Ex-FBI Agent Answers Heist Questions

Hi, I'm Geoffrey Kelly, author and retired special agent

with the FBI's Art Crime Team.

I'm here today to answer your questions from the internet.

This is Heist Support.

[lively Percussive music]

YOGO says, Ugh, I got through the vent system okay,

but there's all these lasers around the exhibit hall.

Use mirrors or acrobatics?

#heist.

That is definitely Hollywood.

You know, in Hollywood, you have

the suspension of disbelief, you know,

and you can believe that Catherine Zeta-Jones

is kind of doing the limbo under all these lasers.

But pro tip, museums don't use visible lasers.

They're not GONNA make it that easy for you

to be able to vault over it.

Most museums employ what's called volumetric motion sensors,

where the entire museum,

or any security facility for that matter,

is one giant space.

And if there's any interruption in that space,

any type of motion that occurs anywhere in there,

it's going to alert.

You don't need lasers when you've got motion sensors.

Jfish2121 asks, If I were to tweet

that I'm planning a bank heist,

would the FBI put me on some sort of watchlist?

[beeps], I'm probably on one.

Everybody talks about watchlists.

There isn't really a watchlist

for committing a bank robbery,

but yeah, I think you would probably

get the attention of the FBI,

and you might get visited by the FBI at some point.

All right, so wesrerec asks, Explain like I'm five:

How do museums know their paintings aren't forgeries?

There's a number of cases where museums

have had pieces in their collection

that turned out to be forgeries.

We had a case a number of years ago

where a museum in South America had a Matisse,

and it turned out that it had been swapped out with a fake.

There's different ways that museums can determine

whether or not they're accurate.

Some museums actually have provenance experts on staff.

You can hire outside experts to come in

and conduct their provenance research.

The experts can do scientific analysis on the pigments used,

the composition of canvas or stone,

or the plaster that's used to determine an age.

And from that, that's going to help you

determine whether or not it's potentially a fake.

Only about 20% of artwork that's stolen from a museum

is actually stolen from the gallery walls.

80% of it is taken from the collection storage areas,

and it's usually done by someone in a position of trust.

If you look at a large museum,

the collection, it's like an iceberg.

And what you actually see on the gallery walls

is the tip of the iceberg.

And the majority of the museum's collection

may be in storage.

That's when you have to worry about theft,

pieces being replaced with forgeries.

And realistically, it's just impossible for a museum

to do scientific and provenance research

on every single piece in their collection.

They only will do it if a question is raised

about a particular piece being a fake

or possibly being stolen.

All right, so nembmika,

I finally watched 'The Town' yesterday.

Honestly, Ben Affleck did his thing with this movie.

That was the most accurate depiction of a heist

I've ever seen in film.

Well, I am really flattered to hear you say that [laughs]

because I was one of the technical advisors on that film.

I worked on Violent Crime Squad for about 25 years.

And I was one of the case agents on the real Charlestown

armored car crew that committed a number of robberies.

And Ben Affleck came to the FBI when he bought the rights

to a book called Prince of Thieves,

which was a fictionalized account

of the Charlestown armored car robbers.

And my partner and I worked with him to make sure

that all the heists that were committed throughout that film

were accurate.

In fact, the first meeting that my partner

and I had with Ben Affleck, I said to him, you know,

If you wanna make a good movie,

just listen to what we're gonna tell you

'cause we'll tell you what it's really like.

And he listened.

Catalina Byrd asks, What in 'The Thomas Crown Affair'

happened in Paris?

How do you rob the Louvre in broad daylight?

We call it a smash-and-grab robbery,

and there's really nothing sophisticated about it.

And I think they were in and out in seven minutes.

You meticulously plan out the heist,

but there's the bigger picture,

which is getting away with it.

And then the biggest picture of all is monetizing it.

I believe that, like, I think four suspects

who were involved in that heist were arrested within days.

And that typifies large-scale art heists.

