Art Heists

The world of art theft looks glamorous in the movies, but the reality is far more complicated. From multi-million dollar forgery schemes to undercover FBI operations recovering stolen national treasures, art crime is a global industry hiding in plain sight.
This conversation digs into how these crimes actually play out and why the people who pull them off often end up stuck with the very pieces they thought would make them rich.

My guest today is Robert Wittman, a former FBI special agent and the founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. Over a 20-year career, he worked undercover in more than 20 countries and helped recover over $300 million in stolen art and cultural property. He’s also the author of Priceless, where he shares stories from those investigations and what really goes on behind the scenes.

We discuss the movie version of art crime and how it actually works. Whitman explains why most stolen masterpieces are nearly impossible to sell, how insider access plays a role in many museum thefts, and why forgery and fraud now make up the bulk of the market. There’s also a practical side to it. Whether it’s fine art, prints, or even sports memorabilia, the same patterns show up again and again. People trust the wrong details, skip the research, and get pulled in by what feels like a deal. The takeaway is pretty straightforward. Slow down, check what you’re buying, and don’t assume something is real just because the story sounds convincing.

Show Notes:

• [01:06] Robert Wittman introduces his FBI career and explains how he founded the Art Crime Team, leading investigations across 20 countries and recovering over $300 million in stolen art.
• [04:01] He shares how he ended up in art crime almost by accident, getting assigned museum theft cases early in his career when no one else wanted them.
• [07:00] We get a breakdown of the art crime industry, including how much of it is driven by forgery and fraud versus outright theft.
• [10:00] Whitman explains why stolen high-value artwork is extremely difficult to sell and often becomes a liability for the criminals who take it.
• [13:43] A reality check on museum security, comparing Hollywood portrayals to how thefts actually happen in the U.S. and abroad.
• [16:18] The conversation shifts to jewelry theft and why stolen gems are far easier to break down and resell than famous works of art.
• [19:19] He walks through a major forgery case involving a well-known New York gallery that unknowingly sold millions of dollars in fake paintings.
• [22:55] Practical advice for everyday buyers on how to avoid getting scammed when purchasing art or collectibles online.
• [26:34] One of the most fascinating recoveries: an original copy of the Bill of Rights stolen in the 1800s and tracked down over a century later.
• [30:20] A much smaller but equally interesting case involving ancient cylinder seals and how they were unknowingly brought back from Iraq.
• [32:30] The risks in the sports memorabilia market, including widespread forgery and why authentication matters more than ever.
• [35:37] Final advice on protecting yourself as both a buyer and seller by doing basic research and understanding the true value of what you have.

Thanks for joining us on Easy Prey. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave a nice review. 

Links and Resources:

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Transcript:

Robert, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

It's my pleasure, Chris. It's great to be here.

Can you give myself and the audience a little bit of background about who you are and what you've done in your life?

Sure. I'm Robert Wittman. It's with a W-I-T-T-M-A-N. No H. I was an FBI agent for 20 years. What I did at the FBI was I was the head of the art crime team and, in fact, the founder of the art crime team. My investigative responsibilities for that period of time, most of that period of time, was to go after stolen art, investigate art fraud and forgery cases. Basically, I worked in 20 different countries and was able to recover about $300 million for the stolen art and cultural property.

Curious. Why did the FBI art crime team only start in the '80s?

Well, it actually didn't start until 2005.

Wow.

I actually founded it in 2005.

OK, that's an even more startling thing. Why did it take up until the 2000s to start an art crime team?

Well, because the art crime, basically, is the same as property crime. In other words, it's considered property crime. A police department would look at the theft of a Monet in the same light as the theft of a Chevrolet. It doesn't matter. It's just property. The FBI was that way as well. Property crime is one of the lowest priorities on the list of priorities at the Bureau. It falls into the same category as a car theft or a bank robbery. Bank robbery, something of that nature.

As a result, and robbery is even higher because that's considered an assault type of crime, a violent crime, whereas a theft might not be. As a result, they never specialized in it until I started the team in 2005 when, quite honestly, Chris, the value of art has exceeded what anybody would ever have thought. This value has gone up so much that it invites criminal activity.

