115. Robert King “Bob” Wittman

I'm Heidi Zuckerman, and this is About Art. I've spent my life connecting people to art to make their lives better. This podcast talks about art in contemporary culture and why we should care. Each episode is an impactful conversation with people I find interesting and think you will too, about their life, values, and always about why they think art matters. This is About Art. Thanks so much for tuning in today. This is a fabulous podcast with a really interesting guy, Bob Whitman. He is a highly decorated former FBI investigator. He was a special agent in the Philadelphia field division from 1988 to 2008, and he helped recover more than $300 million worth of stolen art. He tells some amazing stories about some fake Basquiat's, a lot of stories about when he was undercover, being on a Miami yacht, and the importance of why cultural property matters, what happens if these things disappear forever. Who gets to tell the story of history? When these countries invade each other, the invaders, it's not just taking over the land, it's also taking over the culture. And so they're destroying the heritage of the Ukrainian people, destroying the monuments, because they know that in 50 years, the children will only know Russian heritage. They won't know cultural heritage of Ukraine. So that's why they destroy these museums, and these monuments. It's a terrible thing. Here we go. I am so excited to have you as a guest on the podcast, and you are a different guest than anyone that I've had before, because everyone that I've had, I sort of know what they do, and you, I just have in my mind an idea of what you do, but I don't have any practical experience. So why don't we start off by asking you how you got involved with the FBI? Okay, so I started the FBI in 1988, and when I joined the FBI, Heidi, I wasn't really particularly interested in getting involved in art theft types of cases. I was watching things like Miami Vice, and I saw those guys on those cigarette boats in Miami, and I thought, boy, that would be fun, you know, to get involved in that. And the truth was, I was actually put in the go to Miami after I went through Quantico, but they sent me to Philadelphia, which is a little bit different. They have a whole lot of cigarette boats in Philadelphia, but when I got there, it was interesting because there were two really fairly big museum heists that had occurred, one at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the other one at the Rodin Museum. So as a result, because I was the new guy on the major theft squad at the FBI in Philadelphia, I was given those cases, and I worked with another agent who was an art theft investigator, and the two of us actually investigated those cases. You know, it's so interesting because I went to school in Philadelphia, and I went to Penn. I spent a lot of time both at the Archaeology Museum and at the Rodin Museum, and in fact, the Rodin Collection at Stamford University, because I grew up in Palo Alto, was where I would go in high school when I needed a little respite from my life. So I love that you were working those cases, and you said 1988? Yeah, so I was there. Yeah, you might remember that there was a heist from the UPenn Museum. They had stolen a statue of the God Osiris, the Egyptian God, as well as the crystal ball that's in the Asian gallery. It was collected. It was owned by the Emperor Zixi of China, and if you visited the Asian Gallery at any time, you would have seen that crystal ball right in the center underneath the dome. In fact, it's back there today as a result of our investigation, but they had stolen that, the silver stand that it was on, as well as the, I guess, 5000-year-old God Osiris from Egypt that had been collected. It took us about three years, but eventually we did recover all three pieces. Interestingly enough, the crystal ball, it ended up being held by a witch, because you know witches have to have crystal balls, but she was a good witch. So she was a good witch in Trenton, had been given the crystal ball by a friend of hers, and when we got to the house to recover it, we had gone, like, kind of an undercover saying we were interested in buying it, and when we got to the house to see it, it was in her bedroom on her dresser on a little stand, and I had her friend's baseball cap on it, because it's a it's a perfect 50-pound crystal ball, and when the sun hits it, it diffracts the rays and creates little fires. So she had to cover it in order to keep it from burning her house down. Amazing, amazing. You know, I would think that the idea of being in the FBI and, as you said, thinking about, like, what would be fun and having seen Miami Vice, it's interesting how many people get involved in careers because they think it would be fun, and then there's so much more to it than what they ever initially conceived of. No, absolutely. I did work drugs for about a year, a year and a half, that was during the beginning of the crack wars in '89, '90 in Philadelphia, but I was actually working on the crystal ball, and also the mask of the man with the broken nose, which is the famous Rodin sculpture that was stolen at gunpoint from the Rodin Museum. So while we were doing that, we were also doing drug investigations. Ultimately, I found that I got more satisfaction out of being involved in the recovery of cultural heritage and cultural property than I did working drugs. I mean, it just seemed like the drug situation was putting your hand in a bucket of water, and when you pulled it out, it was just more water. It just kept going. But when you can recover a Rodin sculpture like that, it just spent a lot more, to me personally, than those other types of cases. So how do you start to work a case? What does that mean? What do you look for? How much is intuition? How much is fact? Tell us the story of how you start to work a case and how that goes. Well, over the course of my career from 1988 to today, in 2008, I retired from the FBI and started my own company, Robert Whitman, Incorporated. And we're