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Art Crime Team

The FBI established a rapid deployment Art Crime Team in 2004. The team is composed of twelve Special Agents, each responsible for addressing art and cultural property crime cases in an assigned geographic region. The Art Crime Team is coordinated through the FBI’s Art Theft Program, located at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Art Crime Team agents receive specialized training in art and cultural property investigations and assist in art related investigations worldwide in cooperation with foreign law enforcement officials and FBI Legal Attaché offices. The U.S. Department of Justice has assigned three Special Trial Attorneys to the Art Crime Team for prosecutive support.

Since its inception, the Art Crime Team has recovered over 850 items of cultural property with a value exceeding $65 million. These include:

• Approximately 700 pre-Colombian artifacts. The objects recovered in Miami were the result of a sting operation in coordination with the Ecuadorian authorities.
• Three paintings by the German painter Heinrich Buerkel (1802-1869), stolen at the conclusion of World War II and consigned for sale at an auction house near Philadelphia in 2005.
• Rembrandt’s Self Portrait (1630) in a sting operation in Copenhagen carried out in cooperation with ICE and law enforcement agencies in Sweden and Denmark. The FBI had previously recovered Renoir’s The Young Parisian. Both paintings had been stolen from the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm in 2000.
• Approximately 100 paintings that had been stolen from a Florida family’s art collection in a fine art storage facility. This collection included works by Picasso, Rothko, Matisse, and others that were recovered from Chicago, New York, and Tokyo.
• An extremely rare, experimental Springfield “Trapdoor” rifle to the Armory Museum in Springfield, Massachusetts. It had been stolen from the Armory Museum in the 1970s.
• Native American ceremonial material and eagle feathers belonging to the Taos Pueblo. The items included a war bonnet and a “Butterfly Bustle”. With the assistance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the items were returned to the Taos Pueblo.
• Four rare books stolen from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Among the items recovered were rare pencil sketches by John James Audubon and a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species.
• Eight cylinder seals taken from archaeological sites in Iraq.

http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/artcrimeteam.htm