Because the payday is so big, potentially.

Yeah. There was a famous bank robber named—I can't remember his name. Anyway, there was a famous bank robber who wrote a book. The thing was, they were asking why he robbed banks. What his response at the time was, “Because that's where the money is.”

Exactly.

Well, ultimately, art today, why there's art crime and art forgery and fraud, is because that's where the money is.

Gotcha. How did you get into this field? Did you go to college for art, and it was your passion of art that led you into this?

No. When I went into the FBI in 1988—that’s when I went in—there was a great TV show that I used to watch called Miami Vice. And basically, I wanted to be Crockett or Tubbs. Either one would have been great. It was sitting on cigarette boats in Miami Harbor. It looked glamorous and fun. I checked it out, and I went in. After I went in, I was transferred to a property crime squad in Philadelphia. That's where, basically, I stayed stationed throughout my career in Philly, although working in 20 countries. But I never got to get on a cigarette boat in Miami Harbor. I go, yeah, Miami Harbor, no cigarette boats.

Oh, that's too funny. Was there something specific about the art aspect of it, or is that just kind of the progression of your career that once you got into the FBI, they just needed someone to do this and you either got volunteered or volunteered for it?

Well, when I went to Philadelphia and started in 1988, there were two thefts from museums in Philadelphia. One at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and the other one was from the Arrow Dam Museum. As a result, when I got there, nobody wanted to work, basically work those thefts because that wasn't a glamorous thing to do. It wasn't like kicking down doors and all that sort of thing.

I was the new guy, and I got to find those cases working with another agent. As a result, we were able to solve those crimes, which worked out well. Now, what the Bureau didn't realize was that my parents were in the antiques business. My dad had gone to Japan during the Korean War and worked for the Air Force, and as an Air Force Staff Sergeant, he fell in love with all things Japanese. And while he was there, he started collecting. As a result of his collections, he then came back to the States and started an antique store.

I grew up basically in the antiques business, which teaches you how to do a deal in the art world. Basically, what that comes down to, when you talk about art theft, art crime, art forgery, any of those types of things, it's all about making a deal. That's why I knew how to do that. The Bureau didn't know that at the time, but once you saw some crimes, they sent me to the art school in Philadelphia, and then to the German Jewelry Institute at Zales Corporation in Dallas, and to the diamond training in Santa Monica. As a result, I started doing those investigations.

That's fun. When artwork is stolen, how does the investigation unfold, and what happens with that art once it's stolen?

Well, it all depends on what the specific crime is. If it's a crime of fakes, frauds, and forgeries, then there's a different type of investigation that will occur.

Let's start with stolen legitimate art, and then we'll go to the fakes and the fraud.

OK. Going back to it, in general, the business is a $200 billion worldwide business every year. There's a lot of money that changes hands in the art business. About $6 billion of that is the art crime industry. When we talk about $6 billion, probably 75% is frauds, forgeries, fakes today; the other 25% is theft. Getting back to how you do an investigation in theft, it's just like any other property crime investigation.

The first thing you want to do is you want to look for any type of forensic evidence. You want video of the actual crime itself. You want to talk to people who are witnesses. You want to look for hairs and fiber if anybody left anything behind, if there's any kind of mass or anything that were left behind. Anything that's physical and forensic that would identify the individuals. The next thing you would do is you want to find out what the ingress/egress was, how did they get in, how did they get out?

Because there's certain aspects of art crime that are a little bit different than most other property crimes. Just for instance, 90% of all museum heists in the United States—we found this out when an investigation, when we looked at all the crimes—90% are insider. What does that mean? That means that if someone came in and broke the door down to get in, it probably wasn't an inside job. Whereas if they were able to get in without breaking the door down, then you're going to look at a lot of suspects within the museum, within the institution itself. Those are the things you would look at to begin with in a theft type of investigation.