an international security firm. We do museum security. We just finished a security survey for the National Gallery. I worked with the Barnes Foundation here in Philadelphia, and we do recovery as well, and a lot of expert witness testimony in cases, especially in New York and Southern District in New York and Manhattan. Most times, what happens with a case, it comes in, something is done. It doesn't matter if it's criminal or civil. It could be a civil allegation that someone has sold someone a fake painting. At that point, you want to do the investigation to find out if the painting is actually fake or not. I mean, that's the question. And if the person who sold it knew it was fake. See, those are different types of elements to those allegations. If it's a stolen painting, which is, of course, a criminal case, then what you want to do is find out exactly when it was stolen, how it was taken, what was the modus operandi when they took it, what physical evidence was left, and then move forward from there to check sources in the art community. Working on an art theft case is very, very different from say auto theft or bank robbery. You're not going to go into a museum and spread fingerprint dust all over the museum. There are certain things you can't do. It's a whole different type of investigation. And they're all different. That's what makes it so interesting. From, I'd say, 1995 to 2008 at the FBI, I was undercover the entire time, somewhere in the world, working on a case. So when you're undercover, do you have the same persona that you always go back to? Are there some favorites that you've had, different characters that you've assumed or people that you've kind of impersonated? Or how does that work? It all depends on the case. Just for example, I worked a case involving fake basquiatts, which are pretty common, a lot out there. Just like a lot of fake Jackson Pollux. To do that case, undercover persona was as a shady dealer. So what I was doing, I was buying these fake basquiatts for my clients overseas who didn't know better. So I was their art advisor, shady dealer. And we were undercharging what a market basquiat would go for. But the point was, I was giving our clients a good deal. And once the faker, the forger, agreed, then we had a wire fraud investigation. So that's just one type. Another case I did involving a stolen Rembrandt. It was stolen at gunpoint from the Swedish National Museum. It was a $35 million painting. It was stolen using machine guns. Three individuals went into the museum and robbed it. It took two Renoirs and the Rembrandt. In that case, I was undercover in Denmark. We were able to recover that Rembrandt by offering $250,000 in cash. I was acting undercover in that case as an authenticator for the Russian mob. So my job was to authenticate the painting, pay the money, and then keep the painting in safe keeping. So in that case, I was working as an authenticator, a professor, so to speak, of art. So in each case, it depended on what the scenario called for. And I would just change the background. Were you ever scared? Always. Always scared. In the Rembrandt case, I was dealing with three individuals who stole the paintings at gunpoint. It's an armed robbery. So whatever you're going to take someone's freedom away from them, you always have to be careful. I had another case involving two French thieves in Miami who had been involved in the theft of two Picasso's from Diana Picasso, the granddaughter of Pablo. And we were able to recover those. They threatened to kill me as a result of their loss of the paintings, thinking I was an informant. I was able to convince them that wasn't the case, that I was working legitimately with them, but just didn't work out. You're always using that adrenaline of fear to keep you one step ahead of the bad guys. It's interesting. So I have a friend who's an Olympic snowboarder, silver medalist. And the first time I had a conversation kind of like this with her, and I said, "How can you do these incredible tricks in the superpipe and not be scared?" And she said, "Of course I'm scared, just like you said. That's what keeps me safe." She said, "Any time you're not using fear as a motivator, then that's when mistakes happen." Exactly. You're not on top of your game. I'll tell you a funny story. In 2000, I guess it was the December of 2007, right before I retired in September of 2008, I was in Warsaw, Poland. And I was heading from our hotel, which I think was a Sheraton, going to a Hilton. And I was going to go meet the bad guys at the Hilton. It was around 11.30 at night. It was a weeknight. I got in the back of a taxi, which was my normal thing. I drove over, rode over to the hotel. And on the way there, I wasn't excited. I didn't have any fear. It started to feel old hat. And so I realized at that moment that this was done, that I didn't need to do this anymore. And I kind of stopped working undercover at that point. I finished up with cases I had, but didn't start any new ones because I had lost that edge. In other words, I just wasn't... I didn't have the edge. I didn't have that adrenaline fear. And so once that's gone, that's how you get hurt. You're not all there. You're not on top of the game. It was time to stop the game. It's such a great point. I listened to this Tim Ferriss podcast some years ago, and it was about quitting and how to know when to quit. And sometimes people think quitting is like a dirty word, right? But it's not. It's part of being cognizant of your reality, right? And the whole podcast was about knowing when to quit and some people who had quit too soon and some people who had quit too late and what kind of sensations or how did people know? And your example is the great one, when something just feels different. Yeah, I wouldn't say I quit. I would say more than I stopped. There's a reference. I still do investigations. I'm still involved very much into that. And I still do undercover work. It's just that now I send somebody at the end. You know what I mean? I can set it all up and I can