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  “Look, I understand you want to do it up there, at the consulate,” I said. “But here’s the deal: My authenticator, he’s an old guy. Not in such good heath. Doesn’t like to travel. So I think you’re going to have to bring the backflap down here.”

  Garcia didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he said, “You have the money?”

  Bingo. He was hooked. I said, “We’ve got the money, we got the money. One point six mil. What’s your fax number? I’ll send you a bank statement.”

  Garcia gave me the number, and I asked him how he wanted the $1.6 million. I wanted him thinking about the money, not about where he could meet me or whether he could trust me. He asked for $665,000 cash and $935,000 in wire transfers to bank accounts in Miami, Peru, Panama, and Venezuela.

  I jotted down names and numbers.

  “Got it—see you tomorrow.” With the sale closed, I got off the line as quickly as possible, before he could think of anything else.

  I called Goldman and filled him in: I would meet Garcia and Mendez at the same Turnpike rest stop at noon, then we’d drive to Philadelphia to meet the Gold Man.

  THIS TIME, GARCIA and Mendez arrived even earlier—11:24 a.m., according to the surveillance team—and in style, inside a dark green Lincoln Continental with diplomatic tags, a third man behind the wheel. They backed into a spot, positioning the trunk only a few yards from the picnic tables. Mendez and the third man, a strapping, gray-haired gentleman in a dark suit, grabbed a table and scanned the crisp October sky. Garcia walked over to the Burger King and returned with two coffees.

  At 11:54 a.m., I pulled into a nearby parking space with my undercover partner, Anibal Molina.

  Garcia greeted me warmly. “Bob!”

  “Hey Denis, how’re you doing, buddy?”

  The third man stepped in front of Garcia and handed me his card. “Frank Iglesias, Consul General de Panama, New York.” He was a bear of a man—six-one and at least 230 pounds—but he used the buttery voice of a seasoned diplomat. “How nice to meet you,” he said.

  We moved to the trunk and Mendez popped it. He opened a cheap black suitcase and pushed aside a pile of white T-shirts, revealing a large gold object ensconced in plastic bubble wrap—the backflap. Mendez reached into the suitcase, but I jumped in front of him. “Let me pull it out,” I said.

  I lifted the backflap from the trunk and tried to contain my excitement as I considered its long journey—a Peruvian national treasure, buried for seventeen centuries, stolen by grave robbers and missing for a decade, now glistening in the New Jersey sun, rescued in part by a pair of unwitting Miami smugglers.

  I beamed. “You really did it!” I said, my enthusiasm genuine. “Congratulations!” I laid the backflap back in the suitcase and bear-hugged Garcia. “I can’t believe it! You guys are pros.” I pumped Mendez’s hand. “This is fantastic. Fantastic!” I closed the trunk. “Let’s go see the Gold Man. I’ll drive slow so you can follow me.”

  We piled into our cars and they followed us down the Turnpike, the start of an hour-long ride to western Philadelphia.

  After we arrived in the parking lot of the Adam’s Mark Hotel, Iglesias popped the trunk and handed me the suitcase. “OK,” I said, walking toward the lobby, “let’s get this done.” As I crossed into the middle of the lot, reaching a spot where the bad guys had no place to hide, I gave the go-sign—I brushed my backside with my left hand. (The go-sign should always be something you rarely do, so you don’t give it by mistake.) Agents in raid jackets jumped out, guns drawn, shouting, “FBI! Let me see your hands! Down on your knees! FBI!” The agents pinned Mendez, Garcia, and Iglesias on the rough asphalt and cuffed their hands behind their backs. They led the Miamians away, but once they searched the diplomat, they un-cuffed him. Because of his diplomatic status, we had to let him go—for the time being. To prove Iglesias had been there, we shot a picture of him standing next to me. Ever the politician, the consul general managed an awkward smile.

  At the FBI offices, we put Garcia and Mendez in separate interview rooms, each with one ankle shackled to a chain bolted to the floor. I brought in the prosecutor to see Garcia.

  Goldman flashed his Justice Department ID, smiled, and said, “They call me the Gold Man.”

  Garcia closed his eyes and shook his head.

