Priceless Page 3

  Where was the passion?

  We love art because it strikes a visceral chord in everyone, from the eight-year-old kid to the octogenarian. The simple act of putting paint on canvas or transforming iron into sculpture, whether by a French master or a first-grader, is a marvel of the human mind and creates a universal connection. All art elicits emotion. All art makes you feel.

  This is why, when a work of art is stolen or an ancient city is stripped of its artifacts and its soul, we feel violated.

  As I waited for the Interpol chief to wrap up so I could begin my presentation, I looked out across the room at all the dignitaries. The heavy snow was now piled as high as the windows. I began to daydream. How, I wondered, did the son of a Baltimore orphan and a Japanese clerk wind up here, as his country’s top art crime sleuth?

  PROVENANCE

  CHAPTER 3

  THE MAKING OF AN AGENT

  Baltimore, 1963.

  “JAP!” I’d heard it before, but the slur from the large white woman with an armful of groceries hit me with such force, I stumbled. I squeezed my mother’s hand and dropped my eyes to the sidewalk. As the woman brushed past, she hissed again.

  “Nip!”

  I was seven years old.

  My mother, Yachiyo Akaishi Wittman, did not flinch. She kept her gaze level and her face taut, and I knew that she expected me to do the same. She was thirty-eight years old and, as far as I knew, the only Japanese woman in our working-class neighborhood of two-story brick starter homes. We were newcomers, having moved from my mother’s native Tokyo to my father’s Baltimore a few years earlier. My parents had met in Japan during the last months of the Korean War, while Dad was stationed at the Tachikawa U.S. air base, where Mom was a clerk. They married in 1953 and my older brother, Bill, was born the same year. I was born in Tokyo two years later. We inherited my mom’s almond eyes and thin build, and my father’s Caucasian complexion and wide smile.

  Mom didn’t speak English well, and this isolated her, slowing her assimilation in the United States. She remained mystified by basic American customs, such as the birthday cake. But she certainly recognized and understood the racial slurs. With memories of World War II still raw, we had neighbors who’d fought in the Pacific or lost family there. During the war my American dad and my Japanese mom’s brothers had served in opposing armies. Dad dodged kamikazes driving a landing craft that ferried Marines to Pacific beaches; one of Mom’s older brothers died fighting Americans in the Philippines.

  My parents sent my brother and me to proper Catholic schools in Baltimore, but surrounded us with all things Japanese. Our cabinets and shelves overflowed with Japanese ceramics and antiques. The walls were covered with woodblocks by Hiroshige, Toyokuni, and Utamaro, the Japanese masters who inspired van Gogh and Monet. We ate dinner on a table crafted from dark Japanese mahogany and sat on funky curved bamboo chairs.

  The overt racism that we encountered enraged my father, but his anger rarely flared in front of me. Dad didn’t talk about it much and I knew he’d faced far greater hardship as a kid. When he was three or four years old, his parents died one after the other, and he and his older brother, Jack, became wards of Catholic Charities. At St. Patrick’s Orphanage, my dad learned to fend for himself. When forced to participate in chorus, he sang loudly off key. When unjustly persecuted by a brutal male teacher, he socked the man in the nose. Dad quickly became too much for the nuns to handle, and they shipped him to a foster home, separating him from his brother. Dad bounced from family to family, more than a dozen in all, until he turned seventeen, old enough to join the U.S. Navy, in 1944.

  As I moved through elementary school and junior high in the 1960s, I followed the daily struggles of the civil rights movement in the papers and on television. The FBI and its special agents always seemed involved. They protected victims of racism and prosecuted the bigots and bullies. I asked my mother about the FBI agents and she said they sounded like honorable men. On Sunday nights in the late 1960s, my mom, dad, brother, and I gathered by our new color television to watch episodes of The F.B.I., the no-nonsense series starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., with scripts personally approved by J. Edgar Hoover. On TV, the FBI always got its man, and the agents were noble protectors of justice and the American way. At the end of some shows, Zimbalist asked for the public’s help to solve a crime, a sort of precursor to America’s Most Wanted. I loved it. We rarely missed an episode.