What happens after the art has left the museum? It makes sense to me, if someone breaks into my house and steals a laptop, they're going to take it to a pawn shop, they're going to sell it at the local swap meet or something like that. But high-value art, it's not the sort of thing that your local pawn dealer is going to go, “Oh yeah, I've got $10 million to buy a stolen Monet.”

Yeah, well, here's the thing. Not everything that's stolen is $10 million. There's artworks, prints and things that you can take and people steal. There might be several thousands of dollars. Those types of things can be sold in the secondary market. They can go to flea markets, they can be sold at small auction houses, probably not be discovered because people aren't really looking out. Law enforcement is not really looking out for small-value items of, say, under $100,000. Believe it or not, that's considered a small-value item.

Those things can actually be sold. Eventually, they do show up. You could say it's a limited edition print that's numbered by Picasso or Miro or Saburo or Dali. There is a record of the prints and, eventually, that will show up. But when we talk about these multi-million dollar heists, Monet's and Venet's and whatnot, those don't go through the normal chains of markets. Now I have to tell you, in 35 years of doing these investigations, I've never met a rich guy who's sitting in his basement staring at his artwork.

That's the old Doctor No theory. That's not what happens. What happens is these individuals, these criminals, they steal these pieces because they're able to. They're better criminals than they are businessmen because they can get in, get out, steal the material, and then they get stuck with it because they don't know what to do with it. Because remember, they're not in the art business, they're criminals. We looked at them as gateway crimes.

In other words, these guys are doing more than just art theft. They're selling drugs, they're moving arms, they're doing armed robberies. They happen to do an art theft too. For them, they're reading the newspapers, they're reading the internet, they're seeing that these pieces are selling for millions of dollars, and they're thinking, “Well, we can go into the museum, steal that, turn around, maybe move it for 10% on the dollar or five cents on the dollar and make a nice book.” But the problem is, nobody's buying the stolen art. It's only the police and the FBI.

Any time I see someone wanting to buy stolen art, we should assume that law enforcement is running the deal?

Well, that's what I did. I worked undercover for 15 years doing that, like I said, in 20 different countries. Basically, these individuals would sit on the art and try to figure out how to fence it. Ultimately, they'd talk to the wrong person and I'd get introduced.

Interesting. The generic movie script of some rich guy hiring the crew to steal is pretty, not surprising, that will be far-fetched, but in reality, it is really just a movie script?

It's just a movie script. The reason for that is because if you have a stolen Rembrandt, it's just somebody sitting there with a stolen Rembrandt in their basement. At some point, that Rembrandt is going to come back to market. I mean, somebody's going to die, they're going to pass it on to survivors. Someone's going to see it. Who knows? The piece is stolen. It's right about in an article or something. Then they're caught.

Now, let's say they go out and they pay $100,000 to a crew to go steal this thing. First of all, they're going to hope that nobody says anything. In other words, that crew doesn't say anything, that the crew does a good job, does not leave any forensic evidence, and so they don't get caught right away. Then at some point, when it comes back to market, when they pass it on or whatever, it's going to get recovered. If it gets recovered while they're alive, they go to jail, having stolen property, and for conspiracy to commit. But in the end, no, nobody's going to pay 100 grand to go to jail.

Not worth it. It's really—someone thinks that they've got this clever idea that really turns out not to be a clever idea.

It's basically a white—it’s an albatross around their necks. At that point, for the rest of their lives, as long as they hold it, it's going to be that issue of possibly being caught.

And really not being able to get what it's worth.

Oh, you'll never get what it's worth, because as soon as you try to sell it, it's going to be a situation where the law enforcement is going to hear about it. They're going to be doing an undercover operation, but they're going to come seize it, whatever it happens to be. And in the end, you're going to get charged with a crime. It's like cheating on your taxes. If you want to sleep at night, or would you rather make a few dollars? You know what I mean? It depends on what's more important to you.

Yeah, that makes sense. Are museums particularly difficult to steal from? In the movies, they've always got the super high-tech security, the lasers that cut people in half, the pressure sensors, and someone breathes too loud, it sets off the alarms. How much of that is—I know that, obviously, a ton of that is theatrics, but are museums generally fairly secure, or just because some of them are really old buildings, they're just not designed for security?