  THE AFTERMATH OF every art crime case has two parts: the routine judicial process in which the defendants hopefully go to prison—here Garcia and Mendez pleaded guilty and got nine months—and the public relations bonanza in which the press goes gaga over the rescue of the stolen art.

  This always seemed to baffle supervisors who didn’t appreciate the public’s (and the media’s) love of art, history, and antiquities. To these supervisors, art crime seemed very distant from the FBI’s primary missions of catching bank robbers, kidnappers, and terrorists. Once, years earlier, after Bazin and I had recovered a painting stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we met with the brass to discuss our ideas for a big press conference. A supervisor laughed at our enthusiasm. “For this little painting?” he said. “You’ll never get anyone to come!” Oh, no, we explained, the painting is a replica of a five-dollar bill by the famous artist William Michael Harnett. It’s an important piece, we said; people will care. The supervisor just laughed louder. Thankfully, we had an ace in the room—Special Agent Linda Vizi, the spokeswoman for the Philadelphia division of the FBI and a friend who shared my interests in history and art. Vizi was tough and intellectual—she’d majored in classics in college, studying Latin, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Sanskrit, and hieroglyphics. She also understood the press in ways her supervisors did not. “I guarantee you,” Vizi told the supervisor, “the five-dollar-bill story will make the front page.” The next day, when journalists jammed the press conference, she ribbed the supervisor. An hour later, he stuck his head in Vizi’s office and announced with an odd sense of satisfaction, “Well, it looks like it won’t be on the front page after all. Waco is burning.” Indeed, the next day’s Inquirer front page was dominated by stories about arguably the worst moment in FBI history, the April 19, 1993, assault and subsequent inferno at the Branch Davidian compound that left eighty people dead. But at the bottom of page one, there also was a little story about a long-lost painting, rescued by the FBI.

  From that day forward, Vizi and I worked together to make sure she had as much historical background as possible before we announced one of my cases. (As an undercover agent, I couldn’t appear in front of cameras. I always stood in the back of the room, well out of camera shot.) She kept the press conferences lively. Hardened journalists, weary of the FBI’s routine fare of violence, corruption, and bank robbery, seemed to perk up at the art crime press conferences. They were always on the prowl for something different, a legitimate good-news story, and art crime gave it to them.

  The media reaction to the backflap case surpassed our expectations. Reporters fell in love with a story that offered easy comparison to Raiders of the Lost Ark—a case with an exotic location, grave robbers, a smuggled national treasure secreted into the United States in a diplomatic bag, the rescue of the seventeen-hundred-year-old relic at gunpoint. The story in the Inquirer was stripped across the front page. It began, “In a tale out of an Indiana Jones movie, the FBI has recovered an exquisite Peruvian antiquity.” The headline in the tabloid Philadelphia Daily News, stealing a line from the second Indy movie, blared, “That piece belongs in a museum!” The Associated Press version of the story was published in papers across North and South America. The president of Peru soon announced that Goldman and I would be awarded the Peruvian Order of Merit for Distinguished Service, a gold medallion with a blue ribbon, the country’s top honor for distinguished service to the arts. Goldman enjoyed the spotlight and I was glad to let him and others bask in it, deservedly so.

  A few months later, we held a ceremony at the Penn archaeological museum, formally returning the piece to the Peruvian ambassador and Walter Alva, the Sipan tombs’ chief archaeologist and the author of th
e National Geographic stories. As I stood to the side, out of camera range, Alva convened his own press conference, explaining the significance of the day, straining in broken English to make a comparison the reporters could understand. Finally, he said, “It is a national treasure. For you, it would be as if someone had stolen the Liberty Bell.” The press fawned once more, again invoking the Indiana Jones theme.

  Vizi and I were thrilled because our supervisors were thrilled. 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. The FBI brass seemed to be beginning to realize that art recovery was good for the bureau, and not just in Philadelphia.

  CHAPTER 9

  HISTORY OUT THE BACK DOOR

  Philadelphia, 1997.