You know, when you look at security

that's in place in major cities around the world,

including Paris, the number of video cameras

that are out there, it really is a network

that just envelops the entire city.

And so the investigators are gonna be able to follow you.

You're gonna get picked up on traffic cameras.

You're gonna get picked up on license plate readers.

You're gonna get picked up by

private security surveillance systems

that just about every business in the city of Paris has.

And investigators are gonna be able to follow you.

They're gonna be able to stitch it all together

until eventually you're going to arrive at a location

where something identifiable is going to be located.

And so it's extremely difficult

in today's surveillance world to commit a crime somewhere

and get clean away

without somehow leaving a digital fingerprint

that can be traced back to you.

mirrrroring gives a shout-out to George Clooney

for saving the Ghent Altarpiece from the Nazi ruin.

That [beeps] was fire.

You're referring to The Monuments Men.

It was a fictional movie based on a real unit.

The Monuments Men was set up to protect

and recover the priceless historical artwork

that was at risk in Europe during World War II.

They were responsible

for saving pieces of the Ghent Altarpiece,

which was this beautiful historic multi-panel display

that was at a church in Ghent,

and I think all but one of the pieces

have actually been recovered.

And George Clooney, this character was loosely based

on a guy named George Stout.

They did a tremendous job during World War II recovering

and saving so much artwork that had been looted by the Nazis

and was in danger of being destroyed from battle.

A few years after the war, George Stout went on to become

the director of the Gardner Museum.

He realized from his time during World War II

the need for artwork to be portable

in the event of civil unrest or natural disaster.

And so a lot of the larger pieces in the collection,

the frames have were cut

and basically made a frame within a frame

with little thumb screws to keep it in place.

That way, if there was a need

to evacuate this artwork rapidly,

'cause he saw this from his time during the war,

museum staff could just take these little thumb screws

and turn them and take the piece out

and leave the much larger, heavier, bulkier frame behind.

lunchill asks, What is security fog?

And why do I feel then this need to trigger it to find out?

Well, please don't.

Security fog is a technology that's used.

And basically, when it's activated,

it releases this giant cloud of opaque,

harmless gas that temporarily blinds a thief.

The whole room is enveloped in a cloud.

I think there are some museums that may use it,

but I think it's a terrible idea.

I just wouldn't want the idea

of panicked thieves in a room filled with valuable artwork,

sculptures, whatnot,

panicking and running blindly through it.

I think you could do more damage from that.

There's a number of security protocols

that are in place today

that can be used by a museum to keep their facility safe

without resorting to that.

From Cap_Ame1,

What criminal committed an almost perfect crime?

And what was the thing that messed it up?

The closest thing that came to the perfect heist

would've been the Antwerp Diamond Heist

by Leonardo Notarbartolo, which was in 2003.

He and his crew stole about $100 million worth of diamonds

from a heavily fortified vault.

They were able to defeat the alarm system and get in,

get the jewels, and get out.

That was really the hard part.

And when you're talking about diamonds

and other precious jewels, that's your best bet as a thief

to actually get away with it and monetize it

because these gems can be recut.

Settings can be melted down.

It is a market unlike other cultural property

like statues or paintings.

They left garbage and other items of evidence

that were related to the heist.

It really led to his downfall

because, of course, all of these items had DNA on it.

They were identifiable with him and his associates.

You kind of expected more from them

because they had put so much planning

and skill into the execution of that robbery.

In the end, he wasn't able to profit from it.

He ended up going to prison.

But as far as the heist was concerned,

it was pretty close to being flawlessly executed.

clebo99 asks, Hey, Reddit Electronics,

can you really disable video cameras

like they did in 'Inside Man,'

or was that total bull [beeps]?

There are ways to disable video cameras.

Of course, it's going to be one of the goals of a thief,

whether it's for a museum or any other place.

They're wireless.

If they're cellular,

there's ways that you can try and jam them.