  One of our neighbors, Walter Gordon, was a special agent in the FBI’s Baltimore division. When I was ten years old, he was the coolest man I knew. Mr. Gordon wore a fine suit, shined shoes, and crisp white shirt every day. He drove the nicest car on the block, a bureau-issue late-model green two-door Buick Skylark. People looked up to him. I knew that he carried a gun, but I never saw it, only deepening his G-man mystique. I hung out with three of his sons, Jeff, Dennis, and Donald, playing stoopball in their front yard and trading baseball cards in their basement. The Gordons were genuinely kind people who embraced our struggling family without making it feel like charity. When I turned eleven, Mrs. Gordon heard that I had never had a birthday cake. So she baked one for me, layered with dark chocolate. Years later, when Mr. Gordon heard that my dad had opened a new seafood restaurant, he began to bring fellow agents there for lunch, even though it was out of the way, in a sketchy part of town near the Pimlico racetrack. I knew Mr. Gordon didn’t come for the food. He came to bring paying customers to help a neighbor.

  The restaurant, a short-lived enterprise called Neptune’s Galley, was only one of my dad’s many start-up businesses. Whatever the venture, Dad was always boss-owner and a gregarious guy, never cheap, but we struggled to build savings and financial stability. He opened a home-remodeling company, raced second-tier Thoroughbreds, created a college catalog business, and wrote a book on how to win the lottery. He ran unsuccessfully for city council and opened an antiques storefront on Howard Street called Wittman’s Oriental Gallery. That business was among his most successful and satisfying. My dad figured I’d join him in his business ventures and my mom hoped I would become a professional classical pianist. (I was accomplished in high school, but I soon discovered I wasn’t good enough to make a career of it.)

  By the time I entered Towson University in 1973—as a part-time night student, taking classes as I could afford them—I knew what I wanted to be: an FBI agent. I kept these plans to myself. I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t like to talk much about what he’s going to do until he does it. I guess the trait comes from my mom’s Japanese heritage. Besides, I didn’t want to disappoint my parents.

  Still, my view of the FBI had matured. The job now seemed not only interesting but sensible, responsible yet thrilling. I liked the notion of protecting the innocent, investigating cases, working as a policeman whose main weapon is his brain, not his gun. I also liked the idea of serving my country, and still felt guilty that the Vietnam draft lottery had ended the year before I turned eighteen. And after years of watching my dad struggle as a small businessman, I also could not ignore the promise of a stable government job with guaranteed benefits. Another allure was an agent’s sense of honor, or gedi in Japanese. The little I knew about FBI agents came mostly from watching Mr. Gordon and from television. But it seemed like an honorable profession and a good way to serve my country. After I graduated from Towson, I called the FBI and asked for a job.

  I excitedly told the agent who took my call that I met each of the FBI’s requirements. I was twenty-four years old, a college graduate, a U.S. citizen, and had no criminal record.

  That’s nice, kid, the agent said as kindly as he could. “But we like our applicants to get three years’ real-world work experience first. Give us a call then.” Discouraged, I moved to Plan B: the Foreign Service, figuring I could work for the State Department and travel for three years, then transfer to the FBI. I took the exam, but didn’t get the job. Apparently, I didn’t have enough political juice.

  The same year, my brother Bill and I joined my dad in a new business
, a monthly agricultural newspaper called The Maryland Farmer. Neither my dad nor I knew anything about journalism or farming, but the paper was 75 percent ads anyway—for fertilizer, seed, dairy products, tractors, anything a farmer might need. Our advertisers were as big as Monsanto and as small as a local general store. I had never set type or written a headline, and I couldn’t tell the difference between an Angus and a Holstein. But I quickly learned how to do all of those things. I also learned the art of listening. I met with farmers, judged farm show contests, wooed corporate executives, and got to know career bureaucrats. I wrote stories, edited them, sold ads, designed headlines, supervised copy as it was punched into the big Compugraphic machine, and used an X-Acto knife to paste it all onto the page. We did fairly well, and by 1982, Wittman Publications had expanded to four states. I traveled extensively, perhaps a hundred thousand miles a year, learning how to sell a product, and more important, to sell myself, a skill that would become essential years later when I worked undercover. I mastered the most important lesson of sales: If someone likes the product, but doesn’t like you, they won’t buy it; if, on the other hand, they’re not crazy about the product, yet they like you, well, they may buy it anyway. In business, you have to sell yourself first. It’s all about impressions.

