Priceless

by Robert K. Wittman

  Eight days later, when the rescue mission officially became a recovery effort and the FBI sent me home, I returned to suburbia. Within hours, I found myself on the soccer field, coaching Kristin and her fourth-grade girls’ team, the Green Hornets. I was wearing a new set of clothes, but I could still smell Ground Zero.

  I remained in Philadelphia but did not leave 9/11 behind. Every few days for the next year, my FBI colleagues in New York sent me the effects of local victims found at Ground Zero—credit cards, wallets, jewelry, cell phones, driver’s licenses, anything that could be identified. As EAP coordinator, it was my job to return them to the next of kin.

  NORMAN ROCKWELL, DEAD for twenty-three years, already was making a comeback when the terrorists struck.

  The long-held sentiment by “serious” critics—that Rockwell was a mere illustrator, who painted nostalgic caricatures of an innocent, largely bygone America—began shifting in the late 1990s. In 1999, a retrospective of his work, seventy paintings from 1916 to 1969, began a three-year tour to heavy crowds and uncharacteristically rave reviews.

  “I think you can put it down to trendy revisionism and opportunism,” Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens said at the time. “There is also a built-in hipness about liking Rockwell: It goes against the orthodoxy of Modernism…. The funny thing is, Rockwell wasn’t the cracker-barrel philosopher straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life we might imagine.”

  That stereotype was based on Rockwell’s earlier work for Boys’ Life and the Saturday Evening Post—saccharine paintings of kids at soda fountains, families gathered around a Thanksgiving meal, Boy Scouts saluting the American flag, Rosie the Riveter and private Willie Gillis promoting the war effort against Germany and Japan. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics sniffed at Rockwell’s precise realism, labeling it banal. “Dalí is really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood,” the critic Vladimir Nabokov famously sneered. The term Rockwellesque became a pejorative.

  The revisionist view that culminated with the 1999 retrospective was that Rockwell was misunderstood, both by critics and fans who wrongly presumed he represented all values conservative. Looking deeper, it turned out that Rockwell was a sly progressive. In an essay that accompanied the 1999 national tour, art critic Dave Hickey argued that Rockwell’s art in the fifties helped inspire the social revolutions that followed. He invoked one of the stolen paintings, Hasty Retreat, produced for a 1954 Brown & Bigelow calendar. It depicts two young bathers snagging their clothes, high-tailing it past a sign that says, “No Swimming!”

  “Rockwell was one of the few creatures in American popular culture in the fifties who actually encouraged disobedience, willful disagreeableness and a tendency to break rules. I don’t know if we’d have had a lot of the sixties without the sort of benign permission of Rockwell’s images. There’s a wonderful painting of a girl with a black eye sitting outside the principal’s office, having gotten in a fight and obviously won. It’s not hard to imagine her a few years later burning her bra.”

  After the September 11 attacks, as patriotism soared, so did Rockwell’s stock. He was one of America’s best-known artists, and a frightened nation found comfort in his well-known idealistic, nationalistic images. As part of a “United We Stand” campaign, advertisements of updated Rockwell images appeared in the New York Times. On Thanksgiving Day, the Tampa Tribune splashed across its front page a photo illustration based on Rockwell’s famous Freedom from Want, showing the matriarch of a large American family laying the turkey on the dinner table.

  One of the three stolen Rockwell paintings became especially symbolic during that tumultuous post-terror time.

  Painted for the Boy Scouts and Brown & Bigelow, The Spirit of ’76 was timed for the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976. The work, one of Rockwell’s last before dementia consumed him, is an homage to the famous nineteenth-century painting by Archibald McNeal Willard, in which a fife-and-drum corps from the Revolutionary War marches in front of the American flag. Willard’s work, originally known as Yankee Doodle, was painted for the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. In Rockwell’s updated version, the fife-and-drum corps are Boy Scouts. And in the background is the unmistakable Manhattan skyline and the twin towers of the World Trade Center—a tiny detail that would later help keep our case alive.