If it's a hard line,

then you're gonna try and cut into that line.

The thing you need to understand, though,

is if you disable the video cameras,

it's immediately gonna alert the guards

that there's a situation going on,

and they're probably gonna call the police.

So it's not as effective as it probably was in the movie.

A Quora user asked,

Is it true that Picasso once stole the 'Mona Lisa?'

So at the time, Picasso was considered a suspect,

but he did not steal it.

The Mona Lisa was stolen in 1911

by an Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia.

He did one of the classic museum thefts.

He stayed in the Louvre

and then pretended that he was a worker,

and he left the next morning

with the Mona Lisa tucked under his arm.

And he actually held onto that for two years.

He brought it back to Italy,

and it seems that he tried to sell it.

He ended up getting caught with this.

And during his trial,

he argued that he did it for patriotic reasons

to repatriate this Italian piece back to Italy.

He only did about a year in prison,

but as a result, that really became the most famous theft.

But it has an unfortunate footnote

because if anybody's ever been to the Louvre,

and seen the Mona Lisa in person,

the piece is behind bulletproof glass

and stanchions and barriers,

and it's really difficult to experience the piece

for what it is.

But that was the museum theft of La Gioconda 100 years ago.

misupoalsupo: Trying to tunnel into a bank,

that [beeps] in '80s movies don't work no more, LOL.

[laughs] Yeah, you're referring to a movie

that came out many years ago.

I think it was with Jason Statham,

but it was a real event that occurred at a bank in the UK

where group of subjects actually

went through a, like, I think it was a fish and chip shop

next to a bank and tunneled in

and then got into the safety deposit boxes.

It would not work today because of security protocols

that were not around 40 years ago.

You would not be able to tunnel into the bank

without setting off seismic alarms

or motion sensors or whatnot.

But back then, obviously security wasn't as robust

and sophisticated as it is now.

Okay, and from the CharacterRant subreddit:

Holy [beeps] of you haven't read 'Arsene Lupin,

Gentleman Burglar,' do so.

The idea of the gentleman burglar,

it's on line with Thomas Crown Affair and Ocean's 11.

It's an enduring Hollywood myth.

It doesn't exist.

The closest thing that I could come to

that's ever happened in this country is a couple,

Rita and Jerry Alter.

And in 1985, there was a theft of a Willem de Kooning piece

called Woman-Ochre

from the University of Arizona Art Museum.

And it was taken by a man and a woman

who distracted a guard.

Jerry died in, like, 2012.

And when Rita died in 2018, the contents of her home

were sold off to, like, a local antique store.

And one of the pieces that had been hanging in her bedroom

for more than 40 years was the de Kooning piece,

valued about $150 million.

And they had kept it

purely because of the love that they had for that piece,

even though it had been heavily damaged when it was stolen.

That's about as close as you're gonna get

to the gentleman burglar construct

when you're talking about art thieves, to my knowledge.

From bassistmuzikman, and Explain like I'm five:

Why would someone steal a priceless painting?

Wouldn't it be impossible to sell?

You're absolutely correct.

Nobody should steal a priceless painting

because there is no market.

It's really not priceless.

It's worthless.

Nobody wants to buy stolen artwork.

So when you're talking about trying to move

or fence stolen property that's recognizable,

a painting, a Rembrandt, a Picasso, a Van Gogh,

your actual market, it shrinks,

because it has no investment value because it's stolen.

Stealing it is the easy part.

It's monetizing it after the theft that's difficult.

You know, when I started working art theft,

like, more than two decades ago,

it was very difficult to move a stolen piece of artwork.

Now with smartphones,

Google Image Search will tell you within a second

the whole history of the piece,

the provenance of that piece.

Was it ever reported stolen?

Let's say you steal a very valuable Rembrandt.

There might be somebody in the world

who would be willing to purchase it and keep it secreted.

Maybe some Russian oligarch or a drug trafficker.

