Priceless (13 page)

“What can I do for you, fellas?”

“We need help with an investigation related to Civil War artifacts,” I said. “George, we want to talk to you about some swords.”

Csizmazia turned ashen. “Ernie told you, didn’t he?”

Ernie was the janitor, the only museum employee we hadn’t interviewed.

I shot Thompson a look. “Of course,” I bluffed. “That’s why we’re here.”

“So where are the swords, George?” Thompson asked.

“At my house. I’ll take you to them.”

Csizmazia lived with his wife in a modest two-story home in a working-class suburb called Rutledge, a few miles southwest of Philadelphia International Airport. He led us upstairs, and we followed. He took us to a bedroom door; the door had more locks and alarm systems than any room at HSP. As he opened the door, he said, “I call this my museum.”

The moment we entered, I knew our pudgy little electrician was a thief on a grand scale, responsible for the theft of more than three swords and a rifle.

Two hundred museum-worthy pieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lined the walls and crowded display tables. As I circled the room, I silently counted twenty-five presentation swords and fifty firearms, assorted rifles, muskets, pistols, and revolvers. Valuable relics from early Americana filled the room—an ivory tea caddy; a brass carriage clock; a Victorian silver whistle; a teetering stack of U.S. Mint Indian ten-dollar gold coins; a tortoiseshell cigar holder; a pair of Revolutionary-era oval cuff links; a Georgian silver watch with a glass face; a pear-shaped silver sugar bowl; mother-of-pearl opera glasses in a leather case; a mahogany toy chest of drawers. It was all quality stuff.

Csizmazia played coy, rambling on about the vagaries of provenance in the military collectibles market. My partner and I didn’t say much. We just stood in the room, surrounded by so much history, so much evidence. We stared at the pieces and then we stared at Csizmazia. We let the silence hang, knowing he couldn’t help but
try to fill it. He fidgeted and fidgeted and finally pointed to a Mayflower-era sword. “I use that to trim my hedges!” I gave him a look that said we were not amused. My partner crossed his arms sternly.

“George,” I said. “Come on. Don’t insult us, huh?”

Csizmazia dropped his eyes. “OK.”

He led us to the garage and opened a large cardboard garment box. Inside, we found $1 million worth of presentation swords, including the three missing from HSP.

There was so much stuff to seize we called for backup. Everywhere I looked I saw history. I picked up an early-nineteenth-century silver presentation wine cooler and marveled at the stylized swan-head handles, the chased rim, and an etched relief of Philadelphia’s famous Fairmount Water Works. I put it down and eyed a gold presentation watch with a double woven chain as long as my arm. I flipped it over to read the tiny inscription. “Presented to Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, USA as a token of esteem and regard from his friend E.P. Dorrl, Gettysburg July 1
^st
, 2
^nd
, 3
^rd
. VICTORY.” I laid the watch on the table. The case was growing bigger every minute. What else was here?

Eager to learn more before Csizmazia wised up and stopped talking, I played to his vanity. “George, while we’re waiting, why don’t you give us the grand tour?”

He quickly agreed, moving through the room with pride, displaying one eclectic piece of American history after another: The flint-rock rifle abolitionist John Brown carried during his raid at Harpers Ferry. The telescope Elisha Kent Kane used to locate the Polar Sea. The burlwood coffer Revolutionary War financier Roger Morris used to store handwritten notes. A ring with a lock of hair from George Washington. A locket with a piece of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The wedding band Patrick Henry gave to his wife.

Before the other agents arrived, Csizmazia stood before the two most valuable pieces of his private collection—a silver teapot with a gooseneck spout, circa 1755 and worth about $250,000, and a gold
snuffbox worth $750,000 or more. The snuffbox, he explained, was the most historic because it was presented as payment to Andrew Hamilton in 1735 for his successful defense of New York printer John Peter Zenger, charged with libeling the colonial governor of New York. This landmark libel case was arguably the most important moment in American journalism history—the forerunner of the freedom of the press clause in the First Amendment, as adopted a half-century later in the Bill of Rights.

In all, Csizmazia’s private collection looked to be worth millions. I recognized many pieces from HSP records.

