The Jordan Harbinger Show - 401: Robert Wittman | The Undercover Hunt for Stolen Art

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Robert Wittman (@robertwittman) is the former senior investigator/creator of the FBI's national art crime team and author of Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. What We Discuss with Robert Wittman: Why criminal and terrorist organizations find art less risky to smuggle than contraband like cash, drugs, or guns. The three things that make an art piece valuable: provenance, authenticity, and good title. Why the US has only relatively recently begun to take art crime seriously, whereas Italy's art crime team has a freaking submarine! Simple but effective tactics for remaining undercover without arousing suspicion from the targets. Why losing his fear instinct was a clear signal for Robert to retire from undercover work for good. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/401 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. We walked in with the box, and we had the U.S. Attorney was there, you know, maybe the governor, the head of the FBI office, all these people standing around waiting to see this fantastic object, the Bill of Rights. So as we opened the box up, I knocked the little fake piece out of the top, and it fell on the floor, and Jay, of course, whatever to pick it up, and he stepped on it. And everybody went crazy. They thought we just dropped the Bill of Rights on the ground and stepped on it by mistake, you know. It looked like a Three Stooges Act, you know? Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. If you're new to the show, we have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies and

psychologists, even the occasional FBI undercover, and that's what we've got here for you today. Each show turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. Now, today, art crime is a six billion dollar a year industry. Who knew? Art is used to finance terrorism, drug deals, money laundering. Today's guest, Bob Whitman. He trained the art crime team at the FBI. He basically founded it. He spent years going undercover as a shady art dealer who is used to multi-million dollar deals. He's rescued art from all over the world. We're going to hear about a lot of what he's found today. Tips and tricks of the undercover agents, how they develop rapport, stay secret, how they manage two lives at once.

one as an FBI agent and the other as a criminal. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, celebrities, undercovers every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on our show, they subscribe to the course, they help contribute to the course, so come join us.

You'll be in smart company. Now, here's Bob Whitman. I was surprised, actually, to read that art crime is a $6 billion a year industry. Do you think it's more now since you've written the book, or do you think it's gone down? Well, you know, Jordan, first of all, thanks for having me on your shows. It's great. Oh, yeah. I really appreciate. I love your show. Thank you. But just to let you know, it's interesting. Back in 2000, we were contacted the FBI by the New York Times. And we were asked the question, how big is our crime in the world?

What is the number? We did a study. We talked to Scotland Yardt, the Metropolitan Police in London, who have an Art in Antique Squad. We contacted the Interpol. We spoke to a number of different other countries, and we came up with the figure of $6 billion as an estimate of all art crime. And that encompasses not just theft, but it's also things like fraud, forgeries, fakes, all different types of crime involving the art world. And that was the number back in 2000. Now, since then, 20 years later, the art market has exploded financially. I mean, we have paintings today are selling for $400 million. It's not uncommon for $100 million to pass hands in any specific paintings, say a Picasso or Premiere or anything like that.

We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. So absolutely, the loss has risen as a result of the rise in value. You know, it's a funny thing. Many, many years ago, there was a bank robber. And as he was being let out of the bank after being captured, a reporter asked him, why do you rob banks? And his response was because that's where the money is. And that's why art crime has exploded in the past 20 years. Why art?

Art is probably easier to smuggle but also harder to smuggle. I mean, I think of cash. You can move it digitally, right? Drugs, they're so small. Art, it seems big and cumbersome. Yeah, that's true. But, you know, the thing about cash, drugs, and guns is that they're all illegal. There's a $10,000 limit that you can transfer outside of the United States.

say, so you have to declare it. Of course, guns and drugs are illegal. They're contraband. So all of that is contravets, illegal in and of itself. Or it isn't. So, you know, if you take a Picasso that's stolen, say, in Hungary and you transport it to France, well, first of all, you probably don't have to go through customs to begin with because of the open EU policies for countries. And if you do, if the customs agent at the border doesn't know that this Picasso was stolen from Hungary, He's not going to have any idea that it's the problem. Probably will think it's a reproduction or, you know, a copy of the piece. So that's why it becomes something that criminals like to take around, like to use, because of the fact that it is portable.

Generally speaking, too, what you're going to find out, and what I've seen over the years is that artwork that's actually stolen, like museum pieces worth millions of dollars, they're small. They're very small. They're maybe a foot high, that type of thing. They're not the huge canvases. No, they're small pieces. And the reason for that is because they're poor. It's easy to carry out two or three paintings from a museum that are, you know, a foot apiece that are worth four or five million dollars. Wow.

And so that's kind of a reason why those are the pieces that are stolen in these types of thefts. That makes sense, right? So if I'm carrying a kilo of cocaine and I get caught by a drug dog randomly while on a train or an airplane, I'm going to prison for a long time. But if I get caught with a painting, they're not going to say, well, this is probably stolen guy in a suit carrying a painting in a painting container. we're going to have to call this in. They're just going to think I'm going to write my guy carrying a painting or a little statue in a kind of case. Or the obvious response is that it's a reproduction. Oh, yeah.

It's just a copy. So it's not in and of itself contraband. And that's why sometimes it becomes a thing of value to criminals. But the problem is this. Most of these criminals that are involved in these types of armed robberies and thefts, whether it's a museum or a gallery or a home, they're not artificial autos. You know, they're stealing because they think that the name on the painting, like a Picasso or Renoir or Matisse, is famous and therefore they can make money. They're better criminals than they are businessmen. In fact, so the real art in an art heist, it's not the stealing.

It's the selling of it. What are you going to do with a stolen painting worth millions of dollars when you don't have good title? That's always the issue. So moving it. Moving it is the problem. And I thought it was interesting in the book. You mentioned that these guys are not in it because they love art. It's just pure greed.

Yeah, we called art theft, you know, a gateway crime for gangs. Using these gangs that we would pursue and had done these crimes, they weren't necessarily art thieves. They were thieves in general. So they were robbing banks. They were committing murders. They were, you know, doing aggravated assaults, gun running, drug running, all of it together. And they just happened to do an art heist.

Again, because they read an article when it paid. newspaper that said that, or on the internet that said a Picasso sold for $100 million. So they figured, well, you know what, if we can go steal this Picasso, it'd be an easy heist, and we can make a lot of money. Again, though, they don't realize that the three things that make an artwork valuable are provenance, which is the history of it, authenticity, which means it's real. It is what it's supposed to be. But third thing is you've got to have, it's a third leg of the stool that holds the stool up.

It's good title. If you don't have good title, you don't own anything. Right. So you prove that it is what it is. You prove that it's, I guess, what a chain of custody? Is that kind of what provenance is? Correct. Yes. And then I got to prove that I own it and it's not going to get bought by you for $400,000 and then Interpol is going to come pick it up in a week. Right. Exactly. To find a legitimate buyer who's going to pay $400,000, you have to have good title. Because if you don't, the buyer's just buying a stolen item worth nothing. So that's the problem. You know, it's one thing to steal a $2,000 item and sell it. at a flea market or, you know, third hand through Facebook, you know, marketplace or something like that. But to go out and steal, you know, $100 million painting and try to make $5 million on it, you got to find the buyer. And buyers who have $5 billion to pay for a painting,

they want good title. Right. I don't want to buy something. It's not worth anything and that can land them in jail. Where is most stolen art stolen from? Is it stolen from the ground? Is it stolen from a museum? Is it stolen from some guy's house? Like, what's going on? Where's it from? Well, the vast majority of art and antiques are stolen in burglaries from homes. They're not very expensive. It's not very valuable material under $1,000. You know, it's grandmom's clock or it's photographs for the 1920s of grandpops wedding, that type of thing. And that's really the most material that's taken. And most of that's never recovered. Only 5% of stolen property is ever really recovered. But when When it comes to the million-dollar artworks, those are taken from, what would you expect?

They come from galleries. They would come from mansion homes. They come from places like museums. Those pieces are 95% recovered because, again, ultimately, the only people who want to buy them are the police or the FBI like me. And we're the ones who do the undercover operations to go in and buy these pieces. It seems like Europe cares much more about this. There's dozens of art crime agents in Paris and the United Kingdom. Italy, you wrote, has hundreds of people.

You said that Italy has an art crime submarine. Why do you need a submarine to get stolen art back? What's going on there? Well, it's a investigative tool that they use because, you know, in the Mediterranean around Italy, around the coast of Italy, many, many ships sunk throughout thousands of years. All of that sunken material at the bottom of the Mediterranean is all considered antiquities. It's considered the art of the nation.