  THE SLEEPY, SOMEWHAT MUSTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY of Pennsylvania is largely unknown outside of Philadelphia. But the Federal-style building on Locust Street houses the nation’s second-largest repository of early Americana. Founded in 1824, the HSP holds thousands of important military and cultural pieces. The research library is stocked with more than 500,000 books, 300,000 graphic works, and 15 million manuscripts. Like most museums, the HSP displays only a fraction of its collection at any one time; the bulk of the collection remains in storage, where most artifacts sit for decades, untouched and largely ignored. The HSP had not conducted an inventory in a generation or more. It was simply too expensive and time-consuming.

  In late October 1997, the HSP embarked on its first full inventory in decades.

  Almost immediately, collections manager Kristen Froehlich found problems. Alarmed, she called me.

  So far, her inventory had revealed that four items were missing—a Lancaster County long rifle and three Civil War presentation swords.

  The rifle dated to the 1780s and probably had seen combat in the latter stages of the Revolutionary War. The rifle’s gold-tipped barrel extended forty-eight inches, longer than most sabers, and was handcrafted by the legendary Pennsylvania gunsmith Isaac Haines. The ceremonial presentation swords, made of gold, steel, silver, enamel, diamonds, rhinestones, and amethyst, were part of a military tradition that dated to Roman times. The missing swords and scabbards, Froelich said, were presented to the Union generals George Meade, David Birney, and Andrew Humphreys following great victories. The swords would be easy to identify because each included a unique, engraved inscription and was crammed with lavish, if not gaudy, decoration. Luckily, the curator said, she had pictures and a good written description of each one. For instance, the counter guard of the hilt on Meade’s sword, presented at Gettysburg, included thirty diamonds that formed two stars and the letter M across a blue enamel shield. I knew such swords could command $200,000 or more on the open market.

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Well, there could be more—I don’t know,” she said. “We think we’ve got twelve thousand pieces to inventory. And like I said, we’re just starting.”

  I told Froehlich I’d come right over, and asked her to prepare a list of all HSP employees. I said I would need to interview everyone.

  I didn’t mention that every museum employee, including Froehlich, would be a suspect.

  In art crime, 90 percent of museum thefts are inside jobs.

  ARMED DAYLIGHT MUSEUM robberies, like my Rodin case, are anomalies. Most museum thefts are committed or aided by insiders, people with access who know how to exploit a building’s vulnerabilities. An insider could be a ticket taker, a docent, a guide, an executive, a security guard, a custodian, an academic, even a trustee or wealthy patron—anyone tempted to use his or her access to walk away with a piece of art or history worth millions. The insider might be a temporary employee, perhaps part of a construction crew hired to perform a renovation, even a summer intern. This thief steals for any number of reasons, though greed, love, and revenge top the list of motives.

  Cultural institutions are loath to suspect one of their own; they like to think of themselves as families, colleagues engaged in a noble profession. Many museums don’t bother to run criminal background checks on employees or contractors. But they should. As terrible as it sounds, a museum’s biggest vulnerability is its employees.

  Insider thieves are everywhere: In Illinois, a shipping clerk arranged the theft of three Cézanne paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago, then threatened to kill the museum president’s child if his demands were not met. In Baltimore, a night watchman stole 145 pieces from the Walters Art Museum, taking the pieces one by one over eight months—each night, while making his rounds, he pried open a display case, pinched an Asian artifact or two, then rearranged the rest of the pieces so the display wouldn’t look suspicious. In Russia, a veteran curator in Saint Petersburg systematically looted the world-renowned Hermitage, removing more than $5 million worth of czarist treasures over fifteen years, a crime not discovered until long after she’d died, when the museum conducted its first inventory in decades. A legendary Ohio professor of medieval literature embarked on an audacious serial crime wave, secreting pages from rare book manuscripts at libraries across the world, from the Library of Congress to the Vatican.

  The biggest art crime in history was an inside job.