I called Froehlich. “Kristen, do you believe in Santa Claus?”

“Uh, maybe.”

“He’s left you a lot of gifts.”

Csizmazia wasn’t repentant in the least. “Whaddya want from me?” he begged. He lamely justified that he did what he did out of love and respect for history, not for money. “The stuff had been sitting in storage boxes for decades. At least, by looking at it in my house, someone got some joy from it.”

Only one question remained. “How did you steal it?”

“Ernie,” he said.

Csizmazia explained: As a trusted HSP employee for nearly two decades, Ernest Medford enjoyed unfettered and unmonitored access to the museum’s basement storage areas. The heavyset custodian with sunken brown eyes had first met Csizmazia when the contractor supervised an electrical job at the museum in the late 1980s. Over the next eight years, Medford smuggled more than two hundred artifacts out the back door, a few pieces at a time. The slimy collector paid the corrupt custodian roughly $8,000, for artifacts worth a total of $2 million to $3 million.

As Csizmazia laid out their scheme, the color rose on my face and I felt like a bumbling rookie, chagrined that I hadn’t persisted in interviewing the one guy who’d called in sick. Lesson learned. Interview all employees—no exceptions.

Still, Csizmazia’s word wasn’t good enough to arrest Medford.
We needed real evidence. “George,” I said, “if what you say is true, we need you to call Ernie and tape it for us. I want you to tell him you think he sent us to you.”

Csizmazia didn’t protest—he knew we had him. Glumly, he dialed the number. “Ernie? George. The FBI’s visited me, man. Did you set the heat on me? How did they know?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t say anything.”

“Yeah, but you know, you sold me everything. So, you know, we gotta stick together.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

That was enough.

When I confronted Medford with the evidence and tape, he confessed. I asked him why he’d done it, why he’d systematically assaulted an institution where he’d spent nearly twenty years of his life. Medford shrugged. “I figured no one would miss it. I really needed the money.”

It was fortuitous that we pressed Csizmazia at his home, because by the time he arrived at the FBI office and I took his fingerprints, reality had set in. When I handed him a copy of the initial paperwork used to charge him, he recoiled, revealing his true feelings. “Three million? The stuff was worth three million dollars? I was a fool not to be selling more of this stuff.” A few minutes later, as we walked him to the U.S. Marshal’s office for processing, Csizmazia began mumbling, quietly cursing himself. Like many collectors, he’d seen the notice for the reward and knew the FBI and police were searching for the HSP pieces. “I should have just dumped all that stuff in the river. You guys never would have found it. Like in a murder case. No body, no evidence, no case.”

C
SIZMAZIA’S REMARK ABOUT
destroying the evidence triggered memories of my last face-to-face conversation with my father, who’d died about a year earlier.

Dad and I had just left Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore,
having received a dire prognosis. He’d developed diabetes in his late forties and hadn’t really changed his habits or taken better care of himself. Now, he was sixty-eight and in bad shape. The doctor had given him weeks to live.

Dad hadn’t wanted to talk about it. He asked about my work, and I obliged, telling him about a burglary at Pennsbury Manor, the historical home of the founder of Pennsylvania, William Penn. I said we had a few suspects in our sights, and that we planned to interview their girlfriends the next day.

“No, no,” he interrupted. “Don’t tell me about the suspects. What about the antiques they took? Are you going to be able to get them back?”

That was Dad. He understood what was important—retrieving stolen pieces of history and culture, not arresting a couple of knuckleheads trying to pawn a few pieces of silver.

Another memory the HSP case triggered came later, as I kneeled in the FBI evidence vault with a museum curator, shortly after the arrests. We were cataloging each of the nearly two hundred stolen antiques, one by one, and carefully wrapping them for storage—precisely as I had done at my father’s Baltimore antique shop after his death.

My dad had opened Wittman’s Oriental Gallery in 1986, two years before I left the
Farmer
newspapers to become an FBI agent. He’d sold the papers and returned to his true passion, collecting Oriental antiques, renting a place with my brother Bill down on Howard Street along Jewelers’ Row in Baltimore. He’d stocked it with pieces from his personal collection and with works he’d purchased by taking out a second mortgage on his home, the redbrick house where I’d grown up. He filled it with hundreds of pieces—exquisitely carved jade powder boxes, Kutani vases, ukiyo-e woodblocks, and dozens of works by the bigger names in Japanese art: Hiroshige, Kunisada, Hokusai, and Utamaro.

