Wanted: more eyes on art thieves

IT’S not quite as raw as a Wild West wanted poster. But could the effect be similar?

Last week the FBI announced its top 10 art crimes, which are as long-standing as the theft of Caravaggio’s “Nativity With San Lorenzo and San Francesco” (stolen from Palermo, Italy, in 1969) and as recent as the thousands of antiquities looted from the Iraq National Museum and archeological sites after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The most famous recent grabs are Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” and “The Madonna,” which were stolen from Oslo’s Munch Museum in 2004.

Although the FBI has posted images of plundered artworks on its website, this is the first Top 10 announced.

“The idea is to get the public on the lookout for this material,” says Robert Wittman, the senior investigator of the bureau’s eight-member art crimes team. “We wanted to focus the public’s eyes on these pieces because of the value to the cultural community.” (Art crimes, according to Interpol, amount to about $6 billion a year.)

“We had a case a few years ago where a Chagall painting was stolen from the Jewish Museum in New York -- it was gone for quite a while. And they found it in a dead letter office because a postman had seen it on the website” and called the bureau, Wittman says.

Another time, he took a call from an art dealer who’d been offered a hot antique, and the tip allowed the FBI to recover roughly 200 old firearms, Civil War swords, and a tea caddy owned by George Washington.

As for the Top 10, the special agent says, “there’s a lot of competition. But these are the most important culturally -- it doesn’t have to be the most valuable” in dollar terms.

He hopes the list, which includes $300 million in Rembrandts, Degases, and a Manet and Vermeer poached from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, will help break some cases. (The list, with information on providing tips, is at www.fbi.gov.)

“The public is our eye,” Wittman says. “We need the public: That’s how we recover this material.”