So, again, they're doing the same thing there. They're using that submarine as a... investigative tool. But yeah, the Carbignary in Italy have 300 members in that brigade. There's three brigades. And that's what they do. They do art theft investigation, antiquity investigation. And of course, that's because Italy has a history. Same with Greece. Both countries have major squads that protect their antiquities. Paris has 36, I believe, investigators, what they call the OCBC, which is their organized crime for art squad. These people are Jean-Den-Marie and French national police, and they work all around the country to recover art because there's so much

art in France. Spain has two squads in Madrid. Of course, London has the famed art antique squad. So we were kind of late to the game. We didn't start our art squad here in the United States until 2005. What? Really? Wow. That is late is kind of an understatement, right? Yeah, we started the art crime team is what happened. Wow, that's ridiculous. I guess, so now that you mentioned the submarine, right, if they're looking at a ship right, If they're finding art that's stolen, they might want to go and make sure that it's like the place where they thought it was at the bottom of the ocean has been disturbed maybe or something like that. They're looking for things like that. I guess that makes sense. The archaeologists use it too. Yeah. So the archaeologists go out, the Greeks and the Italians, they go out and they find these wrecks. And then what they do is they map the wrecks over a certain amount of seasons. And they know where everything is. They know where all the pieces are. And they can go in with the submersibles, the submarine, and look and see if things have been. found. Now, what happens is the fishermen in the area. They also know about these wrecks, and the pieces that come up from the wrecks could be very valuable. Many times these pieces are ancient vessels that carried

wine. They had grain in them. You've seen them. Usually they were stacked. They were kind of wide at the top, came into a funnel at the bottom. And there's thousands of these all over the bottom of the Mediterranean from ships that sunk throughout the ancient world. These pieces are worth, if they're in good shape, tens of thousands of dollars to collectors. Wow. So the fishermen go in and actually clean out the rec sites. So that's how the antiquity squads keep an eye on these rec sites to make sure

nothing's being taken. Why do you think art crime hasn't been a priority in the United States? Is it simply because all of the quote-unquote ancient art that we have in the U.S. is Native American and we kind of don't have a great history of caring about those people? I mean, I'm throwing that out there. I don't know. Well, I would say that.

I think the reason we didn't have a directed art squad that was just doing nothing but art stuff, the investigation, and we still don't. Even the art crime team today, I started the team in 2005, just for background. What had worked, happened was I was I was working in countries all around the world, 22 different countries. Between 1988 and 2005, when I came back after doing a case in Denmark, I realized that we didn't have a team, you know, and all these other countries did. I've worked with those teams before. So there was no dedicated group that had training in art theft investigations or art fraud investigations. So in 2005, I went to headquarters in Washington, and I said, look, let's create

this squad like the other countries do, the Carbonieri, the OECBC, the Spanish group, the LaGuardia, in Ireland, all these different areas have, are the investigators. So headquarters said, okay. So we started with eight agents in the United States that we trained who were doing it as what we call a collateral duty. In other words, they weren't full-time art investigators. There were people who were doing public corruption in cases, bank robbery cases, but they also did a art crime case if it came into their area of investigative venue, okay? Since then, I think there's like 21 people now on that team, which is great. We recovered more than, I think, $150 million for the stolen art and cultural property, over a thousand artifacts from a dozen countries. So they're doing a great job.

But up until 2005, we didn't have that dedicated team. And that's because art theft is still considered property crime. And that's basically what it is. It's the lowest level of crime that the FBI investigates. It's not a high level. I mean, international terrorism would be number one. Art theft would be maybe number 14 out of 14, you know, fields. As far as property is concerned, legally, under the law, there's no difference between a manet, a monae, a Monet, and a Chevrolet. Okay, they're all the same. It's just property. It's value. And so a $50,000 painting is no different than a $50,000, $50,000. Mercedes. So if somebody steals a Mercedes under the law, it's the same as a painting. We looked at it that way. We, the United States, all the way up through 2005. That makes sense. Okay, so they don't really attach as much or any cultural significance to the art. It's just, like you said,

it's the same thing as stealing a car of equal value. So if they're just looking at the value, maybe they say it's just not worth the investigative resources a lot of the time to get stuff like that back because it's insured. Nobody's got an FBI agent searching for my Mustang Cobra GT convertible, right? It's just get another one year. It's insured. It's a painting. It's just property. Unless Europe says, hey, this priceless artifact, we need your help recovering it. It just goes on a list of stolen stuff, right? That's a great comment. You've got a lot of different things happening there. So the first thing is, when we talk about property crime, yeah, people would be looking for your Mustang GT. Cobra. It depends on how it was stolen, whether it was taken across state,

I mean, there are federal statutes that cover car theft. Interstate transportation is stolen motor vehicles. ITSMV is actually a federal statute that can be investigated by the FBI. And it's not that it's cultural property. Up until about 2003, you're right about that. Cultural property didn't matter. It was simply property crime involving the value of the property. But in 2003 or four, a federal sentencing commission added what we call sentencing points or guidelines.

that added points to cultural property theft. So in other words, in federal sentencing, what happens is there's a certain amount of points that are allocated to a crime. And usually that's dependent upon the value, the matter and method of the crime. Let's say if it's firearms used, you might add 10 points because a firearm was used in the commission of a crime. The value is say it's over 10 million. You might add five more points.

And the number of points you get on the crime is related to a table that tells you how many months in prison you're going to be sentenced to. So it's really a statistical situation that tells a person how many months in prison based upon the number of points. Well, around 2003, the Federal Sentencing Commission added points for cultural property, which was something brand new. So in other words, if a piece was stolen from a museum or a place where cultural property is kept, you could add three points to that because it was affected everyone's culture and it became cultural property. You know, if it was taken by a person who had a certain amount of, you know, loyalty or a responsibility to protect the artifacts, you could add points. So all those things were based upon cultural property. The reason that happened was because we did a case involving a war bonnet, an Indian war bonnet.

Like a headdress? Is that kind of what we're talking about? Exactly. It was an Indian headdress. It was worn in a dance in the early 1900s by the Apache Medicine Chief Geronimo. The story goes that around 1907 or 1909, when the Oklahoma Territory became a state, there was a huge powwow. And all of the nations, the Indian nations, got together and they danced for seven days. And on the last day, the star of the whole dance was the Apache medicine man, Dronimo. He was a captive. He was actually under guard and taken from a fort and brought to the medicine powwow in order to be able to do the dance. And when he did it, he was given this buckskin outfit and this long eagle-feathered headdress, and he wore this piece.

Well, that was passed down through families, and in 1999 we did a case involving that headdress because it was being offered for sale. And your listeners might not know this, but it's illegal in the United States to try to sell eagle feathers. I did not know that. Is that because it's just an endangered species? Is that the idea? Exactly. It was part of the Endangered Species Act. Also, there was a Bald Eagle Act passed in the 1940s to protect them.

the Eagles because they are the bird of the United States, the symbol. And so as a result, this individual was trying to sell this war bonnet. It's about six-foot war bonnet, may have eagle feathers for $1.2 million. And as a result, we were able to recover that piece. And we showed that to the Federal Sentencing Commission, who then added these points for prison sentences for a cultural property, realizing that there's a difference between a Chevrolet and an eagle feather war bonnet or a Monet. Right. We're able to make it more of an important crime. Now, how is being in search of priceless art different than chasing commodity contraband, like weapons and cocaine?

Well, priceless art, it becomes a passion. You know, I worked for a year in Philadelphia in 1989 during the epidemic involving crack. I worked many cases involving individuals who were taking crack and selling crack and crack houses and whatnot. It's not a passion. It's not a passion, too. take crack off the street. You know, you want to do it, it's important, but it doesn't become a passion. Recovering stolen art, which does represent cultural history, or does represent the genius of mankind, does become a passion. And the investigations are different. You know, you don't go into a museum setting

and spread fingerprint dust all around. You have to be careful. You know, you can't be looking like that. There's a certain intellectual, or shall we say, process involved in trying to determine where the art would have gone. Now, when it comes to drugs or guns, it could go anywhere. But generally speaking, when we talk about art, it's going to go certain places. So knowing the world, the universe of the art market is really important to know to recover that kind of art. To know how to do an art deal is very important, especially when these cases are usually made by undercover agents. That's very difficult to recover stolen art, unless you just stumble upon it. That's one way you get it. But to actually conduct an investigation, determine who has the art,

and then prove that that person, first of all, has it. Secondly, knows it's stolen. And thirdly, is willing to deliver it. That's a whole different type of investigation and takes on a lot of undercover aspects. So all of those things are important in recovery the art. I read in your book that thieves, and this was, it made me, like, cringe so hard. Often thieves destroy the art if they know they're being investigated. So your prime directive is to get the art and getting the thief is a bonus.

