[CPProt.net] What turns collectors into thieves?

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

The 2006 Collectors Guide 
Passion Plays 
Joshua Levine, 12.26.05 


What turns collectors into thieves?

>From his jail cell in Switzerland three years ago Stephane Breitwieser told
a reporter about his first time. It was 1994. He was drooling over an
18th-century pistol in an unlocked glass case in the Musée des Amis de Thann
in Alsace, France. "The pistol fascinated me. My heart was going 100 miles
an hour, I was terrified, but I was driven by passion. I asked myself,
‘What's holding me back?'" said Breitwieser, now 34 and finishing up a
separate 26-month prison term in France. "Afterwards, I slept with the
pistol beside me--I cleaned the wood, removed the rust; I treated it like a
baby I was nursing. But I was still very frightened. Each day for a month I
bought the newspaper, but the museum said nothing about the theft--a lot of
museums prefer to smother these affairs. Eventually I calmed down." 

And how. Breitwieser got so calm that he spent the next seven years
snatching works of art from small museums all over Europe, becoming one of
the busiest art thieves in history. Nothing fancy about his MO. He grabbed
small things he could fit easily under his coat or in a knapsack and
strolled out of sparingly guarded front doors the way he came in. He favored
antique weapons and musical instruments, but he also made off with several
minor masterpieces of painting, including works by Lucas Cranach the Younger
and François Boucher. "There was often no watchman or anything--all you had
to do was bend down and pick something up," marveled Breitwieser. 

Eight years later he had amassed some 250 objects, which he stashed in his
bedroom at his mother's house in eastern France. He finally slipped up in
2001 by returning to the Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne, where two days
earlier he had stolen an antique hunting horn. A museum worker recognized
him and called the police. 

You may recall the sickening end to the story. After hearing her son had
been apprehended, his mother, Mireille, tried desperately to destroy all
evidence of his crimes. She shredded the paintings and mixed the priceless
tatters with her compost. The antique weapons and musical instruments she
dumped in the Rhine-Rhône canal--whether to save her son or herself is still
a matter of conjecture. 

How much was the whole thing worth? Certainly far less than the $2 billion
the newspapers claimed at the time, but probably well above $30 million. 

Not that Breitwieser saw a penny of it. He never sold a single object. That
wasn't the point. "I did it because I loved these things, because I simply
had to possess them," said Breitwieser, a scrawny young man with a jumpy
manner, wispy hair, pale skin, a pointy nose and not a shred of remorse. 

Jonathan Sazonoff, an expert on crime for the Museum Security Network, a
nonprofit group in the Netherlands, calls characters like Breitwieser
"cultural kleptomaniacs." A tiny minority in the fraternity of art thieves,
they are in a way its aristocracy. They steal for love, not lucre, and their
special devotion ennobles them--at least they think it does. 

To this deeply neurotic breed, pilfering is just collecting by other means.
Very often they know as much or more about what they steal than the
acknowledged experts in the field. John Quentin Feller, a onetime history
professor at the University of Scranton, was a noted expert in Chinese
porcelain who talked his way into museum storage vaults and walked off with
over 100 pieces from eight museums, mostly in the U.S., over a period of 20
years. In an uncharacteristic display of chutzpah he went so far as to
donate some of his loot to other, less-endowed institutions. 

"These guys take things because they feel they deserve to, since they have a
better understanding of them than the general public," says Robert Wittman,
a special agent with the FBI. "They rationalize to themselves that the stuff
is better off in their possession than it is in some museum." 

George Csizmazia was an electrician who had done work for the Historical
Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was also a collector of Civil
War artifacts. Csizmazia's work brought him into contact with Ernest
Medford, a custodian for the society. Over the course of seven or eight
years Medford stole 200 items from the historical society and sold them to
Csizmazia for a total of $8,000 or so. They were worth perhaps $2.5 million.


Like Breitwieser, once Csizmazia got hold of an object, he never let go of
it. He arranged his entire collection in an overstuffed bedroom of his small
three-bedroom house in Delaware County, Pa.--more than two dozen swords, two
dozen Civil War rifles, the gun John Brown used at Harpers Ferry and George
Washington's tea caddy. There were locks up and down the bedroom door. 

"He had an interesting rationale," says G-man Wittman, who caught Csizmazia
in 1997. "He said that because the stuff was so easy for him to steal, it
was safer in his possession than in the museum's." 

It would have stayed that way, too, had Csizmazia not let his collector's
pride overcome his prudence. At an antiques market in the Poconos he just
couldn't help boasting that he owned a $15,000 jewel-encrusted presentation
sword belonging to a Union general. Word filtered back to Wittman two years
later when he was tracking a similar sword that had gone missing. The trail
led back to Csizmazia, and his collecting days were over. 

Csizmazia looked set to pull a light sentence. He gave everything back and
cooperated with the FBI. Then 20 large museums demanded that Judge Clarence
Newcomer throw the book at Csizmazia--a highly unusual response to a crime
that dares not speak its name for fear of inspiring copycats. Guys like
Csizmazia aren't art lovers, howled the museums; they're crooks. Csizmazia
and Medford got four-year stretches, despite the fact that it was a first
offense for both of them. 

A rare victory in the battle against the light-fingered art lovers. Unless
they blunder, they can keep going for a very long time. Security at small
museums is often porous, underbudgeted for alarms, surveillance cameras and
manpower. At the kinds of out-of-the-way museums that Breitwieser and
Csizmazia favored, a single somnolent guard is often the only
discouragement. 

More important is the collector-thief's limited ambition for his loot. "The
fact that they're not disposing of the stuff helps explain their long
careers," says Simon Mackenzie, a lecturer of criminology at Keele
University in Staffordshire, U.K. "The point at which art reenters the
market is always the point at which it is easiest to catch people." 

It took 35 years to catch Jeffrey Stevens, who traveled the U.S. in his van,
where he often slept, pilfering hundreds of items in dozens of states. He
had started out working as a picker for antique dealers but soon graduated
to picking for himself. Stevens had a penchant for Americana and American
Indian artifacts. He suffered from Asperger's disorder, characterized by a
deficiency of social skills and a compulsive focus on some hobby or topic.
"He had very little personality--a flat affect," says Herman (Chuck) Watson,
who was Stevens' lawyer. "He was secretive, obsessive. But at the same time
he was brazen. If this guy saw something he wanted, he could dismantle a
locked display case, have the damn thing out and put the case back together
inside of five minutes." 

It all came apart for Stevens when a fire in his San Diego home in 2003
incinerated a good part of his collection, worth $1 million-plus. For
obvious reasons, there was no insurance. "He just kind of broke down after
that," says Watson. "His last spree through Montana was kind of
desperate--as if he wanted to get caught." 

A year later a woman working at the Daniels County Museum & Pioneer Town in
Scobey, Mont. happened upon Stevens as he pried decorations off one of the
museum's antique cars. She threw him out but wrote down his license plate
number as he drove off. 

They caught Stevens a short while later. With an arraignment scheduled for
late 2004, Watson says, he was negotiating to get his client off without
jail time. Stevens would return the stolen items that hadn't been destroyed
and help the feds on other art crimes he knew something about. But before
his case was resolved, he succumbed to a heart attack at age 59. 

http://www.forbes.com/