Dad had spent his final years among the antiques, and I think he took as much pleasure giving customers tours of the gallery, stopping
to explain the significance of a Burmese textile or a Japanese figurine, as he did actually selling anything, probably more so. His collection had filled the floors and walls of the narrow shop and it nearly rivaled the holdings at Baltimore’s best public galleries. Whenever I’d visit the shop with Donna and the kids, he’d dig out a piece from his collection and delight Kevin, Jeff, and Kristin with a quick lesson about Japanese culture. I always listened in and learned something new. Already, I missed that.

Now in the FBI evidence room, my eyes lingered on a stolen antique watch and I thought about how Dad might describe the piece, what history lesson it might reveal.

W
E CHARGED
C
SIZMAZIA
and Medford under a new law that made it a federal crime to steal anything worth more than $5,000 from a museum. Previously, thieves who had never crossed state lines, as was the case here, could only be charged in state court. But Congress had recently created a new federal art-crime law, largely in response to the 1990 Gardner heist in Boston, and in 1995 Goldman and I had been the first to use the law, employing it during the case of the theft from William Penn’s home.

In the HSP case, Csizmazia and Medford entered plea agreements, presuming this would lead to light sentences. But the case did not end neatly.

The judge assigned to the case was a World War II veteran who did not look kindly on the theft of military artifacts. United States District Judge Clarence C. Newcomer, seventy-five years old, had a reputation for toughness at sentencing. He had presided over several celebrated mob and police corruption cases, and issued several rulings that belied his conservative bent, including one close to my heart—he was the judge who broke up the Topps baseball card monopoly, paving the way for competitors. If the judge needed a reminder of American history, his wide-windowed chambers office overlooked Independence Hall, the nation’s birthplace.

A few minutes before the HSP sentencing hearing began on July 16, 1998, I settled into a seat at the prosecution table, next to Goldman. Following routine preliminaries, the judge read aloud the recommendation of the probation office—a sentence in the range of twenty to thirty months for each man. The prosecution, citing the plea agreement, asked for a twenty-month term; the defense lawyers didn’t suggest a specific sentence, just something considerably less than twenty months.

Before he imposed the sentence, the judge held aloft a stack of fifteen letters from museum directors across the nation, each imploring him to impose a stiff sentence. What made art theft different from most financial and property crimes, many museum directors told the judge, is the harm to society. Such artifacts not only fill museums, they serve as the raw material for historians and scholars. Most are irreplaceable. “Any theft from any museum goes beyond the crime itself—such a destructive act robs the entire community of its history, its cultural heritage,” wrote Anne Hawley, the Gardner Museum director. The president of the American Association of Museums, Edward Able, called “theft by insiders the most serious of all, involving as it does a betrayal by those charged with guarding property held in the public trust.” He cited a Latin phrase whispered by wise security professionals,
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Who shall guard the guards?

To my delight, the judge shared the museum directors’ outrage. The thefts were not, as the defense claimed, some relatively minor and isolated indiscretion, an anomaly committed by two men who led otherwise productive lives. The defendants carried out their scheme in a systematic way, pilfering more than two hundred times, month after month for eight years. Worse, these thieves were not common thugs; by virtue of their positions in society as museum employee and serious collector, Medford and Csizmazia, more than most, understood the value and significance of what they took. And the harm they caused.

“The conduct you engaged in is an assault and affront to our
culture, to our society, and must be dealt with accordingly,” the judge said. “Therefore, it is the judgment of this court that you be sentenced to forty months….”

Forty months! Double the sentence we sought!

I wanted to smile but kept FBI cool, stoic. I stole a glance at the defense table. The lead lawyer stood, mouth agape, fingers squeezing an empty legal pad. Medford dropped into his chair and slumped. Csizmazia turned to the gallery, searching for a sympathetic face, blinking back tears.