Priceless

by Robert K. Wittman

Harmelin and Torsella were angry now. They felt duped and worried aloud that the whiff of scandal might somehow taint their great project. It was the perfect time for my pitch: “We want you to help us get it back. We want you to go through with the deal, have them bring the Bill of Rights here to your office, and we’ll seize it.” I tried to make it sound simple.

  Torsella coughed. “You want us to go undercover?”

  “Yes. It’s the only way to keep it safe and in the country. The only way.”

  Harmelin stood and led Torsella into the hallway. They huddled privately.

  When they returned, they said yes. Before we could get into the details, Harmelin did what any good lawyer does—he called a meeting of more lawyers to discuss contingencies, and they spent an hour coming up with things that might go wrong: What if the document is damaged in a scuffle? Who’s liable? What if someone sues the firm for participating in a fraud? What if someone calls the state bar and accuses Harmelin of lying to a fellow lawyer? What if things get out of control or leaked to the press? What if Richardson demands a blanket indemnification clause? Does our firm insurance cover that? What if North Carolina sues the firm? What if…

  “Guys!” I finally interrupted. “You’re just coming up with ways it won’t work.” I turned to Harmelin and his $200 necktie. “It doesn’t matter what you say to Richardson. It’s all bullshit anyway. Just say whatever it takes to get him to bring the Bill of Rights to this room. Remember: You won’t have to keep any promises you make.”

  This was a hard concept for a lawyer like Harmelin to digest, and he asked me if I wouldn’t prefer to conduct the negotiations myself. I told him it was too late in the game to inject a new player. It might spook Richardson. “I’ll play the role of the buyer,” I said. “I’ll be Bob Clay, patriotic dot-com mogul, eager to donate the Bill of Rights to the new Constitution Center.”

  Reluctantly, Harmelin got on the phone with Richardson, and spent the balance of the day pretending to negotiate. At first, there was a lot of throat-clearing legal-speak and I could see it pained him to give in so easily. But by late afternoon, Harmelin began to warm to the role. By the end of the final conversation that Friday, Richardson was asking about the benefactor, the person buying the Bill of Rights for the Constitution Center.

  Harmelin winked at me as I listened in on an extension in his skyscraper office. “His name is Bob Clay. Dot-com guy. You can meet when you come up here Tuesday for the closing.”

  When he hung up, Harmelin was ebullient, comfortable enough to tease me.

  “Agent Wittman?” he said as I headed out the door with Heine. “Do me a favor? If you’re gonna be an Internet hotshot on Tuesday, find yourself a nicer pair of shoes.”

  I WASN’T IN the conference room when the closing began.

  I wanted Richardson to see familiar faces, get comfortable. So the only people in the room were the three men Richardson had met once before—Harmelin, a rare-documents consultant, and another Dilworth attorney. Inside his jacket, Harmelin carried a cashier’s check for $4 million.

  I waited in another room with Torsella. My backup, five FBI agents, including Heine, stood ready nearby.

  We didn’t wire the room for audio or video. I thought it would be too much of a hassle to get permission—recording a sting inside a law firm would have created more worry for the Dilworth lawyers and required layers of approval within the FBI. Besides, Richardson didn’t seem like the violent type. If there was real trouble, we’d hear the shouts through the door.

  Agents on surveillance reported that Richardson arrived alone and empty-handed. A few minutes later, the agents reported that a courier was on his way to the conference room with a large folio.

  I waited a few more minutes and Harmelin fetched me to join him in the conference room. Laid flat on the conference table, beside stacks of fake closing documents, was the Bill of Rights. I made a show of studying it. It was three feet high, written on faded vellum, its texture varying from corner to corner, making some amendments easier to read than others. Considering the parchment’s journey, it was in remarkable condition. Right there, on the bottom, I could make out John Adams’s neat signature in two-inch-high letters.

  I turned to Richardson and pumped his hand. I slapped Harmelin on the back. “Gentlemen,” I said, “this is a wonderful day. This will be a great contribution to the National Constitution Center. I’m so pleased to be a part of this.” I turned to Harmelin, giving him a reason to leave. “Steve, we need to get Torsella in here. He needs to see this.”

