May 6, 2010 • 17 mins
In general, stealing valuable items tends to be difficult and dangerous, but stealing works of art can be surprisingly easy. In this episode, Josh and Chuck cite recent art heists as they discuss why stealing art is relatively easy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark to my left, Charles W. Bryant to
(00:20):
my right, Jerry the Killer Roland. Yes, thank you, Chuck
to your immediate immediate right. Yeah, within two inches. It
looks like in sniffing distance. As she's pointed out, there's
enough of that. Okay. Yeah, Hey, so how you doing, great, sir, Chuck, Josh?
(00:41):
Have you ever seen art? I hate art, Chuck, Let's
let's do something different. Yeah that was nice though, Actually,
thank you. Chuck knows a guy who hates art? Yeah, one,
a guy who knows a guy who hates art. One
of my friends read Nick Cousin, said that one time,
I hate art, just art, whatever makes a lot of sense, movies, poetry, filmy, sculpture.
(01:04):
I hate art. A guy's name art. It's like that
old joke about a guy hanging on the wall. Go ahead, No,
I'm not going to um. Actually, Chuck, we are we
have I think come and gone. On the twentieth anniversary
of the largest art heist in US history. It happened
(01:26):
in Boston. Yes, men, what was the name of the museum,
Isabella Rosalini Art Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston,
And some dudes made out with two hundred and fifty
million dollars and paintings, rem brands, They got sketches and
(01:48):
a manet. Yeah, and they actually did it in high style.
They dressed up in Boston police uniforms. Dropped by the
museum after hours. There were two security guards on duty,
both of them college students. UM. And they went to
the door and like waved at the security guards who
buzzed them in. And then I guess you some employ
(02:10):
to get them away from their desk which held the
the alarm buzzer. UM overpowered them, duct taped them, and
then spent eighty one minutes in this uh, in this
museum pilfering it. But they think that these guys were
local boys who didn't know what they were doing because
he passed by probably southeast, They passed by some very
(02:35):
very expensive works of art and took those day gas
sketches instead. Um. But they still pulled it off. They
pulled off the heights of the Century. I was reading
an article and I think the Boston Globe with an
FBI guy who was talking about um. They they, I guess,
reignited the case or something. Now they're they're using new
(02:57):
DNA techniques on the duct tape and billboards, digital billboards
in Boston going up asking for information. But you know what,
the statute of limitations of being involved in that crime
ran out, So what does that mean they want that
artwork back? Yeah, so that was an example of a
(03:18):
very low fi theft operation. No, that's actually high fi
as far as art theft. Well, that was my point though,
is that art theft is very low fi. Yeah, across
the board. A guy very famously made off with the
Mona Lisa in nineteen eleven. Can I say how he
did that. He's a worker there at the and he
(03:39):
uh hid somewhere in the museum, waited till the museum closed,
came out, cracked it out of its frame, put it
under a shirt, and walked out. That's how he stole
the Mona Lisa. Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? Yeah,
very small, it is surprisingly small. Jerry just nodded like, yes,
a woman was actually Reese ly Um arrested for throwing
(04:02):
a mug at the Mona Lisa because she was rejected
for French citizenship. And yeah, I remember that she was
taking it out on old Mona. Although it's like behind
all kinds of protection now, a bulletproof class. Yeah, but
back then it was. The funny thing is is it
sat empty for a few days, a couple of days
without the museum doing anything because everyone just kind of
(04:24):
assumed that someone knew that it was being cleaned or something,
and someone knew about its whereabouts. And then finally somebody
eventually went, oh, wait a minute, you don't have it.
You don't have it, so then they alerted the cops,
of course, which actually when we were doing research in
this article, and this is by the way, part two
series partooning, the series of how easy is it to
(04:45):
steal blank? Sure? Right, we started with nuclear weapons, now
art now art um And what I found from researching
this article is it's extremely easy to to steal art
compared to like a bank or like a die then
jeweler or something like that. It's not like the movies.
