[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 

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