  The plan was to leave me alone with the document expert and Richardson. With the Bill of Rights essentially secured, it was time to try to make a criminal case. I wanted a few minutes with Richardson, to try to draw him into a discussion about the stolen parchment to see what he knew about its mysterious 125-year journey from Raleigh to Philadelphia. With his mind on a $4 million payday, this would present my best opportunity. I planned to start by asking him how careful I really needed to be, whether there were any marks on the document that would prove it was North Carolina’s stolen copy.

  I never got the chance.

  As Harmelin left the room to get Torsella, he bumped the door to the office where my colleagues waited. They took it as a signal to move in, positioning themselves between the Bill of Rights and everyone else. Thompson, our squad supervisor, handed Richardson the seizure warrant.

  “Am I under arrest?” he said.

  “Oh, no,” I said, trying to reassure him. I walked him quietly toward a corner.

  “What’s this all about?” he said.

  At that point, with my cover blown, I felt compelled to tell the truth. “We’re conducting a criminal investigation into an allegation of interstate transportation of stolen property,” I said. “The document is now evidence.”

  As I feared, Richardson now refused to talk.

  “Can I leave?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. I didn’t have a reason to detain him. We had no evidence that he knew the Bill of Rights was stolen property. “But first I’ve got to give you a receipt for the document.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Nope,” I said. I took out a standard Department of Justice receipt for seized property, a form I’d filled out dozens of times in my career. As I wrote the words—“Description of item: Copy of United States Bill of Rights”—the history of the moment caught up with me. I thought back to my first day at the FBI Academy, when I took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I’d always assumed I’d pledged to defend the ideals, not the actual documents.

  Richardson was stammering at me, but I was lost in the moment and didn’t hear what he said.

  I just handed him his receipt.

  He straightened his tie and walked out the door.

  WE RECEIVED SUCH great publicity when we announced the Bill of Rights rescue, Headquarters didn’t hesitate when we asked to use the FBI director’s jet to fly the parchment home.

  The flight to Raleigh was scheduled for April 1. That it was April Fool’s Day was a coincidence, but it certainly made it easier to pull off our gag.

  Before we left, I stopped by the touristy gift shop at the Independence Mall Visitor’s Center and bought a souvenir copy of the Bill of Rights for $2. Then I went to a drugstore and bought a two-by-two-foot piece of poster board and some superglue. Heine and I mounted the fake Bill of Rights onto the board and slipped it inside the custom three-by-three-foot box holding the real Bill of Rights, which was held inside a special protective plastic sleeve.

  When we touched down in Raleigh, four local FBI agents met us at the airport and drove us to their suburban office. The conference room was already jammed with agents, prosecutors, and marshals. We teased our audience by making a show of the official paperwork documenting the transfer of evidence. People started getting impatient.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you want to see it first?”

  Of course they did. Heine started to open the
box and I shifted strategically in front of him to shield our sleight of hand. He took out the fake Bill of Rights, started to hold it up—and fumbled it to the floor.

  “Oops,” I said as Heine bent over. “Geez.”

  I heard a slight gasp, and as I looked up, Heine gave it his best Three Stooges stumble, clumsily stepping on the damn thing, twisting the cardboard.

  On cue, I screamed, “Oh my God!”

  We heard more gasps and saw a supervisor’s eyes bulge.

  We waited a beat, then bust out laughing.

  The Raleigh supervisor did not laugh with us.

  Gingerly, we withdrew the real of Bill of Rights, laid it on the table, and signed it over to the U.S. marshal.

  CHAPTER 16

  ART CRIME TEAM

  Merion, Pennsylvania, 2005.

  STANDING BEFORE A DOZEN FBI AGENTS AND SUPERVISORS in the expansive main gallery at the center of the Barnes Foundation’s museum, I pointed to a towering modern painting of a man and woman carrying flowers.

  “This is The Peasants,” I said. “It’s a Picasso, very modern, but it has definite influences from Michelangelo. See the feet and the toes? The sinewy arms? The muscular legs? It’s heroic.”