But the question is,

how do you get in touch with that buyer?

Everybody always talks about the dark web,

and it's, like, well, it's not that easy

to go to the dark web, right?

Because if you go on the dark web

and say that you have a very valuable

stolen Rembrandt for sale,

other people on that dark web are gonna turn you in

because there's probably gonna be a reward.

So it's really difficult

to connect a thief who has a piece of stolen artwork

with the very small collection of collectors

who would actually be willing to purchase it.

So as a result, these guys end up just sitting on it,

and stolen artwork ends up becoming

more of a liability than an asset.

From Over_Choice_6096:

CCTV monitoring or unarmed security guard?

Every museum is going to use a combination of both.

It's important to realize

when you're talking about security guards in a museum,

when the museum is closed, their primary goal

is not to prevent, like, an Ocean's 11-type attack.

Their primary goal is to keep the collection safe

from fire and flood.

That's the two most destructive elements

that can happen at a museum.

So you're always gonna have security guards.

CCTV, of course, it's the mainstay of museum security.

AI has brought surveillance video cameras

just in leaps and bounds

over where they were just a decade ago.

There's some museums that still have this

non-AI security cameras where you have a couple of guards

sitting glassy-eyed at a bank

of, you know, 100 video monitors, watching,

trying to look for somebody stealing something

or doing something out of the ordinary.

It's a Herculean task.

But now with AI,

the camera learns what the normal museum person

is going to do in a museum.

Even if they're looking at one piece of artwork for hours,

which is not uncommon, that's not suspicious.

But it learns what is suspicious,

and it makes these cameras smarter, and it can detect this.

So you don't need to have a couple of security guards

watching this bank of cameras.

The AI cameras will do it for you.

And so you're seeing that museum security guards,

while they're always going to be part

of a security contingent at a museum,

security cameras are really becoming

much more and more sophisticated,

and they're really taking over that role.

Something they need to have is disaster planning,

'cause if there is a fire,

if there's a flood or some other natural disaster,

that's not the time when you need to figure out,

What are we gonna do with all this artwork?

And in fact, we saw this terrible situation last year

with all the wildfires in Los Angeles,

and we assisted out there

because there was no place for these museums

to take their precious collections

as the threat of wildfires grew.

So you have to think about

the worst possible things that can happen and plan for it.

Hopefully it'll never happen,

but if it does, you need to be prepared.

faerieprincexx:

Cute date idea: we solved the Gardner Museum heist.

It's the world's largest art heist in terms of value.

It's probably over $1 billion worth of stolen artwork.

So just as St. Patrick's Day festivities in Boston

were winding down,

two subjects showed up at the Gardner Museum,

dressed as police officers, and they demanded entry.

And against protocol, the night guard let them in.

And once they came into the museum,

they asked the guard who else was working.

He said his partner was up doing rounds.

They instructed him to get his partner to come down.

His partner showed up, and they said, Hey, you know,

I think there's a warrant for your arrest.

Let me see some ID.

And the guard who was at the night desk

showed him his license.

And they said, Yeah, yeah,

there is a warrant for your arrest.

Assume the position.

And these two subjects

put both guards against the wall, spread eagle.

So after they handcuffed the guards,

they tied them up down in the basement,

and they spent the next hour or so going through the museum

removing 13 pieces of artwork from the walls,

including Rembrandt's only known seascape and a Vermeer,

which is one of only 36 ever created by Johannes Vermeer.

I worked the case for 22 years.

It's kind of a two-part investigation.

One part was the whodunit part: who actually pulled it off.

And the other part is, I think, the more important question,

which is where the piece is now.

So in terms of solving, we know who did it.

Wasn't some Thomas Crown-like reclusive billionaire.

It was just a group of Boston criminals,

Boston mobsters, who pulled it off.

But the real question to me,

and the one that I continue to work on,

is where are the pieces now?

I got the case in 2002, which was more than a dozen years

after the actual crime occurred.

