[MSN] {Spam?} Reward beats risk for art thieves. Steven Spielberg led the FBI straight to a stolen $700, 000 Norman Rockwell painting someone snatched from a Missouri gallery. It was in his collection in California.

[MSN]

Reward beats risk for art thieves

   
By Brad Lendon
CNN

(CNN) -- Steven Spielberg led the FBI straight to a stolen $700,000 Norman
Rockwell painting someone snatched from a Missouri gallery. It was in his
collection in California.

Spielberg wasn't the thief, and he doesn't know who took Rockwell's "Russian
Schoolroom" -- an oil of 16 pupils looking at a bust of Lenin. All the
A-list director knows is he paid about $200,000 for the 16 x 37 canvas in a
legitimate purchase.

The FBI says its just one example of how pilfered art lands in respectable
places. And it was an uncommon ending for stolen art -- someone found it.
Recovering masterpieces happens in less than 5 percent of cases, said Bonnie
Magness-Gardiner, the FBI's Art Theft Program manager.

Usually, expensive pieces go missing. No one knows who took them. No one
gets prosecuted, and everyone wonders, "Why steal something you can't turn
to cash quickly?"

Art thieves do a simple risk versus reward evaluation, said Corine Wegener,
associate curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Thieves know that "even if they receive only a fraction of the work's market
value, the cash gained was at low risk of death or injury -- museums can be
a relatively soft target," said Wegener, who's teaching a University of
Minnesota class this month on art theft.

But it could be years -- or never -- before the thief sees even a small
payoff. In 1990, robbers took $300 million worth of certified masterpieces
-- among them Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" and Vermeer's "The
Concert" -- from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston,
Massachusetts. No one's seen them since.

On Sunday, robbers made off with one of the biggest art hauls in European
history, grabbing four paintings worth an estimated $163 million from the
E.G. Buehrle Collection in Zurich, Switzerland. They took works by Paul
Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh. PhotoSee what
robbers grabbed in Switzerland >

"These paintings are extremely valuable on the open market, but they'll
never go onto the open market. So at the same time they're both priceless
and worthless," said Charles Hill, the former chief of Scotland Yard's art
and antiques unit.

"Some thieves may buy into the myth that a wealthy but unscrupulous
collector will contact them and offer to take the art off their hands,"
Wegener said. "When this doesn't happen, the thieves often try to ransom the
art back to the museum or the insurance company."

One London art dealer, who said he has handled stolen works, told CNN on
condition of anonymity that an insurance company would rather get art back
at a fraction of its original price than pay the owner its insured value.
VideoWatch how art thieves operate >

Ransoming art to an insurance company through an intermediary adds "up to 10
percent of the market value, which ... given the art market, is quite a lot
of money," the dealer said.

David Vuillaume, secretary general of the Swiss Museums Association, told
Time magazine that ransom may be what the thieves behind the Swiss heist
want.

"We are thinking that maybe in a week or two there will be a ransom demand.
But we just have to wait and see," Time quoted him as saying. The museum has
offered $90,000 reward for information leading to their recovery, Time
reported.

Options for art thieves

Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register, which operates a
database to help recover lost and stolen art, said ransom or reward are
unlikely to bring results.

"It is very seldom that people have been able to undertake a ransom," he
said. "This gang might think that a reward has been offered, and that
they'll get the reward."

But in fact, "the reward won't be paid unless someone is arrested, or there
is proper criminal intelligence," and that's unlikely to happen, Radcliffe
said.

He said the thieves may just be patient, willing to get their payoff decades
later. Or the art may move through an underground network, gradually
increasing in value, before being slipped back onto the legitimate market.
Take Spielberg. He bought "Schoolroom" in an above-the-board transaction.

"Usually, these pictures will change hands in the criminal underworld at a
fraction -- 1 percent or less -- of their true market value," Radcliffe
said, before someone tries to get them back into the international market.
In such an effort, the seller may hope the work has been forgotten over time
or they may disguise it as a copy or student re-creation.

"They may try and sell them not as being by Degas, but as being a copy, or
school, or by a follower of one of the great artists. And that is the ways
in which they try and get them on the market," Radcliffe said.

The original thieves rarely face justice, the FBI's Magness-Gardiner said.
"The stolen items turn up years, sometimes decades, after the theft," she
said. "Because a work of art does not require a title document in order to
be transferred from one owner to another, a stolen object easily enters the
legitimate stream of commerce.

"It is impossible to trace them back to the original thief in most cases.
Even if the original thief can be identified, there is also a statute of
limitations on prosecution for theft," Magness-Gardiner said.

What happens to stolen art?

Even if the art is recovered, original owners may not get it back. While
museum pieces are likely to go back to their collections, private owners may
not be so lucky.

"Russian Schoolroom" remains in Spielberg's possession while courts
determine the rightful owner, a spokesman for the director said.

But art stolen from a Los Angeles mansion and sold in Sweden remains with
its Swedish purchasers, according to a case file posted on the Web site of
the Los Angeles Police Department's Art Theft Detail.

Even though the thief was caught, "the Swedish government refused to return
the paintings, claiming that according to Swedish law, the auction buyers
had purchased the paintings in good faith," according to the Web site.

In the case of Rockwell's "Russian Schoolroom," someone took it from a
gallery in Clayton, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb, in 1973, according to an
FBI synopsis of the case. In 2004, The FBI's Art Crime Team found out that
the piece had been for sale at a New York Rockwell exhibition 15 years
earlier and posted a picture and description of the painting on its art
recovery Web site.

Spielberg's staff learned of the search and told the FBI that Spielberg had
it in his collection in Los Angeles. He had purchased it from a legitimate
dealer in 1989, an FBI press release said. The agency also determined the
painting was auctioned in New Orleans in 1988, but it has yet to determine
who took the painting or its whereabouts from 1973 to 1988.

Whoever took "Russian Schoolroom" from the suburban St. Louis gallery in
1973, or the masterpieces from the Boston museum 1980, or the works lifted
in Zurich this week, shouldn't be mistaken for a high-society,
tuxedo-wearing, "Thomas Crown Affair" kind of thief, Radcliffe said.

"These people are the worst sort of criminal. They are just like the
criminals who traffic individuals or sell children, or murder.

"They are thoroughly unpleasant people. There is no romanticism in anyway
that should be connected to it."

CNN's Paula Hancocks and Teresa Martini contributed to this report.

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