Hello and welcome to today's webinar, Fine Art Theft, Fraud and Loss Prevention. Please be aware of the IMUA statement. We are very fortunate to have David Hall presenting today. David L. Hall is a partner at Wigan and Dana LLP and a member of the Art and Museum Law Practice Group. He represents museums, universities, galleries and dealers in art, private collectors, insurers, foundations, and national governments in matters relating to ownership of cultural property. In 2013, Mr. Hall retired from the United States Department of Justice after a 23-year career as an Assistant United States Attorney. While in federal service, he served as the Special Prosecutor for the FBI Art Crime Team and has extensive experience investigating and prosecuting cultural property crime. David is a member of IMUA's Arts and Records Committee and is a past Annual Meeting and Regional Advisory Seminar Presenter, all to excellent reviews. Welcome, David. Thanks, Lillian. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm going to cover two topics today relating to fine arts and cultural property. One is I'm calling when things go sideways. That means when things end up in court. And then the second thing we'll talk about is art theft prevention and some suggestions as to how to mitigate risk in that area. So starting with things going sideways, what we'll do is give you some examples of matters involving stolen or allegedly misappropriated fine art that ended up in court. But before I do, I wanted to offer the first poll. Give me half a second. Lillian, am I supposed to click on something? Sure, I've got it, I think. Is that the white? No, I think that's not it. Hold on one second. Yeah, it's the other one. We got it. Okay. So the question is, what's the value of art that is stolen each year worldwide? I see the answers are flying in. You want me to broadcast the results now, David? Yes. Okay, there you go. And we have a very smart group, or some very good Googlers. The FBI estimates that annually, worldwide, the value of all cultural property stolen is $4 to $6 billion, which is starting to get to be a pretty serious number when you think about it. So it looks like 41% of you got that right, which is pretty good. And I'll tell you that before I worked with the FBI, I definitely would not have gotten that answer right. And most of the art or the cultural property that drives that number is fine art as opposed to archaeological material, which, although important, tends to have a much lower market value. So we'll talk about three examples of fine art. Well, two examples of fine art and one example of an archaeological object that ended up in court. And we'll start with the United States versus Davis. Davis involved a Pizarro monotype called Le Marche, and this is the monotype pictured here. And the history of it is that it was stolen from a museum in France in 1981, and then Davis bought it several years later in 1985 in Texas for fair market value, which is an important fact in the case. And thereafter, in 2002, he consigned it to Sotheby's for sale. And as many of you know, Sotheby's advertises its auctions, and the French authorities noticed Le Marche in this advertising for the Sotheby's auction, approached the U.S. government and asked for assistance. This is actually a fairly common pattern. When I was a prosecutor, I got a large number of requests from foreign governments to assist in the recovery of their cultural property. And in this case, the French asked the U.S. government to seize the painting as a stolen object and to return it to them. And so the U.S. government and the French coordinated in the investigation, and in 2006, the U.S. government filed this action to seize the monotype. In doing so, the U.S. government invoked a statute called the Tariff Act. And what the Tariff Act forbids is the importation of objects of any kind contrary to law. And what was contrary to law about the importation of the Pizarro monotype was that it was stolen property. And that is a violation of the National Stolen Property Act, which makes it a crime, actually, to transport stolen property across state or international boundaries. So that was the government's theory going into this case, and the government demonstrated that with evidence that had been presented by the French government that the artwork was stolen in France and was imported into the United States knowingly, not by Davis, but by someone else. So it was an object that was illegally smuggled into the United States. Davis' response was to say that the object was procured in good faith by him and at fair market value. The significance of the value of the sale, in other words, the price of the sale, is that, as I'm sure you imagine, stolen property, artwork, cars, jewelry, anything, fetches a much lower price than legitimate property, that is, property that has not been stolen. And so when you're paying a true market price for something, it indicates that you don't know it's stolen and you're not a participant in whatever the unlawful activity is. And so it was with Davis. The problem with that, and as I say here in this slide, the jury finds for the United States. The problem with Davis' position was that valid title to stolen property cannot be conveyed and will not be enforced by a court. So although Davis was an innocent purchaser for value, that fact did not provide him with a defense in this litigation and did not do anything to prevent the government from obtaining a judgment against Davis and the artwork in order to seize it. Similarly, it's common advice from people like me to anyone who's going to acquire artwork to perform due diligence as to the history of the artwork and the title. But due diligence is not a guarantee that everything is going to go well. In this particular case, the fact that the purchaser, Davis, did