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Reposted from GQ
Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums, amassed a collection of treasures worth more than $1.4 billion, and became perhaps the most prolific art thief in history. And as he reveals to GQ’s Michael Finkel, how Breitwieser managed to do all this is every bit as surprising as why.
“Don't worry about parking the car,” says the art thief. “Anywhere near the museum is fine.” When it comes to stealing from museums, Stéphane Breitwieser is virtually peerless. He is one of the most prolific and successful art thieves who have ever lived. Done right, his technique—daytime, no violence, performed like a magic trick, sometimes with guards in the room—never involves a dash to a getaway car. And done wrong, a parking spot is the least of his worries.
Just make sure to get there at lunchtime, Breitwieser stresses, when the visitors thin and the security staff rotates shorthanded to eat. Dress sharply, shoes to shirt, topped by a jacket that's tailored a little too roomy, with a Swiss Army knife stashed in a pocket.
Be friendly at the front desk. Buy your ticket, say hello. Once inside, Breitwieser adds, it's essential to focus. Note the flow of visitor traffic and memorize the exits. Count the guards. Are they sitting or patrolling? Check for security cameras and see if each has a wire—sometimes they're fake.
The museum is the former home of Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish painter of the 1600s. Breitwieser isn't interested in stealing a Rubens; his paintings tend to be extremely large or too overtly religious for Breitwieser's taste. What sets Breitwieser apart from nearly every other art thief—it's the trait, he believes, that has facilitated his prowess—is that he will steal only pieces that stir him emotionally. And he insists that he never sells any. Stealing art for money, he says, is stupid. Money can be made with far less risk. But stealing for love, Breitwieser knows, is ecstatic.
And this piece, right in front of him, is a marvel. He had discovered it during a visit to the museum two weeks previous. He wasn't able to take it then, but its image blazed in his mind every time he sought sleep. This is why he's returned; this has happened before. There will be no good rest until the object is his.
The ivory sculpture is sealed beneath a plexiglass dome fastened to a thick base, resting on an antique dresser. Breitwieser's first objective is to remove the two screws that connect the dome and the base. There's no camera here, and only one guard is in motion, poking her head in every few minutes.
The tourists, as usual, are the problem—too many of them, lingering. The room is filled with items Rubens had amassed during his lifetime, including marble busts of Roman philosophers, a terra-cotta sculpture of Hercules, and a scattering of 17th-century oil paintings.
Patience is needed, but a moment soon comes when it's just Kleinklaus and Breitwieser alone, and in an instant he unfolds the screwdriver from the Swiss Army knife and sets upon the plexiglass dome. Breitwieser is shorter than average and tousle-haired, with piercing blue eyes that, for all his stealth, are often animate with expression. He is lithe and coordinated, and uses athleticism and theater in his work. Maybe five seconds pass before Kleinklaus coughs and he vaults away from the carving, reverting to casual-art-gazing mode.
It's a start. He has turned the first screw twice around. Each job is different; improvisation is crucial—rigid plans do not work during daytime thefts, when there are variables too numerous to preordain. During his previous trip to the museum, he had studied how the Adam and Eve was protected and had also spotted a convenient door, reserved for guards, that opened into the central courtyard and did not appear to have an alarm.
Over the course of ten minutes, progressing fitfully, Breitwieser removes the first screw and pockets it. He does not wear gloves, trading fingerprints for dexterity. The second screw takes equally as long.
Now he's set. The security guard has already appeared three times, and at each check-in Breitwieser and Kleinklaus had stationed themselves in different spots. Still, the time elapsed in this room has reached his acceptable limit. There's a group of visitors present, all using audio guides and studying a painting, and Breitwieser judges them appropriately distracted.
He nods to his girlfriend, who slips out of the room, then lifts the plexiglass dome and sets it carefully aside. He grasps the ivory and pushes it into the waistband of his pants, at the small of his back, adjusting his roomy jacket so the carving is covered. There's a bit of a lump, but you'd have to be exceptionally observant to notice.
Then he strides off, moving with calculation but no obvious haste. He knows that the theft will swiftly be spotted. He'd left the plexiglass bell to the side—no need to waste precious seconds replacing it—and the guard will surely initiate an emergency response. Though not, he's betting, quickly enough.
From the room with the ivory, the museum layout encourages visitors to ascend to the second floor, but Breitwieser pushes through the door he'd seen on his earlier trip, crosses the courtyard toward the main entrance, and walks past the front desk onto the streets of Antwerp. Kleinklaus rejoins him before they reach the car, a little Opel Tigra, and Breitwieser sets the ivory in the trunk and they drive slowly away, pausing at traffic lights on the route out of town.
The road trip ends at a modest steep-roofed house built amid the sprawl of Mulhouse, an industrial city in eastern France. The ivory might be worth a million dollars, but Breitwieser is broke. He does not have a steady job—when he is employed, it's often as a waiter. His girlfriend works in a hospital as a nurse's aide, and the couple live in his mother's house. Their private space is on the top floor, an attic bedroom and small living area that Breitwieser always keeps locked.
They open the door now, cradling the ivory, and a wave of swirling colors seems to break over their heads as they step inside their fantasy world. The walls are lined with Renaissance paintings—portraits, landscapes, still lifes, allegories. There's a bustling peasant scene by Dutch master Adriaen van Ostade, an idyllic pastoral by French luminary François Boucher, an open-winged bat by German genius Albrecht Dürer. A resplendent 16th-century wedding portrait, the bride's dress threaded with pearls, by Lucas Cranach the Younger, may be worth more than all the houses on Breitwieser's block put together, times two.
In the center of the bedroom sits a grandiose canopied four-poster bed, draped with gold velour and red satin, surrounded by furniture stacked with riches. Silver goblets, silver platters, silver vases, silver bowls. A gold snuffbox once owned by Napoleon. A prayer book, lavishly illuminated, from the 1400s. Ornate battle weapons and rare musical instruments. Bronze miniatures and gilded teacups. Masterworks in enamel and marble and copper and brass. The hideaway shimmers with stolen treasure. “My Ali Baba's cave,” Breitwieser calls it.
Entering this place, every time, dizzies him with joy. He describes it as a sort of aesthetic rapture. Breitwieser sprawls on the bed, examining his new showpiece. The Adam and Eve ivory, after a four-century journey to arrive in his lair, appears more stunning than ever. It goes on the corner table, the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes.
During the week, while his girlfriend is working, he visits his local libraries. He learns everything he can about the ivory, the artist, his masters, his students. He takes detailed notes. He does this with nearly all his pieces—he gets attached to them. Back home, he meticulously cleans the carving, with soapy water and lemon, his thumb passing over the sculpture's every nubbin and ridge.
But this is not enough. His love for the ivory doesn't fade, that's not fair to say—he just has room in his heart for a little more love. So he consults his art magazines and auction catalogs. The Zurich art fair is about to begin. He plots a route into Switzerland, avoiding tolls to save money, and early the next Saturday morning they're back on the road.
All his life, inanimate objects have had the power to seduce him. “I get smitten,” Breitwieser says. Before artwork, it was stamps and coins and old postcards, which he'd purchased with pocket money. Later it was medieval pottery fragments he'd find near archaeological sites, free for the taking.
When he covets an object, says Breitwieser, he feels the emotional wallop of a coup de coeur—literally, a blow to the heart. There are just things that make him swoon. “Looking at something beautiful,” he explains, “I can't help but weep. There are people who do not understand this, but I can cry for objects.”
His interactions with the world of the living were far less fulfilling. He never really understood his peers, or almost anyone else for that matter. Popular pastimes, like sports and video games, baffled him. He's never had any interest in drinking or drugs. He could happily spend all day alone at a museum—his parents often dropped him off—or touring archaeological sites, of which there are dozens in the area where he grew up, but around others he was sometimes hotheaded and temperamental.
His first museum heist came shortly after a family crisis. When he was 22 years old, still living at home, his parents' marriage ended explosively. His father left and took his possessions with him, and Breitwieser and his mother tumbled down the social ladder, re-settling in a smaller place, the antiques replaced by Ikea.
Cushioning the trauma was a woman Breitwieser met through an acquaintance, a fellow archeology buff. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus was the same age as Breitwieser, and similarly introverted, with a kindred sense of curiosity and adventure. She had a sly smile and an irresistible pixie cut. They shared a passion for museums, thrilled to be immersed in beauty. Breitwieser finally experienced a coup de coeur for an actual person. “I loved her right away,” he says. Soon after Breitwieser's father departed, Kleinklaus moved in.
A few months later, the couple were visiting a museum in the French village of Thann when Breitwieser spotted an antique pistol. His first thought, he recalls, was that he should already own something like this. Breitwieser's father had collected old weapons but had taken them when he'd left the family, not bothering to leave a single piece for his son. The firearm, exhibited in a glass case on the museum's second floor, was hand-carved around 1730. It was far nicer than anything his father had owned.
He felt an urge to possess it. The museum was small, no security guard or alarm system, just a volunteer at the entrance booth. The display case itself, Breitwieser noted, was partially open. He was wearing a backpack and could easily hide the pistol in there.
One must resist temptation, he knew. It even says so in the Bible, not that he was particularly religious. What our heart really wants, we must often deny. Maybe this is why so many people seem conflicted and miserable—we are taught to be at constant war with ourselves. As if that were a virtue.
What would happen, he wondered, if he did not resist temptation? If, instead, he fed temptation and freed himself from society's repressive restraints? He had no desire to physically harm anyone or so much as cause fright. He contemplated the flintlock pistol and whispered a few of these thoughts to his girlfriend.
Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus has never spoken to the media about her relationship with Breitwieser and any possible role in the crimes, and neither has Breitwieser's mother, Mireille Stengel. Though there exist supporting documents and reported accounts, much of this story is based primarily on interviews with Breitwieser. While he was in the museum, in front of the pistol, Kleinklaus's response, the way Breitwieser remembers it, made him believe that they were destined to be together.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Take it.” So he did.
From that moment on, he catered to his impulses in an unimaginable way. His only goal was to obey temptation. By the time he pilfers the Adam and Eve ivory, three years after stealing the pistol, he's amassed some 100 objects, all on display in his hideout. He is ecstatic beyond measure, cosseted like a king. He feels as though he and his girlfriend have discovered the meaning of life.
A curious thing about temptation, at least in Breitwieser's case, is that it never seems to abate. If anything, the more he feeds it, the hungrier it gets. The weekend after the ivory theft in Belgium, Breitwieser and Kleinklaus drive through the snow-streaked Alps to the Zurich art fair. Behind a dealer's back, quick as a cat, he steals a spectacular goblet, filigreed with silver and gold, from the 16th century.