They don't have the the laser beams with Katherine Zita
(05:06):
Jones shimming and sliding around under the laser beams. Yeah,
I'm not entirely certain that was Catherine z to Jones
body double. Yeah. But you can very easily walk into
a museum with a gun, as was done in two
thousand four in Oslo, Norway, when somebody walked in with
a gun and stole the scream yes, Edvard monks the
(05:31):
scream yes. And that is the second time that that's
been stolen in the past fifteen years alone, And in
the past twenty years there have been dozens and dozens
of major paintings, including twenty works by Vincent van Gogh
from a single heist in Amsterdam. And as we're going
to tell you, there's a weird law in two thousand
(05:54):
next year, those very paintings may be available legitimately on
the open mark. Now now it'll it'll be ten years
from next year. How is it twenty years? It's it's
twenty years for any art. And in the Netherlands is
the only country that has this law, right Chuck, Yeah, No,
it's twenty years for um any work of art, thirty
(06:18):
years if it's from if it's stolen from a public
collection like a museum, or if it's registered as a
national heritage item, but in the Netherlands it after the
twenty or thirty years passes, transfer of rightful ownership goes
to the thief. So these guys, if they're smart, they're
just gonna hang hopefully they're young, and they're just gonna
hang onto them and then sell them for boatloads of cash.
(06:41):
This Dutch, wacky, wacky Dutch. But there are ways around this.
The Dutch just recently busted a group of art thieves
UM who had stolen some works of art from a
private gallery UM and after twenty years were coming forward
UM with the art and they they were set up
by this private detective. Was like, well, it was like
(07:03):
a movie. They were set up by this private detective
in the Dutch National Police and he was going to
help them blackmail the gallery owners family or whatever. UM.
But he actually handed him over to the police who
caught them and the statute of limitations had run out,
but the works of art were still listed as stolen,
so they got them for handling stolen goods and laundering money.
(07:26):
A Dutch gum shoe and a Dutch loophole. I love it.
Can I tell you about one of my favorites in
two thousand. Yeah, the Swedish National Museum. These dudes came
in with a machine gun, stole a Renois and a Rembrandt.
But this is where it gets smart. And they didn't
just walk in with a gun and leave. Before the robbery,
they laid out spikes on the roads so the cops
(07:47):
would you know, get flat tires, toot sweet and uh.
Right before the robbery. They had accomplices and other parts
of the city to other parts that set off bombs
to just instill bunch of chaos going on. Not not
a bad idea, No, it's really not. Although if you're
bumbles somebody up, you got murder wrap tacked on as well. Well, yeah, true,
(08:10):
very true. And uh, can I tell the one about
Zurich to this. Just two years ago, this was another
gun deal. Three three dudes broke into the I'm sorry
they didn't broke in. They waltzed in to the E.
G Foundation Museum in Zurich and they basically walked in
when it was wide open full of people and pulled
(08:32):
their guns and said everybody freeze, everybody get down on
the floor. Nobody moved, nobody get hurt. Right, Yes, that
was my raising Amazon reference of the show. Nice, remember
the old guy, But which is it you want? I
should freeze or drop? So they basically just got the
four paintings closest to the door, all on one wall,
(08:55):
still in their protective cases. They walked out. Included a
says A, Monet, Degas, and Evan and uh. They found
two of these in the back of a car nearby
a few days later, and they just figured that they
were too heavy, so they just kind of let's just
drop two of them. But they were smart enough to
keep the most expensive one, right, Yeah, well lucky they
(09:19):
think that they grabbed it because they think they just
grabbed the fore closest one. That was a says on
the the boy in the red waistcoat. Um. So you
can just walk into a museum with a gun or
gallery with a gun. Um, you can set off some bombs,
you can put down road tax, that kind of thing.
That's one way to do it. There were some guys
in two thousand one, um who drove their jeep through
(09:41):
the front door of a museum and made off with
some paintings worth four million. Um. You could wage a
war who did that? Oh, it happens in every war,
there's actually been a huge dissolute for art. But there's
a huge push that's been ongoing to return what's called
Holocaust era art um to the heirs of the rightful owners.