And you had that story that just makes me just so sad. that this woman dumped like 100 paintings in a river to destroy the evidence because her son had stolen the art, that just makes me sick to my stomach to hear things like that. I'm not even an art guy at all, but you just, it's just such a waste, right? Yeah, that's an outlier. That usually doesn't happen. Thank God. But we do worry about that. I mean, we've had a case involving the Bill of Rights back in 1865, a union soldier was coming back up through North Carolina, and he stopped with his unit to, take over the capital, Raleigh, North Carolina. And the group went into the statehouse and they came out with a North Carolina copy of Bill of Rights. That was sent there in 1789 by George

Washington to be ratified. Well, of course, each state had one, and this was a North Carolina's copy. Well, this young trooper, he took it back to Indiana with him, and he kept it, he took it out of the statehouse. It was North Carolina's Bill of Rights. So as a result, you know, that stayed there until 2002, and we were able to recover that in an undercover operation when it was offered for sale. to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. You know, of course, it was stolen property, was owned by the people of North Carolina, the government, and we had to go through a rather elaborate situation

to do an undercover operation to recover it, because we didn't know exactly where it was, but it was being offered for sale. But here was the reason we did it that way, because we were told that if we didn't buy it, it might go to a sheik, supposedly. This was the term that was used a sheik in the Middle East who would destroy it as a propaganda type of thing,

against the U.S. And this is in 2001. So as a result, we were very careful that we had to do this in a right way to get this thing back at one piece. But that's our cultural history. Other than the Declaration of Independence, the bill of rights is the second, quote, most valuable piece of history in the United States. It's been estimated at value in about $100 million if you could buy one. Of course you can. The other states own them.

So we are able to recover that in order to keep it from going into the wrong hands where it might be destroyed. You know, that was the threat that we were working under. We really do worry about if he's being destroyed. But you know what I found Jordan over the years doing these cases? They usually try to keep these pieces in good shape. And the reason for that is because they realize that if they destroy the art, they have nothing of value. Yeah. So, yeah, unlike a car where you can chop a car up and sell the parts for more than the actual car was worth, a piece of art where you can't chop up.

No, I don't only want the Third Amendment. I want the whole Bill rights. Excellent. That's right. Pasted on a piece of cardboard with glue stick. Yeah, it would be tough because the Bill of Rights was actually written with blackball ink on vellum, which is sheepskin. And this was a huge piece. It was actually a hide from a cow.

I mean, it was almost four feet high. Wow. When they did it, yeah. It's on display right now in the, I think in Raleigh, North Carolina at the State History Museum. I did not know that. I figured they just wrote on a couple century old paper. I didn't realize they wrote on animal skins like that. You know, that's why they call them sheepskins.

when you got your diploma, that's called vellop. There was a sheepskin at one time. Wow, I did not know that. All right. Well, yeah. I'll tell you a funny story with that, too. My partner, Jay Hiney, there's another FBI agent, and he's actually in Atlanta now. He and I recovered this thing.

And it was April Fool's Day, April 1st. And we were supposed to transport it down to Raleigh, North Carolina, because that's where the actual case was. We recovered it in Philly, but the case was opened up in Raleigh because that's where it belonged, and it had to be transported back. So in this situation, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, You can't ride down to North Carolina from Pennsylvania with a $100 million object. It's just not something you usually want to do.

So we requested and were granted the authority to use the FBI director's jet. So they flew to jet up from Washington to Philly. We loaded the piece on. We had to set into a conservation box that was made specifically for that. And we flew it down in Raleigh, North Carolina. Well, the day before we went down, Jay and I went over to the National Constitution Center where they have a gift shop. and we bought a little handheld copy of the Bill of Rights.

It's on a piece of paper. It looks like an old paper is what it looks like. And we put it into the top of the box so that when we arrived on April 1st at the U.S. Attorney's Office or the FBI office in North Carolina, we walked in with the box and we had the U.S. attorney was there, you know, maybe the governor, the head of the FBI office, all these people standing around waiting to see this fantastic object, the Bill of Rights. So as we opened the box up, I knocked the little fake piece of it. out of the top. And it fell on the floor. And Jay, of course, whatever to pick it up and he stepped on it.

And everybody went crazy. They thought we just dropped the bill of rights on the ground and stepped on it by mistake. It looked like a three stooges act, you know? You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Bob Whitman. We'll be right but back. And now, back to Bob Whitman on the Jordan Harbinger show. So you had like a fake bill of rights that you were going to knock on the ground and then stomp on by mistake, just to mess with everything. everybody who's been holding their breath for like three months for you guys to recover this thing. Exactly. Well, it was April Fool's Day, so why not, right? Yeah, why not? How did that go over?

Nobody? Nobody laughed. Jay and I laughed, but everybody else was very serious about it. But then we pulled it out and everybody was happy. You know, we took out the original. Just for a second, you know, we thought to be a nice April Fool's Jew. Yeah, I think, I mean, look, after all that work, you know, got to diffuse the tension somehow, keep things light around the office. Yeah, I can see everybody just being kind of horrified because like, oh, good, it's on the plane, it's safe, it's with two of my best men, and then you roll over there and rip the thing in half or whatever with your feet. Well, wasn't that bad, but anyway, they didn't see the love to eat it. We did. It's weird where you find some of this stuff, right? Like, you write in the book about finding,

was it a giant Chinese ancient crystal ball found it in like a housekeeper's room or a garage, stuff like that. Like these art thieves, they want to keep it in good shape, but they also just, what do they do? They give up on selling it and they just throw it somewhere. I don't understand why these things are just kind of willy-nilly given to, I guess thieves aren't the best judges of what to do with expensive property that they've stolen. Maybe that's what's going on. But it just seems bizarre to me.

Like you'd go through all the trouble to steal this ancient Chinese art and then you stuff it in an attic at someone's house. Well, that's what happens. I mean, as I said earlier, the problem here is that these art thieves, these thieves in general, they go in and they know how to do a crime, but they're not very good businessmen. So like I said, the real art and art heist is selling. In the case of the crystal ball,

it was at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which is a five-star museum, is one of the best in the country when it comes to archaeological material, fantastic material. Anyway, somebody went in to the, what they call the Asian room, back in the night, I guess it was 1989. They stole this crystal ball. Now, this crystal ball weighs over 50 pounds.

It was made over a 10-year or 20-year period by being rotated in a cylinder in diamond dust. Wow. And it was done by the Chinese. It was a gift to the Empress Xi when she was married as part of her dowager. She was known as a dowager empress, and this was given to her. I guess it was collected in the 1930s by the Philadelphia Museum. So it was there, and somebody went and stole that as well as a four-foot-haul-tall-taught

sculpture of the god Osiris, the Egyptian god Osiris, which was over 2,000 years old. And they took these pieces, and we couldn't find them. It took us two years, finally, before we were given a lead. And what had happened was, the guy Osir showed up in an antique shop on South Street in Philadelphia. So once one of the employees at the museum went in and saw it, they called the FBI. We went in, we were able to recover that. Of course, by doing our backup, we found that the piece had been sold to the antique shop by what they call Picker. Now, many of your viewers and your listeners might have seen Pickers on American Picker.

Oh, yeah. I never knew what that meant, actually. Right. That term is used because they pick trash. They picked the trash and they bring it and sell it. Well, at least this picker was going around with an old shopping cart, pick it up picking up trash on trash day. And he picked up this statue, which was out to be thrown away. So, of course, we found him. And we were able to go back to the house, the address where he says he picked it up.

We went and did the interview at the house who knocked on the door, young man opened the door. And we said, you know, can you tell us about the statue? And he says, yeah. He said, when I bought the house two years ago, it was in my mudroom. It was just sitting there. And when he said mudroom, it was a little alcove out of his back door off of an alley on South Street. So we said, well, that's fantastic.