  After the September 11 attacks, many good cases, complicated investigations with years of work invested, fell by the wayside. Understandably, the recovery of stolen property, let alone stolen art, became a very low priority for the FBI in the fall of 2001. Like almost every agent on my squad and others, I was assigned to check out the hundreds of dubious and frantic calls, reports of terrorists, anthrax, the Taliban, and Middle Eastern-looking men lurking and plotting in Philadelphia neighborhoods. I did the job quietly and diligently, waiting for the right time to raise the Rockwell case.

  My prosecutor partner, Hall, faced different priorities and a looming deadline. He received orders to report to his Navy unit by mid-December and to expect a yearlong deployment. Hall told me that if we didn’t fly to Brazil by early December, he wouldn’t get to go at all. In late October, he approached his immediate supervisors carefully. Though they’d approved the trip before 9/11, they’d never liked it. They were control freaks who thought the best ideas came from management, from the top down, not from the people doing the actual work. His supervisors also didn’t see how Hall could justify a five-thousand-mile flight to solve a case that wouldn’t conclude with an arrest. In their view, a prosecutor put criminals in prison; he didn’t travel the globe, rescuing stolen cultural property. So when Hall broached the subject again in October, Hall’s supervisors, citing new priorities since 9/11, said no. A trip to Rio was out of the question.

  Hall called me in a fury. He was thinking about going over his supervisors’ heads.

  I was equally angry and told him to go for it. I added, “If you don’t go to Brazil, Dave, I don’t go.” He was my partner. I had his back. Hall, Goldman, and I believed we were working together to change the long-held law-enforcement mentality that art crime isn’t a priority. To accomplish this, we needed each other.

  Hall set up a private meeting with the new U.S. attorney’s top deputy, the true brains of the office. Hall gave a five-minute pitch, then pulled out a color print of The Spirit of ’76. He pointed to the lower right-hand corner and the faint image of the twin towers. The second-ranking prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office smiled. He was a former Supreme Court clerk, a Bush appointee whose political instincts were as sharp as his considerable legal skills. He immediately recognized the public relations value. If we were successful in Rio, his boss would soon be standing before television cameras with the three Rockwells as backdrop, and the image of the towers.

  HALL AND I arrived in Rio early on a Monday that first week in December, and rested up on Ipanema. We unpacked, uncoiled, and enjoyed feasting on two of the best steaks of our lives.

  The next day, the FBI agent who worked at the U.S. embassy in Brasília, Gary Zaugg, met us in Rio. He drove us to meet the local prosecutors. The Brazilians were pleasant but not optimistic that we would be able to charge Carneiro. We freely acknowledged that we had an ancient case, thin evidence, and that our best witness, Lindberg in Minneapolis, was uncooperative. The prosecutors made clear that extradition was next to impossible. In Brazil, they explained, flight is considered as natural a right as freedom of speech. There’s no crime in Brazil for resisting arrest or fleeing prosecution.

  Worse, the prosecutors said, no one seemed to know if Carneiro still held the paintings. The local police had already searched his home and business, and come up empty. Our weak hand grew even weaker.

  On Wednesday, we returned to the prosecutor’s office to meet the man we’d waited so long to question.

  Jose Carneiro was a short, wide man of fifty, with a broad face and thinning black hair that clumped by his ears. He owned an art gallery, a private school, and was the author of books on art and poetry. He greeted u
s warmly in English and with a hearty baritone. He came alone, showing great confidence.

  The Brazilian prosecutors went first. They reminded Carneiro he was under investigation for failure to pay the national property tax for the purchase of the Rockwells. This was a minor crime, a mere financial nuisance, and Carneiro knew it. He shrugged.

  Hall tried next, opening with a prosecutor’s traditional tack, threatening prison to get what he wants. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he told Carneiro. “The evidence is strong. You’ve admitted you have stolen American property. This is a serious crime in the United States. If we charge you, we’ll extradite you, fly you back in handcuffs, put you in an American prison. You’ll be there a long time.”