Then they head to Holland for another fair, and at one booth, while the vendor is eating lunch and not keeping careful watch, Breitwieser takes a brilliant rendering of a lake bobbing with swans, dated 1620. At another booth, again with the dealer present, he removes a 17th-century seascape painted on copper.
A few weeks later, it's back to Belgium, to a village museum with a single security guard, where he takes a valuable still life, butterflies flitting around a bouquet of tulips, by Flemish master Jan van Kessel the Elder. This is followed by a trip to a Paris auction, where, at the pre-sale show, he steals a painting from the school of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, two polestars of Renaissance art.
Once again he returns to Belgium—a country whose museums, says Breitwieser, “attract me like a lover”—and filches a vivid tableau of a rural market, then over to Holland to snatch a droll 17th-century watercolor of house cats chasing hedgehogs, followed by a journey to the northern French city of Lille for another Renaissance oil work, and finally, for good measure, one more raid in Belgium.
All of this in a matter of months. These paintings alone represent a haul worth millions of dollars. And it's not just paintings—he also steals a gold-plated hourglass, a stained-glass windowpane, an iron alms box, a copper collection plate, a brass hunting bugle, a cavalry saber, a couple of daggers, a gilded ostrich egg, a wooden altarpiece, and a half-dozen pocket watches. Everything is crammed into the hideout, filling the walls top to bottom, overflowing the end tables, displayed in his closet's shoe rack, leaning on chairs, stuffed under the bed.
The collection is not random. Virtually everything he steals was made before the Industrial Revolution, in an age when items were all still formed by hand; no machines stamped out parts. Everything finely crafted in this way, Breitwieser believes, from medical instruments to kitchenware, is its own little work of art, the hand of the master visible in each chisel mark and burr. This, to Breitwieser, was the height of human civilization.
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Reposted from The New York Times
Officials of the Indian government and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are discussing whether a number of prized antiquities that the museum began acquiring three decades ago were the product of looting by Subhash Kapoor, a Manhattan art dealer accused of being one of the world’s most prolific smugglers of stolen artifacts.
Since 1990, the Met has acquired some 15 antiquities that passed through Mr. Kapoor’s hands during a period in which, the authorities say, his smuggling ring was active and he routinely sold or donated rare and costly artifacts to at least a dozen American museums.
The discussions are part of a major push by India to recover some of the tens of thousands of sacred idols and ancient relics now known to have been plundered in the last half-century by a variety of smugglers and temple raiders.
Last month, New York officials charged Mr. Kapoor with 86 felony counts and accused him of trafficking in $145 million in antiquities dating back as far as 1974.
The first Kapoor antiquities to arrive at the Met were a set of first-century terra-cotta rattles in the shape of Yaksha, a nature spirit. The last Kapoor-related piece to enter the collection, an 11th-century celestial dancer carved from sandstone, came in 2015.
Each of the 15 objects was either gifted or sold to the Met by Mr. Kapoor or obtained from collectors who had acquired them from the art dealer or his New York gallery. Most of them arrived at a time when the gallery, Art of the Past on Madison Avenue, was a respected anchor in its field and before Mr. Kapoor’s 2011 arrest in Germany and 2012 transfer to India, where he is still awaiting trial on smuggling charges.
None of the provenances for the Met’s items, as shown on the museum’s website, lists an owner who predates Mr. Kapoor.
Several years ago, when the authorities first characterized the scope of the smuggling they attributed to Mr. Kapoor, the Met said it did not plan a special review of its collection because it said it did not think the items it held were the focus of suspicion. More recently, museum officials reversed that position and began a more thorough review of the antiquities that track back to Mr. Kapoor.
“As we have since learned of the multiple law enforcement actions, and in the spirit of our enhanced procedures over recent years, we are now seeking to identify additional provenance information,” the museum said in a statement.
The Met declined to discuss the status of the talks with India or to characterize whether the museum now believes that some of the items were looted.
Indian officials applauded the Met’s review.
“It is a good initiative,” D.M. Dimri, a spokesman for the Archaeological Survey of India, said of the Met’s effort. His agency is responsible for safeguarding India’s most illustrious objects and monuments. “We hope other museums will follow suit too and verify the source of their acquisitions in case they have our stolen antiquities.”
The Asia Society in Manhattan is studying the provenance of at least one item — a 12th-century copper-alloy statue of the deity Shiva dancing in the center of a spoked circle — that Indian officials believe was looted. It does not have a lineage that tracks to Mr. Kapoor.
“In the past, the institution has supported the return of objects that were found to have been acquired illegally,” Tom Nagorski, the society’s executive vice president, said. “In this particular case, we are taking active steps to investigate and determine the validity of the claim.”
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently deaccessioned an Indian artifact with a sketchy provenance, an eighth-century gilt-copper statuette of Buddha on a throne, and “begun discussions with the authorities related to its disposition,” said a spokeswoman, Erin Yokomizo.
Though neither item is connected to Mr. Kapoor, Indian officials say they help illuminate the extent of the plunder their nation has experienced since independence from Britain in 1947. The United Nations organization UNESCO has calculated that more than 50,000 idols, icons, artifacts and antiquities have been stolen from India, but officials agree there is no exact count and may never be.
Indian officials said their conversations with the Met about the Kapoor relics began last year. The Met’s curator for South and Southeast Asian art, John Guy, had visited the country last August, returning two antiquities that the Met had on its own determined were likely looted from the country.
Neither of those items, an eighth-century sculpture of the Goddess Durga slaying a buffalo-headed demon, and a third-century limestone bust of a man’s head, appeared to have any connection with Mr. Kapoor. The Met said its readiness to return the two pieces demonstrated an increased level of diligence in examining the source of antiquities.
Mr. Guy returned to India last November, looking to borrow objects to be shown as part of the museum’s 150th anniversary exhibitions next year.
The Met has for decades had a policy requiring that artifacts entering the collection be accompanied by export and import licenses indicating they were legally removed from their countries of origin. In the case of Mr. Kapoor, the authorities have said he sometimes provided counterfeit licenses in an effort to dupe museum curators and other buyers.
The Met declined to say whether it had received any licenses when the Kapoor items were acquired. In its statement, it said “as each gift entered the collection it underwent the review protocol of that time — which is to acknowledge that we and the entire field have heightened procedures in recent years.”
Since that time the Met and other American museums have adopted far more painstaking requirements. In part, those strictures read: “The Museum will thoroughly research the ownership history of any archaeological materials or ancient art prior to its acquisition, including making a rigorous effort to obtain accurate written documentation with respect to its history, including import and export documents.”
In the years since Mr. Kapoor was arrested, at least 10 American museums, including the Toledo Museum of Art, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida, have deaccessioned dozens of items with provenances that stretched back to him.
Key to any repatriation claim by India is establishing evidence of where an artifact might have been taken and when. In 1972, India ratified an international treaty barring the export or transfer of cultural property that lacked explicit government approval and formal documentation.
Homeland Security investigators and officials with the Manhattan district attorney’s office have spearheaded the domestic investigation into Mr. Kapoor, seizing more than 2,500 items from warehouses he controlled. Indian officials have begun to sort through these stockpiles to determine which items they can definitively claim and to weed out fakes. As a result, the vast majority of the relinquished items have yet to return to India, and the repatriations have been piecemeal.
Since 2016, when Attorney General Loretta Lynch handed over 200 stolen cultural artifacts during a ceremony at the Indian Embassy in Washington, about 40 have been returned to India, but none yet to the temples and shrines where some of them originated.
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Reposted from Atlas Obscura
Mitch Yockelson knows what’s missing by heart. There’s an arsenal of diamond-encrusted daggers, swords, and scabbards gifted to Harry Truman by a Saudi prince and the Iranian shah—all stolen from his presidential library in 1978. There’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s official White House portrait. It went missing in a move. And there’s a batch of Abraham Lincoln’s telegrams that just up and vanished.
Yockelson, the investigative archivist for the United States’ National Archives, is unlikely to find any of these priceless historical treasures in a fluorescent-lit hall on the Maryland state fairgrounds. The annual Maryland Antique Arms Show brings together hundreds of dealers peddling all types of military antiques and ephemera. There, men toting bayonets for sale peruse table after table of old uniforms, yellowed discharge papers, and bowls of ammunition. Yockelson attends shows like this two or three times a year, in addition to scouring online auctions and following tips, on the hunt for lost Americana that rightfully belongs to the U.S. government.
Yockelson is one-half of the Archival Recovery Program, based in the National Archives and Records Administration’s office in College Park, Maryland. He and analyst Kellie Shipley believe they are the only dedicated team in any museum or cultural institution in the world whose sole purpose is to search for missing and stolen items. This hunt for documents and other objects that belong in the official repository of American history is what brought him to the military antiques show.
Yockelson is making the rounds, as he often does at such events—greeting old acquaintances and flipping through inventory binders—when he gets stopped near a display of old rifles. “Whatchu think you’re gonna find over here?” calls a white-haired man with a heavy drawl, approaching down the aisle.
“Whatever’s in your back pocket,” Yockelson fires back. He’s 56, with graying hair at his temples, a pear-shaped face, and the jacket-and-tie uniform of a career government employee. The man, a buyer named Jan who deals in military documents for private clients, seems eager to dish on old thefts and other dealers. He clearly knows why Yockelson is there.
“You get any of that stuff back that guy stole in the valley?” Jan asks. He’s referring to Howard Harner, who was convicted of stealing more than 100 Civil War–related documents from the National Archives in 2005, and whose case was a landmark in the creation of the Archival Recovery Program that Yockelson leads. Harner served two years in prison, but dozens of items he stole and then sold remain missing.
“We’re still looking,” Yockelson replies, wearily.
“You guys should’ve had him die in prison. Anybody to do what he did … it’s not only criminal, but he screwed so many people.”
“You know, buyer beware,” Yockelson says. “People didn’t ask questions. They took him for his word.”
When Yockelson first started attending these shows nearly a decade ago, he was almost always greeted with cold shoulders and dirty looks. “It’s not up to us to police the hobby for you,” the dealers—Jan included—told him. Some had lost money when stolen pieces they’d bought were reclaimed by the Archives, so many were wary of him snooping around their collections. Most documents, Yockelson muses as Jan wanders off, have been circulating for decades, so industry insiders are confident they’re clean. But when something new and exciting shows up, opportunity curdles into a kind of willful ignorance, and many “turn a blind eye” to its past, he says.