I said, do you know anything about a big glass bowling ball? Did you see that? I didn't want to say crystal ball because if I said crystal ball, then I would be given him the language. If he said, oh, yeah, there was a crystal ball. Then we know that he has knowledge of what we're looking for. So he says, yeah. He said, there was a big ball there too. And that's fantastic. So we said, well, what happened to it? And he said, well, we gave, I gave it to my housekeeper. I said, why would you give the ball to your housekeeper? And he said, because she's a witch. So, of course, our response to what do you mean a witch? He says, well, yeah, every witch needs a crystal ball. So we said, great, you still have her number. And he says, yeah. So I said to give her a call and tell her you got two appraisers that are interested in seeing the crystal ball. So he does. And she lives up and down New Jersey, Trenton, New Jersey. So my partner and I, we

drive up to Trenton, New Jersey from Philadelphia. I mean, I'm going to door and where the two appraisers come in to see the ball. And she lets us into the house. And she takes us upstairs to the bedroom and on her bedroom dresser on a little stand is this 50-pound crystal ball. It's the second largest crystal ball in the world. That's how fantastic it is. And when you look into it, everything is upside down because of the crystal nature of the crystal so that it's like a mirror, but it's upside down. Anyway, so we're looking at it. And she's got a, I think it was a New York Yankees baseball cap on the crystal ball. Remember, this piece is worth $350,000. Wow. So we said, why did you put the baseball cap on the ball? She said, well, because when the sun hit it, it would shoot out the rays,

it would start little fires. You know, how do you have a magnifying glass? Yeah, when the sun rays hit it. So she had to keep it covered, so it didn't get sun on it. So then we told her, we said, you know, the deal on the ball, where it came from, it was stolen. And we said, you must be a good witch, right? She said, yeah, I'm a good witch. So there you go. It's always good. to find a good witch rather a bad witch, because then you might find the crystal ball. That is amazing that the crystal ball could start little fires like that, because I think that alone is impressive to the way that this was made, because you have to machine glass fairly well in order to do that, or crystal, in order to do that, don't you? It has to be really,

really smooth. Oh, it was like a magnifying glass. Yeah. Like I say, it took 10 years inside of a cylinder that they kept rotating with water and diamond dust. They stuck a rock in there, a crystal, and created this perfect ball. Today you can go to the University of Pennsylvania Museum and go to the Asian room. It sits right in the middle of the room on a stand under the glass dome of the building, and it's a highlighted piece within the room.

And it starts fires every other day when it's too sunny. Yeah. I don't know about that, but you can go visit anybody. Well, there's not enough sun in Philadelphia for it to start any fires or wherever is located. Oh, no. Did you know it's always sunny in Philadelphia? Yeah, that's right.

That's right. You got me on that one. Well, how did you become an expert in art? Were you always an art aficionado? Is this something that runs in your family? Well, you know, what happened was back in 1988, you know, 10 billion years ago when I started at the FBI. The reason I went in was because I thought it would be neat to be an agent.

You know, that was a time when there was a TV show called Hill Street Blues. Yeah. And even better, a show called Miami Vice. Oh, yeah. I used to watch that show and see these guys on these cigarette boats, you know, in Miami Harbor wearing these cool looking suits. And I thought, you know, that'd be a fun job. I applied the FBI and went in. After doing, of course, 16 weeks of Quantico, I got a sign to go to Philadelphia.

Well, there was no Miami Harbor. There was no cigarette boats. It's just 6,000 Philadelphia police officers of me, right? So when I get to Philadelphia, my first assignment is to work on that crystal ball case because the theft had just occurred. And also a theft of a Rodan piece, a sculpture taken from the Rodan Museum as well, which was gunpoint robbery. Believe it or not, one of the few gunpoint robberies of a museum. in the U.S. And in this particular one, a shot was actually fired. So those were two cases I started working on. As we solved those cases and recovered them,

I started to get that reputation in the office to work on these types of cases. And it just so happened and it worked out that way that my parents were in the antiques business. So as a result, the undercover work was pretty easy because I knew how to do a deal in the antiques business, and it's just the art market. So really, when you're dealing with criminals who are basically thieves, who do all types of crime, they're looking to make a deal. The art deal is a little bit different than your standard of retail. I mean, most people, you know, when you talk about art deals, don't walk

into galleries and just buy stuff. I mean, you can, and that's what happens, but there's many ways to do an art deal. And these criminals are always looking for a secondary way to do the deal, and I knew how to do that. You need a real level of expertise, right? You can't fake art expertise. So if you're doing your undercover operations, which I know you've done several of, and I want to get into that, I mean, you really can't just be wandering around and making off-color not quite right comments because you're dealing with actual art experts some of the time, right? Like the thieves might not be, but if you're dealing with a crooked gallery owner, you can't come in and say, oh, yeah, that red is really bright. And they're like, art people don't talk like that. And that's not red.

You know, it's crimson. You know, you're using the wrong language and stuff like that. It seems like you could really blow a deal trying to fake this level of expertise. Well, you never fake what you don't know. You know, there's certain precepts that are in the undercover world, and there are certain things that you do that keep you safe. You know, one of them is to use your first name. I mean, any time I went undercover, I always bob somebody.

Whatever the last name was, it didn't matter, but the first name was always Bob. And the reason for that is because when somebody calls you, you're supposed to respond. And if you're using the name Tom and you're not used to it, you're not going to look up. because that's not your name. So just to give you an idea, that's just one of the, you know, another thing would be to stay as close to the truth as possible, you know, because if you're in long-term undercover operation, sometimes six months, a year, two years,

if you fill your whole background with lies, you have to remember all that. Oh, yeah. And they're not stupid these people. They're going to listen to what you tell them. And if you say something different a year from now, they're going to remember you said you had two kids back a year ago. Now you got six.

It doesn't make sense. You know, it's kind of outrageous, but that's the type of thing. And so you try to keep things as close to being real as you can. So in the art world, it depended on what type of undercover operation I was doing. If I was dealing with criminals who weren't art-artisanados, it didn't really matter. I could be a gallery, a professor, or whatever I wanted to be, because I knew enough to be able to impress them. On the other hand, if I was dealing as a buyer to prove fraud, somebody's selling a fake painting,

and I want to prove that they're selling a fake painting, and I'm acting as a dumb buyer, What I'm doing there is letting them tell me the reality of the painting about what it's all about or the artwork. It doesn't have to be a painting anything. And they're telling me the lies, which I would rely upon to make to buy. At that point, it's a fraud. So it depended on what the situation was. Or if I'm dealing with another gallery person and say I'm supposed to be a crooked gallery person representing clients, you don't have to know everything. I'll give you an example.

I did it undercover for six months in Santa Fe, New Mexico, dealing with Native Abundian. American art. And I was going to galleries there who were selling illegal Native American art, material that was taken from the ceremonial places, sacred material. So my client was supposedly a Norwegian who wanted to collect these materials and I was interested in buying them. And he was from Norway. I was from Philadelphia. Remember, I said you got to keep as true as possible. Right. And I'm talking to these individuals and they're saying to me, well, what do you do? What are you dealing? And because my family were involved in Asian art, I knew. Japanese Asian art very, very well. So they didn't know a Japanese Asian art, but I didn't know

Indian art. So as a result, they respected me because, you know, nobody knows everything about everything. No antique dealers know everything. They know a little bit about something or a lot about one thing. Okay. So my bona fides was my knowledge of Japanese art. They recognized that I knew that, and not many police officers would know that. So as a result, you know, that material, as a result, they accepted me as one of them, another gallery guy, another art advisor with a client. And of course, the client supposedly knew nothing. So what we're doing is we're defrauding the client together. And that's how you get involved in these cases. So to work undercover, you have to look at each case, determine what role you're going to play, and then take that role on. You have some pretty interesting

tactics for working undercover in the book. For example, in Craig Newer where I'm wrong here, you always ask, who else knows about this deal or who else knows that you have this piece. And so, of course, any answer they give you is incriminating. So if they say, oh, well, you know, this dealer and this group of guys, you know, or this crooked official or this guy at this museum who gave this to me, those are the only people that know. So they incriminate all their compadres. And if they say nobody, it's like, well, okay, so you stole this yourself. Right. Right. Right. There's different ways of bringing out evidence from people. Basically, working under cover, you're trying to collect evidence that the person gives you himself.