  Carneiro responded with a throaty laugh. At worst, he knew, a U.S. extradition request would limit him to travel inside Brazil, a country nearly as large as the continental United States. Carneiro swept an open palm arm toward a window and its majestic vista of Rio. “I can’t leave Brazil? Welcome to my beautiful prison!”

  Hall sat back, done. He had firm constraints. As an assistant U.S. attorney, he needed to tread carefully. Department of Justice guidelines limited what he could say, even in a foreign country. He represented the U.S. government, and any offers or promises he made could be binding—and he was under strict orders to offer no more than a promise not to prosecute.

  On the other hand, as an FBI agent I could say anything, promise anything. My promises were worthless, but Carneiro didn’t know that. I could lie, twist facts, make threats—do almost anything except beat a suspect to get the job done. I put on my salesman’s hat.

  I opened by trying to even the playing field, framing the issue as a geopolitical dilemma, not a potential crime. “Jose, let’s see if we can fix this, maybe make it all go away. Let’s try to find a way to do that. We get what we want, you don’t get in any trouble, and the prosecutors here get what they want. We all look good, everybody’s happy. What do you say?”

  “I like it when everybody is happy,” he said.

  It was a start. “Why make it worse, Jose?” I said. “Why pay more taxes? What are you going to do with these paintings? What good are they to you? Are you a Norman Rockwell lover to the point that you want to have these on your walls forever and leave a problem for your children and everybody else? Because you know you can’t move them outside of Brazil. And let’s be honest, these paintings are far more valuable in the United States than anywhere else. You’d get twice the price for them in the U.S. than here, but that’s the one place you can’t sell them. What good are they to you, Jose? Why are you holding these pieces hostage against America?”

  Carneiro raised a finger. “Oh, Bob. I love America! We’re good friends. I love United States. I go to buy art all the time.”

  “Great, wonderful,” I said, leaning forward but keeping my voice friendly. “But I’ll tell you what, Jose. If you don’t do this for us, maybe we can’t do anything to you here, but I guarantee you I’ll put you on a list where they’ll never let you inside the United States again.” It was a bluff. In December 2001, the terrorist watch lists didn’t yet exist. “You say you love the United States, but you’re holding our art hostage. Norman Rockwell is the quintessential American artist. In my country, everyone knows his work. You’re holding one of the patron saints of American art hostage. And you think you’re going to make friends doing that?”

  Carneiro didn’t appear moved by my appeal, but he didn’t reject me either. “Let me think about it,” he said. We agreed to meet again on the next day.

  ON THURSDAY, CARNEIRO opened with an offer.

  “Three hundred thousand,” he said. “And you promise not to arrest me.”

  In Europe, it is not uncommon for governments to pay ransom and offer amnesty to recover kidnapped paintings. It’s a game the thieves, the insurance companies, and the governments play. No one publicly advertises this, because they don’t want to encourage more thefts. But the bottom line is that the museums get their paintings back, the insurance companies save millions on the true value, the thieves get their money, and the police get to close the case. The United States doesn’t play this game.

  The $300,000 figure set Hall off. “That’s crazy,” he said. “We’re talking about stolen art.” The U.S. government would not pay a cent for the Rockwells, he said. Carneiro needed to know he was not negotiating with the deep pockets of the U.S. treasury. “Bob and I are here to help, to be the go-between for you and Brown & Bigelow. You make an offer and we’ll run it by them.”

  While Carneiro considered that, I stepped out to call my contact at Brown & Bigelow in Minneapolis. The call was quick. The $300,000 offer was rejected out of hand and I returned to the negotiating table. We haggled for the bulk of the afternoon—pushing Carneiro lower and lower, ducking out to make calls to Minneapolis. When the price reached $100,000, I began to try to convince both sides that this was a good deal. I told the folks in Minnesota they’d be getting $1 million worth of paintings for $100,000. I told Carneiro he’d be getting enough to wipe out his debt and tax bill and walk away. I gave them both the same advice: “You’re not going to get a better deal. At $100,000, you’re going to walk away a winner.”