But now, through years of friendly banter and impeccable bona fides—he’s written several books on military history and is considered a foremost expert on World War I in particular—Yockelson has become a familiar presence, tolerated, respected, and even a little feared. His personal outreach is working: At least once a week a dealer calls him with a tip about a suspicious piece. Usually there’s not much to what they tell him, and in his head Yockelson still keeps that list, the one of items he dreams of returning to the National Archives.
Every Sunday night when he was a kid, Yockelson’s parents flipped on the television to watch The F.B.I., a show about fictional special agents solving real-life cases. He dreamed of joining the agency, and his mom brought him to the headquarters, where visitors were allowed to watch agents shoot at the firing range. Later, after he realized that a lot of Federal Bureau of Investigation cases involve white-collar crimes, Yockelson decided to pursue a Ph.D. in military science. He spent a couple summers in a Union Army uniform, regaling visitors to Virginia’s Petersburg National Battlefield with tales from the Civil War’s longest siege. As an intern at Harper’s Ferry, he edited the diary of a Civil War soldier. He came out of school with a doctorate in World War I military history and, in 1988, joined the National Archives as a research archivist. At the time, there was no recovery team.
Eight years later, a man named Harner befriended a Civil War specialist at the Archives, who helped him pursue his interest in Confederate generals who’d also served in the U.S. Army. On the side, Harner had been asking dealers what they were interested in buying—and then returned to the Archives to swipe the contents of those lists, mainly documents signed by military leaders such as George Pickett, Louis Armistead, and others. He was caught when a researcher noticed that a document Harner had once viewed at the National Archives came up for sale on eBay. The case took a long time to wend its way through the legal system, but it was an alarm call, and helped launch the Archival Recovery Team in 2006.
Within a year Yockelson was transferred to the new unit as an investigator. At the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia he learned basic investigation and interrogation techniques. He also learned how to read facial expressions to tell if someone is lying or withholding information. He’d put these skills to use later, when he sat in on interviews with suspects during criminal investigations. His presence, he found, put the certain type of thief who steals from archives at ease. “I’d go with criminal investigators. They’re armed, they have handcuffs, they look a certain part. Then there’s me, nerdy-looking and into history,” Yockelson says. “I would feel more comfortable talking to me. I can relate. I can talk the talk.”
In 2012, a French researcher named Antonin DeHays began visiting the Archives’ College Park research room, a bright space filled with researchers, authors, and historians sifting through the massive repository of U.S. history. On a pin-drop-quiet, window-filled floor, carts of records sit next to square desks, where visitors can examine and photograph historic items and documents, and scribble notes on borrowed paper. The materials DeHays asked for were popular by archival standards: the possessions of American pilots who’d been shot down by the Germans in World War II. In the boxes he was given, there were dog tags, letters from loved ones—even pedigree papers for a dog that waited in England for one airman’s return.
The file was often perused by researchers and historians, and later that year one had returned for a second look. He was confused by what he saw. The dog tags he’d previously photographed were missing.
Yockelson got a call from the research room and hoped that—like in many such cases—it was simply sloppy filing. He went downstairs and assembled a small group of archivists to look around. Not everything in the Archives is fully inventoried, but they were lucky: Both the staff and the U.S. Army agency for missing soldiers had recently been through the material, so Yockelson and his team pulled out spreadsheets and started checking boxes. For eight-hour days over the next few months, Yockelson and the staff tallied 300 missing items, mostly dog tags. They cross-referenced check-out slips and honed a list of people who’d requested the pillaged boxes. Then they set up a stakeout. Before a box went out, the staff would count the items inside, and then count them again after it was returned. On May 12, 2017, DeHays checked out a box for 24 minutes. When he gave it back, 30 dog tags were missing.
David Berry is one of the five federal agents assigned to the National Archives who collaborate with Yockelson on criminal investigations. After enough evidence was acquired, Berry sat DeHays down at a park near his house and showed him a search warrant. DeHays confessed immediately. He seemed exhausted, Berry says. After he was charged, DeHays, his attorney, Yockelson, and a U.S. attorney met. They wanted the whole story, but at that moment, Yockelson’s primary concern was the dog tags and how he was going to get them back. DeHays, who is from Normandy, had married an American woman and settled in Maryland. His plan, he said, was to make enough money to establish a World War II museum in his home region. He was polite, but seemed coached, and rarely elaborated on his answers. Yockelson pressed him on the whereabouts of the dog tags. He claimed he couldn’t say because he’d kept poor records.
Posing as a collector who wanted to downsize, DeHays had sold them on eBay and via word of mouth. More than two dozen buyers snapped up the rare pieces. One bought more than 100, with the intent of returning them to the airmen’s descendants and donating them to a museum, Berry says. Others went to DeHays’s acquaintances and network of collectors. In one instance he traded a dog tag to a private collector for the privilege of sitting in the cockpit of a Spitfire fighter plane.
“When people see something they want to buy they don’t ask too many questions,” says Berry.
In all, he’d stolen and sold nearly 300 dog tags and 136 other items, including pieces of aircraft and the airmen’s identification cards, from the government. Berry and Yockelson set to work. With DeHays’s cooperation (and computer history), the investigators tracked down buyers—some as far as away as Italy—and requested the artifacts’ return. Nearly every item was recovered. Only nine remain missing.
Once they started investigating, archivists discovered that another thief was working at the same time as DeHays. In June 2019, a member of the National Guard named Robert Rumsby was charged with stealing four World War II dog tags from the National Archives in 2015. He’d given two as gifts to the relatives of the dead soldiers’ families, he told reporters, and planned to do the same with the rest. His case goes to trial soon.
To those working it, the DeHays case felt personal—these items weren’t patents or pardons, but relics of young officers killed or taken prisoner. They also can be used to help locate and identify the remains of those still missing. In April 2018, a judge sentenced DeHays to 364 days in jail—just a day shy of mandatory deportation. Yockelson wishes he’d gotten a harsher sentence. “To me it’s as bad as committing capital murder,” he says. On his desk, Berry keeps a photo of Leonard Willette, a Tuskegee Airman who was killed in action over Germany. In the photo, Willette is wearing a set of dog tags DeHays stole decades later. It’s one of the sets he and Yockelson managed to recover.
Dog tags barely scratch the surface of what’s disappeared from the National Archives over the years. Interns, employees, outside researchers, and visitors have collectively stolen thousands of documents and artifacts since the agency was founded in 1934. Mismanagement, misfiling, and honest mistakes have done away with more.
The National Archives holds 10 billion pages of documents; 12 million maps, charts, and architectural and engineering drawings; 25 million photographs and graphics; 24 million aerial photographs; 300,000 reels of motion picture film; 400,000 video and sound recordings; and 133 terabytes of electronic data. Most are only available to view by those who can travel to headquarters in D.C., the facility in Maryland, or the country’s presidential libraries.
The security system, besides locks and metal detectors, is based on trust with a sprinkling of stern librarian oversight. In College Park, for example, researchers must get a special identification card in the lobby and lock up their bags—no notebooks or even puffy vests are allowed. The staff is quiet but omnipresent, whisper-enforcing a complex set of rules about what can be photographed, how to position the files, how many items can be on a table at a time. The feeling of surveillance is parental, and it seems as though any misstep will be spotted and corrected in hushed, direct tones.
Many of the thefts have been inside jobs. There was a time that staffers could leave the office without being checked. Take Leslie Waffen, a 40-year veteran of the National Archives, who walked out with 955 total items, including an original recording of the 1937 Hindenburg airship disaster. Today employees have their bags searched when they leave, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them, or visitors, to get material out. “We’re not allowed to strip search people,” says Yockelson. “Someone like DeHays was able to sneak those dog tags in his pocket. Even if he was rattling on the way out, our guards don’t have the authority.”
The visitors—historians and hobbyists alike—almost always follow the rules, are thankful for the access the National Archives provides, and serve as watchdogs. Many are experts on their chosen subjects and have an intimate knowledge of the archival system—so they know right away if something looks amiss. They’re the Archives’ eyes and ears.
In cases of theft, some culprits are in it for the money. But most start with a genuine love of history. Yockelson says that many who steal do so because they have grown obsessed with their own knowledge and sense of stewardship. “They think, either, ‘I can take better care of this,’ or, ‘This belongs to me more than it does anyone else.’” Sometimes their collecting develops into obsessive hoarding. DeHays told Berry that stealing had become like an addiction. “I think by and large they’re ashamed and embarrassed,” says Berry—once they’re caught, at least. “It’s sad because their role is to be caretakers to history, and that must be very hard to live with.”
In their College Park office, Yockelson and the analyst Shipley sift through internet dumps of keyword searches of eBay and auction houses every day. The items they’re looking for often have markings, such as index numbers, to indicate their origin. The researchers don’t expect much outside help. Yockelson gets those tips, but no auction house has ever called to ask about the origins of an item, and no dealer has volunteered to return a suspect item they already possess. Shipley has a saved search for every known missing item. It’s fishing, but sometimes she gets a bite. A few years ago a wealthy collector died and a number of signed presidential pardons he had purchased appeared for sale at an auction house. Likely unbeknownst to him, they’d been stolen from the National Archives. In recent memory, Shipley has turned up Civil War letters, World War II submarine plans, and mugshots from the United States Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
The government has the legal authority to confiscate a piece even if they didn’t realize it was missing. “The bottom line is we’ve been victimized and want our stuff back,” says Yockelson. This authority is one reason for the cold welcome Yockelson received when he started visiting military memorabilia shows.
Dealers understand this risk and know that not everything they buy can be guaranteed clean. Some of them certainly want to stay ahead of the game and in the good graces of Yockelson and the government. Bill Panagopulos, who runs Alexander Historical Auctions in Maryland, has helped recover a handful of objects for the National Archives, including a handwritten order from Abraham Lincoln to post a chaplain at a Civil War–era hospital. “It could happen at any time,” Panagopulos says, of the chance something stolen will appear in one of his catalogs. “Some of this stuff has been through five hands since it was stolen 50 to 60 years ago.” Sometimes, before taking a consignment he’s unsure of, Panagopulos calls Yockelson to confirm that the item doesn’t belong to the government.
The objects Yockelson really wants back—those he knows the history of by heart—are persistent phantoms. There’s the bombing target maps for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, used by crew members of the 20th Air Force to guide their mission, which disappeared after being loaned to a public relations officer in the Air Force in the 1960s, probably for a presentation or article. No one noticed they were gone until a staff member went looking for the file 40 years later. Yockelson doesn’t think there’s much chance of finding them. But sometimes those phantoms do reappear.