And it's not that I used to like working under cover that much. It wasn't that. That was the only way to investigate these crimes and to prove the elements of the statutes, whether it's wire fraud, mail fraud, theft of major artwork from a museum. Each of these statutes has elements that you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. For example, if you're going to try to charge someone with interstate transportation of stolen property, ITSB, it's a federal crime, okay, to take an eye. stolen object across state lines, valued $5,000 or more, and knowingly do that. So what you had to do

was prove, number one, that it was stolen, which is not hard. That's pretty easy. You get a police report. Number two, that it was transported across state lines, like from Pennsylvania to New Jersey or New York to California. Pretty easy. But then you've got to prove knowledge. You got to prove it to person who transported had it transported knew it was stolen. So that's the undercover part. You had to get them to tell you to admit that they knew that this piece was stolen and that it was moving across state lines. So that's why we would have to work these types of cases. Another reason would be to recover the artwork successfully.

The other way we could bring it out of the woodwork to have it come out and be offered for sale was to dangle a carrot of buyership. And that's how we would get people to come out and do that. So there's different reasons for working undercover, but it's always to gain evidence or recoveries. That makes sense, right? because I think a lot of us just think, we'll just get the art back. But really, you have to put the thief away as well. That's the other half of the, or at least the other quarter of the equation. Primarily, you want to get the art back. But if you can't put the thief away, you've spent a lot of time and effort.

So you might as well fulfill those legal requirements of incrimination and evidence gathering. Yeah, for criminal cases, that's exactly right. I mean, the idea is to do both. Now, personally, if it came down to just getting the art back and not putting someone in prison, if that was what the choice was, I would do it. And that's because it was important to get the art back to me. In civil situations, it's basically to recover a loss. And oftentimes, nobody's going to go to jail or anything like that. It's just to recover a loss. And that's a different situation. Now, a lot of art comes back when it comes to market. In fact, most of it does. And what we mean by that is, like you said earlier, through an undercover operation or something

of that nature, but it also comes back when people die. So what happens is it gets stolen? Maybe it gets sold. Maybe somebody has it, or maybe a cousin or a brother inherits it. And the next thing you know, they're going to sell it. So they put it up for sale at one of the auction houses. Well, there you go. It comes up for sale. It's recognized. A police report becomes available. Next thing you know, it's recovered. So that's how a lot of pieces do come back. So the one good aspect of this for this cultural property protection and heritage is that, you know, these pieces outlive us. So eventually everything will come back unless it's destroyed, which heaven forbid we hope it's not. But if it's not, sooner or later, it will show up because there's records, and no matter what it was stolen,

it's going to show up and when it does, we'll recover it. You wrote that you have to see the good in your target. Otherwise, you'll just see the people who stole this art as evil, and that inhibits you in your undercover works. You have to connect well with them. Can you explain that a little bit? I think a lot of people think, oh, undercover would be so good, it would be so fun, it would be so interesting. And I'm sure it would, but I think the problem that a lot of folks, normal folks might have, is it's really hard to make friends with people over time, develop relationships, have a lot of meals with them, ingratiate yourself, and then essentially pull the plug on their entire business in life and throw them in prison for 20 years.

Yeah, well, you know, working undercover, basically it's ingratiating people, making them want to do business with you. And so any scenario, you have to act like you care about the person as well. And these things take time. I mean, they don't happen in an hour or two. It takes weeks, months to develop that rapport with a person who wants to do criminal activity, basically, with you. So we call it befriending and betraying, and that's what it comes down to. So on your question, you asked me, you said it could be a lot of fun. It's not really fun.

It's not. Most FBI agents and law enforcement officers are not liars. It's hard to be a liar if you have a conscience, if you are ethical. And the FBI, it stands for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but we also say fidelity and integrity. And so, you know, when you're a liar, you have no integrity. You know what I mean? And so it's not a natural thing to do.

You have to train yourself to be into it and look at it like it's a chess game. You always have to be one or two steps ahead of the person you're playing with. Yeah, it takes a lot of effort. I've heard it described as the most stressful investigative operative operative technique in law enforcement. and I would agree with that, that is very stressful. It's on your mind constantly, and you're constantly thinking of your next move. You're never comfortable lying. It's not something that people do naturally, unless you're sick.

Yes. Sociopath or narcissistic sociopath or whatever you want to call. In those situations, those people lie and don't mind, but normal people don't usually do that. Well, if you're hanging out with criminals all the time, how do you avoid having to go get blackout drunk four nights a week? You know, doing a bunch of cocaine every weekend, three days in a row and staying up all night, cheating on your wife. Like, how do you hang out with bad people and ingratiate yourself and also just not become a total scumbag yourself? Well, that's a situation where you have to control it from the very beginning. Every undercover agent does it their own way.

I mean, they all have their own situations. The way I did it was I would talk about the fact that I had a wife and that I had three beautiful children and I had no interest in losing my life or my children, anything like that and had no interest in that. I wouldn't put myself in a position where I'd be at the club. You know, I'd say, look, meet me afterwards, you know, that type of thing. I mean, we're going to do business here. This is not about partying. Or if I have to do a little bit of a party, I'm there as a businessman or someone who's interested in buying something.

I'm not there as a party guy. So that's the first thing. The second thing about being blind drunk or taking drugs, I would tell them, you know, I would say things like, you know, I've got a problem. If I take a drink, I'll wake up traveling down the street in Cleveland next week. I won't even know how I got there. We won't be able to do any business. So as a result, they weren't interested in seeing that happen.

All of these things are human situations. You just use your basic humanity, all right? And everybody can connect on that level, that someone's got a problem with alcohol. Somebody's got a wife and kids that they don't want to lose and they don't mess around. All those things are basic human concepts. And if you appeal to that, it's much less of a problem. Now, if you're in a situation where somebody says, you've got to have a drink and you don't want to, you walk away. So I guess you don't want to do business.

Yeah, that makes sense. It's like peer pressure. Yeah, believe me, they'll call you. Yeah, do you want a $400,000 dealer or do you really want me to have this shot of vodka at a bar at 11 p.m., right? Yeah, which you won't see me for three weeks if I even stay out of jail. Right, yeah. You know, because that's what does to me.

That's a good fib right there that you're, hey, man, look, I'm a recovering alcoholic. I'm prone to blackout. It's like it's violent. You know, it's going to be a huge problem. It's going to draw a lot of undue attention to me because I'm going to start acting up. Do you do that deliberately as opposed to, say, making a moral judgment and saying, well, I don't drink and I don't do drugs, but you guys go have fun, you scumbags like that? Obviously, you would never say that, but it seems like you're avoiding, probably deliberately, avoiding driving a wedge between you and the target by making it about you and not about them or their behavior. Always. Always. That's why I never carried a weapon as well. Because if you carry a weapon into a meeting, the first thing they're going to do is carry a weapon as well, because they have to match you. So you don't want to look like aggressive. You don't want to be somebody who's going to contest them.

There's no reason for that. I'm here to do a job. Let's do this business and we'll both make money. And that's what I like is making money. How do you avoid letting your undercover life subsume your real life? Or just does that happen sometimes? Well, I was a little bit different than most undercover guys at the FBI. I mean, there's groups of individuals who do undercover work.

And it's not a very big group. At any given time, there might be 20 agents in the FBI who are actually working long-term undercover cases. It's not a very common thing, okay? And what I mean by that is a lot of people do one case, but that's it. And they don't do anymore. But there's only maybe 20 who are always working cases undercover all over the country. So under the rules when I was there, an undercover agent could only basically be doing one case at a time. But because I was the only art guy, I'd be involved in maybe half a dozen at a time at different places, like in, you know, maybe Peru and France and the United States, Atlanta, and L.A. and Philly. So I was always trying to

keep things straight on who I was talking to, what role I was playing. And sometimes it does get a little bit rough because you'd be sitting there at dinner and you get a phone call or you're having a hot dog with your neighbors and you get a call from Miami from a dealer down there who's who you've been working for six months and, you know, you have to go into that role right away. You know, you just keep it separate because your work is your family and that's two different things. So you could be sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with your family and joking about kids and homework and wrestling with your son or something like that. And then you get a phone call and you've got to be scumbag Johnny who doesn't give a crap about anything but money and is down to steal