(10:03):
A lot of times the Nazis were like, give us
this and we won't kill you, and then you gave
it to him and then they killed you anyway. Um,
and then that art gets matriculated into the underground and
then legitimate art world. But there's actually a type of
um cultural law that's developed, and there's these lawyers making
(10:24):
tons of cash in threatening to sue or filing suit
against people who own holocauster artwork to return it to
their rightful owners. Often this is museums as well. Do
you remember what is it the was it artwork from
Machu Picchu? M m The guy from Yale went down
(10:45):
to Peru, I believe, and got something from Machu Picchu
or a bunch of stuff from Machu Pichi, took it
back to Yale and Yale basically refused to hand it
back over to Peru for decades. Just finally recently did
it dude? They think they are Yale's Wow, have you
ever stolen art? Yeah? Shut up that used to be
(11:07):
part of the game. I on my recent vacation, I
don't think I told you about this. I went to
a gallery and Sausalito, across from the across the Bay
and across from San Francisco, and there was a gallery
right next to my little end that had original Dr.
Seuss paintings. Wow, had like ten of them, really really cool.
(11:28):
How much were there? I think they were like they
were under ten grand? What Yeah, I seem to think
they were under ten grand or around tin grand. They
were really cool though, and I really wanted to steal
them because I don't have ten grand. You could just
write a bad check. That's good point. Sure you should
have done that check cutting it doesn't carry quite as
(11:49):
much of a penalty as art theft. And then, Chuck,
do you remember in the Zoo episode where I said
that Toledo has a surprisingly good art museum. Yeah? Uh,
there was a pretty famous heist in UM with a
bunch of paintings that were en route to the Guggenheim,
and they were on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art. Yes, UM,
(12:13):
and there were some professional art transporters that had their
truck and we're transporting this art and then parked overnight
at a motel in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, and the people just
looted the truck made off with the paintings. I think
they were recovered. Yeah. I was at the Googgenheim U
a couple of years ago and I was kind of
in there at a bad time. I think said a
(12:34):
lot of their really good stuff that was being transferred.
It might have been during that thing, but they were
they were sitting there and they're big boxes that they
used to ship them, just kind of right there and
there was no one watching them. I mean, they were huge.
Like I couldn't have just walked out, Or maybe I
could have if I would have had a machine gun. Yeah,
everybody get down. Everybody freeze. Uh So, Josh, this is
(12:56):
off well and fine and fun, But why would you
steal art? What can you do with a Van Gogh
that you have stolen? Well, first off, we should say
that um art theft, that the the trade of stolen
art ranks third in the world as far as illicit
activities go in generating money estimated six billion annually because
(13:20):
they're so art is really really, really expensive. Sure, yeah,
um and it's right behind drugs. And then arms, no,
it isn't bad. Um, well it is bad, right yeah yeah, Um.
So I would say money is the big reason why
the thing is is when you are stealing. Actually, I
(13:42):
would say money is the only reason why. But how
do you unload art is I'm getting to that. I'm
getting that settled down. When you when you steal art,
you're going to get maybe a tenth of its legal
market value on the black market. If you get a
twenty million dollar painting, that's pretty good scratch sure, that's
(14:03):
two million bucks right there, right yeah, um, and you're
going to get a tenth. You're going to get a
tenth of its value two different ways. One you're gonna
sell it to an unscrupulous dealer. It's so funny they
always use the word unscrupulous. It's part of the art world.
When they're talking about art theft, the word unscrupulous always
(14:24):
comes before somebody who is knowingly buying or you know
it's not evil or you know, low a little moral yeah, shady.
It's like saying they're they have no text whatsoever exactly.
An unscrupulous art collector or dealer will buy it, but
it is going to buy it for ten percent um.
And you can also sell them as fakes, high high
(14:47):
quality fakes, and those usually are replicas, we should say,
as they say in the art world, and those usually
fetch about ten percent of the market value um. But
they were saying that there's there. From night to two
thousand ten, an estimated hundred thousand objects of art have
(15:08):
been stolen just in the last thirty years. They think
of a lot of these stolen pieces of art are
in the are in legitimate collectors collections who unknowingly think
that their replicas. Well, yeah, that's the one of the keys.
