Things You Should Know But Don’t: The FBI’s Art Theft Team

The FBI is known for a great many things but most often people associate it with large-scale, high-profile criminal investigations involving serial killers or terrorist threats. While the FBI does deal with those cases, they have <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/how-we-investigate/tactics" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">a number of teams that span a wide breadth of criminal investigations</a>. Perhaps one of the lesser known and more recent teams, however, is the FBI’s <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/newss-fbi-art-theft-program/view#:~:text=The%20art%20crime%20team%20was,looting%20of%20the%20Baghdad%20Museum." rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Art Crime Team which was officially established in 2004</a>. While the FBI had formally handled cases of art theft before 2004, it never had a specialized team for them. The team was established following two major art thefts, one domestic and one foreign: the <a href="https://www.gardnermuseum.org/organization/theft" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Gardner Museum heist in 1990</a> and the looting of the <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/looting-iraq-16813540/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Baghdad Museum in 2003</a>. Across the globe, illegally acquired art on the black market has been<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/art-theft" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"> valued between an estimated 4 billion USD and 6 billion USD</a>. Aside from the monetary value, this sort of theft can come with a loss of cultural artifacts, as the definition of “art” can span from paintings to jewelry to historical items. With this in mind, the FBI determined that these cases needed to be handled differently than typical theft. <a href="https://medium.com/@dwood_42054/things-you-should-know-but-dont-the-fbi-s-art-theft-team-9b6c9c2f2409">Website</a>