something that doesn't infense it. That's got to be kind of a tough switch. Do you do anything mentally to do that or is it just like take a deep breath, pick up the phone and there you are? That's what it is. You take a deep breath and you pick up the phone, and there you are. Yeah. You just remember, you stop for a second and remember what the case is, which case is going to be. If it's the one from Miami, you recognize the phone number and say, oh, yeah, that's what I'm going to be this. And basically, you just adapt to it for each thing. So all the times, I let it go in the voicemail and then call back. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Because it's easier to record that way. Oh, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I was thinking more like, oh, man, you're playing a Nintendo with your kids, and it's like you got to pick up and say, hey, okay, so hold on. an eight-year-old kid, I got to be a criminal for 15 minutes and don't say anything like that could personally identify us. I don't know. It just seems really hard to balance those things. Yeah. You learn to do it over time. And if you don't, you shouldn't do it. You should get out. Yeah, it seems like a good time to get out if you can't balance those things. I know one of your rules is never fake expertise you don't have. We kind of touched on that earlier. That seems wise. But you also mentioned, there's a lot of little undercover stories in the book that I think are

are pretty fascinating. If something makes you nervous, like getting in a target's car, don't do it, just make an excuse. It seems like that's a great tit, but also probably really hard to do in the moment, especially if you can kind of almost just taste the deal is right in front of you, right? It's just like you're ready to close it, but something just doesn't sit quite right. Do you trust your intuition over everything? Oh, absolutely. I mean, whatever your intuition is telling you, you know, fear is invaluable. It tells you when something, wrong. And, you know, if you're in fear, that means that you need to rethink whatever it is you're doing. And nothing you're doing is worth your life or anybody's life for that matter.

It's a situation where you have to judge, you know, the value. And the value of life is always more than any object. So if there's a fear situation, then you want to back out. In fact, towards the end of my career, in 2007, I was in Warsaw, Poland, and we were recovering these stolen African masks that were taken from the National Museum in Zimbabwe. They were taken from the museum there, and they ended up in Poland. They were being offered for sale to a dealer in Denver, Colorado, who contacted us, who then we started the undercover operation. So I was going to go meet the criminals.

I was at one hotel. I was a taxi cab going to the other hotel. To meet with the bad guys, the Polish National Police were going to be there, their SWAT team and all that. And I was in the back of the cab driving over around midnight going to the, I think it was the Sheraton Hotel. And I didn't feel any fear. I didn't feel any kind of apprehension.

Nothing like that, no adrenaline. And at that moment, I realized that, you know what, it's time to quit. Because when you don't have any of that, you're not on your toes anymore. You know, you're not really into it anymore. And that was the night I decided that I wasn't going to do any more undercover operations. And in fact, I didn't after that, after December of 2007. And that's the reason. I had lost the edge, which is the fear.

It worked out fine. We went and got the material. The Polish team came in. They caught the bad guys. They spirited me away very quickly. I was out of the country next morning, and, you know, it was all done. But that's when I realized that, at least the loss of that fear is really a big deal. That's when you need to start rethinking what you're doing.

This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Bob Whitman. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you've just heard so you can check out our amazing sponsors for yourself, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. don't forget, we've got worksheets for today's episode as well. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

Now for the conclusion of our episode with Bob Whitman. It's interesting that you look at fear as an asset, as a tool, as opposed to something that you need to inoculate yourself against. Right. Well, maybe it's not fear. Maybe it's that intuition of apprehension. I guess I call it fear, but that's what gives you that edge, that you notice everything, that you see everything much more clearly.

When you don't have that, you know, you can be surprised. And that's a bad thing to be undercover. Yeah, it sounds like something you would definitely seek to avoid. Like, that little bit of adrenaline seems like it would be a win. And you mentioned something that I thought was actually quite genius in the book. And I'm not sure if I'm reading into this too much, but you call this the decoy, where you find a bond with the target that doesn't have anything to do with the case at hand. And at first I thought, oh, okay, you're just building rapport.

But actually, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed. like, it gives you an outlet for any nervousness or any fear that you have, right? If you can sit there and ramble on about golf because you know your target loves golf, then you talking quickly, nervously, excitedly, it's not weird. You're talking about a hobby that you both share. If you don't have that, and then you start rambling and talking about things, it might seem a little off, right? That fear could come through. Right. The idea of finding the decoy is to, first of all, create that rapport, as you said, ingratiate yourself to the person. And then secondly, when you're involved in a long-term undercover. You don't talk business 24-7. Sometimes you call the

target up or the suspect up and you talk about other things. And you might even do a legitimate deal with them. You might even buy something from them legitimately, you know, that's not fake, that's not stolen to show that you're a regular person, that you're actually involved in this type of business. So the point there is that you've created this called befriending, you know, before you betray. It's a part of the entire operation. And that's where sometimes it makes a difficult at the end. When you do have to betray that person, again, because you are a loyal type of human being to begin with. That's why you're in law enforcement.

You have a band of brothers type of feeling. You have fidelity, bravery, integrity, loyalty to the cause, to the Constitution. And you feel loyalty to the public. You know, you're doing it to serve the public. When you do have to betray someone, it goes against the grain. It really does. It's not a normal thing. That befriending, that discovery of the decays.

court. It makes it harder at the end. You know, as I said in the book, not everyone is evil because they do a criminal act. I mean, it doesn't mean that their entire persona and human psychology is evil. It just means they did something stupid or they're involved in some kind of stupid scheme, but they could be great parents. Do you know what I mean? Or they could be a great children to two parents. They care about their mother and fathers deeply hurt, whatever the situation is. So you have to identify that good part in order to make them into people so that you can understand them and then know how to manipulate them, befriend them, then betray them. And all that's part of undercover work. Yeah, that's got to be tricky because on the one hand, it's like, all right,

I've got to befriend them, I've got to see the good in them, I've got to look at how great of a father this guy is. And then I have to turn around and throw the book at this guy for this scheme that he's involved in. Is that stressful? Does it weigh on your conscience a little? Like, Sometimes these guys are killers and they'll go after somebody's family and they're just terrible people and putting them away is probably really satisfying. But other times, you've got to be a little conflicted, right? Oh, you always. I mean, you know, as a criminal investigator, I always tried to understand the other side. In other words, why were they involved in this? What was the point and what was the background that brought them to it? That helps you understand where they're coming from. So it was always part of it, sure. And any situation when you're a criminal investigator, there comes a point where people are, they're convicted. if whatever the situation is, if you did your job, they're going to have a family. I don't care if they're armed robbery suspects. I don't care if they, you know, even if you said murderers, there's people left behind who are

devastated. I mean, there's a family there. So there's a wife, there's a children, there's parents that are devastated. Like you said earlier, you are destroying a family to a certain degree every time you get involved in one of these cases. And you have to understand that, take that as part of the job. And that's what you're doing. But it doesn't mean you don't feel bad about it.

It's anyone who doesn't. Either they're lying or their sociopaths, you know. One bust, this guy, was his name Joshua Bearer, am I imagining that? Yeah, Joshua was his name, yeah. And he wrote you like a friendly letter after the bust. So that had to be a little weird, and that really, for me, illustrated this kind of tension, this kind of dichotomy between undercover officer and Target pretty well. Yeah, we had worked on that case for about six months.

And, you know, I had been to dinner at his house. I knew his family. He and I had become friends. that's the only way we could do the business. Ultimately, he was arrested, he was caught. Yeah, he wrote me a note. He said that he was devastated by the fact that, you know, that I was an undercover agent and that that's a situation.

And he said that, you know, he recognized that he had done the wrong thing. And that, you know, he hoped that someday it would be a different situation. It happens, you know. And when those things happen, you just have to look at the fact that he's not an evil person. He just made some mistakes. And so as a result, he's going to have to pay for his mistakes and then walk away a better person. In the book, you're talking about sometimes not wanting the role to end, the undercover role, and you feel deflated when the operation is over. What's going on there? That's not something I expected to see or hear.

I wasn't quite like that. What I was saying was when you have an undercover operation going, it's like having a tiger by the tail. It's going to tear you around and take you all over places and you're going to be following it. It's something that you put your heart and mind and soul into. As I say, it's like a chess game. You have to be two steps ahead all the time. And when the case is over, when it's solved, when you've caught the individual, when you've got the art material back, whatever it happens to be, when it's all done, there's a deflation, you know,

because you've got to start all over again on the next case. And so you've got to go right from the beginning, all the way starting over again, getting back into it. And as I say, when you're doing these cases, for a while, they take over your life. You think about it all day. You think about it before you're going to sleep. What are you going to do next?

how this is going to work, what you're going to say, what they're going to say to you, how you're going to respond. And then that's all gone, like in a heartbeat as soon as it's open. And then you have to start over again. And then, you know, whatever you finish one project and get into the next one, there's a moment where there's a relation because it's over, but then there's that deflation because now you've got to move into the next one. But I have to tell you, the next case is always the most interesting. One of the questions people always ask me is, what's your most interesting case? And my response is always, it's the next one. Because I know what happens. in the last one. The next one's most interesting.