not find evidence of the theft of the artwork did not protect him from civil liability. I will point out that due diligence can protect a defendant from criminal liability because in the case of criminal liability, the defendant or rather the government must prove that the defendant knew he was obtaining stolen property. And in the case of this Pizarro monotype, there was no evidence to indicate that Davis knew this was stolen at the time of the purchase. So that would be a good defense in a criminal case, but in a civil case it's not a defense at all. The fact that someone conducts due diligence and otherwise acts in good faith in procuring an artwork that turns out to have been stolen will not defend, will not provide a defense in a lawsuit by someone seeking a return to the true owner. This is one of the factors that has led towards increased interest in the industry towards title insurance for fine art. Let's move to another example. This is an example that my law firm, Wiggin & Dana, was involved in, but I was not. It took place before I was a partner here and when I was still in the government. But our client was Yale University, and the litigation in this case involved this painting by Van Gogh called The Night Cafe, which you can go see at the Yale University Art Gallery now, thanks to a successful result in the litigation. The plaintiff in this case was claiming ownership of the painting, and the basis for that claim was that he was descended of a Russian millionaire named Morozov who had collected a really large collection of artwork, including The Night Cafe. And unfortunately for Morozov, in 1918 the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, and of course that was the beginning of the Soviet Union, and they nationalized his collection along with many other fine art collections. As you know from history, the Soviet Union was a communist state and their ideas of property were very different from our own and were basically contrary to the idea of private property. So valuable objects like The Night Cafe and other artworks were seized by the national government of the Soviet Union. In 1933, the Soviet Union decided, and of course remember that's the middle of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union decided to deaccession its significant holdings of art and other valuable property in order to buy agricultural equipment and other equipment that was being used for industrial purposes. And at that time the Soviet Union sold The Night Cafe to a Yale alum by the name of Stephen Clark. And ultimately Mr. Clark passed away in 1960 and he bequeathed the painting to Yale University, which displayed it conspicuously at their museum. The lawsuit basically asserted, the plaintiff asserted, that this painting had been stolen by the Bolsheviks, that the seizure by the Bolsheviks and ultimately the Soviet Union of a painting was contrary to law, at least law as we see it in the United States, and that therefore Yale could not assert good title to it because it was stolen property. So the plaintiff in this action was trying to make the same claim the U.S. government was making in the Davis case, which is that it doesn't matter whether you were behaving in good faith and whether you conducted due diligence, what matters is that this is a stolen painting and it has to be returned to the true owner or at least the descendants of the true owner. The defenses that Yale raised were, there were two primary defenses. One was the Act of State Doctrine. And what the Act of State Doctrine says is that the U.S. courts are not going to second guess the actions of foreign sovereigns. So when a foreign sovereign like the Soviet Union decides to seize something, in general you can't go to a U.S. court and say, that's contrary to the way we would have done things in the United States and therefore I want you to undo that. It is true that this is the kind of action that generally would not be supported by U.S. law. That is the action in 1918 and sort of nationalization of private property without due process. But under the Act of State Doctrine, the court will not engage in second guessing. The second defense that was raised was the Statute of Limitations. And that's basically saying you're just waiting too long to bring this action. This theft that you're alleging took place in 1918. The sale to the Yale alum Stephen Clark took place in 1933. And it was bequeathed to Yale in 1960. It's been on conspicuous display. And you've waited decades to bring your action, and that's too long. Here's the modern restatement of the Act of State Doctrine. I'm going through it a second time just because it might seem counterintuitive, but it is a particularly important doctrine to keep in mind in cultural property litigation because cultural property litigation is truly international in nature. There are many objects, either archaeological or fine art objects, that originate in other countries and therefore these issues come up. It's also important to keep in mind that the way the U.S. looks at private property is not a matter of consensus worldwide, and there are many different kinds of legal rules that apply to cultural property overseas, and many countries assert ownership of cultural property. And that can give rise to issues under the Act of State Doctrine. And the general rule here that's being stated is that so long as a foreign sovereign is taking an action regarding property within its own territory, that's important. The Act of State Doctrine does not apply if the foreign sovereign leaves its territory to seize property. But within its own territory, generally speaking, the U.S. courts will not second-guess unless there's a treaty or some other multilateral or bilateral agreement that provides a basis in law for the U.S. courts to evaluate that taking. And that comes