make it all happen. But at the very end, I'm not going to be that guy who walks in the door and faces down the bad guy. Let a police officer, a young man do that. It's not my job anymore. So I do work with the police. I work with the RCMP in Canada, the Toronto Police, the FBI, Homeland Security here in the States. I do all that now anyway. But I don't necessarily have to be the last guy in, so to speak. Yeah. And that's a really, that's an important distinction, right? Yeah, there's a great dirty Harry quote. A man's got to know his limitations. Yes, exactly. You have recovered more than $300 million worth of stolen art and cultural property and you've referenced a couple of them. But I'd love you to tell a story of, I don't know, maybe a really, when you're particularly proud of, maybe it was extra hard or it took a long time or, let's tell us a story. It's interesting because, you know, people ask me on the time, what was the most valuable artifact that you ever recovered? What was the most important, most valuable? And one of them, the most valuable piece, single piece, was an original copy of the Bill of Rights. And, you know, in 1789, Washington sent the 13 states, their copy of the Bill of Rights to be ratified. And this one particular one was from North Carolina. And what had happened was, it was stolen during the Civil War when a trooper from Indiana was coming back north with Sherman's troops out of Atlanta. And they stopped it, brought the Raleigh State House, which was the capital of North Carolina. They went in and basically this trooper stole the Bill of Rights right out of the state house in Raleigh. He took it back to Indiana, he sold it for $5. And that's where it stayed in. Yeah, that's where it stayed till 2003. And at that point, one of the appraisers that used to work on the Antiques Roadshow. And by the way, just for fun, you know, I actually had cases against five of the appraisers on Antiques Roadshow that were convicted of fraud. But anyway, this particular one, he was offering it for sale to the National Constitution Center in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. And so we got a call from the U.S. Attorney in Raleigh to look into this. We were able to do an undercover again operation where we were able to recover that document, which was an original, one of the original 13 copies of the Bill of Rights. It wasn't actually a copy, it was, you know, handwritten with black gall ink by the secretaries, you know, of the Congress. And it was interesting that we were able to actually recover that. The value on that financially was estimated at $100 million. If you could sell it, if you actually could sell one of those, the only document that would be worth more would be the Declaration of Independence, financially. But as far as that was concerned, of course, you couldn't sell it. It had no value, because it belonged to the state of North Carolina, to the public. Interestingly enough, one of the most important pieces I ever recovered was, it was much less, it was only a $30,000 piece. And it was a battle flag, again, carried during the Civil War by one of the very first African-American regiments. It was carried by the 12th Regiment Corps d'Afrique in the Battle of Port Hudson. And the story goes that at least five people were shot out from under it, carrying the flag into battle. And you have to understand this was the first time that African-Americans could fight for their freedom for themselves and all of their children and grandchildren for perpetuity. So it was a blood claw. Now, it was stolen from the Army. It was only being valued at about $30,000. You know, once again, we did recover that. But, you know, it wasn't the money. It was the historical value and what it represented. That was so important. So, you know, once $30,000, once $100 million, which one's more important? It all depends. Right. You brought up a bunch of really interesting and important things. And this idea that there's a lot of things that can be stolen, that they have huge value, but they don't have any value because they can't be sold, right? And people have asked me this question. So what happens, for example, when a really famous painting, let's talk about the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist, right? Like those paintings, they've been published everywhere. So you really can't sell them. Or if someone buys them, they're like a, obviously they're a bad actor, but they can't be shown. Who buys stolen works of art and what do they think they can do with them? Well, that's a great question. You know, what I always say, that the true art in an art theft, it isn't the stealing, it's the selling. It's what it comes down to. And basically, the criminals are better thieves than they are businessmen. So they go out and they see these articles in the newspapers and whatnot about Picasso's and Da Vinci's selling for $400 million and Picasso's selling for $500 million at Sotheby's or Christie's or wherever. And they think, well, hey, if I can go steal one of those, maybe I can get a 10% premium on it. You know, that would be a million dollars, you know, I could make with no investment. So it'd be a good deal. But they don't realize they can't sell it. You know, they're used to stealing cars, and you can chop a car up and sell the parts for more than what the car is worth. But you can't do that with artwork, can't chop up an artwork. Although, I got to tell you, working with the Carbonieri recently, I have found out that what's happening there is that individuals are going into the churches and stealing major sized paintings, huge paintings, and then cutting pieces out of them. So they might have 20 saints in the painting, and they'll take pieces of each portrait of the saint and sell it by itself. So that's happening now, which is different than what we've seen in the past. But that's an occurrence in Italy that's going on. The problem is that you can't sell these pieces. They don't have value. And the reason they don't have value is because when it comes to