By the time I got the case,

it seemed that everyone who was actually involved

in the actual robbery was dead.

Three members of that crew were violently murdered

within a year and a half of the robbery occurring.

And a fourth died under very suspicious circumstances,

most likely also killed.

So you have four people who were associated with the robbery

who were murdered or died within a year and a half.

And I think it had a chilling effect

on anybody that harbored any aspirations

about coming forward with information

about the Gardner Heist.

babetron002 asked,

People don't really do bank heists anymore.

What happened?

There's less currency in circulation now.

Bank heists do still occur.

There's still armored car robberies.

But with the security becoming so much more sophisticated,

a lot of people are kind of moving away

from standard currency

and doing everything on their cards or Apple Pay.

There's not a need to replenish banks

and stores with armored cars filled with cash.

And so you do see a decline in armored car robberies

and bank heists as a result.

D_RejectedStone:

FBI Art Crimes, I didn't know they existed.

So the FBI did found an Art Crime Team in 2004,

and I was one of the original members on the team.

The impetus for it started about a year earlier

during the war when U.S. and coalition forces

entered Baghdad.

During that period of instability,

there was a 36-hour timeframe

when looters broke into the National Museum of Iraq,

which is arguably one of the most

culturally historically important museums in the world.

It's really mankind's history.

And they stole about 15,000 objects

and damaged great many others.

And at the time,

there was a call from the U.S. government to the FBI

to basically send in the Art Crime Team to investigate this.

And the FBI said, Well, we don't have one.

And so that was really the genesis

of starting an Art Crime Team.

And so we received training from the Smithsonian

and some wonderful institutions

to learn about how to investigate art theft.

As Art Crime Team members,

we had to learn some of the stranger things about it,

like how do we package up valuable artwork?

How do we photograph it?

What resources do we have available

that can help us authenticate it or ship it?

Typically, when the FBI seizes something,

if I were to seize this laptop,

I'm gonna scribble my initials on it in a Sharpie

and put the date, put an evidence sticker on it.

And that way, if I end up testifying at trial

that I seized this laptop, it's a chain of custody to show

that, yes, this is the laptop I seized.

And I know that 'cause it's got my initials on it.

Well, we can't do that with a priceless Rembrandt.

So we had to come up with new ways and new protocols

that the FBI could use

where we could seize items of cultural property.

We could store items of cultural property

without damaging them

so that eventually they can be returned

to the institution from where they were stolen.

TheDabitch asks, Pro tip,

when selling your dad's house in Argentina,

remove the Nazi-stolen art from the walls.

That's a good tip.

From, I think, 1930s until 1945,

the Nazis seized hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork

from Nazi-controlled Europe,

primarily from their Jewish owners.

The Fuhrer wanted to start his own Reichs Museum

'cause he was kind of a failed artist in his own right.

Over the years, these pieces have made it out

into the commercial market and they've been sold

and they've ended up on museum walls

and in private collectors,

oblivious to the fact that it had been either seized

from their Jewish owners or what we would call duress sales,

which is Jews who needed to get out of

Nazi-controlled Europe would sell artwork,

pennies on the dollar

or trade it in exchange to be allowed to leave.

Well, so this is stolen property.

There's databases that are out there

to try and check this artwork, to track it down,

to make sure that it goes back to its rightful owners.

There's a lot of legal issues that come up with it as well.

In the United States, under our stolen property laws,

you can never get clear title to stolen property.

Even if you purchased it legally from a reputable gallery

or from an auction house, if it's stolen,

the victim from whom it was stolen

has the primary right to that property.

It's something that the FBI Art Crime Team

worked diligently on

to repatriate stolen Nazi-looted artwork

back to the heirs of the rightful owners.

There are private databases out there

that you can check for a modest fee

to see if this piece that you potentially want to purchase

is stolen or looted.

