[CPProt.net] FBI Art-Theft Team Meets In Philly

[MusSecNetworkCulPropProtNet]

 FBI Art-Theft Team Meets In Philly

Jan 13, 2005 10:43 pm US/Eastern
PHILADELPHIA (AP) Philadelphia Art theft may conjure up images of a suave
movie villain creeping through a dark gallery or perhaps last year's bold
daylight robbery of Edvard Munch's "The Scream'' from a Norway museum.

But most art heists are far more subtle, involving forged documents, fake
prints or smuggled cultural artifacts that slowly make their way into
private or museum hands.

It's a huge industry: Interpol ranks it third among property crimes
worldwide.

In Philadelphia this week, a new national FBI task force on stolen art is
meeting with museum curators and scholars to learn more about the global
trade, and how to tackle it.

Worldwide, only 5 to 10 percent of artwork reported stolen is recovered,
said Lynne Richardson, who manages the art theft program at FBI headquarters
in Washington. She hopes the group can learn more about how purloined art
makes its way to U.S. shores.

``We would like to identify more smuggling groups, and more organized crime
groups that are involved in this,'' she said.

The eight task force members visited curators at the Impressionist-rich
Barnes Museum, conservationists at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and
archaeologists at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and
Anthropology, as well as art and antiques dealers.

Most art stolen in the United States is taken during residential burglaries,
the FBI said. But perhaps the bigger problem is the sale of art stolen
offshore to eager U.S. buyers, who may or may not sense their illicit
history.

``By the time they arrive here, they have (forged ownership) papers on
them,'' Richardson said.

Although collectors can be prosecuted for buying art that they know or
should know is stolen, that rarely happens.

More often, prosecutors in recent years have gone after shady dealers, such
as Frederick Schultz, a prominent New York art dealer now serving a 33-month
sentence for trading in stolen Egyptian antiquities.

In a memorable Philadelphia case, the FBI set up a successful 1997 sting to
recover a 1,500-year-old Peruvian ``backflap'' a piece of gold armor worn by
warriors looted a decade earlier from a Mochu lord's grave in northern Peru.

While Peru got the $1.6 million treasure back, the Miami smugglers who tried
to sell it to an undercover agent spent just a few months in prison. The
real target of the probe Panamanian ambassador Francisco Iglesias, who
allegedly helped get the large piece to New York through diplomatic mail
fled the United States and remains a fugitive.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Goldman, one of two federal prosecutors on the
FBI task force, handled the ``backflap'' case and others involving a Civil
War expert who staged phony appraisals on the PBS series ``Antiques
Roadshow'' and antique gun dealers who conned a Colt firearms collector from
Bucks County out of about $20 million.

``Every which way you can defraud somebody, it's taking place in the
high-end art industry,'' Goldman said.

At Penn's museum on Thursday, Penn archaeologist Clark Erickson described
the pervasive looting that experts say has ravaged nearly all of Peru's
ancient archaeological sites. The looters locals who can make as much as
$1,000 selling a sought-after find to middlemen are increasingly
market-savvy, switching their hunt from metals to textiles, for instance, as
demand and prices change.

Archaeological sites in poor or unstable countries including Iraq and
Afghanistan are the most vulnerable. Experts have reported massive looting
in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, whose regime threatened looters of
antiquities with the death penalty.

``With some of new anti-terrorism laws, I expected this huge increase in
announcements about intercepting smuggled archaeological material. And it
doesn't seem to be happening,'' Erickson said.

Statistics on stolen art are virtually impossible to tally, but federal
prosecutors in Philadelphia say they've prosecuted about $100 million in art
fraud in the past four years alone.

In creating the task force, the FBI joins Scotland Yard, Italian police and
other European authorities who have long had special units devoted to art
theft.

``The art world is so huge, things can easily disappear, whether on the
black market or the legitimate market,'' Richardson said.

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