buying art in the market world, you're going to have three things. You've got to have provenance, you've got to have authenticity, and you have to have good title. And stolen art doesn't carry good title. So there's no way to transfer the ownership of that stolen artwork to anyone. I've always said to people who have had these ideas that, you know, there's this guy hiding in his basement, right? He's a rich guy, and he's staring at these malls full of stolen art. And that theory is called the Dr. No Theory, because back in 1962, you know, during the first James Bond movie with Sean Connery, he walks into Dr. No's caverns, and he looks over, and he sees a Goya painting that had been stolen from the National Gallery the year before, which really had been stolen. But the thing was, the producers, they liked the idea. So they had a copy of the painting made and put there on an easel. So that when James Bond walked in, he looked at it like, oh, I wondered where that went. You know, it was a tongue-in-cheek thing. Yeah. So that became the Dr. No Theory, that, you know, there's an individual sitting there with all these paintings in his basement. So I've never actually seen that. There's been a couple of things where, you know, a painting would have been found somewhere at some point, but not, you know, walls full of paintings that, you know, that some collector was buying and stashing away. They realized, too, that, you know, you can't really do anything with them. Look, that Rembrandt that we wanted to recover, that we recovered out of Sweden, that was stolen from the Swedish National Museum, you know, that was a $250,000 deal. I mean, who's going to pay $250,000 for a stolen piece that you can't own? So I say they usually come back to the FBI or police, you know, who are undercover. That's who buy them. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. What percentage of art that's stolen do you think gets recovered? I would say that the high value art, I mean, we're talking about, you know, these Renoir's and Picasso's and whatnot. If they're not destroyed, ultimately they come back because they outlive us, you know, whether it takes, let's look at that, that Bill of Rights was stolen in 1865. We got it back in 2003. You know, I recovered five Norman Rockwell paintings that were stolen from a gallery in Minneapolis in 1979. And we got those back in 2001. So it may take time, but sooner or later, these really important pieces come back. Now, the cheap paintings, pieces that are $1,000 or less, they can be sold through secondary markets and flea markets. And because they're not known, the notoriety is not there, they may not come back ever. Actually, the thought is that about 10% of stolen property is recovered. But when I talk about expensive paintings, I would say 90 to 95%. Does that make you an optimist? Or does that make you optimistic? No, it makes me a realist. Being in this business for 30 years, I know sooner or later that a really expensive painting that gets taken off of a museum wall is going to come back. That's what makes the Isabel Sturck Gardner heist such a mystery. You know, you got 13 objects of art that have been missing now for over 30 years, and not a single one has come back with million-dollar rewards. So it's a strange situation. Usually when you have that kind of reward money out, it creates cracks and things do come back. What do you think will happen there? Do you think that is one of those situations where some people maybe just have to die and then the work comes back? That's a possibility. Like I said, if it's not destroyed, it will outlive us. And luckily, the Vermeer was taken on the stretcher. I mean, the Rembrandts were cut out, which is really bad. I mean, I've seen paintings cut out of frames that have been recovered. They're really bad shape. The Vermeer was taken on stretcher. So I'm hopeful for that. I really am. You know, I worked on that case from 2005 to 2008 undercover in Miami. We came close, I thought, to recover the Vermeer and the Rembrandts seascape. At the time, I thought they were in Corsica, but we didn't get it done. And so it's a case of it. They could be anywhere at this point. And I hope they do come back. I mean, that makes me feel positive that, of course, you hope that they didn't get destroyed, right? You hope that they're still out there somewhere and that they'll come back. There's no advantage in destroying them. I mean, you know, what's the point? I steal them if you're just going to destroy them. Talking about kind of destroying things, but not really destroying them, what do you think about what's been happening with environmental activists coming into museums and splashing paint on things? And of course, mostly it's on like a bonnet recently at the National Gallery or it's on a work that's behind den glass. And to me, it seems like the activists are very intentional in the works that they're choosing to obviously vandalize. It seems to me that they're not trying to do permanent damage, though, and that they've been thoughtful, at least in what they're selecting. You have a security company now. What's your perspective on this? I'm against it. I think we're all against it. So I think it's not a positive statement for their cause. I mean, for their cause, actually. I think that there is an environmental situation we need to address. But I don't think that's a good way to publicize it. I think people understand that there is a problem. And those people who don't will never come around to it because it's a political situation for them. And so there's a reason why they won't admit to the environmental problems. So splashing paint or throwing orange peels or something, food against the glass on a covered piece of art, I don't think it makes much of a statement. And I don't think it brings attention, really, or even good attention to the cause. But it's been a situation where there's been no real damage. And there's not a whole lot you can do to protect against it. It's going to use organics, I mean, mashed potatoes or