In 2003, the National Archives was preparing to celebrate the centennial of the Wright Brothers’ first heavier-than-air flight in the dunes of North Carolina, and someone wanted to pull the flying machine patent for display. Records show it had been loaned to the Smithsonian in 1979 and then returned, but it was not where it was supposed to be, and the trail had gone cold. It bothered Yockelson to no end. He thought about it every time he boarded a plane.
After nearly a decade, a staffer offered a novel idea during a cold-case brainstorm. Could the historic patent have been grouped with another patent file in Kansas, where an underground system of former limestone mines holds millions of overflow items? They called the office to check, and an archivist there began to search a 15-foot-high stack of boxes. Soon a call came back to College Park: Inside a manila envelope, mistakenly filed with a different Wright Brothers patent, was what they were looking for. Yockelson was ecstatic. It was by far the most exciting missing item to find its way back to the National Archives. When it arrived in their conservation lab in 2016, he went to look at it. He’d never thought he’d see it—he never even knew exactly what it looked like—and there it was. “Where have you been all my life?” he wondered. In a cave in Kansas, apparently.
Here I just have a few stolen government documents you might be interested in,” jokes a dealer with a New Jersey drawl. He’s presiding over a couple binders of antique papers and ephemera at the front of the Maryland military show. A stand next to him is roasting nuts, so the joke comes with a caramelized perfume.
“Not today,” Yockelson shoots back.
The two get to talking about what’s out there: fake Nazi artifacts circulating on eBay, genuine documents of opaque origin, and the lies dealers concoct to give their wares a good story. There’s little protection for the consumer, or responsibility on the seller. The market that Yockelson is always watching is nearly impossible to police. “I saw you at the Gettysburg show standing next to Cal’s table,” the dealer says. “I saw the expression on his face. Cal looked like he was ready to say, ‘Just cuff me up.’”
But it’s not that easy. A new case or find brings a fresh historical scavenger hunt for proof that the item should be returned to the National Archives. “On each theft we have to start from scratch: Did it come from us? How can we identify that we actually had it?” Yockelson says.
He admits they need to exercise better control over their holdings. Digitization is one solution. Over the next five years, the National Archives plans to digitize 500 million pages of records, on top of the 235 million that are already available electronically. The entire collection of the Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago will be digitized when construction is finished in 2021. As a result, no one will be able to abscond with the original pieces of history, but will those digitized files—so easy and accessible—hold the same appeal? A box of documents, touched by their original owners, is personal. And bringing them out to be touched again grants them a second life.
Yockelson looks glum as he imagines boxes of military dog tags, presidential pardons, and yellowing letters gathering dust in storage, even if it ensures their safety and even if they remain available to researchers in another form. “We want people to use our holdings,” he says. “That’s why we exist. Just don’t take the stuff while you’re here.”
Reposted from The New Yorker
Long before the burglar Vjeran Tomic became the talk of Paris, he honed his skills in a graveyard. Père Lachaise, the city’s largest cemetery, is a Gothic maze of tombstones, in the Twentieth Arrondissement, that covers more than a hundred acres. Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde are among those buried there. Tomic recalled that in the nineteen-eighties, when he was an adolescent, the cemetery attracted hippie tourists, who flocked to the grave of Jim Morrison, and also drug dealers and gang members. Tomic was drawn by the tombstones. In one of twenty letters, written in careful cursive French, that he sent me during the past year and a half, he told me, “Observing them gave me the desire to touch them—to climb up to their peaks.” Tomic and his friends turned the cemetery into a parkour playground, leaping from the roof of one mausoleum to the next, daring one another to take ever-bolder risks.
Tomic avoided his family’s apartment, which was a few blocks south of the cemetery, because he had a tense relationship with his parents, both of whom were Bosnian immigrants. He was born in Paris in 1968, but the following year his mother became seriously ill, and his father, a car mechanic, sent Vjeran to live with his grandmother, in the Ottoman town of Mostar, in Bosnia. By the age of six, he told me, he had developed what he calls “a devious tendency,” adding, “I was showing some unhealthy intelligence.” He tormented his cousins by putting thorns in their shoes. They often played along the banks of the Neretva River, and Tomic became adept at scaling Mostar’s stone bridges; on reaching the top, he would leap into the water below.
At the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level. He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old. (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic’s plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, “It was intuitive. Nobody ever taught me anything.”
He returned to Paris when he was eleven, speaking almost no French and barely knowing his parents. He resented them for uprooting him from Bosnia. In his words, his mother and father “lived in the apocalypse,” fighting constantly.
Despite the turmoil at home, Tomic said, he did well in school, and was a fine athlete. As a teen-ager, he developed a keen interest in drawing, and in his spare time he walked, alone, through the streets of Paris. One day, when he was sixteen, he was strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries when he noticed people lining up outside what appeared to be a greenhouse. It was the Musée de l’Orangerie, a structure that was built, in 1852, to shelter orange trees, and which now houses Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Tomic went inside. The museum is best known for its Monet murals of water lilies, but Tomic was enraptured by Renoir’s glowing renderings of happy childhoods: kids playing with figurines, practicing the piano, snuggling with mothers. As Tomic saw it, Renoir had used his paintbrush to create a “parallel universe”—an enchanted version of the grim Parisian life he had known. “Renoir has a way of seeing life from a magical realm,” Tomic wrote to me. “It’s as if he even came from this place.” It thrilled him to be “within a hand’s reach” of such spellbinding images.
On returning home, Tomic recalled, he told his mother about his transporting experience at the museum, and said that he wanted to paint—“that it was my passion, that other jobs weren’t worth anything, that they were wastes of time.” Fearing his father’s opinion, he entrusted her to “transmit the message” to him. His father soon approached him and declared that painting was a hobby, not a real job. He pressed Tomic to work at his garage, but Tomic resisted, and eventually “thought about fleeing.”
Tomic and his friends had begun hanging out at Père Lachaise, and when they found an abandoned warehouse nearby they began squatting there. Tomic went to school only intermittently, and he and the other boys supported themselves by stealing pieces of glassware from a local factory and then selling them at a flea market by the Porte de Montreuil. They also began climbing the high walls on the periphery of the cemetery, which allowed them to break into adjoining apartment buildings.
In time, Tomic began robbing apartments in more affluent neighborhoods. His climbing skills continued to improve, and by the age of sixteen he could scale the façade of a multistory building with relative ease. In his letters to me, Tomic described his burglaries in oddly mystical terms, suggesting that his actions were compelled by invisible forces. (He used the French word tractent, which means “towed.”) He described canvassing neighborhoods before choosing his target: “I have to be in harmony with certain places, where I feel good. And then, at that moment, I see—like images from a movie—the places where I have walked in the past week, and some places attract me, and something is waiting for me in the end.”
One night, he had a vivid dream in which he stole five paintings from a museum. He took it as a portent. As he wrote to me, “I knew that someday I would do something great.”
Tomic generally worked alone, scaling walls, leaping between rooftops, and picking locks. Once inside an apartment, he looked first for jewelry, because it was valuable and easy to sell. A burglary that took less than two hours often yielded enough cash to support him for six months on the French Riviera. In his letters, he recounted robbing various Parisian luminaries, including the French-Caribbean singer Henri Salvador and the Egyptian royal family. (He boasted to me that he stole “gold buttons” and some of “Lawrence of Arabia’s medals” from the Egyptians.)
Tomic often returned to an apartment many times without taking anything, in order to find the most expensive-looking items. He adopted this strategy when robbing the apartment of the designer Philippe Starck, in 2004. Starck recently told me, “I never knew anything about my burglar, but I’ve always had respect for his style—an admiration for his temerity—and a sort of intimate affection for him after I discovered that he’d been practically living with us in the apartment for a few days, spending his time sawing into my poor, small safety box without even disturbing us. It was very much a Gentleman Burglar situation, Arsène Lupin style.” (Lupin, the quintessential debonair thief, was invented by the French novelist Maurice Leblanc, in 1905.) Starck went on, “The only shadow was that the only thing he stole was my daughter’s jewelry—her only heritage from her deceased mother.”
Tomic’s confidence as a burglar grew to the point that he felt “indestructible and invulnerable.” Once, while fleeing the police across the rooftops of Paris, he took refuge in an empty apartment in a fashionable building. He decided to take whatever jewelry he could find; suddenly, the owner came home. “I saw that he was an old man with a very sexy girl,” Tomic wrote. He hid in a closet in the bathroom adjoining the man’s bedroom. “I couldn’t get out of it without crossing the room,” he recalled. “The couple . . . began making love, and that went on all night!” He waited until they finally fell asleep, then made his escape. “I have taken many risks like this one, and sometimes much worse ones,” Tomic wrote to me. “But I always perform well when faced with these sorts of obstacles.”
Tomic was exaggerating—his impulsiveness sometimes led him to make poor choices. One day, he ran out of gas while driving through the suburbs of Paris, and discovered that he’d left his wallet at home. “I had a toy handgun on me,” he recalled, and so he held up a bakery for two hundred francs. He filled his tank, but a witness at the bakery reported his license-plate number to the police, and he was arrested. He spent a year in jail.
Starck may be excessively romantic in calling Tomic a Gentleman Burglar. Tomic, who is tall and blunt-featured, with close-cropped dark hair, has been convicted of at least a dozen crimes—among them selling drugs, aggravated robbery, theft with violence, issuing a death threat, and illegal possession of a weapon. A friend of Tomic’s described him as “brutal and a little wild.” At the same time, she said, he had a charming range of passions: “He is into aesthetics, classical music, nature, animals, epicurean pleasures—wine, cheese. He is very out there in his style, even his clothing.” (Tomic favors G-Star pants, New Balance sneakers, cashmere ski hats, and Lacoste underwear.) She said that Tomic was “like a poet,” noting that “he talks about the moon.” He had maintained his habit of wandering around Paris on foot, modelling himself on Arthur Rimbaud.
Above all, Tomic loved fine art. His friend told me that he appreciated Matissef or “his joyful and dancing color palette,” Klimt for “his sensuality,” and Renoir for “the sweetness that emerges from his portraits of children.” She observed, “The Impressionist art feeds the poetry that is in him.”
Many of the luxurious apartments that Tomic broke into had valuable paintings, but he tried to resist taking them, knowing that they would be difficult to unload. “To sell them was dangerous, and I didn’t have reliable sources abroad in order to flog them to collectors or receivers,” he told me. Occasionally, though, the allure of the art proved overwhelming, and Tomic took what he found—including, he says, works by Degas and Signac. “A decent amount passed through my home,” he wrote. He hid some pieces in a cellar, “and some stayed with me for a long time, on the wall, and it’s in these cases that I fell in love.”
