"Upgrading to stay ahead (US museum thefts)," The Art Newspaper, Sept. 1997, p. 14.

US museums meet the challenge of theft

by Jason Edward Kaufman

Since the Gardner heist of 1990 museums across the country have reexamined their security and upgraded wherever possible. The results have been highly satisfactory, with US museum crime plummeting and only a handful of major thefts reported in the past decade. "I see a response directly related to the number of thefts," says Steve Keller, a leading consultant in the industry. "After the Gardner theft I was extremely busy, but business has slowed in the last couple of years. It's been quiet," he says. "Recent thefts have mostly been in Europe where there are more borders to cross and more art in small, less well funded institutions, ill-equipped to deal with security, like churches, provincial museums, and villas that are vacant for August, particularly in northern Italy. The major institutions, however, are comparable to the US," he says.

Nevertheless, museums will always be an El Dorado beckoning to thieves to partake of their fabled treasures. And while less-well-protected private homes remain the easiest targets, about one in eight reported art thefts in the US are from museums. The sheer variety of criminal schemes is impressive, as is the array of armed robbers, visiting scholars, and museum employees who execute them [see article this page], but so is the battery of tactics which museums now use to thwart them.

Whereas it used to be simply a matter of installing reliable burglar alarms, the field has become one of considerable sophistication. "I can rob your museum with high-tech methods now. You really have to stay ahead of these guys," warns Mr. Keller. US museums have been doing just that. James J. Davis, chief of protection services at the National Gallery of Art and head of the American Association of Museums Standing Professional Committee on Museum Security, says that in the last decade anti-theft technology has improved dramatically, with smaller more powerful low-light color cameras, increased sensitivity of intrusion-detection devices and infrared curtains, even wireless motion detectors which can be placed on objects. [An independent company, Underwriters Laboratory, sets insurance standards for all of these types of equipment.]

But according to Mr. Keller, museums face a substantial expenditure to upgrade, and it is "generally when they build a new wing that they're coming around to the twentieth century."

Another problem is that when operating costs rise museums tend to cut guards, not curators, then replace them with closed-circuit cameras and other devices which are no substitute for highly trained staff. Criminals prey on smaller museums which cannot afford to employ an adequate number of guards. By contrast, the Smithsonian Institution, which maintains its own security force of around 1,000, has not suffered a major theft at any of its sixteen highly visited museums for twenty years. A related concern is that museums are hiring their own thieves, and even increased background investigations on personnel have not put a stop to the threat of insider thefts.

A significant development in the fight against art theft was the establishment in 1977 of the International Foundation on Art (IFAR), which, on the initiative of the insurance and art and antiques industries, in 1990-91 began the Art Loss Register (ALR), a computerised database of stolen and missing works of art, antiques and valuables. Operating as a commercial venture from its offices in London and NY, the ALR functions as a clearinghouse for information on stolen art, assisting law enforcement agencies, insurers, dealers, museums, and collectors in the battle against art theft. From 1991-96 inclusive, 80,000 objects were reported lost, of which 55% were stolen from private homes, 12% from galleries, 11% from museums, 10% from churches, and 2% or less from public institutions, commercial premises, warehouses, or while in transit. Of some 9,000 items taken from American victims, nearly 700 were from American museums.

The numbers may be deceiving, however, because image-conscious museums often do not publicise losses. For many years, in fact, they preferred to conceal them, fearing adverse press might discourage gifts. That was the prevailing attitude in 1977 when the ALR issued a report on art theft. "The museum world was overwhelmingly against reporting thefts for reasons of embarrassment and the chilling effect they imagined it would have on gifts," recalls Bonnie Burnham, who conducted the study. "However, today, everyone realises it could happen under the best security circumstances. No one is Fort Knox," she says.

Nevertheless, publicity remains a touchy matter. Officials at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art concur that while their institutions would report thefts to law enforcement agencies, they would not necessarily issue press releases. In a recent example, as The Museum of Modern Art prepared their 1989 Warhol retrospective, the Andy Warhol Foundation sent 45 drawings for examination. Within weeks they were missing, but rather than file a report with the police the matter was hushed up and the museum's insurance adjuster covered the claim with a check for $1,091,000. The vanishing act remains a mystery and the museum intends to keep it that way. A spokesperson stated, "The Museum's policy is not to discuss any matters of security measures, procedures, or issues."

Increasingly, however, the thinking is that publicity will aid an investigation. IFAR director Connie Lowenthal says, "These days it is clear that a theft from a museum has to be reported to the police and to some degree publicised. Nevertheless, every institution has to exercise individual judgement about the case. If you have suspects inside the museum you may not want to spend a lot of money publicising it worldwide. But if it's men dressed as Boston policemen you have a totally different scenario and you have to cast the net as widely as possible."