something. I don't know about your museum, but you probably have a cafeteria so people can go in and buy a hot dog. And if they want to buy a hot dog and stick it in their purse and walk over and throw it against the wall, I guess they can, right? Even if you do a bag check when they come into museum doors, you can't stop them from going over and buying food at the cafeteria. So it's a situation where as long as there's really no damage occurring, do you want to make a good experience for the visitor? Yeah, it's tricky. We're talking today about, I mean, there's obviously a significant difference between accidents and intentional vandalism. And when you get a ton of visitors and we have a lot of security, people are doing their best and no one's head is on a 360 swivel. So you're looking a different direction or if people are intentionally trying to have the guard in another part of the gallery, when they're bad actors, it's almost impossible to be 100%. There's people who do distractions. They'll distract the guard and then their partner will go do something. I do think that something that is helpful, though, is if someone does something like that and they're caught, that they're prosecuted to the fullest extent. I mean, even if they don't go to prison or anything like that, you don't have to have to pay a heavy fine, they might start rethinking a little bit the value of it. So I do think there should be consequences for individuals who commit to vandalism. Yes, I agree. I agree. I wanted to circle back to this idea of who steals art. And you made reference to the fact that when people steal cars, they can take them apart and kind of sell them in pieces. And you can't do that with art, though, of course, you shared an example of what's happening now in Italy. Are the people that steal art the same as people who steal other high value items? Or is it a different kind of person? Well, there's different groups. I mean, you can't put everyone under the same umbrella. At the FBI, we looked at art theft at times as an engagement crime. In other words, a lot of times it was like a shoplift. In other words, somebody could go in and access to a collection and steal it. I hate to tell you, but in the United States, 89% of museum thefts are inside jobs. So the first big people you want to look at in the event of a theft in a museum are the workers, and not just workers, but docents, people who have access to collections. But these armed robbers that do common thefts and rob at gunpoint, like in Europe and in different places, they're involved in all different types of crime. They're involved in gun running, drugs, from what I've seen, all different types. They just happened to do an art heist because they could get away with it, and they thought they could make money. But then there's another level of criminal, as I said, who are experts who get access to collections, and they believe that they enjoy and know more about, have more knowledge about these collections, so they deserve to have them. I've actually had conversations with individuals after we've arrested them, and they told me that. They knew more about it, they liked it, so why couldn't they have it instead of the museum? Because the museum didn't have it on display, so they were studying it in the back room, and why not? It all depends on the mentality of the individual who goes in, sometimes his desire, and sometimes it's just financial. It all depends, and all the times it's just access and availability, so it depends. Fascinating, fascinating about the issue of the psychology, and this idea of almost an unsanctioned love. I value it, I love it, I should have the ability to be with it. Why can't I have it? That was a case I did here in Pennsylvania at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where an individual actually was a maintenance guy, had stolen more than 200 pieces out of the Historical Society, worth a little over $2 million, and the person who bought that, all that material from him over the course of seven years, paid him about $8,000, it wasn't a lot of money, but that was his psychology. Why can't I have it because I like it? And some of those items were incredibly important. A ring with George Washington's hair in it, a tea caddy that was at Valley Forge that George Washington had with him in Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. I mean, just incredible pieces that he had taken out of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. So you've now written a couple of bestselling books also. Will you tell us your story about becoming an author and of all the stories that you have to tell, no doubt? How did you choose these ones to pen first? It's kind of easy to tell you that story. What happened was, when I left the FBI in 2008, I wanted to alert the public. I wanted to get support from the US public to protect cultural heritage, because it's a very low priority in police department. It's property crime. So it's on the same level. It doesn't matter if it's a Monet or a Chevrolet, it's considered property. And so I wanted to get it raised up a bit, and I thought one way to do that would be to write a memoir. So I wrote my first book, which was Priceless. It's called Priceless, How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World Stolen Treasures. It's published by Random House. The editors at Random House wanted me to do undercover cases. So we picked like 10 or 12 undercover cases to profile in the book. And it's a chronological basically a story of my beginnings in the art theft world to the end when I retired in 2008 from the bureau. And that's how we picked these specific stories. And then in 2013, I was doing a case involving a diary that was written by Alfred Rosenberg, who was the chief civil scientist for Hitler. In many respects, Rosenberg's ideas are what created the Nazi socialist movement. And in fact, I was with Hitler from 1919, all the way through 1945. In some respects, he's credited as making Hitler the man that we know of as Hitler. Okay. So anyway, this diary was