from the Supreme Court, and that's about as good as it gets. Let's talk about an archaeological object that involved the same sort of issues. This is a case that's usually referred to as the SLAM case. SLAM stands for the St. Louis Art Museum. But it involved this mask from 19th Dynasty Egypt, the mask of Kenefer Nefer. And the mask was originally excavated in 1952 in Egypt, and it was registered pursuant to law, a law that required the registration of archaeological objects in Egypt. Soon thereafter, it was shipped to Cairo for storage in 1966, and then it was discovered to be missing in 1973. I will point out that that gap between 1966 and 1973 might seem long to you if you don't have a lot of experience with cultural property, but this is actually a common scenario in terms of objects of cultural property that go missing. Often they go missing and nobody really knows when they went missing. There were shipping documents that showed the object going to Cairo in 1966, but then there was nothing until someone made note of its absence in 1973. So it could have gone missing in late 1966 or early 1972. Nobody knows. It's just not there anymore. In 1998, the St. Louis Art Museum bought the mask for about a half a million dollars. Some years later, quite a few years later, in 2006, the Egypt Supreme Council of Antiquities, which is a government agency that governs Egypt's cultural property, learned of that accession and objected to it and asked the U.S. government for assistance, which was provided. And the U.S. government, in sort of a similar situation to the Davis case, the U.S. government brought an action in court and did so in order to obtain possession of the mask of Knafer Nefer in order to return it to Egypt. And like the Davis case, the government in the Slam case invoked the tariff act, which provides for seizure and forfeiture of objects that are merchandise, is the term of art, which is imported into the United States unlawfully. The government's theory was the mask was stolen and was stolen property, and so because it was stolen property, it could not be legally introduced into the United States. Therefore, it should be seized and forfeited. And the U.S. government should return it to Egypt. The outcome here was a lot different from Davis. In the Slam case, the government really got slammed by the court. The court dismissed the claim of the U.S. government on the grounds that it had been insufficiently pled. In other words, the court said you haven't alleged facts sufficient to support the claim that the mask was stolen, therefore you can't show to a level of probable cause that the mask is stolen property. All you've said is that it's missing, but you haven't explained anything about your theory of theft. It's not there anymore. But you didn't say where it was stolen, when it was stolen, who stole it. And the government apparently also failed to identify an adequate legal theory to support their claim of theft. And so what the court said is this, and believe me, and I should point out, I had nothing to do with this case. And I would really not want to receive an opinion like this in the mail from the court. This is the court being pretty rough with the government. But the court is saying the government cannot simply rest on its laurels and believe that it can initiate a civil forfeiture proceeding on the basis of one bold assertion that because something went missing in 1973 and turned up somewhere else in 1998, it was therefore stolen and illegally imported. I don't know about your backgrounds necessarily, but in the law, that's about as rough as it gets. So here's a couple of key takeaways. Again, one of the reasons there's increasing interest in title insurance for fine art is that you cannot convey good title to stolen goods. It is actually very difficult, particularly when you're talking about old objects of fine art. It's actually difficult to establish through provenance a perfect chain of custody and a perfect chain of title. It is always worth doing. That is, due diligence is always worth the effort because it is important, and particularly if there's a stolen art allegation, it's very important to be able to show a good faith effort to determine the bona fides of a piece of fine art. But the fact that the purchaser is an innocent purchaser for fair market value has done due diligence and conducted himself or herself in good faith does not protect against civil liability. Again, it will protect against criminal liability, and that can be very important, but it will not shield the purchaser from civil liability. There are defenses, however, that are illustrated in these cases. One is the act-of-state doctrine, which was at work in the Yale case. Likewise, statute of limitations and latches. Latches is a concept that's like the statute of limitations in that it prevents plaintiffs from waiting too long to bring actions, and a defendant can bring up the doctrine of latches and the statute of limitations as a defense when too much time has gone by. And then, of course, there's the issue of insufficient pleading. You know, if somebody is going to – you know, if the government is going to allege a terror fact violation, they actually have to get around to alleging a theft. And if they fail to do that, then they're not going to be able to show that the object is stolen property. Now we're going to turn our attention to art theft prevention. And Eileen, if I can trouble you, I think this is where we wanted to do a poll. The question is, what percent of art theft do you think is committed by insiders? This will be a way to determine how many of you are still awake. Would you like me to broadcast it now, David? Please do. All right. First of all, again, this is a very high IQ crowd. Either that or my questions aren't hard enough. But the correct answer is