The Michelangelo of Security

For more than 25 years Joseph Chapman has made his living, in part, by breaking into museums.

“I walked through the museum like I was a visitor and then at the end of the day I went into a men’s room stall and hid there,” said Chapman, 60, a ruggedly built man who speaks about art with reverence. The story he was telling took place in 1965 at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Tex. “At 5 o’clock I heard the toggle switches go and everything got dark and quiet,” he said.

“And the museum was all mine.”

Chapman was not there to take anything. Rather, he was intent on leaving something behind--his business card. Chapman, a former FBI agent, is founder of one of the best known museum security companies in the world. He and his team of architects and engineers have designed security systems for the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Archives, the Forbidden Museum in Beijing, the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, some of the Smithsonian museums and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Locally, he has done work for the the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum and the Gene Autry Museum, for which his team designed a high-tech system so pervasive that it makes use of cameras hidden inside the heads of manikins, microwave motion detectors hidden in the walls and tiny electronic sensors attached to every object on display.

In the last week-and-a-half, the number of calls coming into his Connecticut-based firm has increased at least 50%, Chapman said. The reasons are easy to trace. On June 28, three Van Gogh paintings were stolen from the North Brabant Museum, 55 miles south of Amsterdam, and last Wednesday three paintings were taken from three museums in Paris, including a Renoir that was sliced from its frame in the Louvre.

“We’ve been getting calls from museums I have never heard of,” Chapman said, adding that they had a similar flurry of calls in March after the theft of $200 million worth of paintings and drawings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. “There is nothing like a terrible robbery to call attention to the woeful security situation in some museums.”

Indeed, Chapman leaves today for the Netherlands--officials of the North Brabant Museum are bringing him in to visit their institution and discuss what a new security system would entail.

He has not been contacted by the Louvre. “French museum officials don’t much like to call on outsiders,” said Chapman, who has been a frequent visitor to that museum. Asked to hazard an assessment of the Louvre’s security arrangements, he said he has noticed that the security guards are not aggressively diligent.

“Unfortunately, at the Louvre the security guards are almost all, by requirement, disabled war veterans,” Chapman said. “The problem is that they have not had a war recently from which to draw worthwhile people.”

Chapman began dealing with art thefts in 1958 when J. Edgar Hoover appointed him as the first FBI agent to exclusively investigate these types of crimes. He made several famous art recoveries while with the bureau, including Picassos stolen from a Pittsburgh industrialist (Chapman was made up to look like the industrialist to deal with a thief who demanded ransom) and a group of Paul Cezanne drawings stolen in France.

In 1964, Chapman left the bureau to be a consultant to Lloyd’s of London, the New York attorney general and an art heist movie entitled “How to Steal a Million.” He set up his own security firm in New York, and one of the first calls came from an old friend, the director of the Carter Museum in Ft. Worth. “He told me, ‘We have a good security system but I would like to have an outside evaluation. Why don’t you drop in some time? You don’t even have to tell me you are coming.’ ”

Chapman, who believes in the element of surprise, left on a flight that same morning to Ft. Worth. Being careful not to be seen by the museum director, he toured the Carter and then hid. He was a “stay behind,” in the jargon of the art-theft world. He wandered the museum halls unchallenged, placing his card behind several pictures. He also got into the director’s office to leave another card and a note giving the telephone number of his hotel across the street.

When he left through a door, he purposely tripped a photoelectric beam alarm and then went up to his room to observe the police response.

“The director called me the next morning,” he said. After muttering an epithet in greeting, the director demanded that Chapman “come over here and have lunch.” Chapman eventually designed a new security system for the museum, one that has at least so far guarded it from “stay behinds” or any other kind of theft.

Chapman has, however, suffered losses from museums with which he has worked. The worst came just before Christmas, 1978, when a call came from the Chicago Institute of Art, for which he had designed a security system. Three Cezanne paintings, worth more than $3 million, were missing. He caught a flight to Chicago, not to return home for several months.

Chapman gives credit to the Chicago police for eventually solving the crime, which centered on “the most dangerous piece of paper in the museum environment, the temporary removal notice,” he said.

Everyone who frequents museums is familiar with those small notices that mark the spots where art has been removed for photography, a loan, repair or some other reason. The man who was eventually convicted of the crime, Laud Spencer Pace, worked as an art handler in the museum and figured out that if he took a painting off a wall and replaced it with an official-looking notice, the robbery would not be discovered for at least several days. This gave him ample time to take each painting out of its frame and wear it home under his winter coat.

“When they arrested him,” Chapman said, “they found over 2,000 blank notices in his apartment.”

Chapman now asks all his museums to keep careful control of the temporary notices, and he trains security personal to regularly read them.

Another important safeguard against inside jobs, Chapman said, are thorough, centralized inventory records. At some major museums individual curators still keep their own records, which can lead to easy theft. If a stored object is taken and the record of it destroyed, it can be difficult to trace.

Computerized inventories provide better security but can also be the source of unpleasant surprises. A computerized inventory check last year resulted in the discovery that more than 100 objects, worth more than $2 million, were missing from the collection of American Indian art at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. Officials at that museum still refuse to call it a theft, even though the FBI has been investigating and has reportedly recovered some of the objects from dealers and collectors far from Los Angeles.

Officials at the Southwest Museum would not discuss details of their security system but said it had been upgraded since the objects were discovered missing.

At some museums, a thorough inventory is simply not practical. “In 1976, the word came down that we had to put a real emphasis on inventory and collections management,” said Warren Danzenbaker, who at the time was in charge of security for the Museum of American History, one of the Smithsonian museums in Washington.

“Of course, we only had about 15 million objects to worry about,” he said with a laugh, “of which about 12 million were stamps.”

Because the Smithsonian has periodic inventories, strict policies on the movement of art objects and a pervasive electronic security system, said Danzenbaker, who is now chief of security systems for all the Smithsonians, the museums have not suffered a serious loss due to theft since 1981 when someone made off with a set of George Washington’s false teeth.

The electronic wizardry of the modern security world is markedly out of place with the bucolic surroundings at Chapman’s home and offices in suburban Connecticut. A cobblestone walk leads to the simple white house where Chapman and his artist wife, Else, live. There are gardens, stone walls, wind chimes and lawn benches.

Nearby is a converted barn that looks homey from the outside, but inside are immaculate workplaces and offices for the 14 full-time employees of his company, a drafting room and a library.

Also inside are stored the security plans for some of the world’s most famous museums.

Doesn’t it make Chapman nervous to have those plans--which are printed on the premises because Chapman doesn’t trust them to outsiders--out here in the country? He shakes his head no and points to various wooden boxes attached to the house and barn.

“That one is a passive infrared energy type,” he said, pointing to a box painted to fit the color scheme of the barn. “There is another one behind the rain gutter and another behind the wind chimes.”

All, he explained are connected to a master control in the house that is monitored 24 hours a day.

Not even his employees--all of whom go through extensive background checks before being hired--have access to complete plans. Several of them might work on a museum, but in the company only Chapman, his wife and Robert Ducibella, an engineer who recently became his partner, ever see a museum’s complete security scheme.

The company is currently working on new projects being designed by prominent architects such as Robert Venturi, Frank Gehry and Peter Eisenman. They have several Southern California projects in the design stage, including at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles and museums in Newport Beach, Santa Ana and La Jolla.

Chapman and his crew are also under contract to periodically run a security check on museums for which they previously designed a system. This includes an occasional staged stay behind--they enter the museum unannounced and try to find a place to hide.

“We fit ourselves into a closet or some place where we might not be discovered, and then wait and see if the system works,” he said.

“Usually,” he said with a smile, “we get caught.”