This might sound like braggadocio, but Tomic did make off with some masterpieces. In the fall of 2000, in an episode that subsequently made the papers in France, he used a crossbow with ropes and carabiners to sneak into an apartment while its occupants were asleep and stole two Renoirs, a Derain, an Utrillo, a Braque, and various other works—a haul worth more than a million euros.
In May, 2010, Tomic was walking near the Seine when he came upon a large Art Deco building. Looking through a window, he noticed a Cubist painting hanging on the wall. Tomic later learned that the building was the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, known as the MAM. But it was the style of the window, rather than the Cubist painting, that caught Tomic’s interest. He glanced up: there were cameras on the roof. Tomic walked up to one of the building’s other windows, which was blocked from the security cameras by a parapet. Studying the window’s metal frame, he became convinced that it was the same type that, years earlier, he had disassembled, screw by screw, in a heist. He took out a pocket knife, chipped away at the paint on the frame, and examined the screws that were embedded in the metal. He could easily break in, he decided. It astounded him that nobody had considered this vulnerability. “This made me realize that luck and my past experience were at a rendezvous,” he wrote. “I even asked myself if I was not in another dimension at that time.”
A few days later, Tomic went to the MAM as a visitor. It occupies the east wing of the Palais de Tokyo, which was built for the International Exposition of 1937. The museum started amassing its collection in 1953, when the city of Paris donated more than five hundred paintings once owned by a man named Maurice Girardin; Janet Flanner, writing in this magazine, later described Girardin as “an eccentric Paris dentist who had little money but such a gift for scenting talent among still unappreciated important artists that he had been able, starting in 1913, to buy their paintings at the low prices he could afford.”
Tomic looked around the galleries with a mixture of pleasure and unease. “Certain paintings can provoke me like an emotional shock,” he told me. A friend of his compared him to a “shaman,” and added, “A work of art emits a vibration, a palpable energy, and Vjeran is able to connect to it.” When I asked Tomic about this assessment, he agreed, observing, “I love to touch antique objects, and I sense a great past—of generations and generations—that I think are a part of the works.” He said that he avoided thinking about art in scholarly terms, and noted, “Sincerely, I have never read a single work about painting or art in my entire life.”
Inside the museum, Tomic noticed that although the motion detectors were meant to flicker from green to red whenever anyone passed by, several of them appeared to be stuck on green. The discovery delighted Tomic, who has described robbery as, ultimately, an act of imagination. He wrote to me, “I sometimes think for a while, then as if by magic—but without the magic wand—I have the formula to overcome an obstacle.”
In the 1962 film “Dr. No,” James Bond, played by Sean Connery, passes through the lair of a wealthy villain and notices a portrait of the Duke of Wellington, by Goya, on the wall. The painting had been stolen, the previous year, from the National Gallery in London. The scene helped to cement a popular misconception that stolen masterpieces are often bought and secretly held by wealthy, reclusive collectors. In fact, this almost never happens. Unlike jewelry, which can be recut, or antiquities, which may never have been photographed, famous paintings are almost impossible to resell—even at ten per cent of their value, a common rate on the black market. Some criminals try to collect ransom for museum paintings based on their insurance value, but that’s a risky proposition, particularly given that many publicly owned works aren’t insured. Charles Hill, a former head of the art-and-antiques squad at New Scotland Yard, told me that most museum thieves nevertheless “go for the big-ticket items,” adding, “It’s foolhardy, it’s stupid, it’s pig-shit ignorant.”
The typical art thief has no idea who will buy his loot. But, by the time Tomic began thinking about robbing the MAM, he had established a steady business relationship with a sponsor: Jean Michel Corvez, a white-haired man in his fifties who owned several businesses in France, including a health-care-data company and a small gallery in the Bastille neighborhood. Tomic told me that he met Corvez in 2004, through another thief. “Our relationship was more than fine, although it wasn’t quite a friendship,” he wrote to me. “We believed in each other, and he wasn’t evil—but I later realized that he was dangerous and that he was unable to predict danger.”
According to Tomic, in the span of several years he sold Corvez roughly ninety thousand euros’ worth of contraband, including jewelry, gold, and a painting by Johan Jongkind, a Dutch seascape artist. Knowing that Tomic frequently broke into rich people’s apartments, Corvez gave him a list of artists favored by his clients, among them Basquiat, Chagall, Klimt, Léger, Modigliani, Monet, Pissarro, and Warhol. Corvez gave Tomic the nickname l’Araignée—the Spider—and urged him to remain in good shape. He often chastised Tomic for eating poorly, Tomic recalled, adding, “Corvez wanted me to work out, so that I could climb without any problem.”
Soon after visiting the MAM, Tomic went to see Corvez at his gallery. Corvez reminded him that he would love to have a Léger, and one of the paintings at the museum was Léger’s “Still Life with Candlestick,” a depiction of a domestic interior, from 1922. When the painting had last been on loan to another museum, it had been insured for four million euros, and its market price was likely much higher than that. Corvez offered Tomic forty thousand dollars. “I hesitated,” Tomic told me. “But my mouth spoke, and then I couldn’t help but act.” He spent the next several days making plans for the robbery.
On May 14, 2010, in the early hours of the morning, Tomic walked up to a window that faced an esplanade where skateboarders congregated during the day. At around 3 a.m., he saw a guard briefly patrol the galleries, then walk off. Tomic was carrying a piece of dark cloth, and he hung it like a curtain on the outside of the window, to give himself cover. Then he got to work on the window. It took him six nights to finish the job. First, he dabbed the window frame with paint-stripping acid, exposing the head of each screw. Then, after applying another solution, to eliminate rust, he removed the screws and filled the holes with brown modelling clay that matched the color of the window frame. It was a painstaking process, and Tomic didn’t rush.
A few hours before dawn on May 20th, Tomic returned to the site, in a hooded sweatshirt, with two suction cups, and silently pulled out the window. There was a lock holding a grate in place; using bolt cutters, he broke the lock. He entered the museum briefly, avoiding the few working motion detectors. Then he left and retreated to the banks of the Seine, where he waited for fifteen minutes, to insure that he hadn’t set off a silent alarm.
When Tomic went back inside, he spotted the Léger painting, took it off the wall, and maneuvered it out of its frame. He now had an object Corvez prized, but, standing in the museum in the dim light and the silence, he began staring at Matisse’s “Pastoral.” A Fauvist canvas from 1905, it depicts three pale nudes resting while a fourth figure, rendered in bronze tones, plays a flute. “I saw a deep, vivid landscape,” he recalled. “And the little devil playing his flute out of nowhere, as if by magic, as if he were the guardian of this environment.” He took it off the wall.
Then he noticed Modigliani’s “Woman with a Fan,” a portrait of the artist’s muse and obsession, Lunia Czechowska. Tomic fixated on the image, which depicted Czechowska in a yellow dress, her eyes a cloudy white. “The woman in the picture was worthy of a living being, ready to dance a tango,” he wrote to me. “It could have almost been reality.” He stole the Modigliani, too.
Hill described Tomic’s state of mind in the gallery as a kind of mania. “The paradox of great paintings is that they are inanimate objects that have lives of their own,” he said. “And they tend to mesmerize those who look at them. For some viewers, they then take leave of their senses.” Tomic, he said, was in some ways little different from “the buyer at a Sotheby’s auction who gets carried away and ends up bidding ten times what he intended to pay.”
Tomic kept moving through the galleries, taking down “Pigeon with Peas,” by Picasso, and “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque,” by Braque. He almost stole a sixth: Modigliani’s “Woman with Blue Eyes.” But, Tomic recalled, “when I went to get it off the wall, it told me, ‘If you take me, you will regret it the rest of your life.’ I will never forget what this ‘Woman with Blue Eyes’ did to me. When I touched it, to take it out of its frame . . . the feeling started instantly—a fear that came over me like an iceberg, a freezing fear that made me run away.”
It took two trips for Tomic to carry the canvases out of the museum. He had parked his Renault a few minutes away, along the Avenue de New York. He sat in the driver’s seat for five minutes. As a professional thief, Tomic knew that it was reckless to linger at a crime scene, but he continued to equivocate about the Modigliani that he hadn’t taken.
Tomic headed back, but within a minute reality set in: the streets of Paris were deserted, and he was quite possibly the only person within blocks of a recently burglarized museum. He fled the scene again, though his regret lingered. “When I drove, the blue-eyed lady was in my head,” Tomic told me.
Tomic had planned to meet with Corvez later that morning, on the fourth level of an underground parking garage in Bastille. He spent much of the intervening hours gazing at the paintings in his car, especially the Matisse. “I had fallen in love,” he recalled to me. When Corvez arrived at the garage, in a rented Porsche Cayenne, and realized that Tomic had not one but five stolen paintings, he was more unnerved than pleased. “He was afraid of me,” Tomic recalled. Nevertheless, Corvez accepted the Léger, as agreed, and also took the Modigliani, on consignment. Tomic didn’t want to part with the three other paintings, and asked Corvez to store them on his behalf, even though he worried about what might happen to the Matisse. He recalled saying to Corvez, “You could get hit by a car—whose door will I knock on to recover my goods?” The mood turned tense. “We were not far from thinking that all could end badly,” Tomic wrote.
By the end of the day, newspapers around the world were reporting on the heist. The stolen works were estimated to be worth more than seventy million dollars, making the theft the biggest of its kind since 1990, when two thieves, disguised as police officers, stole thirteen art works, collectively valued at roughly half a billion dollars, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston. (They have yet to be recovered.)
The mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, declared, “I want everything to be done to recover these masterpieces.” France’s élite armed-robbery unit, the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme, launched an investigation and soon found a witness: Goran Radosavuevic, a skateboarder. He told police that, a few days before the robbery, he’d seen a suspicious character on the esplanade outside the museum: a white man, six feet two, weighing about two hundred pounds, with a muscular build, an oval face, and a square jaw. He observed, “I really got the impression that he was at work. He was not there to look at the skaters and seemed really to be observing the side of the wall with the windows of the museum.” Police records noted that the removed window screws had been laid out neatly in a corner of the museum, underlining the “cold-bloodedness” of the operation. The five paintings were among the most important in the museum’s collection, suggesting to investigators that the thief had “a sophisticated knowledge of the works”—or, at least, a good eye.
After the robbery, Tomic went to meet Corvez at the gallery to collect his payment. Tomic was deeply worried, even paranoid, that police officers were following him. “I knew that a great hunt was going to start,” he wrote me. Corvez gave him a shoebox stuffed with forty thousand euros, in small bills. Tomic left and hailed a taxi. He told me that he didn’t dare take the Métro, because he feared the security cameras. As the taxi navigated the twisting streets of Bastille, the radio buzzed with news of the heist. Tomic eventually arrived at the apartment of a woman he trusted. He taped his stash to the underside of a chair. Fearing that he would be discovered at his own apartment, he asked to spend the night.