the one most of you got, which is 90%. And I'll give you some examples of that as we go through here. What I'm going to do is first describe the three pillars of art theft prevention. And then I'll give you some examples of some art thefts to illustrate where things went wrong. The three pillars are physical security, human resources, and internal controls. I want to admit something at the outset here, which is that pillars are independent objects. And in truth, these three pillars are not all that independent. You'll see as we go through this that there's a lot of overlap between physical security, human resources, and internal controls. But for the purpose of organizing the presentation and the fact that I had a picture of three pillars, I thought we'd go forward with that concept. The physical security aspect of it really has to do with walls and locks and ways of putting up barriers, physical barriers, between thieves and valuable property. The human resources pillar relates to using humans as a barrier between thieves and artwork, both in the form of guards and also in the form of internal monitoring within an organization like, say, a museum. This goes to the insider threat issue, which most of you are already well aware of. And then finally, internal controls, that mostly is about the insider threat. It includes concepts like background checks, different inventory control models, and having written procedures to govern who can deal with valuable property and under what circumstances. All right, here's our 90% figure. The FBI estimates that 90% of our thefts are by insiders. The remainder, 25%, are burglaries, thefts by outsiders making entry into private property. There are a few armed robberies, and they get a lot of publicity, like the Gardner Museum and the Swedish National Museum. But they're actually quite rare. They're, in some ways, more interesting, usually more splashy, but they're really quite rare if you look at the total distribution of property crimes involving art. Some examples of physical security that you might want to keep in mind, particularly if you're in the business of risk mitigation with fine art. There are devices that can be implanted in cultural property that enable tracking if the object is stolen, or even if it's stolen, that can be used to track it. There are devices that can be implanted in a painting if the object is stolen, or even if it's moved. And a serious question to think about is where you're going to insert that object. I mean, you have to understand that if you're going to put a GPS tracking device into, say, a painting, that you're putting a foreign device inside a painting. That might not be positive in terms of the nature of the artwork. You could put it in the frame, but keep in mind that a lot of thieves will simply cut a painting away from its frame, and that won't do you much good. Of course, other forms of monitoring, like CCTV and high-resolution cameras, motion detectors within the space of a museum or a warehouse, are extremely helpful. There are a lot of different physical barriers that can be created, and technology, just as technology has given us more options in this area with respect to electronic surveillance, so it has in the area of physical barriers. There are all sorts of advanced alarm products. Simple, I mean, wall-mount locks, just devices that need strange wrenches to dislodge an object from a wall are extremely useful. And then, of course, locks, and that includes digital locks, which can be quite effective. In terms of human resources, a serious question for anybody who has valuable cultural property is whether to employ guards. But then once that decision has been made, there are serious issues in terms of how to use them. Strategic placement. Where do you put them? How many do you need? When do you need them? And how do you train them to make sure that they're good at their jobs? In terms of the insider threat, the personnel monitoring is a very important component of all this. Simple rules like two-person validation, which are analogous to accounting controls. I mean, you might be familiar with a rule in a company that says a check over $5,000 has to be countersigned by a second party. So it is with valuable property. If somebody is going to go look at an object that's in a high-value storage area, good idea to have a sign-in procedure and a rule that says a second person has to accompany. And then in terms of internal controls, very important background checks for new hires and then renewals of background checks for people who have been employed for a long time. The government, people who have security clearances in the government have to have a background check renewed every five years. I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb. Inventory is extremely important. I mentioned in the case of the mask of Kneffer-Kneffer that the mask went missing in 1966 and then was discovered to be missing in 1973. That's an indication of imperfect inventory control. It's a good thing they had an inventory, and I'll tell you that actually it's not always the case that valuable objects of cultural property are carefully inventoried, but it's very important to do so, to literally keep a written inventory, to take photographs front and back of fine art. The reason for taking the photograph of the back is that the back often has unique identifiers, and there have been cases of paintings being forged to a very, very high quality, so on the front it was very difficult to tell that the object had been forged, but the back told the story because the unique identifiers were not there. I've also used the back to identify stolen property where a painting had been significantly repaired and restored, so the front of it actually looked quite different after the restoration, but the back looked just the