Well, that's a good question, because you have to do it depends on where you are in the US. The museums are pretty good. They're very secure. The reason for that is we're a new country, we’re, like, 200-years-old museums have probably only been around the state, middle the of 18th, 19th century, 1850s, 1860s, when we talk about actual museums. These new museums that are being built have a lot of security built right in.

Secondly, we have armed police departments. There's no place to go if you go to Denver and you rob a museum, where are you going to go? You go to Colorado, you're going to go to Utah, you know, there's still police everywhere. It's not like you're crossing an international border. We've got pretty good security here. There probably hasn't been an armed robbery of a museum where artwork was stolen. I can't think of that happening since 1990, with the Isabella Stewart Gardner theft.

That's the last time that I would think that that happened in the US. Now, in New York, different story, totally different story, because the buildings are a thousand years old. Look at what happened in Duluth just in October, you know, the individuals went in, and was it really high tech? No. They went in, they acted like they were workers at the street workers that were going into maintenance. They went in, basically cut through some betweens and stole the crown jewels. They made their getaway.

But as I said, when it came to the forensic evidence, they left all their material back behind. In fact, they dropped one of their masks, you know, and one of the vests. Ultimately, five people were arrested within a week. I'll never forget, I was on The Today Show for that heist. And they said, “Well, what do you think is going to happen?” I said, “Within five days, we're going to arrest the people who did it.” And five days later, they had everybody in custody, because of all the forensic evidence they had left behind.

Now, they have not recovered jewels. That's the problem with jewelry. When jewelry is stolen, the diamonds can be popped out of the holdings. The metals, the precious metals, can be melted. As a result of that, you don't recover the jewelry. But if it's an artwork, if it's a Modigliani or a Picasso, you can't do that. It has to be kept intact. As a result, those come back. Jewelry is tough. A lot of times, you don't recover jewelry.

Interesting. Is it the classic movie script as they cut the giant diamond down into something smaller so it's easier to move? When it's a one-of-a-kind, gigantic stone, I assume those are probably relatively easy to identify within the jewelry community. But once it's been cut, it's an entirely different piece at that point.

That's correct. I don't want to really tell your listeners how to commit crimes, but you're right.

Listeners, don't commit crimes. Most of you will get caught and spend a long time in jail. When it comes to forgeries and fakes and things like that, why are people buying forgeries if art is so easy to—or maybe it isn’t—if art is, in theory, easy to identify whether it's an original or not, why do the forgeries and fakes exist?

Well, forgeries and fakes are the largest part of the crime market. In today's world, that's what we're really seeing a lot of, especially with the sales on eBay, with sales over the internet, and even auction sales that are just strictly on the internet. Otherwise, you can't go see and inspect these pieces. As a result, people are buying them based off of a name. The people who sell these things, they realize what they need to say or not say when putting them on for sale.

You could say, “signed by Picasso,” but you know what it is; it's signed in the print, which means that it's signed. It's signed by Picasso, but it's in the print. As a result, the value is $50 versus $50,000 when it's actually signed by Picasso. They know what to say. That's really the problem today. And I will tell you what it is, Chris. It's all these TV shows, like Unexpected, Antiques Roadshow.

Everybody's looking for treasure. Everybody wants to make a big deal, get a big score, go find the gold. People are out there, and what they're doing is they had more dollars than spent, you know? They go out, and they spend small amounts compared to what they normally would. Let's say they're going to buy a $20 million Mark Rothko, and they got a deal where they can get it for $2 million. “Oh my gosh. What a great deal. I'm making so much money.”

It's fake. That's what we're seeing. We're seeing people who are seeing the evaluation of artwork, who are not schooled, who are getting into it, and they have done well in some other business. In the end, they're being taken, because they're not doing their due diligence.

What is the largest price forgery or fake that you have been involved in investigating?

