[MSN] Stealing beauty: Art theft happens everywhere

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

  Stealing beauty: Art theft happens everywhere

Google "art theft" and you'll be off on a merry, if depressing, chase. 
Thieves take everything, everywhere, it seems. And not just from museums 
-- more than half of stolen art is snatched from homes, only 12 percent 
each from galleries and museums. Art theft may seem pretty exotic, but 
Interpol estimates it's the world's fourth-largest crime after drug 
running, money laundering and illegal arms trading. That's why the FBI 
set up a special 12-member Art Crime Team in 2004. One of the agents, 
Robert Wittman will be in town this week to discuss the subject.
Google "art theft" and you'll be off on a merry, if depressing, chase. 
Thieves take everything, everywhere, it seems. And not just from museums 
-- more than half of stolen art is snatched from homes, only 12 percent 
each from galleries and museums. Art theft may seem pretty exotic, but 
Interpol estimates it's the world's fourth-largest crime after drug 
running, money laundering and illegal arms trading. That's why the FBI 
set up a special 12-member Art Crime Team in 2004. One of the agents, 
Robert Wittman will be in town this week to discuss the subject.

There are high-profile cases: The looting of Baghdad's National Museum 
at the start of the war in Iraq, the recent theft of hundreds of objects 
from the Hermitage Museum in Russia and the 2003 heist of a Leonardo da 
Vinci painting from a Scottish castle. (By coincidence, the documentary 
"Stolen," about the 1990 theft of 13 paintings from the Isabella Stewart 
Gardner Museum in Boston, is also being shown all week at the University 
of Minnesota's Bell Auditorium.)

There are also ghastly, garden-variety blunders like the $2 billion 
worth of stolen paintings, sculpture, books and musical instruments that 
a mad mom from Germany destroyed in 2001 after her son was arrested for 
stealing them. She was ticked off that he had stored the loot in her 
house, so she tossed some into a canal and ground up the rest in the 
garbage disposal. We're talking about paintings by Brueghel, Boucher, 
Watteau and other rarities. Ugly.

Locally, a 1978 theft of Norman Rockwell paintings from Elayne's 
Galleries in St. Louis Park took 20 years to solve, a case Wittman might 
touch on.

MARY ABBE

http://www.startribune.com