May 3, 2007: Big heists
No one was injured after $1.8 million was stolen from an armored truck yesterday.
Is that a lot of money? Just what are the biggest heists in history? It may surprise you that $1.8 million is in fact just chump change.
Art heists rank among the most celebrated. The Mona Lisa was spirited out of the Louvre in 1911 and recovered two years later – and in the interim thousands lined up to see the blank space on the wall whether the famous painting had been. Today the Mona Lisa has its own room.
Edvard Munch’s The Scream – valued at $100 million – was stolen from the Oslo’s Munch Museum in August 2004. In non-art thievery, some say that $8.8 billion was stolen from the Development Fund for Iraq, also in 2004, evidently a good year for thieves – or at least possibly politically motivated accusers.
The largest haul in US history took place in Boston in 1990 when $300 million in art, including works by Rembrandt and Manet, was taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The artwork remains missing today despite a $5 million reward. It’s not a surprise: The FBI estimates that only 5 percent of stolen artwork is ever recovered.
Yesterday’s armored truck heist pales to the $18.8 million stolen – and later recovered – in a 1997 heist from an armored car vault.
But the math on the annual numbers may surprise you: the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research estimates that $3 billion in art and artifacts is pilfered each year. Pilfered seems too quaint a word for that, doesn’t it?!
And with today’s technology, art may no longer be what thieves take: 9 million Americans have their identify stolen each year and the FTC estimates the cost to the US economy at $50 billion. With those numbers, what thief in his right mind would want to steal art?
That’s today’s math behind the news. I’m Larry Shiller.
Sources:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18440577/
http://www.jacksonville.com/apnews/stories/050207/D8OSHAKG0.shtml
http://www.couplescompany.com/features/politics/2004/heist.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3590106.stm
http://www.boston.com/news/specials/gardner_heist/heist/
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/stolenart1.html
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/09/on_identity_the.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/13/trustedid-this-is-important/
