Priceless : : how I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / True Crime / Wittman, Robert K	4-week checkout	Due 05-20-2024

Alla prima. South Beach -- Crimes against history -- Provenance. Making of an agent -- Mask of the man with the broken nose -- The accident -- Learning to see -- A new life -- Body of work. The gold man -- History out the back door -- A blood cloth -- Befriend and betray -- The con artist -- A hot hand -- The property of a lady -- National treasure -- Art crime team team -- The old master -- Operation masterpiece. Mrs. Gardner -- Cold case -- A French connection -- Laurenz and Sunny -- Allies and enemies --- A coward has no scar -- Suspicious minds -- End game.
Robert K. Wittman, the founder of the FBI's Art Crime Team, pulls back the curtain on his remarkable career, offering a real-life international thriller. The son of an antique dealer, Wittman built a twenty-year career going undercover, usually unarmed, to catch art thieves, scammers, and black market traders in Paris and Philadelphia, Rio and Santa Fe, Miami and Madrid. Wittman tells the stories behind his recoveries of priceless art and antiquities: the golden armor of an ancient Peruvian warrior king; the Rodin sculpture that inspired the Impressionist movement; the rare Civil War battle flag carried into battle by one of the nation's first African-American regiments. The art thieves and scammers he caught run the gamut from rich to poor, smart to foolish, organized criminals to desperate loners. Wittman has saved hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art and antiquities, but he considers them all equally priceless.--From publisher description.

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Kept Me Reading submitted by subeth on July 20, 2011, 8:51pm I wanted to know what happened in the author's quest to recover the art stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He hints at it early on and then tells a lot of other stories- some interesting, some less so - before getting back to the Gardner thefts. The stories could have been told with more finesse, but I was very much interested in the subject and I did enjoy my time spent with it over all.