Priceless (8 page)

Barnes believed that one could only come to appreciate and understand art by viewing it firsthand. Most Americans began at a disadvantage, he believed, because they held preconceived Western notions of art, likely learned (subconsciously or not) from ivory tower academics. The best way to understand art was to look at a
painting, compare it to what you saw next to it, and come to your own conclusions. Which is why Barnes arranged his galleries like no other—masterpieces beside the mediocre, Old Masters next to Impressionists, African near European, tribal juxtaposed with Modernists. To emphasize shapes, he arranged three-dimensional objects—often simple metalwork and basic kitchen utensils beside paintings. On the floor along the walls, Barnes set up furniture, candles, teapots, and vases. He called these unorthodox and controversial layouts “wall ensembles,” and they were designed to help students see patterns, shapes, and trends you can’t teach in books. He wanted classes to be democratic, a place where free discussion was encouraged.

Study the overstuffed walls and discover two chairs that match the female derriere in a set of Renoirs, or an African mask that matches the shape of a man’s face in a Picasso painting. Notice a wooden trunk that mimics shapes in Prendergast and Gauguin paintings. Ponder the significance of a set of soup ladles straddling a series of Old Master paintings, or a pair of ox shoes hanging over a pair of Soutines. Chuckle when you realize the theme of a corner gallery is elbows.

Barnes always kept you guessing, thinking. He hung Matisse’s iconic
The Joy of Life
, considered the first painting of the Modern art era (and the one a conservative French critic famously labeled “beastly”) in a stairwell.

I got a kick out of Barnes’s life story, his egalitarian values and eclectic galleries, each filled with jaw-dropping art. But I dreaded my first homework assignment: the first few chapters of
The Art in Painting
, the 521-page treatise Barnes wrote in 1925. The canary-covered book felt as heavy as a brick and I feared the words would be as dense and intimidating. But when I cracked the first chapter, I was pleasantly surprised. The writing was, as I suspected, erudite, but Barnes’s unpretentious, workmanlike philosophy struck a chord. He wrote that his method for studying art presented “something basically objective to replace the sentimentalism, the antiquarianism,
sheltered under the cloak of academic prestige, which make futile the present courses in art universities and colleges.” In other words, Barnes devised a method for his students to think for themselves, to resist the urge to simply accept the prevailing and often pretentious sentiments of so-called experts. Barnes seemed like my kind of guy.

“People often suppose that there is some secret about art, some password which must be divulged before they can discover its purpose or meaning,” Barnes wrote. “Absurd as such an idea is, it contains the important truth that seeing is something which must be learned, and not something which we all do as naturally as we breathe.” He called this “learning to see.”

First and foremost, Barnes taught that all art is based on the work of previous generations. “A person who professes to understand and appreciate Titian and Michelangelo and who fails to recognize the same traditions in the moderns, Renoir and Cézanne, is practicing self-deception,” Barnes wrote. “An understanding of early Oriental art and of El Greco carries with it an appreciation of the contemporary work of Matisse and Picasso. The best of the modern painters use the same means, to the same ends, as did the great Florentines, Venetians, Dutchmen, and Spaniards.”

The purpose of art is not to create a literal, documentary-style reproduction of a scene from real life. “The artist must open our eyes to what unaided we could not see, and in order to do so he often needs to modify the familiar appearance of things and so make something which is, in the photographic sense, a bad likeness.” The greatest artists teach us how to perceive through the use of expression and decoration. They are scientists, manipulating color, line, light, space, and mass in ways that reveal human nature. “The artist gives us satisfaction by seeing far more clearly than we could see for ourselves.”

A great painting should be more than a sum of technical beauty. At the Barnes, we were taught to look for delicacy, subtlety, power, surprise, grace, firmness, complexity, and drama—but to do so with
a scientist’s eye. This was an important point. As an art crime investigator, or an undercover agent posing as a collector, I would have to evaluate and expound upon a wide variety of art, regardless of whether I liked a particular piece.