There are moments where you discuss bringing in the SWAT team, right? Like you're made the buy, they just brought up the art, you just handed over the money, and you've got these little code. Sometimes it's a gesture. Your favorite was, or at least from the book, it sounded like your favorite was, are you guys hungry? Do you just nonchalantly say, hey, are you guys hungry? And then a SWAT team bursts in the door, because I'm imagining that must be so satisfying. Now, yeah, the actual term that I use most often because there would be a microphone, you know, recording us would be, this is a done deal. I would look at everything.

I'd say the painting is correct, everything that looks good, or sculptures are good, and I would say, this is a done deal. And done deal meant that was the code term for the SWAT team to come in, because by then it was a done deal. I had all the evidence that's good again. We had all the conversation we were going to make, and it was ready to be closed out at that point they would come in. Do you feel like you appreciate the art more when it's back in the place where it's supposed to be? Because you're handling this. No one gets to do that, right? Like someone hands you a Picasso. It would be, as an art lover, I would imagine, you know, I'm not into art, but I would imagine that that's pretty sweet. You're holding on to this amazing piece of art. You never get to just touch it and grab it and put it in a bag.

Or is it more satisfying to you to see it on the wall in a museum? For me, seeing the art on the wall in the museum is great. You're right. I do like to hold. When we recovered it, I liked to sit and look at it, hold it up, take a picture of it, because it was gratifying to finally recover the piece. And I enjoyed looking at the art close up that way, from front and back all around to see how it was constructed. So it was more fun for me. It's more fun for me to actually have the piece.

It's almost like if you're an animal lover, you know, seeing animals in the zoo, it can be a little heartbreaking. But if you got to go on a safari, you know, that's kind of like what you're doing, or you're going to a place where you can touch the animals and pet them and they're not miserable, right? They're not in a cage. That's kind of like what you're doing with the art, right? You get to hold it, you get to look at it because you run your fingers across the frame and you get to see, like you said, look at the back of it and how it's constructed. Like, that just seems infinitely more satisfying.

Yeah, it's a good feeling to be able to. It's a eureka moment when you get the art back. Did you ever have any close calls? I know the, I'm trying to lead you to this story where was it you that used all these photos from like the FBI stolen art website or something like that? Yeah, we had a case in Madrid, Spain, where about $65 million worth of stolen art was being offered for sale. It was 17 paintings that were taken from the same collection. And I'd been missing for about a year, a year and a half. So we had an informant that told us some information about where it could be.

And we went over to Madrid and started meeting with the bad guys who had stolen the art. What I had done was I had downloaded the photographs from the FBI Stolen Art site on the Internet. And I had cut off all the identifiers. It was just the pictures. So I'm showing them to see which paintings he still had for me to buy. He was going to sell me 10 of them for, I think, $11 million. So we're sitting in a hotel in Madrid, around 3 o'clock in the morning in the lobby of the hotel on a couch. And I pulled out the folder and I started pulling the paintings out.

And he's pointing, he has this one. He still has this one. He still has that one. He looks at him and says, they're from the FBI art website. And I said, oh, oh. You know, just for a second, I clenched up. And I said, yeah, yeah, it's the Internet. best place to get to pictures. It's free. And he says, oh, yeah, good pictures. And then we kept going.

But he actually recognized those photographs, the construction of the photographs, as from the FBI website. And so it just shows that he was watching all over the world. He's like, here's a guy in Spain looking at the Washington website to see where his stuff's showing up. How did that happen? I mean, that seems a little lazy, Bob, that you just happen to use like, yeah, I'll just get him off the FBI website. You know, like, were you the one that put that together? Unfortunately, yes. I downloaded them and printed them out and, you know, cut them up so they looked like they were just photographs. But he recognized the formats as being from the website.

So he must have been looking at that website a lot. Yeah. Because for him to actually recognize, I mean, there were just pictures of pictures. Yeah. But for him to know that, that was pretty interesting. Yeah, I would imagine you clenched up for sure. It kind of goes to what you said before with art may be priceless, but it's not worth your life. I would imagine there's a few times where you think, you know what,

If this is going south, I'm sorry missing headdress or sorry missing war bonnet or sorry missing painting. This is not going to happen today. You know, you make an excuse and you walk out. If the piece of scenario in a room, you call them the backup teams, whatever they are, SWAT or whoever, and they'll come in to do what they have to do. I never really reached a position where, you know, I had to walk away like that. I guess I could talk myself out of most things.

I thought my best weapon was always your brain, you know, and your ability to talk yourself out of it, not a gun or a knife, anything like that. The fewer are those to better. Yeah, no kidding. It seems like as art becomes more valuable and the money goes up, you're going to attract more experienced and possibly more dangerous thieves as a result. Is that the case? Well, thieves are thieves. I mean, you know, like I said, it's not that hard to go into a museum and steal a painting. If you're willing to go in and take the chance and break the door down and run in and run out, you can do it, especially in Europe because the guards don't have, weapons usually, that's usually where it happens is in Europe. It doesn't happen that much in the United

States. In fact, very seldom do we have any kind of museum heist. The reason for that is because security is very good in the U.S. The buildings are newer. There's all kind of, you know, IT security. We have armed guards. The police departments are nearby. And, you know, basically you can't go from one state to the other without a police department following you. I mean, in Europe, you can. So it's a different situation between the United States and Europe. So we don't have that much. happening here when it comes to armed robbery of paintings and sculptures and art. Well, we have more here as fraud. It's people buying fakes. So it's a different type of crime here. Do you think it's easier to rob a museum than it is to rob a bank?

No, I think bank robbery is probably easier. Really? Yeah, because you walk into a bank and you stick up the teller, and the teller gives you some money or whatever in a bag and you run out. It's pretty quick. That's why there's a lot more bank robberies than there are museum robberies. But I think that's a teller, and the teller gives you some money or something. I think a museum, you have to kind of plan that out. Are you going to go in when it's open? You're going to go in when it's closed. How are you going to get in when it's closed?

How are you going to defeat the surveillance? So I think it's easier to rob a bank. Do the criminals you work with ever suspect that you're a cop and just kind of do the deal anyway? Every time we would do a undercover operation, the first thing they would always say to me is I knew it. I knew you're an FBI agent after it was over. That's the first thing they would say to me. And I'd always look at them and say, well, if you do it, why'd you do it? Why'd you do deal with me if you do?

They didn't know, but they always would say that to try to save face to a certain degree. I can't tell you how many times I smiled and laughed at that when they said, I knew it. I read that you always call your wife before undercover busts. Why do that? What does that do for you? So one of the things I would do before an undercover operation, before I walked in, I'd be involved in the operation, and we'd be to do 10 meetings, 20 meetings, whatever, but each meeting was separate.

And what I would do before I walked into that new meeting was I would call home, wherever I was, if I was in Madrid or if I was in Poland or whatever I'd be, I'd call home and just talk to my wife for a minute. And what that would do is two things. I could tell her that I loved her. And I could tell her that I was getting ready to go in and that I would call her when I got back out. And thirdly, the idea was that it would ground me. She would tell me something the kids were doing. Maybe it was a bad day at school or whatever it would be. It made me feel, you know, less apprehensive, maybe remember what's important and basically, you know, calm me down. It worked for me. me. It might not work for all the guys. Everybody was doing stuff. I don't know, but it worked for me.

Have you ever heard of an art forduring in Ken Perreni, by the way? He was on the show. Ken Peretti? Yeah, sure. He was from Florida. I thought of him when you wrote that you inspected the paintings using UV because the UV coating on an old painting is there and it's pretty uniform because of the age. And I remember Ken Perreni finding out about that, taking old worthless paintings, dissolving the varnish with a solvent, and then putting in it a jar and painting it onto his forged paintings so that when somebody, like yourself, for example, would inspect it, it would look old. Right, right.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting what foragers. That's a whole different situation from thieves. That's two different things. Foragers could be very, very technically correct to try to defeat forensic investigation. I always thought, you know, these guys did these fabulous forgeries. If they would just put their mind to do an art, they'd probably be due pretty well. They could do real art themselves and do pretty well. Because in order to do a forgery, you have to be a fairly good painter.