I was involved in a case in New York called the Knoedler Gallery case, and in that situation, the gallery sold around 20, 22 paintings worth more than $60 million. They had all been created by a Chinese artist living in Brooklyn. But these paintings were supposedly by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Cliff Clifford Steele, the top artist from the abstract expressionist school.

The gallery was able to buy them based on a story that they had heard. They believed they were real. They didn't know they were fakes, and they put about to their clients, and their clients were buying them. It was over $60 million. That's the biggest fake fraud at this point in U.S. history. There's been some bigger ones. There’s a big one in Canada involving some indigenous artists.

There was an indigenous artist who was faked over and over to the tune of tens of thousands of artworks. In that situation, it's a little different, but it's still the same. It's still fakes. That's what happens. Yes, I've been involved in some pretty big ones.

I mean, it's interesting that the museum was the one who bought the fake art, in a sense.

Give me the gallery.

The gallery, yeah. Because then the [inaudible] comes. “Well, this is the gallery. They've done their due diligence. It must be real.” And me as the buyer, I would assume to be less inclined to hire my own authenticator to come in and take a look at it before I buy.

Well, in this case, a couple of the buyers actually did have art advisors that they hired and paid a lot of money to, to look at these artworks before they bought them, and they were wrong. They relied on the gallery as well. I mean, the gallery was well-known. It’s out of business now because of this situation.

It was a famous, well-known gallery, one of the old, gray battleships of New York galleries around forever. But they were taken, and they thought these pieces were real, and they did some research and were able to get some justification for the sales. That's why they weren't convicted of any kind of crime, but they had to pay the money back. That basically put them out of business.

How did that crime ultimately—how did someone find out that what they bought was a fake?

Well, ultimately, the person who was selling the material to the gallery was a person out of a small gallery in Manhattan, and she was found out to be selling for fakes. That's how they traced it back. She actually did go to prison, and the people she was working with had been indicted. But the gallery could prove that they didn't know that what she was telling them was wrong. Ultimately, like I said, they paid the money back, but they went out of business over it.

That's interesting that it was not one of the buyers that figured out it was up the supply chain. She got caught by some other particular art fraud.

Yeah, by all of the things she was doing, but also, because once the pieces were sold, there were knowledgeable collectors who started to look at the artwork a little more closely, and they started to have doubts. At that point, things started to unravel.

Oh, that's crazy. Most of us and my listeners, they're not going to be going out and buying, probably not in the market for $100,000-plus pieces of art. What are some of the things that happen on the smaller scale artwork market, where it's maybe hundreds or thousands of dollars, as opposed to hundreds of thousands?

Well, again, people are selling pieces that they're overpriced. Your listeners should check the prices of things before they buy them. Take a look at the internet. You can check prices, and you will see what the secondary market is paying for a specific item, and at that point, decide how much you want to spend. Those are things that protect yourself.

As far as the authenticity, get it in writing, because if you get something in writing over the internet, say a contract or something, or some type of description, that could be a wire fraud. If you rely on that information and you buy something and you lose something of value, money, or a trade item or something of that nature, and we can prove that that person who told you this wasn't true, you've got a fraud. That's a criminal case.

Those are the types of things you can do. You can protect yourself by using the contract given to you either over the mail or on email. Either way, wire fraud or mail fraud could occur, or check your due diligence to make sure that what you're being told is right.

Some due diligence would be, like, if someone is claiming this is a print number, five out of 10,000, whatever, and there were never 10,000 done. That should be a red flag, or I suppose if you Google the print numbers, that might actually give you some history of if there's been transactions before.

Well, usually, if you don't want to talk about prints, if you have a name of a print, you can Google the name or ChatGPT or any kind of search engine. It will tell you the basic background, how many copies were actually printed, how many were signed by the artist, who sold them at the time, what gallery actually sold them. If any of that information that you have doesn't check out, stay away from it.

Of course. Good advice. If it's too good to be true, it's probably not.

That's what your mother told you, and that still stands to reason. If it's too good to be true, don't do it.

A couple of stories. What's the largest physical, heaviest object that you've investigated the theft of?

We've looked at things like statues, sculptures that are pretty heavy, but the most valuable object that I've ever investigated and recovered was one of the original 13 copies of the Bill of Rights.