written between '35 and '45, 1945. It was 400 pages. It was stolen during the Normberg trials. So the Holocaust Museum wanted that back. And, you know, they came to my company and we talked about it. So we did an investigation and we were able to recover that. So the second book, it's called The Devil's Diary, Alfred Rosenberg and The Stolen Secrets of the Third Reich. And we talk about the investigation, but then we also talk about what's in that 400 pages. And, you know, it's interesting. It's really interesting because when we recovered the Bill of Rights and other books like that, they were great. That was really important, but we knew what was in them. If you get back the Bill of Rights, you've got 10 others out there. You know what's written. And so it's the document itself, but not the ideas. In this case, because it had never been transcribed or translated, this 400-page diary, we didn't know what was in it. It was primary information from the highest reaches of the Third Reich during World War II. And so it was really important to be able to get that back, to learn new information about the Holocaust, about all those things that happened during World War II. It's so interesting to think about what can be lost when these things are missing, right? And being able to fill in the gaps. I love your answer for why you became an author. You're right. There are so many things that can take our focus, and people really can't be curious about things that they don't know anything about. I'm obviously really interested in art theft, and I know less about cultural property. But the stories that objects tell us, they're unique. They can only be told in this way. We look at, when we, I say with you, investigators, the FBI, it's all cultural property. It's all cultural heritage, whether it's a document or a painting. It's all the same type of material. I mean, it could be a Batmobile. I've had cases involving the Batmobiles. So it all depends on baseball cards or even comic books that are worth millions of dollars today. This recently, a Mickey Mannel rookie card sold for $12 million. So that becomes part of the cultural heritage, part of the cultural property. And so it's all part of that. It's a $200 billion industry. When we look at all of it, not just art, when we talk about prints, sculptures, and paintings, but also collectibles, all of it together. So today's world is very valuable, and that's why the criminals get involved. There was a famous bank robber named Willie Sutton, and at one point, he was asked by a reporter, Willie, "Well, why do you rob banks?" And he turned around and he said, "Because that's where the money is." Well, that's why these individuals commit crimes with cultural property, whether it's fakes, frauds, forgeries, or theft, because today, that's where the money is. What do you think about the Nodler case and all of those fake paintings? Who do you think knew what? Oh, I know who knew what. I was the expert witness on that case. So I do know who knew what. I do know that Lafira Rosales knew those fake paintings were fake. When she was selling them to Nodler, she knew that she had gotten them from a Chinese painter in Brooklyn. So if you're going to prove a criminal case, you've got to be able to prove you own a reasonable doubt. And there were a lot of actions that Nodler, the gallery itself, did that are not indicia of knowledge of fraud. When I get involved in a fraud case, I speak to indicia of knowledge of fraud. In other words, what are they doing that would be common with cases I've known I've been involved with when people are committing frauds? And a lot of the things they did are not what people who know that things are fake, but that they do. Do you see what I'm saying? You have to be able to look at it from the standpoint of you're never going to be able to know everything they knew, but you can look at what they did and see what it indicates. And I'm involved in another case right now involving a collector who's suing an auction house for hundreds of millions of dollars because he feels like he was defrauded. So you have to look at what the indicia of what they did to see if it coincides with experience in that industry. And having worked undercover and doing fraud cases and fakes and forgeries, I know exactly what these individuals want to do and what they don't want to do when they sell these pieces to you. And so as a result, I can look at that and make a decision. So that's why people haven't gone to jail because it's an abstract thing, right? This idea of beyond a reasonable doubt. It's not all doubt. It's about a 90% level. And that's why the U.S. attorney didn't charge criminal cases other than Glyphia Rosales and the individuals in Spain. And that's why, because they couldn't prove those cases beyond a reasonable doubt, there was reasonable doubt as to the knowledge, being able to prove knowledge in those cases. And that's one of the elements of the crime, is knowledge of the crime. You know, to give you an idea, interstate transportation of stolen property is a federal crime. It's got to be worth $5,000 or more across the state or international border. And the person has to know it's stolen. The hardest element to prove is knowledge. That's why I worked undercover so much, because I could talk to people on the phone or in person with a tape and say, "You know it's stolen, right?" And they'd say, "Yeah, it's stolen." And then I have them on as a confession. So that was proving that element. And in these cases that are historical cases that occurred 10, 12 years ago, you can't use that technique. So you don't have the ability to be able to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. But you know, they were all sued civilly and they settled all the cases and paid money back. So that's one way to judge the case. Did you know about art before you started this part of your life? Did you go to museums or anything growing up? Yeah, well, we talked about the industry, $200 billion industry. My parents were in the antiques business. My