Tomic initially characterized this woman to me as an “acquaintance,” but in a subsequent letter he explained that she was a sex worker who gave him “free passes” from time to time. She was not his “concubine,” he assured me; they were confidants who helped each other out. The woman, an immigrant, had experienced “problems with other girls” working the same territory and, according to Tomic, had spent time in jail. Tomic had agreed to keep an eye on her as she reclaimed a spot on her old corner, on Avenue Foch. One evening, she brought him home, fed him, and let him stay overnight. It became an occasional ritual.
Tomic, by his own admission, is not suited to intimacy: “I am a thief. I roam in beautiful neighborhoods. I see what I have to do, but I stay out of people’s private lives.” This woman, however, grew close to him, he said, adding, “She asked me to do her favors a few times, like to fix her car, change a tire.” Tomic never fully let his guard down, though. Most of his arrests occurred when someone betrayed him, and Tomic sometimes wondered if she was a police informant.
Six months after the MAM robbery, the police had only a few leads in the case, but they were conducting a separate investigation, based on an anonymous tip about a thief and his fence, and the informant provided Tomic’s name. On October 1, 2010, they eavesdropped on a phone conversation in which Tomic ranted, “The cops! The fucking cops think it was me who did the museum, I swear! . . . They’re assholes, it’s crazy! They can’t understand that the paintings were sold and that they’re pissing me off!”
The police compared a photograph of Tomic with the description given by the skateboarder, and concluded that they had a likely match. On December 7th, they followed Tomic to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which houses one of the largest modern-art museums in Europe, and observed him studying the emergency exits. A day later, they surveilled him as he bought two suction cups, glue, and a pair of construction gloves. In a letter, Tomic told me that he had indeed been intending to rob the Pompidou but had intuited that the authorities were on his trail. “It was definitely a project that would need to wait its turn,” he told me.
On December 10th, detectives phoned Tomic and the call was sent to voice mail. His greeting was astonishingly brazen, as if he were in a manic state. “If you want to buy paintings or works of art, or exceptional jewelry, do not hesitate to contact me,” he said. “Among the many paintings, there are five that are extremely expensive.”
It’s not clear why Tomic wasn’t immediately arrested. Charles Hill told me that he found it hard to contain his frustration at the inaction of the French police, which he attributed to smug complacency—a feeling, common to those investigating art thefts, that the work will ultimately be recovered. (In fact, several experts told me, only about ten per cent of stolen art ever resurfaces.) But Derek Fincham, a professor at South Texas College of Law, who specializes in the illicit trade in cultural property, suggested a potential justification for the delay: the French police might not have wanted to spook Tomic and “inadvertently push the paintings further underground.” Fincham explained, “A painting that is cut from its frame and rolled up is easy to move. It could be put in a bank vault or buried in a field, or even destroyed.” Such fears are warranted. In 2001, when the police arrested Stéphane Breitwieser—a French thief who stole two hundred and thirty-nine works of art from more than a hundred museums and galleries—his mother shredded many of the paintings and ground them up in a garbage disposal.
On the wiretap, Tomic had promised to get revenge on anyone who followed him too closely. He said, “I’m gonna dig up the guns and, on my mother’s head, you’ll see—the first one who comes near me will get a bullet in the head.”
As the months passed, Tomic grew increasingly suspicious of Corvez. He tried calling him, but discovered that his number was no longer in service. One day, they ran into each other at the Gare de Lyon. Corvez looked “totally white” and “freaky,” Tomic recalled, as if he were “going to pass out,” and stalled when Tomic asked him about the status of the paintings. “He gave me no guarantees,” Tomic told me. “It was fishy, fishy, fishy.”
Tomic surreptitiously taped a subsequent conversation with Corvez, in order to have proof of his involvement in the crime. On the recording, Tomic asks him about the Léger, and Corvez tells him that it has already been sold, and that the police investigation “prevents me from sleeping at night.” In fact, as Tomic eventually learned, Corvez still had the Léger. A client had paid him eighty thousand euros for it and taken it home. Two days later, apparently rattled by the media attention surrounding the theft, he returned the painting to Corvez, without asking for his money back.
Corvez did find a buyer for the Modigliani: Yonathan Birn, a thirty-three-year-old watchmaker with an art-history degree from the Sorbonne. Birn had a small shop in the Marais. Several months after the theft, Corvez showed Birn the Modigliani, which he described as “extraordinary” but “of dubious origin.” Birn was delighted by the portrait, and eventually agreed to buy it from Corvez. It is unclear if Birn understood that the Modigliani had been stolen from the MAM, but he handled the painting with great secrecy, persuading an employee at a Crédit du Nord bank to let him place it, off the books, in a safety-deposit vault.
Corvez eventually made arrangements to store the four other paintings at the shop where Birn sold and repaired his watches, which had a sophisticated alarm system. Birn and Corvez hid the canvases behind an armoire.
Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance
When you think of workplace violence, you may envision a disgruntled ex-employee returning to their former office with a gun.
But that’s just one scenario. The full spectrum of workplace violence encompasses four main threats, going beyond current and former employees. Active shooting situations, physical violence, threats, intimidation and harassment all constitute workplace violence.
While workplace violence may happen at any business, it’s not entirely arbitrary. There are factors you can look for and address, though not every company is in jeopardy of experiencing every type of violence. Risk assessment should be specific to your circumstances.
For instance, healthcare has the greatest incidence of violence than any industry, so if you work in a health-related field, you may need to take extra precautions. Similarly, if your company uses cash registers, such as a bank, convenience store or gas station, you face a higher likelihood of getting robbed.
When you recognize what risks you face, you can prepare proactively to prevent greater catastrophes. Here’s a rundown of the four main types of workplace violence and strategies for approaching them that will help your employees stay safe.
1. Violence as a result of crime Example: A shooting during a bank robbery Mitigate your risks:
2. Violence by clients or customers Example: An angry customer threatening to hurt an employee Mitigate your risks:
3. Violence by a co-worker or former employee Example: An employee becoming violent after a performance review Mitigate your risks:
4. Violence by domestic and intimate partners Example: An abusive boyfriend showing up at work Mitigate your risks:
Reposted from The News Tribune
A sand sculpture in the lobby of Honolulu’s Grand Hawaiian Hotel was defaced earlier this week at the hands of a teenage vandal.
Video released Thursday by the Honolulu Police Department shows the vandal attacking the sculpture with her bare hands and various objects just after 11 p.m. Monday, as another person looks on — apparently capturing video of the destruction on her phone, according to police.
“Both females then fled in an unknown direction,” police wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.
Police have identified a teen Hawaii resident as the suspect, but she was not named, HawaiiNewsNow reports.
Jill Harris, an owner of Sandsational Sand Sculptures, said her partner Thomas Koet is on the island and started fixing the damage Thursday, KHON2 reported. The damage has been covered up with a lei, according to the TV station.
“It’s amazing how much effort you know probably went into it and how little it took to destroy it,” visitor Jim Bruce said, according to KHON2.
The footage of the vandalism that police released shows the teen straddling a clear partition separating the sculpture from a walkway, using her bare hands and what appears to be a pillow to deface the art. She also throws other objects at the sculpture.
See Original Post (with video)
Law enforcement officials have sounded the alarm for months: Homegrown terrorism, including by white supremacists, is now as big a threat as terrorism from abroad. But the mass shooting in El Paso last weekend, the largest domestic terrorist attack against Hispanics in modern history, has made it glaringly clear how poorly prepared the country is to fight it.
The United States spent nearly 20 years intensely focused on threats from Islamic extremists. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, rerouted the machinery of government to fight against threats of violence from the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan. But those attacks have waned in recent years, replaced by violence from white supremacists — an increasingly internet-driven phenomenon of lone wolves, not groups, that will prove immensely difficult to combat.
On Monday, President Trump pledged to give federal law enforcement authorities “whatever they need” to combat domestic terrorism. The motive for the second attack of the weekend, in Dayton, Ohio, remains unknown. But even before the shootings, which left at least 31 people dead, officials said that preventing attacks from white supremacists and nationalists would require adopting the same type of broad and aggressive approach used to battle international extremism.
“We need to catch them and incarcerate them before they act on their plans,” Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general, said in an email interview. “We need to be proactive by identifying and disrupting potential terrorists before they strike, and we can accomplish that by monitoring terrorist propaganda and communications.”
Under current federal law, that is difficult. Federal officials have broad powers to disrupt foreign terrorist plots, given to them as part of the Patriot Act passed after the 2001 attacks. They can take preventive action, for example, by wiretapping or using an undercover online persona to talk to people anonymously in chat rooms to search for jihadis.
But domestically, federal officials have far fewer options. A federal statute defines domestic terrorism but carries no penalties. The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, makes stopping terrorist acts committed by Americans before they happen more challenging. No government agency is responsible for designating domestic terrorism organizations. And individuals who are considered domestic terrorists are charged under laws governing hate crimes, guns and conspiracy, not terrorism.
“It’s a big blank spot,” said Mary McCord, a former top national security prosecutor who has drafted a proposed statute to criminalize domestic terrorism not covered by existing laws. This would include criminalizing the stockpiling of weapons intended to be used in a domestic terrorist attack.
The issue is urgent. Right-wing extremists killed more people in 2018 than in any year since 1995, the year of Timothy McVeigh’s bomb attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, according to the Anti-Defamation League. And the attack in El Paso and an April shooting in a synagogue in Poway, Calif., alone have claimed as many lives as all extremist homicides “of any stripe” in 2018, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
The F.B.I. field office in Phoenix recently issued a report that said conspiracy theories — often with racial overtones and fueled by dissemination online — had become a growing national security threat. The existence of the F.B.I. document was first reported by Yahoo News.
Mr. Rosenstein said that law enforcement needs to model its domestic terrorism response after the international counterterrorism efforts undertaken in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
“In the same way that honorable members of mosques report people who express violent designs, so, too, should people report violent white nationalists to the police,” he said.
The First Amendment’s protection of citizens’ rights to engage in hateful speech makes it difficult to track down attacks before they happen.
“From the perspective of the courts, white supremacy is a hateful but protected form of speech,” said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University. “What courts resist are efforts to classify whole movements as violent as a result of the actions of some of its members.”