You have to have some knowledge of how to paint. And the fact that they would go to such great lengths to defeat forensic investigation of UV light or whatever it would be or to go out and find ancient canvases or go out and find paints that existed at the time the real paintings were made, all that work they would go through. if they just did a real painting, they'd be all right. Yeah, be very valuable, you know. With Ken, that's episode 282. He wanted to just paint, you know?

And then he realized, wow, this is really hard for me to make money. And through various shady dealings and probably kind of a troubled childhood, he found that he could pay the rent by making some forgeries here and there. And then it just became the thing that he was getting paid to do all the time. And that forging almost became his art, right? because he is a super talented and skilled painter. He really can make some, now he makes paintings for people that request them,

and he doesn't bother with fake UV coding and stuff like that, of course. But it's brilliant. It looks amazing. It looks just like any sort of world-renowned artist would paint, even from the old time in the styles that he can mimic, and he can create new originals. And he mentioned that the art he's creating now

from these masters who are long since deceased, he says he'd like to think that that's what they'd be doing now if they had lived longer and their art had sort of evolved and used modern tools. And I don't know how much of that is sort of like fluff and how much of that is really the case. Because honestly, I think if he had had it his way, and I asked him about this, if he had had it his way, he would never have had to forge stuff. He would have just sold his own art and been appreciated it for the skill that he had. Yeah, I think that's true.

I think that master foragers, you know, you have to understand throughout history, students have copied masters. I mean, that's what they do. It's how you learn. There's paintings in a louvre of artists with their easels painting paintings. In other words, you'll see the original painting on the wall, and you'll see an artist sitting there actually reproducing the painting that's on the wall. And there's paintings of them doing that.

And that's how artists learn to paint. They look at a master, and they see the technique and the brushstroke and what's used, and that's how they learn to paint. But you know something, Jordan, and this is something I always thought, the real art of an artist, it's not the image. it's him being able to paint what he sees, the way he sees it. So that's Impressionism. That's Picasso and all his different periods.

And that evolution, all right, throughout an artist's life, they start with one thing, and they move forward and forward and forward. In Dali, for example, was a fantastic painter. He could paint, and then he moved on to surrealism and started creating surrealism. And the surrealism wasn't as painterly as his original work. but it was a different kind of work. He moved on in his art. Picasso grew.

He went through all different stages of his life. And each stage was a masterwork of life, each stage of painting. So the real artists, they grow, they create, they do different things throughout their lives. People who do forgeries, they're good at one thing. This is what they do.

And they don't come up with anything creative. There's no creation of new work. Do you understand what I'm saying? The difference between creating new work that takes you to the next level versus constantly just repeating the same thing over and over and over for whatever reason, because you can sell it or not.

To give you an example, I mean, I love Renoir. I really do. I love Renoir's works. But if you look at one Renoir, you've seen a lot of them. You know, one girl's the same as the next girl, the same as the next girl. I mean, they're just repeated over and over. There's no evolution beyond a certain point.

Whereas I had to say with Picasso, who again was a very master painter in the beginning, He evolved to the things which you don't even recognize, cubism and all that. It's a different type of creativity. That creativity is what makes great art. In movies, in TV shows, when we see undercover busts and things like that, they're often in a fancy hotel room or they're on some kind of yacht. Bus this myth, if it is a myth, how often are you, as the FBI,

renting a yacht and staffing it with all of your people and then taking down some kind of drug dealer or art thief in that situation? or is it usually just like meet at the holiday and express and kick the door in? How often are we talking about that the tax dollars go into the yacht rental place? I guess is what I'm asking you. Well, the yacht rentals would be rented. It's usually a seized yacht from drug dealers. So the government owns the yacht.

That makes me feel better. Yes, there's no rental there. I did both. We used both, depending on what was appropriate for the specific situation. You know, we used hotel rooms. We used yachts. We used whatever was appropriate to make the deal happen. So, but usually we try to pay government rate for the hotel rooms.

Yeah, it might be a little bit of a red flag if they're like, yes, sir, this is the one that had the FBI discount, Room 17. Let's go. Yeah, let's get out of here. It could be a problem. Yeah, it could be. Oh, man. Bob, thank you so much for your time. This has really, really been interesting.

It's been great talking to you. I hope your listeners enjoy it. Now, we just hit 400 episodes here, and people always ask me, what are your favorite episodes? What are your favorite episodes? It's always hard to pick a favorite. But here, I'm going to run a trailer for you with Howie Mandel, one of the most iconic comedians of our day, and a judge on America's Got Talent.

Howie spent some time with us being especially candid about his anxiety and about how he turned being impulsive into a superpower and more. So what happened was we were doing, not unlike we're doing now, we were doing an interview, and he says, thank you. And we'll probably go to a commercial and thank you, Howie. and I got up. And I started walking to the door, and I thought he was, like, wrapping it up

and going to commercial. And then I just said to somebody really quietly, can you back? Can you back the door? And he's going, what are you? Afraid of the door? And then he goes, just open the door. And I got, can't open the door.

He goes, just open the door. And then what happened is I started getting a panic attack, and I started breathing heavy, and I just turned to him, and thinking that he had already thrown the commercial because he was just talking to me, Howard, please, this is really serious. I go to therapy for this.

I have something called obsessive compulsive disorder. I'm about to pass out. If you don't open the door for me now, you'll be calling 911 and taking you to the hospital. This whole thing was on the national radio. I thought, oh, my God, that was probably the darkest space I've ever been, and I'm walking through the lobby toward the door out into the steaming streets of Manhattan. I might as well just continue walking and walk right into traffic.

And I stopped just outside the door. You know, millions of people are on the street, but I felt very alone. and some guy came into my periphery and said to me, are you, Howie Mandel? And I just nodded affirmatively. And he said, just heard you on stern. And my heart dropped him in my stomach. And right before I could take off in the traffic, he said two words, which means something very different today.

But they changed my life. And he went, me too. For more with Howie Mandel, including some pretty awkward moments of my own making, check out episode 210 here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Big thank you to Buzz. Whitman, you know, art thieves, they steal culture and history. Shout out to our Roger Atwood episode about art thieves, just ruining archaeological sites, ruining the natural context, ruining the ability of other people like us to see and enjoy this art when it's sitting in some thieves

garage or some rich guy's basement. The U.S. government won't pay for stolen art to get it back. You have to actually find a museum to buy it. It kind of goes along with our policy not to negotiate with terrorists. You can't just buy the art back. Otherwise, it'd be a great business to just steal art because you know you've got a buyer in the U.S. governments. You actually have to find a museum to buy it or to pretend buy it and then bust the thieves that stole to the seller. I found it interesting that Bob couldn't use that many dealers or gallery owners as informants because the art world is actually too corrupt. It's riddled with crooks and they can easily talk and it's a very small industry. So he really had his work cut out for him because it wasn't

like this big industry where you find a couple people you can count on or a bunch of people you can't see him again. It's a small world with a bunch of people that can't be trusted. And I thought that was kind of an interesting point that we didn't really get to discuss during the show. Most museum theft, by the way, is actually an inside job by employees. There's not a whole lot of people kicking in the door and going and grabbing stuff. Almost all of it has to do with somebody that works at the museum, turns off the alarm, leaves a back door open, unlocks a case, and goes home for the day, that kind of thing. And art recovery, the reason the FBI does it, even though there's only like one agent and now zero that we're doing it, it makes the FBI look good.

And that was especially important after the Waco Branch Davidian debacle where the FBI essentially burned down a cult compound with a bunch of people eating breakfast in it that was loaded up with a bunch of folks. It was one of the worst bongles in FBI history. So they figured having an art crime division where they recovered stolen works was just always good news and good press. And now apparently they're not too worried about that these days. I don't know. Bob Whitman retired and that was it. Big thank you to Bob Whitman. The book title is priceless. Links to that will be in the show notes. And if you buy any book from any of our guests, please use the website links. It does help support the show. And yes, they work in other countries too. Worksheets for the

episode in the show notes. Transcripts for the episode in the show notes. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter, Instagram. You can hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships similar to what Bob Whitman had to do as an undercover, only you probably won't get shot at or find any stolen art. But anyway, that's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. It's a free course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests on the show, subscribe to the course and the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with podcast one and my amazing team, including Jen Harbinger, Jay Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show, this free show, is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in undercover work, art, art theft, heists, then share this episode with them. Hopefully you find something great in every episode. So please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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