  On the road, I learned how to manipulate—how to make cattlemen, peanut farmers, tobacco growers, and lobbyists believe this city boy cared about their issues. But I didn’t really care. I still longed to join the FBI. And after eight years of constant deadlines, weekly scrambles to find advertisers, and managing banal disputes between reporters and advertising salesmen, the job got old.

  One October evening, after another frantic day at the office, I headed out to blow off some steam and grab a good dinner. I made my way to a trendy new restaurant in the city, a place where I knew I could grab a great bowl of lobster bisque and catch Game Four of the American League Championship Series, the Orioles versus the Angels. My bisque arrived and hit the spot; I’d been so busy that day I’d missed lunch. The Orioles jumped out to a three-run lead in the fourth inning, but at the bar, a blond woman kept bobbing up and down, blocking my view of the television. I found it irritating. But during the fifth inning, she turned slightly and I caught her profile. Wow. This woman was a radiant beauty with a smile that made me forget the game. I introduced myself, tried to stay cool. We spoke for an hour and she finally agreed to give me her number. Her name was Donna Goodhand, and she was twenty-five years old, a dental office manager with a bright sense of humor. On the rear of her white 1977 Malibu Classic was a bumper sticker that said, IGNORE YOUR TEETH AND THEY WILL GO AWAY. I liked her style, and I thought I’d acted suavely during our first encounter. Later, she would confide that she hadn’t seen it that way—she originally found me pushy, obnoxious. By her account, I rescued myself on our third date, when I took her to my parents’ home and serenaded her with “Unchained Melody” on the piano. We married two and a half years later.

  In the mid-1980s, Donna and I had two young sons, Kevin and Jeffrey. We lived in a tiny townhouse and, because my newspaper business was too small to provide medical benefits, Donna worked full-time for the Union Carbide Corporation.

  One day in 1988, Donna showed me a newspaper ad that said the FBI was hiring. I played it cool and shrugged, careful not to raise expectations, still embarrassed by the post-graduation call. But my mind drifted back to the notions of service, honor, independence, Mr. Gordon and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. I also knew I didn’t have much more time. I was thirty-two years old. The FBI stopped taking new agents at age thirty-five. Without telling Donna, I took the aptitude test at the FBI offices in Baltimore. I figured if I failed, I wouldn’t tell anyone and that would be it. A few months later, an FBI agent showed up at the newspaper and asked to see me. I took him into my private office and we sat down. He was thin, tall, and wore large round glasses with thick lenses. He wore a cheap light-brown sport coat and blue trousers. The agent was there to check my background, but we also talked a lot about what it was like to be an agent. He was a good salesman. Then again, I was an easy sell.

  “… And so, in just a few months, if you became a special agent, you could find yourself driving a high-powered car with a shotgun on the side of a mountain or on an Indian reservation, and you might be the only law around for thirty miles…”

  That sounded pretty cool. Working alone, supervising no one. Carrying a shotgun. Representing the U.S. government. Protecting the innocent, prosecuting evil. The only law around for miles.

  The agent looked me over once more. “Let me ask you something.” He pointed through the door to my newspaper employees scurrying to put out the next edition. “Why do you want to leave all this? You make $65,000 and you’re the boss, the owner. In the FBI, you’ll start at $25,000 and be told what to do, where to live.”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Easy choice. I’ve always wanted to be an FBI agent.”

  We shook hands.

  There was one more test—the FBI’s physical training test, a complexly scored series of exercises—running, pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups. I was thirty-two years old, and had to train to pass. That summer, every evening after work, I hit the local track. The whole family joined me, Donna pushing baby Jeffrey in an umbrella stroller as toddler Kevin ran behind her. I passed and won entrance to the FBI Academy. On the Sunday of Labor Day weekend 1988, we drove to Donna’s parents’ home on the Chesapeake Bay to celebrate Kevin’s fourth birthday and my entrance into the FBI. We lined six picnic tables side by side—sixty friends, neighbors, and family members munching burgers and hot dogs, cracking large steamed crabs, sipping chilled Budweiser by the bay. There were toasts, hugs, and family photos. It was bittersweet. The next day, I piled into Donna’s aging Malibu, left my family, and headed to Quantico, Virginia, to report for the fourteen-week FBI Academy.