  Fourteen years after my yearlong class at the Barnes, I was returning to help with a daylong training session designed for agents from the FBI’s newly formed Art Crime Team.

  “Each gallery you’ll see today is a classroom,” I told my FBI colleagues. “The four walls in each gallery are your blackboards. They are the lesson plans. Each teaches us something about light, line, color, shape, and space. By the way, in this room alone, you’re probably looking at a billion dollars’ worth of art.”

  My pupils looked overwhelmed. Few agents knew much about art, and the dollar figures could be unsettling. “Don’t be intimidated by what you see,” I said. “We’re not here to learn how to spot a forgery or know the value of this painting or that painting. You’ll learn that when or if you need to. We’re here today to learn the basics. We’re here to train your eye. To learn to see.”

  The group crowded into the second gallery. I swept my arm toward a cluster of paintings and said, “What’s amazing here in this one gallery is that you look at this wall, and here’s a Cézanne, there’s a Cézanne, and another and another—Cézanne after Cézanne. They’ve got seventy of them in this museum, folks.”

  I stepped in front of a Renoir portrait. “Look at the color. Look at the palette, the shape of the people, and how it’s done. See that? Now, look at the Cézanne. See how he paints the folds, the creases in the tablecloth? That’s one of the hardest things to do. Compare the palettes: Renoir is rose, bright blue, cream, flesh tones. Cézanne is dark green, purple, violet, muted tones.”

  The group walked into the next gallery. “Now, in this room, can you tell which one is the Cézanne and which is the Renoir?”

  The emboldened students began throwing out answers, and I could not have been prouder. I was no longer the sole FBI agent who cared about art crime.

  THE FBI’S COMMITMENT to art crime was entering a new era. The creation of the Art Crime Team marked a great leap forward for the Bureau—and a natural progression from our successes following the high-profile Rockwell, Koplowitz, Antiques Roadshow, and Bill of Rights cases.

  The FBI had assigned eight agents scattered across the country to the Art Crime Team, and I was named senior investigator. The agents would not work art crime full-time as I did, but they would take cases as they developed in their regions, and would be prepared to deploy rapidly. The FBI’s new commitment did not compare to the Italian art crime effort—the Carabinieri force numbered three hundred. But it was a start.

  Gone, or so it seemed, were the days when the FBI would get by with one or two agents who expressed an interest in art crime—when an agent like Bob Bazin would handle cases, then informally pass the mantle to someone like me. Historically speaking, I knew of only two other FBI art crime experts beside Bazin and both had worked in New York. In the sixties and seventies, it was Donald Mason, probably best known for his recovery of a stolen Kandinsky, and in the seventies and eighties, Thomas McShane, who once recovered a stolen van Gogh in the carport of a New York gas station.

  To bolster the new Art Crime Team, the Department of Justice provided a team of prosecutors—one of whom was Bob Goldman. They were granted special authority to prosecute art crime cases anywhere in the country. With great fanfare and a series of public events, the FBI unveiled an Art Crime Team website, a logo, and even created special souvenir coins. The press exposure and the accolades kept piling up. Just before the Art Crime Team was officially launched, I was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s highest honor for the protection of cultural property, the Robert Burke Memorial Award. Two years later, Goldman won the same honor. While we welcomed media coverage, I was careful to keep my identity secret so I could continue to work undercover. I never let photographers take my picture and I always remained in the back of the room, out of view, during press conferences. Whenever I appeared on television, I did so with my face blacked out.

  In the months after the Art Crime Team’s formation, we kept busy with smaller cases, using each to raise our profile. In Pennsylvania, I recovered eight Babylonian stone signature seals purchased by a U.S. marine as souvenirs at a flea market near Baghdad, the first such FBI case of recovered Iraqi artifacts in the United States. In a St. Louis hotel-room sting, I arrested a fake Arab sheik who tried to sell me a forged Rembrandt for $1 million. In a federal courtroom in Philadelphia, Goldman and I squared off against two antiques dealers who defrauded a wealthy collector during the sale of historic Colt revolvers.