If you get an art, a piece of art that
is less uh known, maybe it's not the Mona Lisa,
(15:31):
you can sell it. And then that gets sold and
it's sort of I think they put it in the
article like art laundering. The first dealer kind of dumps
it quickly for a lowish price, and then they'll sell
it to someone. The other personal sell it and by
the time it gets around two or three places, and
maybe it goes off to auction, the auction thinks it's
a legit, you know, because it comes from a verified owner.
(15:51):
And that happened to one Steven Spielberg. I remember when
this happened, he had he found out he had a
stolen Norman Rockwell and his UH in his collection. Just
figures UM. You know, Switzerland is UH notorious apparently for
holding uh illegitimate art auctions. They were they're legitimate. These
(16:12):
are legitimate auction houses, but they're knowingly selling questionable or
stolen art. And the very fact that it's passed through
this auction house and and been purchased legitimately, there's some
sort of legitimacy attached to that stolen art now, right,
so it be fuddles UM claims of due diligence. There's
this thing called UM buying a piece of art and
(16:33):
good faith where you're like, I didn't know it was stolen,
and I bought it legitimate, legitimately, so it's mine. And
the UM international police community who deal with art theft
have kind of come up with these rules that are
carried out in the court, and first among them is
due diligence. You have to go look to see if
(16:54):
the paintings stolen UM, if your if your work of
art is stolen, there's certain steps you have to follow.
You have to alware the authorities, you have to UM
you know put it on the stolen Art register um
and so if it's stolen, you do you take certain steps.
If you're buying a piece of art, you have to
take certain steps. But first of among them was something
that you mentioned was quick art sale. If you buy
(17:17):
something in haste, that should be a red flag to you.
Somebody's just trying to unload it. Let's just do this.
I just want to get rid of this Rembrandt real quick, exactly.
So if they find out that you made a quick sale,
your claim of due diligence is out the window and
you can't say that you bought it in good faith,
and you're probably going to lose your money and the
piece of
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark to my left, Charles W. Bryant to
(00:20):
my right, Jerry the Killer Roland. Yes, thank you, Chuck
to your immediate immediate right. Yeah, within two inches. It
looks like in sniffing distance. As she's pointed out, there's
enough of that. Okay. Yeah, Hey, so how you doing, great, sir, Chuck, Josh?
(00:41):
Have you ever seen art? I hate art, Chuck, Let's
let's do something different. Yeah that was nice though, Actually,
thank you. Chuck knows a guy who hates art? Yeah, one,
a guy who knows a guy who hates art. One
of my friends read Nick Cousin, said that one time,
I hate art, just art, whatever makes a lot of sense, movies, poetry, filmy, sculpture.
(01:04):
I hate art. A guy's name art. It's like that
old joke about a guy hanging on the wall. Go ahead, No,
I'm not going to um. Actually, Chuck, we are we
have I think come and gone. On the twentieth anniversary
of the largest art heist in US history. It happened
(01:26):
in Boston. Yes, men, what was the name of the museum,
Isabella Rosalini Art Museum, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston,
And some dudes made out with two hundred and fifty
million dollars and paintings, rem brands, They got sketches and
(01:48):
a manet. Yeah, and they actually did it in high style.