The problem touches every aspect of American life — politics, civil liberties and business — and involves complicated new questions around the issue of technology. How much will technology and communications companies, including the big social media platforms, be willing to share information about domestic customers with law enforcement agencies? On the internet, white nationalists can align with other radicals, become inspired and find the resources they need to act alone — a process that has also helped foreign extremists become terrorists.
Perhaps most important, a new focus on white-supremacist violence would test whether Americans are as accepting of aggressive law enforcement tactics when the targets aren’t Muslims, but white Americans.
“If they did the same thing that they did with the Muslims, they’d say every white guy is a potential terrorist,” said Martin R. Stolar, a New York civil rights lawyer. “You can’t do that with white people. The blowback would be outrageous.”
The rise in the white supremacist threat has paralleled an increasing racialization and divisiveness in the nation’s immigration debate. Mr. Trump has used ethnonationalist language that his opponents argue is arousing political extremists. Even in past years, some political leaders have been slow to recognize the existence of domestic terrorism: After the Oklahoma City bombing, Newt Gingrich, at the time the speaker of the House, refused to hold hearings on white nationalist terrorism.
In the years since, the nature of white supremacism has changed. It used to be that white supremacists, for the most part, operated in groups, often living in the same area, said Brian H. Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. The chapters had some control over the timing and choice of targets. He cited as examples Aryan Nations, the Ku Klux Klan and local Nazi skinhead groups.
“The top-down hierarchies of the past have been increasingly supplanted by a more democratized and a geographically dispersed set of erratic do-it-yourselfers,” he said. “Now, so-called lone wolves are turbocharged by a fragmented and hate-filled dark web which has become a modern-day, virtual neo-Nazi boot camp available 24-7 anywhere in the world with an internet connection.”
Examples of these kinds of actors are the attackers in the Poway synagogue shooting, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last fall and now, according to the authorities, El Paso.
While these men often act alone, the F.B.I. says that technology has allowed American terrorists to plug into a global community of terrorists who espouse similarly hateful ideologies. Domestic terrorists are increasingly citing terrorists overseas in their killings. In his manifesto, the suspected El Paso gunman said that he agreed with the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The suspect in New Zealand said in the manifesto he is believed to have written that he had been inspired by Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. special agent and the author of “Anatomy of Terror,” said he had been struck by how much white supremacists resemble the jihadis he spent so many years fighting.
Both use violence to reshape society in their own image. Both use recruitment videos that emphasize a lifestyle of “purity,” militancy and physical fitness. Jihadis share beheading videos, while right-wing extremists share the live stream of the attack in New Zealand. He said Ukraine was now a global gathering place for white supremacists, much as Afghanistan was for jihadis in the 1980s.
“This is becoming a global network in so many different ways, just like we’ve seen with the jihadis before them,” he said.
Federal investigators have also found white supremacist elements flourishing in prisons. In March, federal prosecutors in Alaska announced that an investigation had resulted in charges against 18 members and associates of a white supremacist gang known as the 1488s. In May, a federal grand jury indicted members of an Aryan Knights prison gang that had operated in Idaho.
The indictment in the Alaska case described the 1488s as a gang with dozens of members operating in Alaska and elsewhere.
David Neiwert, who has long reported on extremism in the Northwest and has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he sees the threat of the Northwest’s racist groups returning to levels of the 1980s, when neo-Nazi elements around the country had moved into the Northwest in a bid to create a white ethnostate. In the 1990s and 2000s, those groups lost much of their power and subsided.
Mr. Neiwert said people with extremist sympathies were now organizing online and attaching themselves to groups that aren’t as explicit about white supremacist notions.
“Local agencies in particular should be better equipped,” Mr. Neiwert said. “On the other hand, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department could probably do a better job of equipping local law enforcement.”
As the international terrorism threat evolved to include more lone actors, radicalized online rather than in terrorist cells abroad, the F.B.I. sought to enlist technology companies in its efforts to combat the threat. But companies have been slow to respond — and have been shielded, in part, by the First Amendment.
“It’s been a very long few years of getting platform companies to understand the role that digital media plays in spreading hate speech, harassment and incitement to violence,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. “Generally, a piece of content is only reviewed if someone else has flagged it first.”
Under intense criticism for their delayed reaction to disinformation and hateful content after the 2016 presidential election, technology companies have started to take a more proactive approach to disinformation and hate speech. In most cases, spokeswomen for Google and Facebook said the companies report white supremacist content only when it poses an imminent threat to life, or when they are complying with valid legal requests.
In May, Facebook evicted seven of its most controversial users, including Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, and Laura Loomer, a far-right activist.
But critics say that is not enough. “White supremacy, at least at Facebook, was seen as a political ideology that one could hold,” said Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at the City University of New York and the author of a forthcoming book on white supremacy. “It’s only recently that they’ve said they recognize white supremacy as an ideology of violence.”
Ms. Daniels said there was an important lesson in what happened to Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur, after he was banned from using Twitter and Facebook.
“Milo has ceded from view since that happened. I really think that’s an argument in favor of this strategy,” she said. “He lost a book deal. He’s bankrupt. It showed ‘deplatforming’ is a useful tool and we need to find more ways to adopt it in the U.S.”
Ms. Daniels and others say the companies’ own algorithms for deciding what constitutes far-right extremist content are insufficient in tackling the threat. Often they rely on users, and in many cases names and content that percolate in the media, to decide what content and accounts should be taken down.
“We’ve reached this position where these companies have scaled beyond their capacity for safety. We don’t know what the next steps should be,” Ms. Daniels said. “We’re in a pretty significant bind now that we have a very large tech industry we all depend on, and we don’t feel we can trust them to keep us safe.”
Reposted from Securitas Security Services, USA, Inc.
Situational awareness is a human experience defined as knowing and understanding what is happening around you, predicting how it will change with time, and being unified with the dynamics of your environment. We practice situational awareness every day—when crossing the street, driving our cars, and making dinner in our kitchens. Situational awareness is knowing what is going on around you and staying vigilant to any changes or threats. By becoming more aware and observant in the workplace, all employees can help maintain a safe environment and improve the safety of everyone around them.
Establish a Situational Baseline
The first step to situational awareness is to establish a situational baseline. Make it a daily habit to look around and actively process your surroundings. Ongoing monitoring of daily activities can help establish what is “normal” for your workplace. Observe what the typical state of the workplace is. Who are the people you usually see? What do they look like? What are they doing? What are the sounds you often hear? Note any changes and decide what action to take. Identifying your situational baseline requires ongoing maintenance and consideration. This is something all employees should practice every day. Remember, baselines not only change with a change in environment, they can also change with time of day or even the weather.
Be Aware of Those Around You
Become familiar with the people in your workplace. If you see someone out of place or acting suspiciously, take the time to assess the situation and decide what action to take. Certain kinds of activities in the workplace can indicate suspicious activity, especially when they occur at or near high-profile places where large numbers of people gather.
Trust Your Instincts
If something “feels” wrong, or out of place, don’t dismiss it. “Gut feelings” can be a very useful to help alert you to a threat. Part of situational awareness involves being mindful of your subconscious and conscious environments. Take the time to assess the situation and decide on an action. If you are unsure, contact your supervisor or other personnel to help you.
Staying Aware
Awareness is a choice. One has to choose to pay attention. Routine tasks often become just that: routine. Maintaining operative situational awareness requires real effort. Take time to focus on your responsibilities and your surroundings, even those that are most familiar. Additionally, try to avoid things that lock your focus, such as your cellphone. Things that lock your focus prevent you from maintaining active awareness. By making situational awareness part of your workday, you can reduce risks and help improve the safety of your work environment.
Be Prepared
Education is key. Learn what to do in the event of an emergency before there is one. Maintaining your sense of situational awareness can improve your decision-making under pressure and you will be better prepared to respond. Make sure you understand the plans of action for different circumstances in your workplace for yourself and others. Lack of knowledge is not an excuse for poor job performance. All employees should educate themselves about any potential hazards that their environment or actions can pose to themselves or others. Ensure that you are up-to-date with the systems, processes, and procedures of your work environment, and that you feel confident about what to do in any situation.
All employees are encouraged to practice situational awareness, by being alert to their surroundings at all times, and to use their experience, training, and skills to assess their workplace environment on an on-going basis. Situational awareness adds value to the workplace by cultivating enhanced preparedness, essential new knowledge, and enhanced response safety.
AN INFORMATIONAL GUIDE FOR SECURITY CLIENTS
Suspicious BehaviorsWatch for behavior that doesn’t fit. Suspicious behavior can include:
USE THE SLAM TECHNIQUE
StopObserve your surroundings and become aware of what is going on around you.
LookPay attention to what you see and notice whether anything appears out of the ordinary or out of place. Take note and report anything that looks unsafe or unusual to your supervisors.
Assess If you think you have identified a potential threat, decide what action to take. Report anything that looks unsafe or unusual to your supervisors.
Manage If you feel unsafe at any time, stop. Tell your coworkers and immediately report to your supervisor. If you have solutions that would help improve the safety of yourself and others in your workplace, alert your supervisor.
For more information on this and other security related topics, visit the Securitas Safety Awareness Knowledge Center at: http://www.securitasinc.com/en/knowledge-center/security-and-safety-awareness-tips
Reposted from the Evening Standard
The six-year-old boy who was allegedly thrown from a viewing platform at Tate Modern has suffered brain injuries, broken arms and legs, and a fractured spine, a court heard today.
The youngster, a French national who was visiting London with his family, plunged around 100ft in the horror fall on Sunday afternoon while visiting the world-famous gallery with his parents.
Prosecutor Sian Morgan told the court the boy survived the fall after landing on a fifth floor roof, but has suffered a “deep bleed to the brain”.
“He suffered very serious injuries and is currently in hospital”, she said. “He has injuries to his brain, and fractures to his spine, legs and arms”.
He was sporting a bruised right eye as he stood in the dock in a grey tracksuit to confirm his name, age, address, and British nationality.
“This is an incident which took place on August 4, the complainant is a six-year-old boy who was visiting the Tate Modern gallery with his parents”, said Ms Morgan.
“They were on the tenth floor viewing platform, looking over the side, and enjoying the view.
“The six-year-old started to walk a couple of feet away from his parents.”
She said the teenager is accused of picking up the boy and throwing him over the edge of the viewing platform “extremely swiftly and in one movement”.
The boy was airlifted to hospital as staff locked down the gallery, and police arrived to detain the suspect.
Olga Malehevska, who was on the viewing platform with her four-year-old son when the incident took place, described it as “absolutely terrifying”.
Appealing for witnesses, Detective Chief Inspector John Massey said: “It would have been incredibly distressing to watch, and it may be that you left Tate Modern very quickly after. If you have not yet spoken to us about what you saw, please contact us without delay.”