dad was in Japan during the Korean War. And he basically fell in love with everything Japanese, including my mother, so to speak. When he came back, he really did was a collector. He collected Asian antiques and had a little store from around 1985 to when he died in 1996. So I grew up in a household with a lot of antiques in the house. So I wasn't throwing a football around too much in a living room, so to speak. But it's interesting, while he was doing his business, I was helping him on occasion. And as I said earlier, you know, I didn't have to know about art history to do these deals. Because art history is not what this is about. This is about the art business world. And it's two different things. What you do in the business world in art is different from art history. So being able to do a deal and knowing how to do a deal in the art business world was very helpful. Yeah, that's super fascinating, right? Because one of the things that's interesting about the art world and the art market, they're such a specific language. They're such specific nomenclature. And people need to know the difference between an advisor and a dealer and, you know, provenance. And I mean, I don't know anything about being under cover. And of course, I've watched TV shows where, you know, someone gives themselves away by using the wrong word or having the wrong accent. And the art world is a very specific place. And, you know, for the most part, people know each other. And there are these cultural norms, right? And so what you're talking about in terms of being able to do a deal, there's language, there's nomenclature, there's verbiage. And you have to be able to have that parlance. Right. Yeah, well, working with dealers, that's really important. I did an undercover in Santa Fe with some of the Indian market individuals. And, you know, being able to go in and talk to the galleries, the gallery owners who were involved in this criminal activity, and sounding like I knew what I was talking about, was very helpful. But, you know, I didn't have to know about Indian art. My background was in Asian art. So I could transfer the knowledge of the Asian art and the, as you say, the verbiage into the Indian art. But I used them as their expertise to sell to my clients, you see? So the fact that I knew about Japanese Neske, about, you know, different types of ceramics, most policemen don't. So as a result, they trusted me. Did you ever work with a partner? Occasionally, I would take somebody with me. I did a case in Barcelona, and I had a Spanish police officer who basically was my interpreter. And so he came in and he did a really nice job. He was a very young man. And I basically said that I had hired him, you know, that week to come and interpret for me, because these criminals I was dealing with were French. So they could speak Spanish to him, and he could tell me in English. So occasionally, I had a partner do that. Or, once in a while, I could tell you we had an undercover case we did on a yacht in Miami. In that case, I was supposedly selling five stolen paintings to a Colombian drug dealer. And this was to impress a target. In other words, the person we were trying to impress was a target that we were bringing on to prove to him that I was who I was. And so the yacht was all set up. Of course, it was an FBI yacht, and we had a big party with all the young ladies, you know, in their bathing suits, and the Colombian drug dealer who was an FBI agent as well. But he was convinced by the time it was done that we were real. So, I mean, yeah, we used partners, we used stagecraft, you know, whatever we needed to do, we would use. Did you have fun doing all this? The most fun was when you were successful. That moment when you got the art back, you know, the Rembrandts or the Picasso's or the Norman Rockwells or whatever it was, that moment was a Eureka moment. So I don't know if you have children, but I have three children. And, you know, there's a moment when your feet don't touch the ground, when your children are born, you know, you're so happy. But that lasts a whole week, that lasts a month, you know. Getting the art back lasts about two hours, you know. But it's the same kind of feeling. Interestingly enough, though, you work hard and you catch a case like that, and it's like having a tiger by the tail, and you go everywhere it takes you, it just drags you with it. And then finally, when you win, when you're done, there's this huge letdown. I mean, for a few minutes, you're really, it's a Eureka, but then there's a big letdown because you got to start all over again on the next one. And so that one's done. You got to start over and build yourself back up. I mean, that's a really interesting point too, which is we're talking about kind of some of the intrigue around it and whatnot. And it is, it's a job, right? And there's that great Dunkin' Donuts commercial where they say, you know, got to make the donuts, right? And so there's all the, all the work that goes into setting something up, right? Building the case, like the chasing things down that don't end up where you thought they were going to having to kind of start from scratch and dead leads and all the things that make the success eventually, hopefully, but it's hard work. It's hard work. And also the planning. I mean, you've always got to stay one step ahead when you're undercover, the bad guys. So you're always planning things and creating the atmosphere. And so you're, you're always one step ahead doing that. And it's a constant conversation in your head on how to do this. It's all part of the game. We talked a little bit about the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist and the time that you spent working on it. Are there other things that you didn't yet solve or things that kind of eluded you that still kind of keep you up at night? Well, honestly, Heidi, nothing keeps me up at night. I sleep well. And that's because, you know, I do the best I can. And, you know, if I get it back, I get it back. If I don't, I try it hard. There's cases