Oh, wow.

It was a document. It wasn't very heavy, but it was about three-and-a-half feet tall. It was on a vellum, which was cowhide, written in black gall ink by John Adams. It was very interesting because it was one of the ones sent out by George Washington in 1787 to the states to be ratified for the Bill of Rights. It was stolen in 1865 by a Union trooper who was going with Sherman's troops, who was coming north from Atlanta.

They stopped in Raleigh, North Carolina at the state house, and they took the surrender of North Carolina at that point. The trooper from Indiana went into the Raleigh state house, and he basically took their copy of the Bill of Rights. That's a North Carolina copy. He took it back to Indiana with him where it stayed until 2003. We recovered it then in an undercover operation when some individuals who were made well known from the Antiques Roadshow offered it for sale to the National History Center in Philadelphia.

Once we were able to determine that this was the copy from North Carolina, it belonged to the state of North Carolina. It was never in private hands, so we were able to recover that. That was valued. If you could sell that piece, the only document that would be more valuable in the United States, it's a Declaration of Independence, and that particular piece was worth about $100 million.

Wow. Do you know where this piece was in the intervening, what, hundreds, hundred-plus years?

Yeah. The trooper sold it for $5 basically to a shopkeeper in Indiana, and it was kept by that shopkeeper's family. In fact, it was found in the shop as an ornament, and it was kept there until 2002 when the two sisters who had it sold it to the United States Roadshow dealer.

Did the family know it was an original, or did they just think it was a copy?

They thought it was an original because they are a very, very early copy. I think they were paid $150,000 for it, and so they expected it to be very valuable knowing it came through in 1965. But we couldn't charge them with anything because we couldn't prove that they knew. But the individual who had it, he did know because the person who was trying to sell it had taken it to Georgetown University, to the Constitution Center there.

They have an academic center for the Constitution that's there, and they had it checked out. The professors there told that person, “That is North Carolina's copy,” and they could tell by what they call the franking, the writing on the back of the document, which was done by the scribe who actually wrote it.

Were they the ones who informed the police, or where did law enforcement get involved in it? Like the final sale, or where was it being tracked before the sale happened? Before the sale?

Yeah, well, the person who had it actually was trying to sell it back to North Carolina. He contacted the authorities of North Carolina, “So I have this document, are you interested in buying it?” And the authorities of North Carolina said, “No, we're not going to buy our own copy of the Bill of Rights. That belongs to us. We need to get that back. We need to give it back. It's stolen.”

Then he went silent on that and then offered it for sale to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, at which point by then they knew that it was a North Carolina copy. What happened there was the governor of Pennsylvania at the time contacted Governor Easley in North Carolina and said, “We're interested in buying this piece for our new National Constitution Center. They wanted $4 million for it.” Governor Easley told Governor Rendell in Pennsylvania, “No way. That belongs to us. That's stolen property.”

The state government got in contact with the U.S. Marshals and the U.S. Attorney's Office in North Carolina in Raleigh and they started an FBI investigation. I got the call from the agents in Raleigh to go do this investigation here in Philadelphia. At which point, we did an undercover buy, met with the criminals, had them bring the piece to us, and were able to recover that and arrest them.

Good job. What's the smallest thing that you've ever investigated being stolen?

I had a series of about, I think it was three, what they called cylinder seals. And these pieces are about an inch long and they were from Iraq. What had happened was a Marine had gone over during the Iraq War, and he bought them on the street. They're 5,000 years old easily. He thought they were reproductions. He brought them back with him when he came back to the states.

Once he found out that these pieces were originals, he contacted us to let us know that he had them. At which point, of course, we went and seized them from him, and we've identified them as actual real cylinder seals from Iraq, more than 5,000 years old. There are little pieces of stone that are shaped into a cylinder, and then they're carved.

What they were used for was as a signature on contracts. They would take it and they would roll it onto a paper or even to a tablet. That would create a signature seal of that person, and that would be a contract.

