Sometimes the long-sought art treasure is found under a baseball cap in a witch's house. For three years, FBI agent Robert King Wittman searched for the crystal ball that belonged to Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi. It had disappeared from the Archaeological Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, a masterpiece of glass art. Then a garbage collector told him he had found the ball in his front yard some time ago and given it to a friend who happened to be a witch.
Welcome to the world of art thieves, a realm filled with stories featuring stolen goods straight out of the Arabian Nights - crowns, crystal balls, and legendary paintings - and thieves with names that sound like they're from fairy tales. We often read these as heroic stories. Anyone who manages to steal treasures from well-guarded museums must be a criminal genius. The master thief - a loner, rich and respected. There's just one problem: everything about this image is wrong.
When Robert King Wittman solved the case of the missing crystal ball, he didn't yet realize that at that moment, a simple FBI agent with dreams of Miami Vice had become the Indiana Jones of the FBI. For the next 20 years, Wittman would hunt for missing art treasures around the world. He tracked down pre-Columbian Peruvian gold treasures, found decades-lost works by painter Norman Rockwell, and returned stolen Goyas and Rembrandts to museums.
Wittman has probably studied more museum robberies than anyone else. When he learned from his wife last Monday morning that the world's most famous art museum had been robbed, he could hardly believe it. Wittman was impressed: perfect planning, precise timing, clear target. But then Wittman quickly added a caveat. The Louvre heist plan was good, but the execution? Sloppy.
The crown lost during the escape, abandoned glass cutters, even a water bottle - for Wittman, these are amateurish technical errors. Because actually, it's not a great art to break into a museum. The heist? The easiest part of all. What it takes: courage or audacity, some imagination, and insider knowledge. In 80 to 90 percent of museum robberies in the US, the thieves had access to internal information, according to an FBI study Wittman explains. That doesn't necessarily mean a museum employee helped them, but maybe someone chatted too much at the lunch table.
Logically, museum employees often find themselves among the suspects at the beginning of investigations. This was also the case with the largest art theft in history to date: the 1990 raid on the Gardner Museum in Boston. Thirteen works worth $500 million today were stolen then. They remain missing to this day, and the case remains unsolved.
On March 18, 1990, the night after St. Patrick's Day, two thieves disguised as police officers gained access to the museum. At 1:20 AM, they rang the entrance bell, claimed they needed to check a security incident - and then overpowered the guards. What was striking about this otherwise simple raid: one of the guards had briefly opened a side door to the museum during his rounds and turned off the fire alarm. Additionally, it was the second guard's first day on the job, a weak point in the system that came in handy for the thieves.
The human factor shouldn't be overestimated, according to Wittman. Museums, especially in Europe, are simply not built as securely as would theoretically be possible. This is also due to history: unlike in the US, where many art museums are housed in buildings specially constructed for that purpose, European art museums are housed in old palaces, castles, and historic residences. Securing these consistently? Actually impossible.
What's needed for the perfect heist: some criminal energy, imagination - and the courage to work alone. Or as Wittman puts it: the first mistake many thieves make is not working alone. There really are loners, super thieves who come close to the heroes from Netflix series and heist films. One of them is Stéphane Breitwieser. But unlike in most films, his story doesn't end with fame and lots of money, but with the destruction of centuries-old art.
Stéphane Breitwieser grew up in the French Alsace region and developed an early passion for art. Instead of playing with friends, he reportedly spent most of his time looking at paintings. Eventually, that wasn't enough for Breitwieser. He wanted to own the works. So he took what he could never afford. He stole his first painting from a museum in Gruyères in the canton of Fribourg, removing the painting from its frame while his girlfriend kept watch.
It was the beginning of a series that would eventually earn him the title of the world's greatest art thief. Breitwieser's strategy: rob small museums, away from tourist attractions. Here there are no laser alarm systems like in the movies, often not even surveillance cameras. Here he could calmly unscrew pictures from walls, cut canvases out of frames with a pocket knife, and smuggle them outside in bags or under jackets.
Here Breitwieser sometimes felt so secure that he would talk to museum guards or leave cards at the crime scene with the inscription: "Object removed for study purposes." He displayed the stolen artworks in his mother's house in the attic - in semi-darkness so that sunlight wouldn't fade the pictures. But then, in 2001, Stéphane Breitwieser's art world collapsed during a visit to the Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne.