same. And any other unique identifiers should be noted at that time, anything that's going to help the authorities identify the property if it ever is stolen. And, of course, written procedures regarding access and control to valuable property are extremely important. I'll give you some examples of failures of that, but generally speaking, it's not a good idea to have unfettered access by any employee into an area where artwork is stored. The two-person rule is a very good rule of thumb. All right, let's talk about Wyatt Yeager. So Wyatt Yeager is somebody that I prosecuted a few years ago. I guess that was about a year before I retired from the federal government, and this was a case that demonstrates the insider threat quite well. He was hired as a curator by the Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Ironically, one of his jobs was to put together a rigorous inventory of their holdings because they didn't have any such inventory at the time he was hired. He was only employed there for about three months, and in that time he stole about $1 million worth of rare coins. Basically what he was doing was spending his time researching these coins. He would actually go into the vault. This was a case where there were no controls whatsoever. He had unfettered access to the storage area where the coins were, and he'd look at them, and he would do research on them to figure out which ones were worth the most, and then those coins ended up in his pocket. This obviously is an example of multiple failures. I would point out that there was nothing to prevent his exiting the museum with his pockets full of rare coins. I would suggest a device for detecting metal would be a pretty good idea in the context of a money museum. This case represented a physical security failure in that he had unfettered access that was not recorded in any way. There was no log that indicated when he signed in or signed out coins or anything like that. There was no CCTV or other sort of video monitoring. There was no second person looking at what he was doing. There was also no background check. As I said, there was no effective inventory and no written procedures to govern the handling of this valuable property. So this was pretty much a hat trick in terms of the failures of all three of the pillars. Ultimately, well after the fact, well after he had left the museum, the theft was discovered. Of course, that's not a good thing when the theft is discovered long after the fact because memories have gone stale, evidence is lost. So it was hard to sort of recreate the case and investigate from a temporal distance. It's also, another challenge was because there was no inventory, it was difficult to figure out what was actually missing. And the way, ultimately, we had to do that was by using accession records to figure out what had been accessioned into the collection. And then if they were missing, we investigated them as stolen property. But as you learned in the Knaeffer-Knaeffer case, the fact that something's missing doesn't necessarily mean it's stolen. So ultimately, we were able to prove that he had stolen a number of objects. Mainly we were able to do that by showing that he was selling them overseas for quite a bit of money. And he was ultimately convicted. He pled guilty and was sentenced. Here's another case, Marcus Patman. This is a case that I prosecuted with an FBI agent named Bob Whitman, whom you might have heard of. He wrote a book called Priceless, which is actually a good book to read in terms of, if you're interested in examples of art crime. And this is an example of an outsider threat. This is actually a burglar. The press characterized him as sort of a cat burglar, but he wasn't quite that stealthy. He was more of a smash and grab. What he did was he figured out that Picasso etchings are extremely valuable. And he also figured out that they're not unique because they're etchings. And so he went online to identify some etchings that were particularly valuable, and then he went to a local gallery. He was in Miami, and he went to West Palm Gallery, and he saw the three etchings that are shown at the bottom of the slide were being sold there. And so he basically went shopping there for them, and then came back later that night and stole them. And the only barriers to his entry were there was a fence. The gallery was next to a golf course, and there was a fence between the golf course and the gallery. He went over the fence, and he kicked in the back door and took the etchings. That's why I say it was really a smash and grab. And he ended up selling one of the etchings to an art dealer who alerted the police. We conducted an undercover investigation, and we were able to arrest him, and he did plead guilty. This case shows the significance of a physical security failure. There was no outside monitoring. There were no guards. There was no outside monitoring. It was not a difficult thing for him to make entry just by kicking in the back door. There was some electronic surveillance during the day when he was visiting, and so that's one of the ways we knew that he had actually visited the gallery to conduct pre-operational surveillance. But that was it. So this is really the main lesson here is the importance of physical security as a way of preventing art theft. Here's a case, a Andrea Lawton case. I want to emphasize that I had nothing to do with, and you'll see in that last bullet why I'm so anxious to explain I had nothing to do with this case. This was a Benjamin Franklin bust that was stolen from a private collection in the Philadelphia area in 2012. It was the bust was estimated to be worth between $1 million and $3 million, and it was stolen by an outside agency, a housecleaning agency employee who was cleaning the house. She had been specifically told that this was a very