4. Odessa Museum of Western and Eastern Art – Odessa, Ukraine
July 31
A Caravaggio was stolen in the night. Or was it? The thieves, almost certainly members of an organized crime syndicate, out-smarted an antiquated alarm system at the Odessa museum by removing a pane of glass from the window instead of breaking it. Once inside, they sliced the canvas off of its stretcher and disappeared into the night without tripping a single alarm. An original Caravaggio can fetch upwards of $50 million at auction, but as it turns out, the stolen “Caravaggio” was a fake. To be precise, the Odessa Taking of Christ is a contemporary copy of Caravaggio’s original in the National Gallery of Ireland. The Odessa copy was proclaimed an original in the 1950s by biased Soviet authorities, but a 1993 article in the well-respected but little-read academic journal The Burlington Magazine proved what anyone who is familiar with Caravaggio’s work could see from looking at the painting — that it is a decent contemporary copy but nothing more, one which might bring in six figures at auction. Of course six figures is nothing to sneeze at, but it is highly unlikely that the thieves knew they were stealing a copy worth less than 10 percent of the value of the original. So is the last laugh on them? Are the Mafia undone by their own lack of research? Unfortunately, no. The thieves are not the only ones who may have missed the Burlington Magazine article. Most people think that the Odessa painting is an original — especially if they believe the newspaper articles, which generally reported that the stolen work is an original Caravaggio worth $100 million. The thieves will present these newspaper clippings to other criminals as “proof” that their stolen Caravaggio is real and thereby claim the full value. Under-researched journalists, it seems, can be an art thief’s best friend.

5. The British Library and the Bodleian Library – London, England
Arrest on November 20
Businessman, intellectual, and rare books expert Farhad Hakimzadeh was arrested on November 20 for having stolen at least 150 rare maps and manuscripts from the British and Bodleian Libraries. A true emblem of high society, Hakimzadeh stole artifacts and pages worth at least $100,000 in total and yet, for all his thieving prowess, did not attempt to sell a single item. Already a millionaire, he was quite content to admire his treasures at home, stealing only for his personal enjoyment. His method is all too familiar to the few scholars and police who recognize the plague of archive theft. He used a scalpel to slice out pages from rare books that he claimed to be studying as a scholar in the victimized libraries. Using similar methods, thousands of objects worth tens of millions of dollars are stolen from archives each year in the United States alone. Rare book archives and libraries are dismayingly under-protected, and archive theft is perhaps the simplest of art crimes — and the one that is easiest to profit from. Hakimzadeh, meanwhile, is a perfect exception to the rule stated zealously by many art police — that in real life, there are no Thomas Crowns or Doctor Nos. Authorities try to extinguish the fictional concept of art crime, because it distracts from the true severity of the act and stands in the way of their investigations, but every now and then, a Thomas Crown creeps out of the celluloid and into real life — reminding us that, like it or not, there is sometimes a certain romance attached to art crime.