They dressed up in Boston police uniforms. Dropped by the
museum after hours. There were two security guards on duty,
both of them college students. UM. And they went to
the door and like waved at the security guards who
buzzed them in. And then I guess you some employ
(02:10):
to get them away from their desk which held the
the alarm buzzer. UM overpowered them, duct taped them, and
then spent eighty one minutes in this uh, in this
museum pilfering it. But they think that these guys were
local boys who didn't know what they were doing because
he passed by probably southeast, They passed by some very
(02:35):
very expensive works of art and took those day gas
sketches instead. Um. But they still pulled it off. They
pulled off the heights of the Century. I was reading
an article and I think the Boston Globe with an
FBI guy who was talking about um. They they, I guess,
reignited the case or something. Now they're they're using new
(02:57):
DNA techniques on the duct tape and billboards, digital billboards
in Boston going up asking for information. But you know what,
the statute of limitations of being involved in that crime
ran out, So what does that mean they want that
artwork back? Yeah, so that was an example of a
(03:18):
very low fi theft operation. No, that's actually high fi
as far as art theft. Well, that was my point though,
is that art theft is very low fi. Yeah, across
the board. A guy very famously made off with the
Mona Lisa in nineteen eleven. Can I say how he
did that. He's a worker there at the and he
(03:39):
uh hid somewhere in the museum, waited till the museum closed,
came out, cracked it out of its frame, put it
under a shirt, and walked out. That's how he stole
the Mona Lisa. Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? Yeah,
very small, it is surprisingly small. Jerry just nodded like, yes,
a woman was actually Reese ly Um arrested for throwing
(04:02):
a mug at the Mona Lisa because she was rejected
for French citizenship. And yeah, I remember that she was
taking it out on old Mona. Although it's like behind
all kinds of protection now, a bulletproof class. Yeah, but
back then it was. The funny thing is is it
sat empty for a few days, a couple of days
without the museum doing anything because everyone just kind of
(04:24):
assumed that someone knew that it was being cleaned or something,
and someone knew about its whereabouts. And then finally somebody
eventually went, oh, wait a minute, you don't have it.
You don't have it, so then they alerted the cops,
of course, which actually when we were doing research in
this article, and this is by the way, part two
series partooning, the series of how easy is it to
(04:45):
steal blank? Sure? Right, we started with nuclear weapons, now
art now art um And what I found from researching
this article is it's extremely easy to to steal art
compared to like a bank or like a die then
jeweler or something like that. It's not like the movies.
They don't have the the laser beams with Katherine Zita
(05:06):
Jones shimming and sliding around under the laser beams. Yeah,
I'm not entirely certain that was Catherine z to Jones
body double. Yeah. But you can very easily walk into
a museum with a gun, as was done in two
thousand four in Oslo, Norway, when somebody walked in with
a gun and stole the scream yes, Edvard monks the
(05:31):
scream yes. And that is the second time that that's
been stolen in the past fifteen years alone, And in
the past twenty years there have been dozens and dozens
of major paintings, including twenty works by Vincent van Gogh
from a single heist in Amsterdam. And as we're going
to tell you, there's a weird law in two thousand
(05:54):
next year, those very paintings may be available legitimately on
the open mark. Now now it'll it'll be ten years
from next year. How is it twenty years? It's it's
twenty years for any art. And in the Netherlands is
the only country that has this law, right Chuck, Yeah, No,
it's twenty years for um any work of art, thirty
(06:18):
years if it's from if it's stolen from a public
collection like a museum, or if it's registered as a
national heritage item, but in the Netherlands it after the
twenty or thirty years passes, transfer of rightful ownership goes
to the thief. So these guys, if they're smart, they're
just gonna hang hopefully they're young, and they're just gonna
hang onto them and then sell them for boatloads of cash.
(06:41):
This Dutch, wacky, wacky Dutch. But there are ways around this.
The Dutch just recently busted a group of art thieves
UM who had stolen some works of art from a
private gallery UM and after twenty years were coming forward
UM with the art and they they were set up
by this private detective. Was like, well, it was like
(07:03):
a movie. They were set up by this private detective
in the Dutch National Police and he was going to
help them blackmail the gallery owners family or whatever. UM.
But he actually handed him over to the police who
caught them and the statute of limitations had run out,
but the works of art were still listed as stolen,
so they got them for handling stolen goods and laundering money.
(07:26):
A Dutch gum shoe and a Dutch loophole. I love it.
Can I tell you about one of my favorites in
two thousand. Yeah, the Swedish National Museum. These dudes came
in with a machine gun, stole a Renois and a Rembrandt.
But this is where it gets smart. And they didn't
just walk in with a gun and leave. Before the robbery,
they laid out spikes on the roads so the cops
(07:47):
would you know, get flat tires, toot sweet and uh.
