Crime and Picasso: The Shadowy Underworld of Art

There didn't seem anything particularly unusual about the sale of William Kingsland's art collection, at least at first. A well-known New York art connoisseur, Kingsland died in 2006, and the auction house Christie's was hired inthe months after his death to sell many of his paintings and sculptures. But it turned out that Kingsland was not his given name. His birth name was Melvyn Kohn, and dozens of the artworks in his collection had been stolen from museums and galleries. The most notable include canvases by Pablo Picasso and John Singleton Copley and an Alberto Giacometti sculpture worth as much as a million dollars. "It appears that during a period of time in his life he went into galleries and took things that caught his eye," says New York Public Administrator Ethel Griffin, who is overseeing the case.

So whom did the auction house call for help? The FBI. One of its art theft investigators, Special Agent Jim Wynne, has been working the case since the beginning, researching the provenance of the stolen pieces and interviewing galleries believed to be the last verified owners. "[I wanted] to try and recover this stuff for the victims," Wynne says. And while the rightful owners of some of the pieces have been determined, most of the works still sit in a sort of legal limbo, their exact ownership unclear. The bureau recently posted images of the stolen objects on its website at www.fbi.gov, just a few clicks away from its list of the most wanted terrorists, under the headline: "Stolen Art Uncovered. Is it Yours?"