There is no fixed procedure for reporting museum thefts, but common practice is to notify local police and the Art Loss Register, which will not make known the victim without permission. Mr. Keller's firm offers a diskette containing up-to-date lists of everyone in the US art community who should be contacted initially, including Federal Bureau of Investigation offices, Customs, Interpol, art dealer associations, commercial galleries, etc. According to Mr. Keller, "A theft contingency plan should set in motion a chain of actions involving police, the press, and the highest levels of the museum management."

"I do not advocate hiding anything from the press," he says, "but I feel that the investigation can be hindered by them. The press will create a climate that is not conducive to negotiating the return of the object, and press coverage may result in a number of false extortion calls with callers claiming to have your object and offering to return it for a fee. Of course, when you drop the money in the proverbial phone booth you never see the return of your object. The thing to do is to avoid press coverage for a few hours, if possible -- and I truly mean only a few hours. Then, don't seek to avoid the press, only manage' it a bit. Release some minor detail that is false. If the paintings have numbers penciled on the back, say 456490,' tell the press that the number is 456555.' This way, the false extortion callers will tell you the incorrect number, and you will know if and when you are dealing with the real criminal."

The federal statute for prosecuting museum thefts is Interstate Transportation of Stolen Goods [18USC 2314] which pertains to objects valued over $5,000 assumed to cross state lines. In 1994, in the wake of the Gardner case, another statute was added, Theft of Major Artwork [18USC 668], which makes it a felony to steal museum objects more than a century old or worth $100,000. The penalty for both is imprisonment up to ten years and possible fine. The statute of limitations for the Interstate law is 5 years, and for Major Theft 20 years.

Richard Sylvest, program manager for art theft in the FBI's Interstate Theft Division, says the bureau has no separate unit to pursue art thefts, but agents in New York and Los Angeles specialise in the field. He maintains the National Stolen Art File with about 60,000 items, but could not determine what percentage is from museums because, as he notes, the FBI does not analyse the data to develop statistics and projections for improved law enforcement in this area in the future.

Mr. Sylvest finds that "The offering of a reward by the insurance company, a foundation, or the victim is a significant aid in any investigation." Insurers tend to pay a finder's fee equivalent with what they would pay a private investigator. But such occasions are increasingly rare. "There has been nothing in the last five years. The security is getting better all the time," says Eric Fisher, a museum specialist with the Huntington, one of the country's leading fine arts insurers, who works with about 60 museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, and others.

He explains that museums buy an all-risk blanket policy which covers both their collection and temporary loans, setting a value that reflects not the total value of the museum's holdings, but what might be lost in a single incident, but always at least enough to cover all the loans. For major loan exhibitions they increase coverage. Annual policies range from between $100 and $400 million at a rate -- "so many cents per hundred dollars" -- that is fairly consistent from museum to museum. Rates are much lower than in other industry because it is recognised as low risk, with a loss ratio of under 5% claims paid to premiums, more than 80% of which are due to works damaged in transit. "The market is very soft now," he says, noting that "underwriters are so hungry for museum business that it's a very good time to buy insurance." Most of his business is underwritten by the Lloyd's syndicates in England.

As to what becomes of stolen art, Mr. Fisher has his opinion. "I think a lot of these paintings go into storage and will be discovered many years later. I don't agree with the Dr. No theory that there's some guy with a valuable collection in his basement. Mainly they're stolen to fence. Some people panic and ditch them, but I don't think so many go out of the country, nor do I don't think they're used as collateral in drug deals. If they had value the thief would use it. I think the biggest value is selling them back to the insurance company or to the museum -- extortion." But a spokesperson for the Art Loss Register disagrees: "The international dimension of this business can be gauged from the fact that of over 1,000 objects recovered since the ALR's inception, 20% have been recovered outside the country of ownership."

Jason Edward Kaufman ©

Tales of woe: the US museum crime blotter

by Jason Edward Kaufman

"I can think of so many ways to rip off museums it would make your head spin," says Steve Keller, one of the leading US consultants in the field of museum security. [see box this page]

But thanks to heightened vigilance and improved technology, incidents of thefts at U.S. museums are becoming rarer by the year. The wake-up call was sounded seven years ago when a pair of thieves disguised as Boston policemen dropped in one night at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, bound the guards, and made off with $300-million worth of paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Flinck, and Manet, works on paper by Degas and Rembrandt, and a Shang bronze beaker. The perpetrators snatched the surveillance tapes that recorded their entry, and knew enough about the rudimentary security system to prevent the guards from pushing the "panic" button that would have summoned the real police to the scene. Notwithstanding a $5 million reward and a massive international investigation, the authorities and the museum have come up empty-handed. And the museum had elected to forego the expense of insuring the collection because the founder's bequest forbade acquisitions as well as deaccessions.