Witnesses reported in the aftermath seeing the boy’s distraught mother calling out “my son, my son” and desperately trying to climb over the barrier after him, before being restrained.
Scotland Yard said there was nothing to suggest the victim and the teenager accused of carrying out the attack were known to each other.
The youth from northwest London, has not yet entered a plea to the charge of attempted murder. A formal plea hearing has been scheduled for August 22.
He was remanded into a youth detention by magistrates David Armitage and Esther Amanang, until a hearing at the Old Bailey on Thursday to consider bail.
Reposted from Yahoo!
The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat, according to a previously unpublicized document obtained by Yahoo News.
The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.
The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).
“The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts,” the document states. It also goes on to say the FBI believes conspiracy theory-driven extremists are likely to increase during the 2020 presidential election cycle.
The FBI said another factor driving the intensity of this threat is “the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups involving illegal, harmful, or unconstitutional activities by government officials or leading political figures.” The FBI does not specify which political leaders or which cover-ups it was referring to.
President Trump is mentioned by name briefly in the latest FBI document, which notes that the origins of QAnon is the conspiratorial belief that “Q,” allegedly a government official, “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.”
This recent intelligence bulletin comes as the FBI is facing pressure to explain who it considers an extremist, and how the government prosecutes domestic terrorists. In recent weeks the FBI director has addressed domestic terrorism multiple times but did not publicly mention this new conspiracy theorist threat.
The FBI is already under fire for its approach to domestic extremism. In a contentious hearing last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Christopher Wray faced criticism from Democrats who said the bureau was not focusing enough on white supremacist violence. “The term ‘white supremacist,’ ‘white nationalist’ is not included in your statement to the committee when you talk about threats to America,” Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said. “There is a reference to racism, which I think probably was meant to include that, but nothing more specific.”
Wray told lawmakers the FBI had done away with separate categories for black identity extremists and white supremacists, and said the bureau was instead now focusing on “racially motivated” violence. But he added, “I will say that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases that we've investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.”
The FBI had faced mounting criticism for the term “black identity extremists,” after its use was revealed by Foreign Policy magazine in 2017. Critics pointed out that the term was an FBI invention based solely on race, since no group or even any specific individuals actually identify as black identity extremists.
In May, Michael C. McGarrity, the FBI’s assistant director of the counterterrorism division, told Congress the bureau now “classifies domestic terrorism threats into four main categories: racially motivated violent extremism, anti-government/anti-authority extremism, animal rights/environmental extremism, and abortion extremism,” a term the bureau uses to classify both pro-choice and anti-abortion extremists.
The new focus on conspiracy theorists appears to fall under the broader category of anti-government extremism. “This is the first FBI product examining the threat from conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists and provides a baseline for future intelligence products,” the document states.
The new category is different in that it focuses not on racial motivations, but on violence based specifically on beliefs that, in the words of the FBI document, “attempt to explain events or circumstances as the result of a group of actors working in secret to benefit themselves at the expense of others” and are “usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”
The FBI acknowledges conspiracy theory-driven violence is not new, but says it’s gotten worse with advances in technology combined with an increasingly partisan political landscape in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election. “The advent of the Internet and social media has enabled promoters of conspiracy theories to produce and share greater volumes of material via online platforms that larger audiences of consumers can quickly and easily access,” the document says.
The bulletin says it is intended to provide guidance and “inform discussions within law enforcement as they relate to potentially harmful conspiracy theories and domestic extremism.”
The FBI Phoenix field office referred Yahoo News to the bureau’s national press office, which provided a written statement.
“While our standard practice is to not comment on specific intelligence products, the FBI routinely shares information with our law enforcement partners in order to assist in protecting the communities they serve,” the FBI said.
In its statement, the FBI also said it can “never initiate an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity. As with all of our investigations, the FBI can never monitor a website or a social media platform without probable cause.”
The Department of Homeland Security, which has also been involved in monitoring domestic extremism, did not return or acknowledge emails and phone requests for comment.
While not all conspiracy theories are deadly, those identified in the FBI’s 15-page report led to either attempted or successfully carried-out violent attacks. For example, the Pizzagate conspiracy led a 28-year-old man to invade a Washington, D.C., restaurant to rescue the children he believed were being kept there, and fire an assault-style weapon inside.
The FBI document also cites an unnamed California man who was arrested on Dec. 19, 2018, after being found with what appeared to be bomb-making materials in his car. The man allegedly was planning “blow up a satanic temple monument” in the Capitol rotunda in Springfield, Ill., to “make Americans aware of Pizzagate and the New World Order, who were dismantling society,” the document says.
Historian David Garrow, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr. who has worked extensively with FBI archives, raised doubts to Yahoo News about the memo. He says the FBI’s default assumption is that violence is motivated by ideological beliefs rather than mental illness. “The guy who shot up the pizza place in D.C.: Do we think of him as a right-wing activist, or insane?” Garrow asked.
Garrow was similarly critical of the FBI’s use of the term “black identity extremists” and related attempts to ascribe incidents like the 2016 shooting of six police officers in Baton Rouge, La., to black radicalism. He said the shooter, Gavin Long, had a history of mental health problems. “The bureau’s presumption — the mindset — is to see ideological motives where most of the rest of us see individual nuttiness,” he said.
Identifying conspiracy theories as a threat could be a political lightning rod, since President Trump has been accused of promulgating some of them, with his frequent references to a deep state and his praise in 2015 for Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy site InfoWars. While the FBI intelligence bulletin does not mention Jones or InfoWars by name, it does mention some of the conspiracy theories frequently associated with the far-right radio host, in particular the concept of the New World Order.
Jones claimed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which 26 children were killed, was a hoax, a false flag operation intended as a pretext for the government to seize or outlaw firearms. The families of a number of victims have sued Jones for defamation, saying his conspiracy-mongering contributed to death threats and online abuse they have received.
While Trump has never endorsed Sandy Hook denialism, he was almost up until the 2016 election the most high-profile promoter of the birther conspiracy that claimed former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He later dropped his claim, and deflected criticism by pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton. He said her campaign had given birth to the conspiracy, and Trump “finished it.”
There is no evidence that Clinton started the birther conspiracy.
Joe Uscinski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, whose work on conspiracy theories is cited in the intelligence bulletin, said there’s no data suggesting conspiracy theories are any more widespread now than in the past. “There is absolutely no evidence that people are more conspiratorial now,” says Uscinski, after Yahoo News described the bulletin to him. “They may be, but there is not strong evidence showing this.”
It’s not that people are becoming more conspiratorial, says Uscinski, but conspiracies are simply getting more media attention.
“We are looking back at the past with very rosy hindsight to forget our beliefs, pre-internet, in JFK [assassination] conspiracy theories and Red scares. My gosh, we have conspiracy theories about the king [of England] written into the Declaration of Independence,” he said, referencing claims that the king was planning to establish tyranny over the American colonies.
It’s not that conspiracy theorists are growing in number, Uscinski argues, but that media coverage of those conspiracies has grown. “For most of the last 50 years, 60 to 80 percent of the country believe in some form of JFK conspiracy theory,” he said. “They’re obviously not all extremist.”
Conspiracy theories, including Russia’s role in creating and promoting them, attracted widespread attention during the 2016 presidential election when they crossed over from Internet chat groups to mainstream news coverage. Yahoo News’s "Conspiracyland" podcast recently revealed that Russia’s foreign intelligence service was the origin of a hoax report that tied the murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer, to Hillary Clinton.
Washington police believe that Rich was killed in a botched robbery, and there is no proof that his murder had any political connections.
Among the violent conspiracy theories cited in the May FBI document is one involving a man who thought Transportation Security Administration agents were part of a New World Order. Another focused on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government-funded facility in Alaska that has been linked to everything from death beams to mind control. The two men arrested in connection with HAARP were “stockpiling weapons, ammunition and other tactical gear in preparation to attack” the facility, believing it was being used “to control the weather and prevent humans from talking to God.”
Nate Snyder, who served as a Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism official during the Obama administration, said that the FBI appears to be applying the same radicalization analysis it employs against foreign terrorism, like the Islamic State group, which has recruited followers in the United States.
“The domestic violent extremists cited in the bulletin are using the same playbook that groups like ISIS and al-Qaida have used to inspire, recruit and carry out attacks,” said Snyder, after reviewing a copy of the bulletin provided by Yahoo News. “You put out a bulletin and say this is the content they’re looking at — and it’s some guy saying he’s a religious cleric or philosopher — and then you look at the content, videos on YouTube, etc., that they are pushing and show how people in the U.S. might be radicalized by that content.”
Though the FBI document focuses on ideological motivations, FBI Director Wray, in his testimony last week, asserted that the FBI is concerned only with violence, not people’s beliefs. The FBI doesn’t “investigate ideology, no matter how repugnant,” he told lawmakers. “We investigate violence. And any extremist ideology, when it turns to violence, we are all over it. ... In the first three quarters of this year, we've had more domestic terrorism arrests than the prior year, and it's about the same number of arrests as we have on the international terrorism side.”
Yet the proliferation of the extremist categories concerns Michael German, a former FBI agent and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty & National Security program. “It’s part of the radicalization theory the FBI has promoted despite empirical studies that show it’s bogus,” he said.
German says this new category is a continuing part of FBI overreach. “They like the radicalization theory because it justifies mass surveillance,” he said. “If we know everyone who will do harm is coming from this particular community, mass surveillance is important. We keep broadening the number of communities we include in extremist categories.”
For Garrow, the historian, the FBI’s expansive definition has its roots in bureau paranoia that dates back decades. “I think it’s their starting point,” he said. “This goes all the way back to the Hoover era without question. They see ideology as a central motivating factor in human life, and they don’t see mental health issues as a major factor.”
Yet trying to label a specific belief system as prone to violence is problematic, he said.
“I don’t think most of us would do a good job in predicting what sort of wacky information could lead someone to violence, or not lead anyone to violence,” Garrow said. “Pizzagate would be a great example of that.”
While Trump may not be supportive of labeling a group like QAnon, which sees him as a hero, as extremist, he’s in favor of broadening the number of organizations that are labeled as violent extremists, at least on the left. On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that Antifa, a far-left movement opposed to what it considers fascism, should be labeled a terrorist organization.
Snyder, the former Homeland Security official, agrees that conspiracy theories may in fact inspire violence and be a threat, but questions what the government is going to do about it.
He notes that at the Department of Homeland Security, “nearly all, if not all, the intelligence analysts focusing on domestic extremist groups” were eliminated under the Trump administration. “There is no one there doing this,” he said.
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