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Former FBI agent details the world of art theft

October 29, 2015

Former FBI agent Robert K. Wittman gave a lecture at Penn Law on law enforcement’s efforts to recover stolen art.

By Kathy Zhang C’17

On October 27, former FBI agent Robert K. Wittman gave a lecture on art crimes and theft at Penn Law. After joining the FBI in 1988, Wittman was assigned to the Philadelphia Field Division where he served as an investigative expert in art crime. In his twenty-year career, Wittman helped recover over $225 million worth of stolen art and cultural property and was even featured in the Colbert Report in 2005.

Today, the market for legitimate art hits about $200 billion annually, Wittman explained, and the market for illicit art and cultural property stands at about $6 billion annually. Part of the difficulty in addressing the illicit art market is being able to identify genuine works.

“I’ve seen a lot of fake Pollocks, a lot of fake Chagalls,” said Wittman. “And, quite honestly, the concept of how to do the piece, the idea behind it, was genius. But the reproduction of them is not so hard.”

Other than the crime of illicit reproduction, Wittman went into detail about art theft and the different federal statutes used to catch and convict thieves, such as the Hobbs Act. He gave various example scenarios, some from experience, where a federal statute was violated and the individuals were arrested accordingly.

Wittman also talked about one of the greatest success stories of his career — “Operation Bullwinkle.” In this operation, Wittman and his team sought to recover a $35 million Rembrandt self-portrait stolen from the Swedish National Museum in 2000. He presented the audience with surveillance video clips of the operation, from “flashing the cash” to the police coming in and arresting the art theft conspirators.

In the end, Wittman remarked on how out of all other types of property, it is art that really brings people together. It’s when art theft occurs, he noted, that different countries work together to recover something “beloved by all.”

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