Oh, that's neat. It’s interesting that he was the one who initiated it. I assume he was not charged with anything because he didn't technically do anything illegal.

No, he didn't do anything illegal. Once he realized what he had, he contacted an archeologist who verified it. That's when they had, well, once he did that, he realized the archeologist was going to contact us. He did it first, which is smart.

If you know the police are going to come knocking on your door, you might as well let them know in advance.

You might want to get out in front of that.

As we start to wrap up here, how much of this kind of can apply to, like, sports memorabilia, autographs, maybe things that listeners might be more, you know, baseball cards? They might be more in the market for it.

Baseball cards have gone into a new stratosphere. Mickey Mantle's rookie card, his 1952 rookie, recently sold for $12 million. And that's just a standard rookie card that had not been signed, nothing like that. It was in good shape, I think it was a nine out of 10, but it sold for $12 million. Even a two out of 10 will sell for hundreds of thousands now.

What that does is it creates a marketplace for criminals. Any of your listeners, if you have baseball card collections, especially the older cards from the 50s, be careful. Make sure you put them in, you know, in a very, you know, fortified place, like a vault or something in your house, because they're very valuable now and as values go up and people get involved with stealing.

And as far as forgeries are concerned, the sports memorabilia market is one of the biggest markets for fakes. Unless you're able to actually see the person sign these things—the football, the baseball, the baseball card, or you get it from a reputable dealer like the original companies that put these pieces out, you know, I would be very circumspect as to what I would buy, because it's something that I did a case.

I was involved in a case out of San Diego, and it was called Operation Bullpen, which was kind of a cool name if you think about it, and they're investigating, you know, fake baseball cards and fake autographs for all kinds of sports memorabilia. My end of it was these Einstein autographs that people were selling in this area, and I did that investigation and showed they were fakes. That's very much a huge situation. You can Google that Operation Bullpen and see how many they recovered and how much of that stuff was out there, and it's still there. So be very careful before you pay a lot of money, you know, for a fake autograph.

Does the kind of the opposite side of the transaction also have a lot of theft in terms of, I've got this old card collection that's 50 years old, and so I take it to a dealer and they realize, “Oh my gosh. This card is worth thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands.” They go, “Oh, hey, that was kind of nice to give you 100 bucks for it.” Like, does that happen also where it's the dealer is taking advantage of the seller's lack of knowledge?

Yeah, of course. That's called collection management. We do that in my company, my company, Robert Wittman Incorporated. We get involved in collection management, due diligence, all these types of questions to protect individuals from both sides, both buyers and sellers. You have to understand that a legitimate sale is whatever a buyer is wanting to pay a seller and he'll accept on any given day.

If you're going to sell a $100,000 card for 100 bucks, and you accept that, then you just did a legitimate sale. You have to know what you're doing, you have to check your stuff out before you go. That's what coin collections, with sports memorabilia collections, whatever you have, you need to go do a little due diligence before you go out to sell so you know what you're talking about.

I bet nowadays with the internet, it's a lot easier to do that research than it used to be.

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, you get some general ideas, anyway. I mean, it's not going to be specific, because it's always about condition, you know? What's the condition of the items that you have compared to, you know, what the things you're seeing on the internet? But it just gives you an idea, you know, it's got some value. That’s the thing.

Or shop it to multiple buyers.

I would do that too. You always want to go to a few people to see what the value is.

Awesome. You also have a book about your life and some of the stuff that you've done. Can you tell us about the book?

Sure, but when I retired from the Bureau, I wrote a book, a memoir, it's called Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. I got maybe 15 stories in there about the undercover operations we did around the world, represent some of the best cases. And it came out. It’s in 15 languages now to New York Times bestseller. I would say to your listeners, if they're interested, you pick it up on Amazon. Have it delivered. It's priceless, but it's about 15 bucks.

That is a great line. If people want to learn more about what you do or connect with you, how can they find you online?

You just go to [email protected] or just Google Robert K. Wittman Art.

Awesome. We will make sure to link to both of those in the show notes. Robert, thank you so much for your time today coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Chris. It's been a blast.