Robert Wittman, who helped develop the FBI's Art Crime Team and now owns a private art recovery company outside Philadelphia, said the work requires specific skills.
"They are not like most property crime investigations," he said. Investigators must tread lightly and know the way the art world operates to recover items before they're taken underground or destroyed.
Wittman, who was born in Japan but raised in Baltimore, knows the vulnerabilities of the art business. His American father ran Wittman's Oriental Gallery on Howard Street, stocking the shop with hundreds of intricate pieces from his Japanese wife's culture.
The younger Wittman inherited his father's interest and took it with him into the FBI as an agent in Philadelphia. One of his first cases involved a Chinese crystal ball stolen from the Pennsylvania Museum.
He teamed up with the like-minded prosecutor Goldman in Philly, and they formed their own art crime team well before the FBI formalized a unit years later.
"We were doing this work before it was sexy," said Goldman, who's now in private practice in Pennsylvania.
They bent the laws to fit the crimes they discovered, applying mail fraud statutes and environmental protections to their creative prosecutions.
In 1998, after discovering an electrical contractor's home museum full of items from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, they became the first to use a "Theft of Major Art" law, which made it a federal offense to steal from a library or museum.
In 1999, they used the Bald Eagle Protection Act to prosecute a man who tried to sell a war bonnet that had belonged to Geronimo.
And in 2001 and 2002, they won mail- and wire-fraud convictions against two former "Antiques Roadshow" experts who staged phony appraisals on the show, sometimes lowballing property and then buying it.
"We found that if you did these cases, and got good press, then the managers would let us continue," said Wittman. He tried to stay out of the spotlight to protect the undercover work he did in countries around the world as "Bob Clay," posing as an art broker, collector, expert or buyer.
Between 1997 and 2004, he and Goldman racked up a dozen significant recoveries, including a rare copy of the Bill of Rights, a Norman Rockwell painting and a Civil War sword that belonged to the U.S. Naval Academy. They used those cases to propose an Art Crime Team to the FBI, which launched the program at the end of 2004.
Today, the group is made up of 13 agents who do the work part time, in addition to their other duties, and archaeolopgist Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, who oversees the operation. Three federal prosecutors are assigned to handle their cases.
Most of the agents get on the team because they have an interest in art and antiques, Magness-Gardiner said, though there's quite a bit of turnover. Wittman, who has been gone three years, says that's because it's not a career-making gig.
"It's not the type of job where you're going to become a manager; you don't get raised up because it's low priority," he said. He says he was the bureau's first and only full-time art investigator, both before and after the development of the Art Crime Team.
"I wasn't so interested all the time in catching somebody," Wittman said. "I was more interested in recovering the art. It always seemed more important to recover it and have it for our children than it was to catch some guy and have [him get] three years in prison."
Both he and his former partner worry that few people feel as they do, however.
"Not being there anymore, my concern is that this isn't just a passing fancy by the federal government, that they continue to give these crimes the attention" they need, said Goldman.
"The loss to civilization and the loss to our cultural heritage" is significant, he said. "The best prosecutors and the best agents in these cases are the people that get it."
Cultural property protectors:
Art Crime Team (FBI) — 13 agents work part time to recover lost and fraudulent cultural works. More than 2,600 items worth $142 million recovered since later 2004.
Art Recovery Team (National Archives and Records Administration) — Four- to five-person group within the inspector general's office focused on theft and fraud within the National Archives 44 facilities.
Art Theft Detail, (LAPD) — One-man unit focused on cultural property fraud in Los Angeles, has recovered more than $80 million worth of items since 1993.
Cultural Property Crimes Program (U.S. National Central Bureau of Interpol) — Publishes international theft notices making it harder to trade goods. Interpol also publishes a quarterly "Stolen Works of Art Database" bulletin and a biannual poster of the top 10 missing items.
Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities program (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) — Repatriates stolen items across borders, returning more than 2,500 items to 21 countries since 2007, when it ramped up agent training.
