The world of stolen art

First aired on The Current (23/9/11)

In film, art heists have a cachet of glamour and daring. In the real world, art theft is an international labyrinth of petty criminals and hotshot detectives. Joshua Knelman spent four years inside the international black market for stolen art, a market that fuels organized crime and one in which Canada plays a prominent role. He chronicles the results of his insider investigation in his new book Hot Art.

There's a lot about the trade in stolen art that people don't know. Ransom is often involved, and organized crime plays a big role in managing the multi-billion-dollar market. It's a dark, complicated and dangerous world. In short, The Thomas Crown Affair had it completely wrong. "There's a lot of information that never makes it out to the public sphere," Knelman admitted to The Current guest host Piya Chattopadhyay.

Knelman is now an expert on the world of stolen art, but it's an expertise that he acquired almost by accident. He was assigned a story about a theft from a Toronto gallery, and by chance ended up face to face with the thief himself. This thief, in an attempt to deflect Knelman's interest elsewhere, introduced the journalist to international art theft. "The first thing he did was threaten me. The second thing he did was try to hand me back some of the stolen artwork," he recalled. "The third thing he did was try to veer me away from writing about that specific story by talking about how art theft works."

What's most surprising is just how much trafficking in stolen art there is in Canada. In Quebec alone, the market is worth $20 million a year. And Quebec isn't even the art theft capital of Canada. Toronto is. So why doesn't the rest of Canada have the same statistics (and recovery rates) as Quebec? It's simple: we don't pay as much attention. Quebec has the only dedicated art theft unit in the country. Knelman thinks this oversight is (almost) as big a crime as art theft itself. "We just don't know how much art is being stolen in Toronto," he said. "We don't know what stolen works are coming in from the outside and being sold here."

Why is this? One of Knelman's book subjects (and author in his own right), Robert Wittman thinks he knows why. The former FBI agent and author of Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures argues that as long as stolen art is seen as property theft, it will never receive the same resources as the wars on terrorism and drugs -- even though it's just as lucrative a business for those involved.

"It is considered a property crime and property crimes are a very low level as far as the FBI is concerned," Wittman explained. With the FBI, "the first priority is to stop terrorism and it goes down from there. I think that's what happens all around the world."

While Wittman has spent much of this 30-year career recovering art worth millions and millions of dollars, he sees it much more than simply returning property to its rightful owners. He sees it as a way to preserve culture.

"My goal was usually not to catch the criminals, it was to recover the art," he said. "That's not what's going to be important 100 years from now. What's going to be important is that culture's return to where it belongs."