The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession

by Michael Finkel

beauty is the world’s only true currency, always enriching whatever its

Inside of paintings is where I keep my second home.”

The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art, an international group of professors and security experts who publish The Journal of Art Crime twice a year, reports that art

Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage remains the world’s largest, with around three hundred detectives.

the United States, the FBI’s Art Crime Team consists of twenty special agents and produces its own Ten Most Wanted list of missing art. The thirty-person French art force, the OCBC—the acronym translates to the Office for the Fight Against Trafficking in Cultural Goods—is

University of Oslo study documented illegal art or antiquities transactions in forty-three nations. The going rate for stolen works is 3 to 10 percent of retail;

Second: extort payment from fleeced museums or private owners, or their insurance companies. Art-napping, it’s called.

Association for Research into Crimes Against Art.

Beauty, to be unpoetic but precise, is in the medial orbital-frontal

Old works of art are like time travelers, he says, and his attic was only a way station.