  Carneiro wanted a letter from Hall promising he wouldn’t be prosecuted. “Done,” Hall said.

  Carneiro stood. “I let you know tomorrow. I call you in the morning.”

  Late that evening, Hall and I wandered out to the water’s edge on Ipanema. We lit Cuban cigars. The stars of the Southern constellations crowded the night sky. We puffed in silence for a few moments.

  Hall turned to me. “Well?”

  “He’s looking for a way out,” I said. “Gotta save face, get the tax man off his back, not get killed financially.”

  “Right, so what do you think?”

  I lifted my cigar. “We’re playing a hot hand.”

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, Carneiro called Gary Zaugg, the Brazil-based FBI agent, and accepted the deal. He invited us to pick up the paintings at his school in Teresópolis, sixty miles to the north.

  On the two-hour ride out of Rio, we passed mile after mile of shantytowns—open sewers, barefoot children in ragged clothes, corrugated huts that stretched to the horizon—poverty only intensified by its proximity to the opulence of Ipanema. Beyond the city limits, the road wound up into the beauty and mountains of Serra dos Órgãos National Park, a lush land of peaks, rivers, and waterfalls three thousand feet above sea level. We arrived at Carneiro’s school, a stucco storefront on the main street in Teresopólis, shortly before noon.

  We confirmed Brown & Bigelow’s $100,000 wire transfer and Carneiro’s assistants brought out the paintings. He shook our hands vigorously, clearly pleased. He insisted that we pose with him for pictures with the paintings. In the photo, Hall and Zaugg stood in front of The Spirit of ’76 and So Much Concern. Hall had a smile on his face now, his frown from the beach a few days before long forgotten. I held up the much smaller painting, Hasty Retreat.

  Carneiro urged us to examine the paintings closely before we left. “I have kept them in excellent condition, you see.” We saw that he had.

  To consummate the deal, we appeared before a local magistrate for a quick hearing conducted in Portuguese. Zaugg translated. Hall and I had trouble following the proceedings. We smiled and nodded a lot. Ten minutes later, we were out the door with the paintings, headed back to Rio.

  “Let’s make our own hasty retreat,” Zaugg said as we moved to the car. “Let’s grab your gear at the hotel and find the first flight out.” On the ride back, he called colleagues at the embassy and made the arrangements.

  At Galeão International Airport, Zaugg used his diplomatic credentials to whisk us through security and customs with our three oversized packages. At the Jetway, I discreetly approached a Delta stewardess, careful not to spook anyone. Three months after 9/11 most American passengers and crews were still jittery, especially on long-haul flights.

  I showed her my FBI badge and explained
the situation. “We have to carry these onboard. They can’t go in the hold, and we can’t stuff them in the overhead racks.”

  “No problem. We’ve got a closet between first class and the cockpit. You put them there. They’ll be safe.”

  “Great, thanks. Really appreciate it. But, um, it’s a ten-hour flight, and I’ve got to keep the paintings in sight at all times. Our seats are in coach.”

  The stewardess looked down at her folded passenger manifest. I could see from her list that first class was only half full. “Official FBI business, right?”

  “Official business.”

  “Well, then I’ll guess we’ll have to find you seats in first class.”

  A FEW DAYS later, the new U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, the ambitious Patrick L. Meehan, convened his press conference. I watched from the back of the room as Meehan stood in front of the paintings before a bank of television cameras and a room jammed with reporters.

  “Norman Rockwell was that most American of artists,” Meehan said. “Here is a guy who has really caught the character of the United States, especially in times of crisis. This is an important case for the American psyche at this time.”

  The next morning, a photograph of the U.S. attorney pointing to the twin towers in the background of The Spirit of ’76 ran in newspapers across the country. Hall saw it in the Washington papers. He’d reported to duty at the Pentagon the day after we returned.

  We’d proved we could take our art crime show overseas. Now it was time to raise the stakes and try it undercover.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

  Madrid, 2002.

  THE BRIEFING WAS SCHEDULED FOR 7 P.M., A CONCESSION to the broiling June sun.