So yeah, I would encourage anybody

who's looking to buy a valuable piece of artwork

to do a little bit of research to make sure

that it's not stolen or wasn't looted by the Nazis.

Quora asks, Do people really believe

the museum jewelry heist in Paris

was actually done by professionals?

Sounds more like lucky-ass dumb thieves to me.

I'd be very surprised if those stolen pieces

aren't recovered intact at some point.

Everybody thinks that the first thing somebody's gonna do

is throw it away if you steal artwork or jewelry

because it links the crime to you.

Well, there's places you can hide it,

but if the French National Police

come knocking on your door,

you better have something to bargain.

If you've broken down those jewels,

you really don't have a bargaining chip.

All right, our next question, a Quora user asked,

How are art thieves usually caught?

Well, like I said, they may steal televisions or watches,

but the typical channels

that they would have to fence their stolen property

is not going to be the same channels

where they can go to try and sell high-end artwork.

As a result, they end up sitting on it for a while,

and they get kind of desperate to monetize it.

A thief that steals a $10 million painting,

he has this vision of making $1 million on this deal.

Over time, as he can't find a buyer,

that price drops and drops and drops.

Eventually, he ends up selling it to the wrong buyer

because he gets desperate.

Enough people hear about the fact that he's got it,

and that's usually how they get caught.

There's a reason why it's so enticing for thieves

to wanna steal from museums.

Museums are not meant to be

secure storage facilities for artwork.

It's not a vault.

It's meant to be open to the public.

It's meant to be welcoming.

It's meant to give the visitors a pleasurable experience

when they come in

and take a look at this beautiful collection.

So because of that,

artwork in museums is just easy to steal,

but it's the monetizing it which is difficult.

reallygoosename asks,

How the [beeps] do thieves get caught stealing stuff

when there are literal YouTube videos about picking locks

and not leaving fingerprints?

Yeah, thieves continue to get caught.

And it's typically not going go be leaving fingerprints.

It's DNA these days.

Even bad thieves understand the concept

of wearing gloves when you commit a crime

because you're not gonna leave fingerprints.

But DNA is pervasive.

Like the sebaceous oils in your fingertips will leave DNA,

or touch, say, like, a hair follicle falls out.

But you're also going to get technology as their undoing.

It's surveillance cameras

and the interconnectivity of all the different marketplaces

that are out there, car rentals and tolls and E-ZPass

and pinging off cell towers.

There's so much technology that's out there

that it is so difficult to defeat all of that,

commit a crime, not leave any DNA behind.

So it becomes very difficult to pull these things off.

They still happen,

but it's harder and harder to get away with it.

The Quora user asks, How long after a major art heist

do investigators usually continue to actively pursue leads?

Well, as the case agent on the Gardner Museum heist

for 22 years, I can tell you that they don't stop.

Investigators will continue to follow leads on an art heist

until there's absolutely no leads left.

They're not going to leave it undone.

In the United States, we have a statute of limitations,

which is the period in which somebody

can be charged with a crime.

Back when the Gardner Museum heist happened in 1990,

that statute of limitations was five years.

Because of the Gardner Heist, Senator Ted Kennedy in '94

introduced legislation

to make a theft from a museum statute to our law,

which makes it a 20-year statute.

But even after that statute of limitations expires,

investigators will still work the case

because in the United States, you can never get clear title

to stolen property, as we discussed.

And so, therefore, you can always be charged

with possession of stolen property.

For me, getting the Gardner case in 2002,

I was, like, 12 years behind.

So it took many, many years to even get up to speed

and to start re-interviewing people that were still around

and available to be interviewed.

And then you're really just following the trail.

It can take years to actually find the people

who can give you answers that you're looking for.

Especially when you're looking at an old case like this,

people don't think that it still has any importance.

It's unlike, say, a terrorist event or a murder,

which people know is extremely important,

and they're gonna hold onto that in their memory banks.

Well, that's everything for today.

I hope you learned something.

Thanks for watching Heist Support.

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