Dear Listers:

As a former Chairman and a long time Secretary of The International
Committee On Museum Security of ICOM, I have been following the recent
discussions.  We have always advocated a policy of reporting any thefts
of cultural property or artifacts to the proper authorities (although
you may have to educate your local police about the missing items or
artifacts; descriptions, estimated cost, etc.).

This morning, an interesting piece appeared on our Museum Security Web
Site in Amsterdam which outlines the operations of the FBI Stolen Art
Unit - and should give you the reasons WHY you should report missing
items and artifacts to the police.
_____________________________________________________________________
TO CATCH AN ART THIEF WIELDING HER DATA FILE, LYNNE CHAFFINCH TRACKS
THOUSANDS OF STOLEN WORKS

By Michael Kilian Tribune staff reporter April 18, 2001

WASHINGTON -- According to INTERPOL, between $4 billion and $6 billion
in art is stolen every year throughout the world, much of it turning up
on the U.S. art market. To cope with this global crime problem, the FBI
has deployed a powerful law enforcement resource.  Her name is Lynne
Chaffinch. Since 1997, she has run the FBI's art theft program, which
among other things maintains a computer database containing files on
more than 100,000 pieces of stolen art. And, as the bureau's only
certifiable art expert, she does it all by herself.  "You're looking at
the art theft program," she said, indicating herself as she sat in her
modest office at FBI headquarters in Washington.

An art and archeological scholar who came to the FBI from her position
at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, Chaffinch is not an FBI
special agent.  She packs no heat, and is not empowered to make
arrests.
But she doesn't need to, for she has all 56 FBI field offices, 400
smaller offices and 11,300 special agents at her disposal in dealing
with art cases. And, when they or other law enforcement agencies need
assistance with cases involving stolen art that break in their
local jurisdictions, they call Chaffinch. The same goes for foreign
governments who think stolen or looted art may have turned up in or been
bound for the U.S.  Chaffinch keeps track of what stolen art is out
there--whether it's 3,000-year-old Chinese terra cotta heads or a
priceless Vermeer painting, such as was snatched in the 1990
robbery of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Expertise that agents don't have

"Basically, there's not a single FBI agent assigned to art theft, not
one," said Special Agent John Strong, who has worked with Chaffinch. "In
five minutes, they [art experts] know I'm not one of them. Lynne's not
an agent, but she can go out there [into the art world] because she was
one of them. She doesn't have to fool them. . . . She's got the
knowledge and the education."  Such expertise can be valuable. One piece
of supposedly junk sculpture a burglar sold to a pawnbroker for $40
turned out to be an Alexander Archipenko work worth $600,000.
Unlike the art theft insurance agent Rene Russo played in "The Thomas
Crown Affair" movie, Chaffinch does not spend a lot of time wearing
designer clothes to posh gallery openings or on jaunts to exotic
locations.  Instead, she is most likely to be found at her computer. She
directs investigations, coordinating various agents' efforts, and
pursues leads on her own. She also serves as the in-house program
analyst for the FBI's stolen jewelry and gem theft investigations.
But once in a while she does get out, such as the time she went out on a
search warrant. An informant had told the bureau there was some valuable
art on a suspect's premises, and the field agents needed Chaffinch's
expertise to determine whether that was true.  "The informant was
embellishing," Strong said. "He didn't know art from a lawn jockey."

The daughter of an Air Force colonel, Chaffinch was born in Texas and
grew up on or near military bases all over the world. She graduated from
the University of California-Davis with majors in archeology and
anthropology, and earned her master's degree in museum studies
from San Francisco State University. Before the FBI, she worked as an
archivist, cultural anthropologist and in other arts and antiquities
related positions for the Smithsonian Institution, the Los Angeles
Museum of Western Heritage, the Oakland Museum and Monticello.
She read about the FBI job in a museum newsletter and responded to it on
impulse, encouraged by some detective work she'd done for her sister, a
Los Angeles-based customs agent.  "She called me and said, `You know,
I've got these [stolen] pieces and I don't know who to go to about
them,'" Chaffinch said. "I helped her find the right experts and where
the stuff might come in and where it might hit the art market. She was
able to do surveillance on the warehouse and recover the objects. I
thought, `That's really neat.  That's a cool thing to do.' So when I saw
this job listing, I thought, `I've got no chance to get it but I'm going
to send in a resume.'"  Though there are occasional high-profile museum
heists like the Gardner case, most of the art stolen in the U.S. is
taken from residences, Chaffinch said, and usually the perpetrators
don't know the value of what they're taking.  "Not that there aren't
more sophisticated thieves out there," Chaffinch said, "but generally
the art thief in the U.S. is the same guy who will steal your car or
your TV."  The problem for the FBI is that the U.S. buys 60 percent of
all the art sold in the world, and a lot of that art is stolen.
American galleries are often suspicious of prospective sellers of art,
Chaffinch said. "But they won't call law enforcement because they're
afraid their customers will fear that if they have any suspicion,
`they'll call the cops on me.'"  Chaffinch's data file is a big help in
that respect. It even contains reports of stolen classic cars, including
a rare decades-old Aston Martin taken in Florida that was originally
used in an early James Bond movie.  "It's still out there," she said.

How stolen pieces are disguised

Because there's no way yet for a customs agent to tell on the spot that,
say, a Picasso painting might be stolen, it's often hard to stop the
importation of purloined art in the U.S. If the thieves try to hide the
art or fail to declare it, however, agents can grab them for customs
violations. Sometimes thieves go to great lengths to disguise their art,
especially statues.  "In a case where some Egyptian items were taken,
what the thieves did was dress them up to look like cheap souvenirs,"
Chaffinch said. "Then, when they got them to the U.S., they took
everything off, and, boom."  After the Gardner burglary, Sen. Edward
Kennedy (D-Mass.) and others gave Chaffinch and the FBI a hand by
getting legislation passed in 1994 to make a lot of art theft a federal
crime.  Now, if a piece of art is stolen, is worth more than $5,000 and
is more than 100 years old, it's a federal crime to possess it. If it's
worth more than $100,000, the age doesn't matter.  Chaffinch's job may
be considered one of the most exciting to be had in the art world,
though she confesses she spends most of the time at her computer, "going
`arggghhh.'"

But she's happy.

Said Strong: "She doesn't want to become an agent Strong, "because then
she'd be like the rest of us."  "I'd be shipped off to do
cunterterrorism somewhere," Chaffinch said.  "I'm already where I
want to be--in my own little kingdom here."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/

Kind Regards

Roger Wulff

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