Though the Gardner remains the sine qua non of US museum heists, it was not without ample precedent in the previous decade. But the 1970s were surely the halcyon days for US museum thieves. There was the 1972 hold-up of the Worcester (Massachusetts) Art Museum in which a pair of robbers armed with sawed-off shotguns went on a shopping spree during museum hours, interrupted only by a conscientious guard who told them to get off the sixth-century Antioch mosaic. The marauders peremptorily shot him in the hip and fled with paintings by Rembrandt, Picasso, and Gauguin, all of which were recovered within a week, sending the ring leader and his partner to jail. Then there was the legendary 1972 sacking of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The alarm system had been shut down for roof repairs allowing the crooks to descend through a skylight, tie up the lone gallery guard, and drive into the night with 18 paintings including oils on copper by Brueghel the Elder and canvasses by Rembrandt, Rubens, de Heem, Piazetta, Gainsborough, Delacroix, Daumier, Corot, Courbet, Millet, and Francois-Andrée Vincent. None has been recovered.

Just six years later, following the same formula, thieves broke through a skylight at the San Francisco Legion of Honor and left with masterworks by Rembrandt and others, none of which has been recovered. And the same year, three Cézanne paintings vanished from a closet at The Art Institute of Chicago. When police questioned an art handler he concocted a story about the mob having hired him to negotiate their return. Demanding a $10,000 finder's fee, he arrived at the director's office with two of the pictures, and when officials insisted on the return of all three before they would pay the ransom, he dashed home and got the third, handing it over in exchange for a beer carton filled with money only to be arrested in the hall. The employee, a Neo-Nazi, later confessed he had simply crated the paintings and shipped them to his own address. He served five years before being paroled, and following a subsequent arrest committed suicide.

The Chicago case highlighted the insidious problem of insider theft. Time and again, trusted employees and colleagues have exploited their privileged access. In 1988, a night-shift supervisor at the Walters Art Gallery, apparently finding the Asian art installation objectionable, opened the vitrines in his galleries and pocketed 145 small-scale works, carefully rearranging what was left behind to appear as though the display was untouched. Gone were an 18th-century porcelain Peach Bloom Vase, 56 Chinese snuff bottles, antique pistols and jeweled daggers, and nine Etruscan, Greek, and Egyptian items in gold. The ruse went undetected until the Asian curator returned from vacation. When the thirty-year-old guard failed a lie detector test, the FBI raided his parents' home where they uncovered all of the art and 84 books from the museum library, resulting in an unpaid sabbatical to brush up on museum display in prison.

Not every insider thief is a guard. A 1989 inventory of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles revealed some 125 Native American objects were missing, including Navaho blankets, potteries,

baskets, and kachina dolls valued at over $3.5 million. FBI bulletins generated tips leading to the

recovery of various items from dealers and collectors across the country. The ensuing inquiry led to none other than the museum's director, Patrick Houlihan, who was implicated for falsifying records, stealing artifacts, and selling or trading them off. The director claimed to have had the best interests of his institution at heart, seeking only to circumvent uncooperative trustees who had blocked his attempts to deaccession. But the prosecution demonstrated that Mr. Houlihan reserved some of the proceeds for personal use, and in 1993 he was ordered to pay $70,000 in restitution and obliged to deliberate the intricacies of trustee relations behind bars. The conviction was upheld in 1995, earning Mr. Houlihan the ignominious distinction of being the highest ranking museum official ever charged with stealing from a museum.

Then there was the case of John Quentin Feller, a professor of history at Scranton University whose reputation as a scholar in Chinese export porcelain allowed him privileged access to the eight museums from which he stole more than 100 items over the course of two decades, calmly placing them in his briefcase, camera bag, or clothes. Nothing if not magnanimous, the "Robin Hood of Export Porcelain" frequently loaned or donated his acquisitions to other museums. He stole 18 objects from the basement of the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford and gave them to The Peabody Museum (now the Peabody-Essex) in Salem, Massachusetts, which responded by electing him a trustee. And he took a porcelain service from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in order to donate it in memory of his parents to the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the US Department of State in Washington. His other victims were the Philadelphia Museum, the MFA Boston, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and private collections. The escapade ended in 1991 when he was nabbed secreting a piece of George Washington's dinner service in the drawer of a chest at the Wintherthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. He got 18 months, a $30,000 fine, and expulsion from the hallowed halls of academe.