Right before the robbery. They had accomplices and other parts
of the city to other parts that set off bombs
to just instill bunch of chaos going on. Not not
a bad idea, No, it's really not. Although if you're
bumbles somebody up, you got murder wrap tacked on as well. Well, yeah, true,
(08:10):
very true. And uh, can I tell the one about
Zurich to this. Just two years ago, this was another
gun deal. Three three dudes broke into the I'm sorry
they didn't broke in. They waltzed in to the E.
G Foundation Museum in Zurich and they basically walked in
when it was wide open full of people and pulled
(08:32):
their guns and said everybody freeze, everybody get down on
the floor. Nobody moved, nobody get hurt. Right, Yes, that
was my raising Amazon reference of the show. Nice, remember
the old guy, But which is it you want? I
should freeze or drop? So they basically just got the
four paintings closest to the door, all on one wall,
(08:55):
still in their protective cases. They walked out. Included a
says A, Monet, Degas, and Evan and uh. They found
two of these in the back of a car nearby
a few days later, and they just figured that they
were too heavy, so they just kind of let's just
drop two of them. But they were smart enough to
keep the most expensive one, right, Yeah, well lucky they
(09:19):
think that they grabbed it because they think they just
grabbed the fore closest one. That was a says on
the the boy in the red waistcoat. Um. So you
can just walk into a museum with a gun or
gallery with a gun. Um, you can set off some bombs,
you can put down road tax, that kind of thing.
That's one way to do it. There were some guys
in two thousand one, um who drove their jeep through
(09:41):
the front door of a museum and made off with
some paintings worth four million. Um. You could wage a
war who did that? Oh, it happens in every war,
there's actually been a huge dissolute for art. But there's
a huge push that's been ongoing to return what's called
Holocaust era art um to the heirs of the rightful owners.
(10:03):
A lot of times the Nazis were like, give us
this and we won't kill you, and then you gave
it to him and then they killed you anyway. Um,
and then that art gets matriculated into the underground and
then legitimate art world. But there's actually a type of
um cultural law that's developed, and there's these lawyers making
(10:24):
tons of cash in threatening to sue or filing suit
against people who own holocauster artwork to return it to
their rightful owners. Often this is museums as well. Do
you remember what is it the was it artwork from
Machu Picchu? M m The guy from Yale went down
(10:45):
to Peru, I believe, and got something from Machu Picchu
or a bunch of stuff from Machu Pichi, took it
back to Yale and Yale basically refused to hand it
back over to Peru for decades. Just finally recently did
it dude? They think they are Yale's Wow, have you
ever stolen art? Yeah? Shut up that used to be
(11:07):
part of the game. I on my recent vacation, I
don't think I told you about this. I went to
a gallery and Sausalito, across from the across the Bay
and across from San Francisco, and there was a gallery
right next to my little end that had original Dr.
Seuss paintings. Wow, had like ten of them, really really cool.
(11:28):
How much were there? I think they were like they
were under ten grand? What Yeah, I seem to think
they were under ten grand or around tin grand. They
were really cool though, and I really wanted to steal
them because I don't have ten grand. You could just
write a bad check. That's good point. Sure you should
have done that check cutting it doesn't carry quite as
(11:49):
much of a penalty as art theft. And then, Chuck,
do you remember in the Zoo episode where I said
that Toledo has a surprisingly good art museum. Yeah? Uh,
there was a pretty famous heist in UM with a
bunch of paintings that were en route to the Guggenheim,
and they were on loan from the Toledo Museum of Art. Yes, UM,
(12:13):
and there were some professional art transporters that had their
truck and we're transporting this art and then parked overnight
at a motel in Strasburg, Pennsylvania, and the people just
looted the truck made off with the paintings. I think
they were recovered. Yeah. I was at the Googgenheim U
a couple of years ago and I was kind of
in there at a bad time. I think said a
(12:34):
lot of their really good stuff that was being transferred.
