Every year over 10,000 works of art are reported stolen around the world, adding to a total which hovers around the 100,000 mark. The FBI estimates that the market in stolen art is worth around $5 billion. Recent striking cases include portraits by Rembrandt and Renoir taken from the National Museum in Sweden and the theft of a Cezanne oil painting from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on New Year's Day 2000. These paintings have yet to be found.
The Art Crime series, however, follows the successful investigation of six major frauds and thefts. A murky world of deception, violence and intrigue is uncovered, as incredible, if not as elegant, as that of the Thomas Crown Affair.
The Scream | Women in a Bathhouse | The Hairdresser's Tomb
| The Emperor's New Clothes | Rubens Unwrapped | Tiffany Tomb Raiders
The Scream
Wednesday 8 June 2005 7pm-8pm; 2.55am-3.55am
On the eve of the 1994 Winter Olympics, a gang of thieves break into Norway's National Gallery and make off with Edvard Munch's The Scream. It takes less than a minute for the group to break in and they leave behind a hand-written note saying, "Thanks for the poor security".
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Women in a Bathhouse
Wednesday 15 June 7.10pm-8pm; 12.40am-1.30am; 3am-3.50am
In the mid-1990s a former Japanese wrestler walks into the German Embassy in Tokyo claiming to have in his possession an important collection of drawings for which he wants $12 million. The pictures transpired to be part of the collection of the Bremen Museum and included Dürer's 1494 masterpiece Women in a Bathhouse. The bizarre story of how the pictures had disappeared and were finally recovered included a suicide pact, the Red Army and a Russian Olympic wrestler.
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The Hairdresser's Tomb
Wednesday 22 June 7.10pm-8pm; 12.40am-1.30am
In 1994 Detective Sergeant Dick Ellis of Scotland Yard is contacted by the British Museum after experts there become suspicious about some papyri they had been asked to translate. The curator approached believes that the artefacts could only have come from Saqqara, the legendary City of the Dead in Ancient Egypt. The ensuing operation uncovered an ingenious smuggling ring and a theft which could be traced back to the tomb of a high-ranking hairdresser to the Pharaohs.
The Emperor's New Clothes
Wednesday 29 June 7.10pm-8pm; 12.55am-1.45am
When New York art dealer Amand Bartos pays $175,000 for a Giacometti painting called Nu Debout 1955 he has trouble authenticating it. He travels to London to meet art researcher Dr John Drewe who offers to check the work's provenance in the archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The next day however, Bartos is contacted by Scotland Yard who inform him that not only is his picture a fake, but it had been sold to him by Dr Drewe himself who has been working with a forger to create and authenticate pictures.
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Rubens Unwrapped
Wednesday 6 July 2005 7.10pm-8pm; 11.40pm-12.30am; 3.10am-4am
In March 1991 US Customs are alerted to a painting by an artist called 'Rueben' being offered on the black market. In a series of undercover operations a Customs special agent discovers that it is a genuine Rubens called Aurora, stolen from a Spanish museum six years previously together with another Rubens called The Daedalus. The latter had been recovered when it was brought in to be valued at the National Museum of Stockholm. The programme follows the elaborate sting in Miami which recovered the Aurora.
Tiffany Tomb Raiders
Wednesday 13 July 7.10pm-8pm; 12.35am-1.25am
A beautiful Louis Comfort window worth £1 million is stolen from a family mausoleum in a New York graveyard. Nothing was heard of the window for five years until an FBI agent stumbled across a lead while recruiting an informant on a car crime case. An elaborate undercover sting leads agents to tomb robber Anthony Casamassima and finally to a respected Tiffany expert.
