-- During the night of Feb. 2-3, 1990, masked men surprised six unarmed guards watching a storeroom in Herculaneum, ancient Pompeii's bedfellow in fate when Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. After breaking through a wall, the thieves took four hours to select 223 of the most precious antiquities, as if they had a dealer's catalog in hand. Estimated value: $18 million. None of the relics have resurfaced.
-- On March 18, 1990, two thieves disguised as policemen entered Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, trussed up two guards and made off with a king's ransom: three Rembrandts, five paintings by Degas, one Manet and one of only 36 known Vermeers in existence. The Vermeer canvas was hacked from its stretcher, leaving chips of paint on the floor. At an estimated total value of $200 million, it may have been the most lucrative art theft in history.
-- On April 14, 1991, armed robbers raided Amsterdam's state-run Van Gogh Museum at night, cut the alarm system and spent 45 minutes picking out 20 works by the Dutch Impressionist. Thanks to a flat tire on the getaway car, the heist was short lived. Among the loot recovered 35 minutes later: The Potato Eaters, which had also been stolen in 1988, from another Dutch museum. Total worth of the take: about $500 million -- assuming that such famous hot potatoes could have been resold.
The art of the world is being looted. From New York to Phnom Penh, from ancient ruins in Turkey to up-to-date museums in Amsterdam, precious records of human culture are vanishing into the dark as thieves steal with near impunity. Paintings, prints, statuary, rare coins, rare books and cultural treasures of every kind and all ages are being snatched.
Why not? The auction market may be faring poorly this season, but over the years an insatiable demand for artworks and antiquities has kept the price trajectory rising well above the rate of inflation. What used to be upheld as things of beauty or objects of veneration are increasingly traded like zero- coupon bonds or pork-belly futures. According to U.S. government estimates, "art theft is a $2 billion-a-year business," says Constance Lowenthal, executive director of the nonprofit New York-based International Foundation for Art Research. "But it could be much larger." Trace, a three-year-old British magazine that tracks art crimes, reckons the value worldwide at $6 billion a year.
If Trace's estimate is accurate, the take from museum burglaries, gallery heists, housebreaks and the looting of archaeology sites would rank as the world's third most profitable criminal enterprise, behind drugs and computer theft. More and more, art is becoming a prey of organized crime. Italy's single most valuable missing artwork is a Baroque masterpiece, Caravaggio's 1609 Nativity, which was stolen in 1969 from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily. Investigators in Britain are now convinced that the painting, worth about $50 million today, has been used by the Mafia as security for drug deals over the past 20 years. Kenneth Klug, a deputy special agent for the U.S. Customs Service, says his agency is "sure" that drug lords in Colombia's Medellin cartel "have priceless works of stolen art hanging in their villas."