
team occurred on a perfect blue-sky morning, just a few hours away from Wittman's office.

ON SEPTEMBER
11, 2001, Wittman was at his office in Philadelphia watching television coverage of the two airliners that crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The next day, Wittman was standing at Ground Zero. The New York
FBI
office, at Federal Plaza, had been shut down; it was too close to the smouldering destruction zone. Agents from Philadelphia and New Jersey were called in. Wittman recalls the scene: “It was a sight that you couldn't wrap your mind around. The size of the devastation wasn't possible to convey from the pictures the world was viewing on television screens. There was so much dust you couldn't see the curb. All the air was grey. It was like the moon and smelled like burned rubber,” he said.

Wittman was deployed to work “psychology,” but for ten days he dug for bodies instead. He told me he stayed at Ground Zero “until the rescue project became a reclamation project.” His eyes were still adjusting to the reality that the towers were history, but in one corner of his imagination he was holding an altogether different picture: Boy Scouts waving a U.S. flag.

When 9/11 exploded, Wittman was in mid-hunt for a few pieces of precious American heritage—three paintings by Norman Rockwell, whose apple-pie depictions of small-town utopia had graced hundreds of
Saturday Evening Post
covers and informed a generation of postwar American families how life could be. The year Rockwell died, in 1978, thieves stole seven of his paintings from the Elayne Galleries in Minnesota. It was the largest single theft of Norman Rockwells in history, and there were no clues, no trail to follow.

One of the stolen Rockwells was titled
The Spirit of '76
. In that picture, Rockwell had painted a group of Boy Scouts standing on the shores of New Jersey. In the background, very small, were the Twin Towers. At the time that they were stolen, the paintings were on loan from a company called Brown & Bigelow, a manufacturer of posters and calendars that often featured Rockwell's work. The Rockwells vanished until 1994, when the Norman Rockwell Museum received an unexpected offer from José Maria Carneiro, an art dealer in Rio de Janeiro.

Carneiro admitted to having the paintings and said he was willing to sell them to the museum. The museum politely declined and informed the Elayne Galleries. Then silence. A few years later Carneiro called the Elayne Galleries, hoping the gallery would be interested. It was—it bought back two of the paintings,
Before the Date
and
Cowboy before the Date
. The
FBI
was also informed. Wittman looked into it.

Carneiro had the rest of the paintings, but the
FBI
was powerless to act—the art was way over there, on foreign soil. At Wittman's behest, the Attorney General's office of Pennsylvania filed a mutual legal assistance treaty request with Brazil. The
MLAT
call was essentially a plea for help from the Brazilian authorities, and it was the first ever request of that nature made by the United States to Brazil. The request was approved by Brazil's National Congress in February 2001.

In September of that year, Brazilian police executed a search warrant on Carneiro's house, but the paintings were not on the premises. In October, Carneiro was subpoenaed by the Brazilian government and forced to admit that he was in possession of the remaining paintings. But he would not tell anyone where the paintings were. In December, Wittman decided to fly to Brazil himself to interview Carneiro. What Wittman said in that interview changed the dealer's mind. Carneiro led Wittman out into the Brazilian countryside, to a secluded farmhouse. The Rockwells were in the barn.

When Wittman described finding those paintings, his voice was guardedly emotional. “You can actually see the World Trade Center in that painting,” he said. “This is American heritage—a Norman Rockwell painting with Boy Scouts and the World Trade Center in the background. Recovering those Rockwells was the U.S. equivalent of protecting Europe's seventeenth-century paintings.”

What he couldn't do was make an arrest. No one could trace the paintings back to the original thief, and there was an information vacuum about where the paintings had been for the time gap. “Carneiro wasn't completely clean,” said Wittman. He knew the paintings had been stolen but told the agent he'd received them from a person who owed him money. If that was true, it was another example of paintings being used as credit-card payments.

Wittman brought the Rockwells with him on the plane back to the United States, in a folder he kept near him. The Twin Towers were gone, but recovering those distinctive images gave the
FBI
agent the feeling of at least having saved a small piece of an American ideal that seemed to have been lost. In the hours and days following 9/11, while Wittman was sifting through the wreckage and finding only bodies, under the structural remains of the towers also lay, buried and burned, over $100 million worth of fine art. That fact wasn't widely reported in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks— just a couple of articles, one of them in
US A Today
—because the human loss was far more important.

The World Trade Center was operated by the New York Port Authority, and, as
US A Today
reported, the Port Authority had set aside 1 per cent of the cost of building it for public art projects. These included a bright red, twenty-five-foot Alexander Calder sculpture that looked a bit like the wings of a giant bird—
WTC
Stabile,
in front of 7 World Trade Center. A painted wood relief by Louise Nevelson called
Sky Gate–New York
hung in 1 World Trade Center. A painting by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein from his Entablature Series was in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center. A 1974 Joan Miró tapestry,
World Trade Center
Tapestry,
hung inside the lobby of 2 World Trade Center.

Lichtenstein's thirty-foot sculpture
Modern Head
did receive some airtime in the days that followed the collapse because it had survived, with a new skin of dust. It looked as if the Nevelson could be salvaged as well. A Dubuffet was also spotted in the ruins.

In addition to the Port Authority art budget, some of the richest companies in America had occupied the Twin Towers, and many of them had adorned their walls and boardrooms with pieces of art that will never be seen again. Cantor Fitzgerald alone possessed a collection of three hundred Rodin sculptures that were demolished that day. I left messages with a few of the companies that once had offices in the World Trade Center and were known to house impressive collections of art. No one returned my calls. My hunch is that none of the companies felt comfortable discussing any losses from that morning, except for the horrible human toll.