It might have been during that thing, but they were
they were sitting there and they're big boxes that they
used to ship them, just kind of right there and
there was no one watching them. I mean, they were huge.
Like I couldn't have just walked out, Or maybe I
could have if I would have had a machine gun. Yeah,
everybody get down. Everybody freeze. Uh So, Josh, this is
(12:56):
off well and fine and fun, But why would you
steal art? What can you do with a Van Gogh
that you have stolen? Well, first off, we should say
that um art theft, that the the trade of stolen
art ranks third in the world as far as illicit
activities go in generating money estimated six billion annually because
(13:20):
they're so art is really really, really expensive. Sure, yeah,
um and it's right behind drugs. And then arms, no,
it isn't bad. Um, well it is bad, right yeah yeah, Um.
So I would say money is the big reason why
the thing is is when you are stealing. Actually, I
(13:42):
would say money is the only reason why. But how
do you unload art is I'm getting to that. I'm
getting that settled down. When you when you steal art,
you're going to get maybe a tenth of its legal
market value on the black market. If you get a
twenty million dollar painting, that's pretty good scratch sure, that's
(14:03):
two million bucks right there, right yeah, um, and you're
going to get a tenth. You're going to get a
tenth of its value two different ways. One you're gonna
sell it to an unscrupulous dealer. It's so funny they
always use the word unscrupulous. It's part of the art world.
When they're talking about art theft, the word unscrupulous always
(14:24):
comes before somebody who is knowingly buying or you know
it's not evil or you know, low a little moral yeah, shady.
It's like saying they're they have no text whatsoever exactly.
An unscrupulous art collector or dealer will buy it, but
it is going to buy it for ten percent um.
And you can also sell them as fakes, high high
(14:47):
quality fakes, and those usually are replicas, we should say,
as they say in the art world, and those usually
fetch about ten percent of the market value um. But
they were saying that there's there. From night to two
thousand ten, an estimated hundred thousand objects of art have
(15:08):
been stolen just in the last thirty years. They think
of a lot of these stolen pieces of art are
in the are in legitimate collectors collections who unknowingly think
that their replicas. Well, yeah, that's the one of the keys.
If you get an art, a piece of art that
is less uh known, maybe it's not the Mona Lisa,
(15:31):
you can sell it. And then that gets sold and
it's sort of I think they put it in the
article like art laundering. The first dealer kind of dumps
it quickly for a lowish price, and then they'll sell
it to someone. The other personal sell it and by
the time it gets around two or three places, and
maybe it goes off to auction, the auction thinks it's
a legit, you know, because it comes from a verified owner.
(15:51):
And that happened to one Steven Spielberg. I remember when
this happened, he had he found out he had a
stolen Norman Rockwell and his UH in his collection. Just
figures UM. You know, Switzerland is UH notorious apparently for
holding uh illegitimate art auctions. They were they're legitimate. These
(16:12):
are legitimate auction houses, but they're knowingly selling questionable or
stolen art. And the very fact that it's passed through
this auction house and and been purchased legitimately, there's some
sort of legitimacy attached to that stolen art now, right,
so it be fuddles UM claims of due diligence. There's
this thing called UM buying a piece of art and
(16:33):
good faith where you're like, I didn't know it was stolen,
and I bought it legitimate, legitimately, so it's mine. And
the UM international police community who deal with art theft
have kind of come up with these rules that are
carried out in the court, and first among them is
due diligence. You have to go look to see if
(16:54):
the paintings stolen UM, if your if your work of
art is stolen, there's certain steps you have to follow.
You have to alware the authorities, you have to UM
you know put it on the stolen Art register um
and so if it's stolen, you do you take certain steps.
If you're buying a piece of art, you have to
take certain steps. But first of among them was something
that you mentioned was quick art sale. If you buy
(17:17):
something in haste, that should be a red flag to you.
Somebody's just trying to unload it. Let's just do this.
I just want to get rid of this Rembrandt real quick, exactly.
So if they find out that you made a quick sale,
your claim of due diligence is out the window and
you can't say that you bought it in good faith,
and you're probably going to lose your money and the
piece of
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