Sophistication may seem apropos the realm of high art, but things are rarely so complex. The typical museum thief is stupefyingly dumb. Several months ago, as curators at the Dayton Art Institute in Ohio began unpacking artworks stored during the institute's renovation and expansion, a number of Chinese objects were missing, including a Ming gilt-bronze Buddha, a ceramic figurine, glass snuff bottles, jars, and a Tibetan silver butter lamp, valued at around $10,000. During the next week, a newly hired guard on the graveyard shift strolled into an antique shop two miles from the museum and hawked the hoard, along with a handful of colonial silverware, for a grand total of $65. Perhaps to demonstrate his art-world bona fides, the 32-year-old neophyte proudly mentioned that he was in the employ of the venerable art institute -- and for good measure offered them a souvenir mug from the museum's Oktoberfest. The dealers' suspicions were confirmed on the evening news, so when the bungler returned for another session, they requested copies of his driver's license and social security card, which he provided posthaste, enabling police to arrest him that day. "I thought that was pretty stupid, trying to sell something marked DAI," reflected the shop owner, who declined the $500 reward. The guard is awaiting trial.

Comparably inept were the punks who in February knocked off colonial governor William Penn's reconstructed seventeenth-century Pennsbury Manor in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. The trio of locals kicked in the back door and made off with about 50 antique and reproduction ceramics and decorative arts valued in excess of $100,000. Rattled by the ensuing media blitz, they tossed some of the loot into the Delaware River where, following a tip, divers retrieved 38 pieces, including a 1676 English pewter serving platter with Penn's monogram, and a 1730 lantern clock from London. A late-17th-century English needlework jewelry casket and other items are believed to have floated downstream. The craven crew brazenly burgled other establishments in the area until the law caught up with them the following week. In the first application of the Theft of Major Artwork statute passed by Congress in September 1994, each was sent to federal prison.

And even more crude was the the gentleman who ventured into the Rodin Museum of Philadelphia one afternoon in 1988 and set about dismounting Rodin's bronze Mask of the Man With a Broken Nose (1863-64). The guards' protestations ceased when he drew a pistol and fired a shot into the wall. A $10,000 reward offered by the insurance company produced an informant who led the authorities to the basement of the perpetrator's mother's house where the work was recovered in 1989. Apparently unsatisfied with his museum performance, the youth then held up a local Thriftway supermarket, and again was apprehended. He pled guilty to both counts in May 1991 and is serving 7 ½ to 15 years.

Not all museum thieves are mentally deficient. Some have demonstrated that even the finest electronic equipment and the strictest procedures may not deter them from their corrupt ends. In 1989 two men and some female partners donned workmen's garb and made a cultural swing through the northeastern United States, taking in museums in Columbus, Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse, Albany, Boston, and Baltimore. While guards went about their rounds, the bogus handymen used an electric screw driver to open vitrines and help themselves to several million dollars worth of decorative arts, including a Tiffany pitcher from Detroit and a Yuan vase from Boston valued at $500,000. When they offered a Ming bowl from the Columbus Museum to Michael Weisbrod of New York, the unscrupulous dealer asked, "How warm is it?" "Don't sell it in California," replied the thief, who accepted $53,000 for the bowl and other items worth more than $1 million. When they tried to fence English pocket watches from the Baltimore Museum to Fanelli Antique Timepieces in New York, the proprietor recognised the goods from a museum circular and contacted the FBI who set up a sting that led to the recovery of the art and a confession from the crooks. Mr. Weisbrod got six months.

The cleverest crooks can even make it look easy. Three summers ago a well-oiled team relieved the Headley-Whitney Museum in Lexington, Kentucky of its collection of bibelots by jewelry designer George Headley. The state-of-the-art alarm system was rigged to automatically telephone the police upon detection of an intruder. But a short distance from the museum the high-tech thieves cut into the phone line and sent a dummy signal that made it appear like a routine service problem. Meanwhile, accomplices drilled the cyllinders on the locks, disarmed the security system, and gathered up 103 jeweled objects in gold, silver, and precious gems worth $1.6 million. Despite their command of the latest telephony, the perps opted for a decidedly low-tech mode of escape: tracks in the dirt suggest they made their getaway on cross-country bicycles. "The most-asked question we get here," says executive director Diane Wachs, is, "Haven't y'all solved that yet?"

Jason Edward Kaufman ©

For further information on art thefts, visit the Museum Security Network on-line at http:\\museum-security.org.