  On a sultry midsummer morning in 1911, Mona Lisa vanished from her vaunted perch in the Louvre, between a Correggio and a Titian. The theft occurred on a Monday, the only day of the week the museum was closed to the public, but it was not confirmed until late that afternoon because listless guards dickered over whether the most famous painting in the world had been stolen, or merely temporarily moved as part of a Louvre cataloging project. French detectives immediately interviewed more than a hundred members of the museum staff and contractors, including a simple-minded Italian glazer named Vincenzo Peruggia. The Parisian authorities botched a chance to catch Peruggia in the early days of the investigation when they mistakenly compared a left-thumb fingerprint found on Mona Lisa’s abandoned protective box to Peruggia’s right thumb.

  The heist garnered page-one news across the globe, and for a few weeks it became a bigger story than the looming world war. As the investigation foundered, the stories even briefly merged and sensational allegations appeared in the French media. Anti-German newspapers implied that the kaiser had played a role in the theft; opposition papers accused the struggling French government of stealing Mona Lisa as part of a wild Wag the Dog conspiracy to distract, outrage, and unite the French people against foreign aggressors. The Mona Lisa investigation took an awkward turn early on, when two radical modernists were wrongly detained under the theory that they’d stolen an icon of Old World art as some sort of artistic/political protest. One of the arrested radicals was a young artist named Pablo Picasso.

  The real thief, Peruggia, should have been a suspect from the outset. He had the means, motive, and opportunity. A craftsman who helped build the wood and glass box that protected Mona Lisa, he was privy to a fateful museum secret—Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece was secured to the wall by little more than four metal hooks and guarded only by a lone and drowsy military pensioner. The Louvre was so cavernous and in such a state of constant renovation that Peruggia, with his white workman’s blouse and smock, drew little attention when he waltzed into the Salon Carré shortly after sunrise that Monday morning.

  “The room was deserted,” Peruggia recalled years later. “There hung the painting that is one of our great works. Mona Lisa smiled down on me. In a moment, I had snatched her from the wall. I carried her to the staircase, took off the frame, slipped the painting under my blouse, and left with the greatest nonchalance. It was all done in a few seconds.”

  Peruggia hid Mona Lisa in his tiny Paris apartment for two years. He was careful, of course, but like most art thieves, he became frustrated when he could not sell the painting to a legitimate dealer. In 1913, he smuggled the painting to Italy, and offered to sell it to a dealer who was close to the director of Uffizi Gallery, the most famous mus
eum in Florence. The dealer and museum director met Peruggia in a hotel room and promised to pay 500,000 Italian lire on the condition that he bring Mona Lisa to the Uffizi for a final examination. They tipped the police, and officers arrested Peruggia when he arrived with the painting. Afterward, Peruggia claimed to be a patriot, insisting that he stole the Mona Lisa to return her to her native Italy. The story appealed to many Italians, but it fell flat in court. As prosecutors noted, da Vinci himself brought Mona Lisa to France during the sixteenth century, and they presented a letter Peruggia wrote to his family after the theft in which he boasted, “I have finally obtained my fortune!” At trial, Peruggia’s own testimony proved his motives were not pure. He expected to claim a reward for “rescuing” Mona Lisa.

  “I heard talk of millions,” he testified.

  Convicted in 1914, Peruggia spent less than a year in prison, an appalling sentence for so serious a crime, yet a trend that would haunt art crime cases throughout the century. By the time he was released, a world war raged across Europe and he was largely forgotten.

  IT TOOK ME the better part of a week to interview the HSP staff. I met with thirty-seven of the thirty-eight employees—a custodian named Ernest Medford called in sick. The supervisors insisted that talking to Medford would be a waste of time. “Ernie’s been here seventeen years,” Froehlich said. “When we have a problem, he’s our go-to guy.”

  We turned next to the public, and helped the museum publicize a $50,000 reward, blasting faxes to a long list of media outlets, from National Public Radio to The Inquirer to Antiques and The Arts Weekly. This generated a quick splash of publicity, but the reward tactic that had worked so well in the Rodin case brought dubious results this time, clogging our confidential tip line with useless crap. “Caller reports suspicious man eyeing a display case. No further information,” an operator scribbled in her notes. “Caller saw a sword in the backseat of a car at a parking lot on Essington Avenue near Seventy-fourth Street in a Chevrolet. Two weeks ago.” And my favorite: “Caller is psychic, will volunteer time, notes a Capricorn moon day of robbery.”