I'm working on now that, yeah, we're working on, I guess, Norman Rockwell, we're looking for a number of other paintings that were stolen that we're looking for. Got some leads on some good things. But, you know, I just do the best I can. And I'm not always successful at everything I do with every, every case that comes in. And, you know, I don't take cases unless I think there's something I can be helpful with. I get a lot of calls today, people who have issues, but I can't always help them. Yeah, it's nothing I can do to do about it, you know? So I only do things when I think there's actually something I can do. So I try. I try to do my best on that. But, you know, I do sleep well, because as I say, I don't have any regrets. I like the idea of knowing what you can do and being realistic about that, right? And also acknowledging there's all sorts of crazy and bad stuff out in the world that you can't do anything about. So knowing how and where you can be helpful. One of the things I'm doing right now, I'm a, I'm a member of a transnational task force working with the OSCE out of Vienna. It's a carbonary myself, Homeland Security investigators, Scotland Yard, Spanish National Police. And we go to different countries. And we do training for, you know, customs agents, police officers, prosecutors on how to stop cultural heritage theft and the transportation of cultural heritage across international borders. So we do regional security trainings. Last one we did was in Sofia, Bulgaria. And we had a Ukrainian delegation there. And that's a terrible situation right now when it comes to the art in Ukraine. It's being destroyed. And what you have to understand is that when these countries invade each other, when they invade a country, the invaders, it's not just taking over the land. It's also taking over the culture. And so they're destroying the heritage of the Ukrainian people, destroying the monuments, because they know that in 50 years, the children will only know Russian heritage. They won't know cultural heritage of Ukraine. So that's why they destroy these museums and these monuments. It's a, it's a terrible thing. You know, when you see this happening, it's been done throughout the years. I mean, the Romans did it, you know, but when you realize what's actually happening there, it's, it's disgusting. And, you know, we need to help them as much as we can, I think. It's such a, such a great point. It's systematic and it's intentional. Intentional. That's the point. It's not, it's not a mistake. It's not an accident that there's missiles destroying a cultural monument. It's done so that that's gone. The Russians will rebuild another Russian monument. And as I say, in 50 years, the children will never have known there was a Ukrainian cultural monument there. And that's really the thing that really opened my eyes. What have I not asked you about that you think would be important for our audience to know or to hear? I think your audience does realize that cultural heritage protection is a very important thing. That's something that we need to say for our children and our grandchildren, because there's nothing like looking at a real thing, an object. And we can look at books, you can look at photographs, but seeing the real object is just, it takes you to another level. And I think that that's what's important. That's our job. You know, our parents, our grandparents saved it for us. We need to save it for them. It's a great segue to my last question, which I ask everyone, Bob, which is, why does art matter? No, art matters because it's a reflection of our culture and our heritage throughout history, throughout the history of civilization. We've created art. And the reason we've done that is because it's an outlet. It's an important psychological tool. It's a way of creating a history of our cultures. There's, you know, there's many cultures that we only know about. They didn't leave language. They left pictures. And so that's why we know about them. It matters in all those different aspects. And you know what? It makes people happy. And look, that's what we need. That is so true. That is so true. Well, I was so excited to talk to you today. And honestly, I was a little intimidated. Your career has been so impressive and so exciting. And I, you probably know that. And yours has too. I was a little intimidated too. You're pretty famous. Well, it's just so interesting the way that people come at the same thing with different experiences. And I'm so grateful for the work that you do. And I loved hearing a little bit about it. I am in the process of reading priceless. And it's really fascinating. So I hope our audience will go out and join me in that as well. So thanks for making time to speak with me today and for sharing your wisdom with us. Really interesting. Great to speak with you. Thank you so much, Bob. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Probably pretty obvious that I was kind of fangirling with Bob and his stories. We were introduced actually through Kelly Crow from the Wall Street Journal. And she I think had kind of a similar experience. Join us again in two weeks when my guest is the phenomenal artist, photographer, head of the UCLA art department, Catherine Opie. I think there are few artists as eloquent about their practice and their commitment and their process and creativity and experience than Kathy. The podcast is fantastic and personal and authentic and you're going to love it. About Art is part of the Why Art Matters project, a global initiative that makes art accessible, relevant and transformational. We connect all to art through books, a podcast series, talks, brand collaborations, TV and more. This episode was mixed by Dominic Anthony Walsh. Our theme music was composed by Eric McDougal. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and review us on whichever platform you listened as it helps us further our goal of connecting all to art. We'll be back again every other Tuesday with new episodes. Thank you so much for being part of our community.