For the next year, I spent four hours a week in class with ten other students. Each week, we gathered in one of the Barnes’s twenty-three galleries, just a few feet from the three or four masterpieces we would study that day. As our teacher outlined the finer points of composition, palette, makeup, and light, I drank it in. I wasn’t only listening to the teacher—sometimes I learned more by tuning out and just staring at a wall ensemble. At the Barnes, I didn’t learn how to identify a fake or a forgery, but I trained my eye to discern a good painting from a bad one. I learned how to tell the difference between works by Renoir and Manet, or Gauguin and Cézanne—and more important, how to confidently explain in detail these differences and patterns. It’s not as hard as you might think, certainly not for a trained art historian or curator. But it’s not the kind of thing most police officers know. As I would learn years later, it’s not even the kind of thing most art thieves know.

My Barnes experience couldn’t have come at a better time, personally or professionally. I remember walking through the second-floor gallery one day, depressed about the indictment, stressed about lawyer bills and the thought of leaving Donna and the kids for prison, when I came upon Renoir’s
Mussel Fishers at Berneval
. The painting stopped me. A young mother and children along a sienna seashore. Smiling sisters holding hands. A boy with a basket of mussels. An indigo sky. I moved closer. I cocked my head and followed a brushstroke out to sea. The painting felt warm, soothing. It evoked images of a quieter, simpler time, when playing on the shoreline coupled with picking mussels for a fresh dinner were enough to bring joie de vivre.

Young kids and a mom at the shore. A family. My family.

I found a bench, sat down, and exhaled.

*    *    *

T
HE
B
ARNES CLASSES
only deepened my interest and appreciation for art, and I couldn’t help but approach my art crime cases with new enthusiasm and perspective. While I was still enrolled at the Barnes, Bazin and I got a break on an old case, a 1988 heist from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Inside its ninety-foot rotunda, the Penn Museum showcases one of the nation’s foremost collections of Chinese antiquities. Late one winter evening, thieves lifted the Chinese exhibition’s most significant piece, a fifty-pound crystal ball from the Imperial Palace in Beijing, from its place of honor in the center of the rotunda. The perfect sphere, which projects a person’s image upside down, once belonged to the Dowager Empress Cixi, and is the second largest such orb in the world. Handcrafted during the nineteenth century, the crystal ball represented a triumph of skill and patience, a year’s worth of an artist’s labor with emery and garnet powder and water. The burglars who took the orb also swiped a five-thousand-year-old bronze statue of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. Museum officials figured it was the work of amateurs, but the pieces seemed to vanish without a trace.

Now, three years later, a museum official was calling Bazin to say a former curator had spotted the Osiris statue for sale at one of the jumble of eclectic shops on Philadelphia’s South Street. We rushed over and pressed the proprietor for details. He told us that he’d bought the $500,000 bronze statue for $30 from “Al the Trash Picker,” a homeless man who trawled the streets with a shopping cart, looking for junk. We found Al and he quickly told us that he’d gotten the statue from a man named Larry, who happened to live a few blocks from the store. Bazin and I went to see “Larry.”

Larry was a compact man with a South Philly attitude and a flimsy story. “I dunno, man, it just showed up in my mudroom a few years ago,” Larry offered, lamely suggesting that a friend probably dropped it off and forgot about it. We countered with the textbook good-cop, bad-cop routine. Bazin stomped, glowered, and
threatened to arrest him if he didn’t tell us “the truth.” When Bazin stormed out, I spoke softly to Larry, confiding that we wouldn’t charge him if he helped us out. When that didn’t work, I went out to tell Bazin.

“Why did you walk out so quickly?” I said.

He shrugged. “I’m hungry, I want to get lunch.”

I kept a straight face, and we went back inside to see Larry. I tried the direct approach.

“Was there anything else that you just happened to find when you found the statue?”

“Anything else, like what?”

“A glass ball.”

“A glass ball? Yeah, yeah. It was a big heavy thing, but I thought it was one of those lawn globe things. It was pretty ugly, so I just left it in the garage for about a year. Then I gave it away.”

As nonchalantly as I could, I uncapped my pen and drew my notebook. “Gave it away?” I said. “To whom?”

“Kim Beckles. My housekeeper. For her birthday, September 1989. She was into crystals and pyramids and stuff like that. She joked that she was a good witch.”

I told Larry to call Beckles, to say that he’d just learned that the crystal might be valuable, and that he was sending a couple of appraisers over to take a look. “Tell her that if you sell it, you’ll split the money, OK?”

