[MSN] FBI agent like a modern-day Indiana Jones.

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

FBI agent like a modern-day Indiana Jones
By DAVID HENCH Blethen Maine Newspapers

For Robert Wittman, life as an FBI agent isn't all about catching bad guys.
His passion is in reclaiming pilfered pieces of our cultural heritage,
unique items of historical significance that unscrupulous thieves and
black-market dealers parlay for profit. 

"I didn't get that back for the Swedes," he says of a $35 million Rembrandt
he recovered last year. "I got it back for all of us." 

Wittman is like some modern-day Indiana Jones, working against tomb-robbers
and art thieves to recover stolen antiquities. But instead of a bullwhip and
wide-brimmed hat, Wittman is as likely to wear a sport coat and carry a
briefcase full of cash. 

Posing as a buyer in this country, Wittman recovered a 2,000-year-old piece
of gold battle armor looted from a king's tomb in Peru. In that country,
rife with poverty and desperation, the artifact was received with a
reverence and symbolism like that of the Liberty Bell in this country, said
Wittman, who lives outside Philadelphia. 

"It's pride in what their ancestors did. It's about the hope and cultural
property of people who need that so they can have pride in themselves," he
said. Wittman forbids having his photograph taken because of his undercover
work. 

With silver hair and tan, handsome features, and a debonair bearing, Wittman
concedes he wouldn't be as effective as an undercover drug agent. "But I
could be an art buyer." 

It helps that he can tell a Miro from a Monet, and a Renoir from a Cezanne,
and that when negotiating to buy Geronimo's eagle feather war bonnet he can
convince the seller to a sign a receipt for the $1.2 million artifact.
Wittman is the senior investigator with the FBI's Art Crimes Team. His slide
presentation last week at the Portland Museum of Art to 100 members of the
World Affairs Council was the group's grand finale to this year's series of
events.

The key to Wittman and his team's success is greed. For the bad guys, "it's
all about the money," he said. The profit motive in art theft not only gives
authorities their best chance at catching crooks, it also gives Wittman
confidence that almost all the stolen items will resurface, eventually. 

"They're all going to come back sooner or later," he said. "

To a thief, a Picasso is just a piece of canvass with paint on it unless you
can resell it." 

The black market art and antiquities trade is estimated at $2 billion to $4
billion a year, he said. 

Art thieves are not the handsome, charismatic men of the silver screen, Cary
Grant, Sean Connery or Pierce Brosnan. 

"I see Larry, Moe and Curly," he said, showing a slide of several
international art thieves looking very unromantic. 

The FBI team, with just a dozen members, is dwarfed by similar units in
countries such as Italy, Spain and France. 

But the U.S. is a lucrative market for dealers in stolen art and
antiquities, so the FBI is drawn in to some of the biggest international
capers. 

When three armed men, using car bombs for a diversion and a speedboat for
escape, stole paintings from a museum in Stockholm, there was little
connection with U.S. authorities. 

But Wittman's team eventually arranged to buy the $35 million Rembrandt,
apparently the only self-portrait ever done by the Dutch master, at a
Copenhagen hotel for $250,000 in $100 bills. 

He described one of the unit's more rewarding cases, the recovery of the
battle flag of the 12th Regiment Corps d'Afrique, one of only two battle
flags in existence from the original Negro regiments that fought for the
north in the Civil War. It was stolen from U.S. Army museum authorities as
it was transferred from one fort to another 20 years earlier. 

"Five color guards were killed with that flag. ... In the smoke and dust and
blood and pain of the battlefield, all they had was this flag. That's what
kept them going," he said. "It's not the object, it's not the money, it's
what it means." 

One of the most profound assaults on cultural heritage right now is the
looting of artifacts from the 10,000 archeological sites in Iraq that are
not guarded, he said. 

"Any time a piece of that leaves the ground without any historical
information, we lose a piece of our humanity." 

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/