  Perhaps most important to our cause, we gained two earnest and well-placed advocates at Headquarters in Washington. The first was Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, a veteran State Department cultural property analyst with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern archaeology. She became the Art Crime Team’s program manager. Magness-Gardiner was well-versed in the ways of Washington and international diplomacy and, as it happened, was the spouse of an accomplished artist. She ably spearheaded our public outreach and education efforts and played an advisory role during investigations.

  The second boost came when Eric Ives, a forward-thinking supervisor with a strong background in a wide range of property crimes, was named chief of the Major Theft Unit, the section that supervised the Art Crime Team. Ives asked me to visit him in Washington his first week as unit chief. I met him in a windowless office on the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and in minutes I knew we would become good partners, despite the differences in age and experience. He was a former U.S. Marine with close-cropped sandy hair and intense green eyes, eager for action. Before Ives joined the FBI, he had worked for the Target retail store chain, chasing thieves who targeted bulk shipments. As an FBI agent in Los Angeles, he went after the same kind of thief, and came up with a marketing gimmick that helped catch a few. To solve the crimes, he posted pictures of wanted thieves on highway billboards, figuring this was a great way to get the photos in front of the most likely witnesses, truckers. Ives and I soon found that we shared a passion for property theft and a knack for taking chances that paid off.

  In Washington, Ives came up with another novel approach. He proposed to aggressively promote—in effect, market—the Art Crime Team, raising awareness inside and outside the FBI. “The Bureau has thirteen thousand agents and we have fewer than a dozen working part-time on art crime,” he said to me. “We need to exploit two things we have working to our advantage—one, the notion that the FBI was founded in 1908 to stop the interstate transport of stolen property, and two, this romantic allure of art crime, the Hollywood view, as projected by The Thomas Crown Affair and National Treasure.” He knew that the Hollywood version was a caricature, but believed we could leverage the misconception to our advantage. In our first marketing venture, Ives, Magness-Gardiner, and I drew up a Top Ten Art Crimes list. Written in the style of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, our list generated a
nice, moderate wave of publicity. I liked Ives’s style; for a supervisor, he didn’t think like a bureaucrat. All the better, my new boss was a fellow salesman.

  Ives and I spoke nearly every other day, and he traveled as my handler on my undercover cases, watching my back, a rare role for such a senior supervisor. Traditionally, unit chiefs at Headquarters stuck to administrative and supervisory duties and rarely ventured into the field. But Ives took a special interest in art crime. My direct supervisor in Philadelphia, Michael Carbonell, was wise and secure enough to let me work independently and with Ives. It wasn’t always easy for Carbo—his bosses in Philadelphia, who paid my salary, were always pestering him to ask where I was and what I was doing, and how the hell art crime was relevant to the local division’s mission. A legendary fugitive hunter and no-bullshit supervisor, Carbo shared my work credo: Just get the job done and the office politics will take care of itself.

  By the fall of 2005, with support from Carbo, Ives and I were ready to cut our ambitions loose.

  And we aimed high.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE OLD MASTER

  Copenhagen, 2005.

  “IS IT ALL THERE?”

  The Iraqi counting stacks of $100 bills on the narrow Danish hotel bed didn’t answer or even look up. So I asked again. “All there?”

  Baha Kadhum grunted. He didn’t lift his eyes. He just kept flipping through the inch-high piles of cash I’d brought him, $245,000 neatly arrayed on a rumpled white bed sheet. In exchange, Kadhum had promised to bring me a stolen Rembrandt worth $35 million. Presumably, one of his colleagues held it downstairs or just outside the hotel. It was always possible the thug would offer a forgery—or worse, rob me. I kept my eyes on his hands.

  Kadhum looked younger than his twenty-seven years, certainly younger than I had expected. Olive-skinned, with an aquiline nose and a mound of tousled black hair, he wore tight jeans, a pink polo shirt, black buckled leather shoes, and a gold chain around his neck. I doubted he was armed, but I took him for an amateur—desperate, and worse, unpredictable.