His downfall was a journalist who happened to be walking his dog. He saw Breitwieser behaving suspiciously, as if he were casing the museum. The journalist knew that something had recently been stolen from this museum, so he reported the incident to the museum guard. Shortly afterward, Lucerne police arrested Stéphane Breitwieser. The investigators were so grateful to the journalist that they gave his dog a lifetime supply of food.
A happy ending, one might think, even one with a funny anecdote. So like a heist comedy after all. But for over 60 artworks, the story doesn't end happily. When Breitwieser's mother learned of her son's arrest, she began sawing, cutting up many of the stolen artworks and disposing of the pieces in the trash. She threw vases, jewelry, and statues into the Rhine-Rhône Canal.
When authorities searched the mother's house on the German-Swiss border, they found nothing. The mother only confessed to her vandalism when individual artworks began washing up on the banks of the Rhine. A Swiss police officer reportedly said: "Never before have so many old masters been destroyed at once." Breitwieser's story shows that noble super thieves like in the movies only exist at first glance, and Breitwieser himself is an exception.
The reality of art thieves is much more primitive and brutal in most cases. In 2008, armed and masked men stormed the Bührle Collection in Zurich, threatened those present, and stole four valuable paintings. In 2015, three perpetrators raided the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, overpowered and tied up employees, held a weapon to one's head, and stole 17 masterpieces. In 2019, during a break-in at the Green Vault in Dresden, thieves smashed display cases and when they torched their getaway car after the deed, two people nearly suffocated from smoke inhalation.
Art thieves are supposed to be gentleman criminals? Robert Wittman doesn't understand this. He says: "Hollywood romanticizes these heists because in the end, the perpetrators are simply criminals. Today they rob a museum, and tomorrow they mug your mother on the street." Art thieves aren't a professional group like bakers or auto mechanics. Art thieves are also dealers, car thieves, human traffickers. They're often closely linked to criminal groups, to mafia structures.
Their ruthlessness leads to them often being successful, as shown by the listed cases. The value of stolen artworks: Bührle around 180 million Swiss francs, Castelvecchio 15 million francs, Dresden 107 million francs. And Stéphane Breitwieser? Within six years, he accumulated an estimated crime total of 1.3 billion francs. Given these sums, the robbers should be rich. But Wittman says that's a mistake: good thieves are bad businesspeople. The real art in art theft isn't stealing - it's selling.
Radu Dogaru is a good thief, as he proved on the night of October 16, 2012. Together with accomplices, he broke open the back door of the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam, took pictures by Picasso, Matisse, and Gauguin off the wall, and disappeared back into the night after barely three minutes. Estimated value of the seven pictures: between 50 and 100 million euros.
Later, Dogaru would say the heist was far too easy - he practically got in with just a screwdriver. What followed after the robbery was then much too difficult for Dogaru. After smuggling the pictures from the Netherlands to Romania in pillowcases, the search for a buyer began. Dogaru and his accomplices carried the pictures around in plastic bags without knowing how much the art was worth or what they should ask for it.
But there's a huge difference between paper value and black market value. In the underworld, you pay only 2 to 5 percent of the estimated value for a Picasso or Matisse. For the seven works in Dogaru's plastic bag, that would still be a few million. But not even at bargain prices would anyone buy a painting for which Dogaru couldn't provide proof of ownership, especially since art experts would immediately recognize that the Picasso, Matisse, or Gauguin actually belonged to the Rotterdam Kunsthal Museum.
Eventually Radu Dogaru realized this too. Six months after the break-in, he deposited the pictures at his mother Olga's house somewhere in the Romanian countryside. The mother buried the paintings in the village cemetery, and when investigators got closer, she burned them in her house's kitchen stove. At least that's what Olga Dogaru told investigators in her first statement. Later she retracted her confession.
Meanwhile, forensic experts took ash from Dogaru's kitchen stove and examined it in the laboratory. They found pigment residues, canvas remnants, and nails like those known from oil painting frames. Good thieves, terrible businessmen - Radu Dogaru confirmed Wittman's principle: paintings can hardly be turned into money.
Is stealing a famous painting therefore the stupidest crime you can commit? Robert Wittman says: "Basically, yes. It's actually very stupid. Many believe you can make millions with it, but without clean provenance, the picture is worthless." It's different with jewels - gemstones can be recut. According to experts, there are numerous buyers in Antwerp, Tel Aviv, or India who ask no questions. But even easier than jewels is gold.
