Robert Wittman had a handgun in each pants pocket.
http://liarcatchers.com/crime_scene_investigator.html
Just in case.
This wasn’t any ordinary art transaction. He was dealing with Miami mobsters trying to sell $65 million in stolen Picasso paintings. And Wittman’s life was in real danger.
“They were angry,” says Wittman, 56, a former FBI art detective who has helped recover an estimated $225 million in lost art and other historical treasures. “They said they were going to kill me, and I had to face them down.
“I had to convince them that I wasn’t responsible for certain aspects of their losses.
But, of course, I was.”
It wasn’t the first time Wittman had faced death. As the FBI’s top art investigator, he often went undercover to root out crooks, thugs, scammers and other assorted criminals. Once, he even had to disarm a man who had him at knifepoint.
Wittman will tell stories from his 20-year FBI career tonight in Bonita Springs.
“Affair of the Arts No. 5” is a fundraiser for the Center for the Arts of Bonita Springs.
Forget any Hollywood notions of art thieves. Most aren’t glamorous at all. And many wouldn’t know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. Or even between a
Rembrandt and a Picasso.
“They’re just thugs,” Wittman says. “They’re just criminals.”
Take, for example, the Manet and Renoir paintings stolen from a Palm Beach house about seven years ago. The thieves had no idea what to do with the things afterward.
“We did get them back eventually,” says Wittman, now a private security consultant. “The thieves weren’t looking for art when they broke in. They were looking for jewelry and money.
“It took us about a year to get the art back. The paintings were in a closet in one of their homes.”
The son of an antiques dealer, Wittman started working as the FBI’s top art-crime investigator in 1988 and eventually founded the agency’s Art Crime Team. In that time, he posed as Mafia members and art buyers and traveled to places as far-flung as Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid.
His recoveries included an original copy of The Bill of Rights, Geronimo’s eagle-feather war-bonnet and a $36 million Rembrandt self-portrait stolen from The Swedish National Museum in Stockholm.
Wittman, now retired, wrote about those cases and more in his hit book “Priceless,” now being turned into a Hollywood movie.
He has no idea who should play him in the film. “How about Danny DeVito?” he jokes.
“Hell, I don’t know!”
Wittman says he isn’t much of an art collector, himself. He loves art, but he can’t afford the big names.
“I’m just a working guy,” he says. “I don’t have any Manets. I have some nice reproductions that my nephew painted for me. He’s in art school. That’s the closest I get to Manet.”
Still, he appreciates the value of those priceless items.
“This artwork is irreplaceable,” he says. “Once it’s gone – a piece like that – it’s gone forever. We’re losing a piece of our culture.”