Larry made the call and we headed for the witch’s house in Trenton, New Jersey. As soon as we arrived, we dropped the ruse. I banged on the door and yelled, “Police!” She answered quickly. From Larry’s description we were expecting a hag, but Beckles was a lithe beauty, twenty-nine years old, blond curly hair. We showed our badges, explained what we were looking for, and she seemed genuinely surprised. She told us she kept the orb in her bedroom. We followed her upstairs.

I’ll never forget the anticipation I felt climbing those stairs. It was the same kind of nervous anticipation I got whenever I went on
a drug raid, or helped collar a fleeing suspect—but better. I felt my heart pound. I wasn’t searching for common drugs or guns. I was searching for lost treasure.

We found the Dowager’s crystal ball on the witch’s dresser, under a ball cap.

When Bazin and I returned the orb to its rightful place under the rotunda at the Penn museum, I felt as proud of myself as an agent as I ever had, even though no one was charged with a crime. These art cases offered a different kind of satisfaction. And because Bazin and I were the only ones working them, we won a degree of independence rare in the by-the-book world of the FBI.

It didn’t hurt, either, that the case made big headlines. The day before the scheduled FBI press conference, someone leaked the story to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the paper put its exclusive on the front page. After the press conference, the story made all the evening news programs and appeared in four other papers the next morning. A few years later, when Bazin and I recovered a long-lost painting stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the story landed on the front page again. Fellow agents who pursued the more traditional FBI crimes, like drugs and robbery, might not seem too interested, but journalists appeared eager to write about art crime and give the stories good play. Each art crime inevitably carried a “hook,” a bit of intrigue, and the public ate it up. The attention was nice, but most important was that it made our local bosses look good, making it easier for them to green-light our next art crime case.

I led one other significant investigation while awaiting my trial in the early 1990s. Violent gangs were hitting high-end jewelry stores in smash-and-grab heists, bolting into the likes of Tiffany, Black, Starr and Frost, and Bailey Banks and Biddle in broad daylight, taking hammers and tire irons to display cases, and dashing off with fistfuls of diamonds and Rolex watches worth tens of thousands of dollars. The hoods came from Philadelphia but had hit more than one hundred stores in five states. I created and led a special task force that not only won federal indictments against thirty
gang members but also snared the ringleaders who fenced the stolen loot—two corrupt merchants from Philly’s Jewelers’ Row. Our work made the front page again and I developed long-term sources on Jewelers’ Row.

The successes at work were gratifying, but the accident continued to haunt my life. No matter how hard we tried, Donna and I couldn’t escape it. It always lingered in the background. Neighbors and friends followed developments regularly in the
Inquirer
and the
Camden Courier-Post
. Most people meant well, but they asked about the case whenever they saw us, and it was awkward—we didn’t want to be rude, but we wanted to talk about anything else. Meanwhile, the legal bills and delays piled up. Court hearings were scheduled, then postponed, scheduled, then postponed again. I wanted it all to end, but I feared the result. I was driving myself nuts. I needed an escape, something to occupy my mind.

“I gotta find something to do,” I told Donna. “I gotta find a hobby.”

“Yes, you do.”

I found one in baseball. I coached my sons, Kevin and Jeff, in Little League, and we liked to duck down to Baltimore to see my Orioles play at their new, throwback stadium, Camden Yards. On each trip, we fell into a routine: We arrived early for batting practice, got cheap seats, split a pack of baseball cards, and sometimes stayed late to try to snag autographs. Soon, we started attending baseball card shows, and I recognized a market in the Cal Ripken ’82 rookie cards (special Topps edition). The Oriole infielder was hugely popular in Baltimore, but not in Philadelphia. I started driving to card shows and strip mall storefronts near Philly, snapping up as many Ripken cards as possible. I got ’em for about $25 to $50 each. Then I’d drive to shows and events in Baltimore and sell them for $100 or $200 more. The year that Ripken broke the Iron Man record for most consecutive games, I sold the cards for $400. I was making a little extra cash doing something I liked. I thought,
Who knows?
If I lost my job and landed in prison, I’d need a new career
when I got out. Inspired, I branched out, trying my hand at Civil War collectibles and antique firearms. I attended shows, scoured newsletters for bargains, and began to buy, barter, and sell. I even put my Barnes experience to work and dabbled in fine art. I bought a few Picasso prints, and spent weekend afternoons wandering through suburban galleries and flea markets. I daydreamed about finding a long-lost Monet and turning a $1,000 investment into $100,000.