  From the first day, I was struck by how much each of my fifty classmates had in common. We were mostly conservative, roughly thirty years old, patriotic, clean-cut. I was also struck by the fact that unlike me, most recruits came to the Academy with a law-enforcement background. They were ex-soldiers and former policemen, people who embraced military bearing and physical contact. They enjoyed boxing, wrestling, kicking, handcuffing and firing weapons, taking pepper spray in the face as part of a manly rite of passage. I didn’t share their macho creed. While I understood that my job might be dangerous, and I stood willing to sacrifice myself to save a civilian or a fellow agent, that didn’t mean I would do something stupid. I always scored well on FBI written tests because I knew the correct answer in most scenarios was to call for backup, not to play hero. Question: Two armed men rob a bank, fire at a police officer, and duck into a home. What do you do? Answer: Call for backup and the SWAT team. The military might be willing to accept some losses, but in law enforcement there is no such thing as an acceptable loss. The physical training at the academy was necessary, but I found it something to endure, not embrace. Thankfully, my dorm roommate, Larry Wenko, shared my view. Larry came up with a mantra that helped us get through the hellish fourteen weeks: Here to Leave.

  In our final weeks at the academy, we received our postings. Donna and I had hoped for Honolulu. We got Philly.

  It was not a choice assignment. In 1988, Philadelphia was grimy, expensive, and a decade away from making its great comeback. I tried to make the best of it, lamely reminding Donna that Philadelphia was only ninety minutes from our relatives in Baltimore. She laughed and bit her tongue. We both knew we weren’t moving to Philadelphia for its location or quality of life. We moved to Philadelphia so I could pursue my dream.

  We didn’t realize how fortuitous the FBI’s choice would be. Philadelphia is home to two of the nation’s best art museums and one of the country’s largest archaeology collections.

  The month I reported for duty, two of them were robbed.

  CHAPTER 4

  MASK OF THE MAN WITH THE BROKEN NOSE

  Philadelphia, 1988.

  THE FIRST THIEF HIT THE RO
DIN MUSEUM, AN ELEGANT building dedicated to the French artist who sparked the Impressionist movement in sculpture.

  The museum holds the largest collection of Rodin’s work outside of Paris and sits prominently on the northwestern edge of Philadelphia’s grand boulevard, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The Rodin is managed by its sprawling neighbor, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which boasts paintings by Dalí, Monet, van Gogh, Rubens, Eakins, and Cézanne. In pop culture, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is better known as the spot where Sylvester Stallone jogged up seventy-two steps in the movie Rocky. It’s an exhausting climb. The flat terrain in front of the Rodin Museum, on the other hand, is far more hospitable. The only barrier between the museum and the parkway is a lovely courtyard anchored by a six-and-a-half-foot-tall cast of the artist’s most famous work, The Thinker.

  On November 23, 1988, a troubled young man entered the Rodin Museum at 4:55 p.m., five minutes before closing time. The winter sun had already set, and the museum was nearly empty. The man wore blue jeans, white sneakers, a dark T-shirt, and a long gray tweed overcoat. His dirty blond hair fell below his shoulders, and the guards at the door figured he was an art student. The lone cashier at the tiny gift shop did not notice the man until he spoke.

  “This is business!” the bandit announced as he drew a .25-caliber Raven pistol, a Saturday night special with a worn wooden grip. “On the floor, I say!” He pointed the shiny silver barrel at the guards, but the weapon was so small and the man spoke so theatrically that the guards hesitated. Was this an act? A prank? Was this guy unhinged? He spoke with the lilt of a British accent, but was clearly American. With his hair slicked back and his high cheekbones, he looked a little like James Dean. When no one moved, the man fired a shot into the wall.