Berlin, March 27, 2017, 3 AM: Unknown perpetrators climbed through a window of the Bode Museum in the city center using a ladder. Inside, they smashed a display case, hoisted a 100-kilogram gold coin onto a cart, pushed it to the window, and lowered it down with a rope. There they wheeled away the artwork "Big Maple Leaf" with a wheelbarrow.
Three years later, the perpetrators were convicted, but the gigantic gold coin worth 3.3 million euros? Gone. Investigators assume the mega-coin no longer exists, that it was melted down and sold as pure gold. This is just one of the more sensational cases - smaller precious metal thefts from museums happen much more often.
Thieves may be bad businesspeople, but sometimes it pays off for them anyway, at least in the short term. On September 15, 2005, FBI agent Robert Wittman nervously tested whether his hotel room key card worked in Copenhagen. Nothing could go wrong now; he had left a copy of the key card in the adjoining room where a SWAT team was waiting for deployment.
The armed police were supposed to enter Wittman's room as soon as he exchanged a bag full of money for a painting. $250,000 for a Rembrandt, the conclusion of a months-long planned operation. He was about to meet art thieves who had been heavily armed during their raid. The Rembrandt had been stolen five years earlier from a Stockholm museum in a spectacular heist. The painting is worth $35 million.
For five years, the thieves had unsuccessfully searched for a buyer. In Wittman, who posed as an art dealer for the Russian mafia, they believed they had finally found a buyer. Trade in the underworld is one of the few ways stolen artworks can be turned into money. Between mafia organizations, they serve as a kind of security or currency in drug or weapons deals.
Works by van Gogh stolen in 2002 surfaced 14 years later during a raid against the Neapolitan Camorra. Investigators assumed they had used the works as collateral in drug trafficking. Sometimes the works also serve more romantic purposes. Belgian cocaine baron Flor Bressers allegedly acquired the 2020 missing work "Two Laughing Boys" by Frans Hals for 500,000 francs (estimated value: 15 million euros).
Most criminals try to directly extort the owners or their insurance. In such cases, they often end up with lawyer Chris Marinello. "Sometimes they call me and say: I know someone who knows where the work might be," explains Marinello, who has turned art recovery into a business. Museums often offering rewards for tips attracts informants who often turn out to be acquaintances of the thieves or accomplices acting as middlemen.
The so-called art-napping may work - there are numerous examples where thieves succeeded in extracting money from insurance companies or museums in exchange for previously stolen works. But the business is risky. In Copenhagen, it briefly looked like the operation would fail. After an initial check of Wittman's money package, the gang representative disappeared again. Had Wittman been exposed? Then the criminal returned with the painting.
Wittman disappeared into the bathroom, checked the Rembrandt for authenticity, then opened the door to the hallway, jumped outside, and the SWAT team stormed the room. In the end, character flaws bring down most thieves, according to Wittman and lawyer Marinello. On one hand, there's greed. On the other hand, criminals are fame-seeking and envious.
"I guarantee you: the Louvre thieves are talking about it. They're bragging. To others they think they can trust. But criminals are always in competition, so they always betray each other eventually," says Wittman. Rewards for tips are therefore very efficient, also because in the US, anyone who responds to a call is interrogated and questioned before a jury. If they lie, that brings five years in prison.
The decisive tip that helped Wittman buy back the Rembrandt in Copenhagen came from a man already sentenced to ten years for drug trafficking in the US. Thanks to his tip, he was released on probation - the largest sentence reduction in California history. He had betrayed his own son for it.
The FBI estimates the market for illegally traded cultural goods at $6 billion in annual revenue, with most of it involving forgeries. But dozens of museums and galleries are broken into every year, and the public never learns about many cases. Wittman estimates that despite this, most truly significant artworks eventually resurface: 90 to 95 percent of paintings. (The recovery rate for jewelry, however, is only 10 percent.)
"You just have to be patient," he says. "Once my team recovered five Norman Rockwell works. They were stolen in 1979, and we got them back in 2001. They resurface because they outlive us." But the works from the Gardner Museum are still missing today, 35 years after the heist. Wittman is convinced they almost cracked the case a few years ago.
"We were very close," he says. That the 13 masterpieces worth half a billion haven't resurfaced still torments him today. Does he believe the works still exist? "Oh yes, definitely. They're hanging somewhere in Massachusetts." When asked if he has a precise address in mind, Wittman simply responds: "You'll see."
