“Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures”

Robert Kennedy of the NY Times reviews the new book, “Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures,” by ex FBI art crime sleuth Robert Wittman. The book is available on Amazon.com, click HERE to view and order. The NY Times piece is actually more of a background article on Wittman, and less a formal book review, but it does note how interesting a tracking art crime can be.

I have ordered the book and look forward to reading it.

Kennedy states in his review

Of course pursuing art thieves also had its perks at a place where a big cocaine bust could start to feel like just another big cocaine bust. Mr. Wittman’s investigations — which he says resulted in the recovery of more than $225 million in art and antiquities, including works by Goya, Rodin and Rembrandt, along with Geronimo’s eagle-feather war bonnet and the original manuscript of Pearl S. Buck’s “Good Earth” — took him around the world, to Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen. In 2003 he accompanied one of the 14 original copies of the Bill of Rights on the F.B.I. director’s jet to return it to its home in Raleigh, N.C., after it was seized in an undercover sting.

Even the local cases could be thrilling. He and his mentor, an agent in the Philadelphia office of the F.B.I., Bob Bazin, once tracked down a 50-pound crystal ball from the Forbidden City in Beijing, which they found sitting in a housekeeper’s bedroom in Trenton, beneath a baseball cap. (It had been stolen from the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and later given to the housekeeper as a birthday present; she thought it was worthless.)

“When you track down something like that, you have this feeling of euphoria that I can only compare to how I felt when my kids were born,” said Mr. Wittman, a burly, soft-spoken man who carries himself with the authority of a cop, but who was able, for long stretches, to convince criminals he was one of them.

“Priceless” can read at times, not unpleasantly, as if an art history textbook got mixed up at the printer with a screenplay for “The Wire.”

Readers learn, for example, the difference between “the bump” (in which an undercover agent makes contact with a suspect by way of a seemingly accidental meeting) and “the vouch” (in which someone leads the suspect to believe the undercover agent is who he says he is). Other investigative details dazzle: a Miami yacht at the ready to entertain a group of thugs; a gym bag filled with 500,000 euros in cash to “buy” a Breughel in Spain; an unnamed Hollywood starlet who helps the bureau by pretending to “know” an undercover agent in his alter ego, cementing his reputation as a player.

To read the full article in the NY Times, click HERE.