valuable object and to be very careful of it, and then she was fired. And so she decided to steal it. Eventually, the FBI conducted an investigation. She was located in New Orleans, and through an intermediary she was asked to return to the Philadelphia area, and she did so by bus. And when she took the bus north, she put the bust into her duffel bag and threw that under the bus, and then other luggage was thrown on top of it, and so the bust was broken. That's not the optimal way to do an art recovery, in my opinion. So this case proves that proposition. It also shows the importance of physical security and what happens when there's a failure. This house cleaner had unfettered access that was unmonitored. There were no guards. Of course, there were no internal procedures. Now we can be a little sympathetic with that because I doubt most of us have internal control written procedures that govern our activities inside our homes, but most of us probably don't have million-dollar busts in our homes, and so it would have been a good idea to spend a little more time on art theft prevention in this case, in my humble opinion. The Swedish National Museum case is a case of – this is an armed robbery case. This is – I mentioned Whitman before in his book, Priceless. This is – he writes about this in his book because he was the undercover agent who ultimately recovered the Rembrandt here, but several paintings, including this self-portrait of Rembrandt from 1630, were stolen from the Swedish National Museum. It was an invasion-style armed robbery, well-planned. A car bomb was set off in a different part of Stockholm in order to divert the police, and it did. They went in with weapons drawn, put everybody, including guards and patrons, on the ground, took the paintings they want, escaped out the back door. The museum abutted a canal, and there was a speedboat waiting for them. It's like something out of James Bond, and they went speeding away. This case illustrates the proposition that's actually very important in art crime, which is there are some really good art thieves out there, good in the sense of being very bad. They're very effective at theft, but they're not necessarily so good at business. So actually, once they stole these paintings, they had a really hard time selling them, and ultimately sold this Rembrandt self-portrait to Whitman, and they were arrested. This is a case that demonstrates a physical security failure, but at some level, I think you have to be somewhat sympathetic with the Swedish National Museum here, because when you have a well-armed adversary with enough will, it's actually very hard to defend. I'm not sure we want the guards opening a fire on the armed robbers in broad daylight when there are patrons on the floor of the museum, and so this is a particularly difficult kind of theft to defend against. I'll tell you about another one, which was not quite so dramatic, but in Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, this was basically a long, slow, seven-year embezzlement by a trusted employee of historic artifacts worth about $2.5 million. Many, if not most, of the objects stolen were presentation swords from the Civil War era, and it was all stolen by the janitor, and he sold it to a collector who was very interested in these objects and was willing to sell them. The way the janitor did that is he had unfettered access to the storage area and also unfettered exit. There was no surveillance or recorded video of his activities, and what he would do is he'd go in there with a trash bag, and he'd throw something in the trash bag and drop that in the trash and then put that out in the dumpster, and then at the end of the day, he'd recover it, bring it home, and sell it to his customer. It took a long time due to the fact that there were no effective internal controls or inventory controls for the Historical Society to realize that they'd been the victim of a crime. That's why the crime went on for so long. Eventually, he was convicted, and the objects were recovered, and the collector, his customer, was also convicted. That was an interesting case also because it's the only case I actually have ever seen where there actually was a single person who was sort of just buying – had sort of put in a standing order for particular kinds of objects. You see that in movies a lot, but I'd never actually seen that other than this particular case where there was this one collector who was really interested in presentation swords, and he would buy whatever the janitor could come up with, and it turned out to be quite a lot. So key takeaways. This is just to repeat really what I've already said, and that is that the three pillars are physical security, human resources, and internal controls. They're all important, and which category of art that presentation is the most important depends on the facts and circumstances of each institution. I would say in a museum, all of these categories are important, and I've given you examples of what happens when any one of them fails, and I'd like to invite you – I suggested for future reading, you could read Priceless if you want. The other thing you might look at is this book, which is called The Legal Guide for Museum Professionals. It is written for museum professionals, not insurance professionals, but it does talk about a lot of risk issues, and in particular, a lot of legal issues that relate to different kinds of cultural property. You'll find that chapter two is especially well-written. And I'm happy to entertain questions if that's – if anybody has any. It might have been helpful for me to say early on, you can send your questions in during the presentation, but it's a little late for that. Yeah, this is fine. Anybody who has any questions at this time, they can type them into the Q&A pod in the text box and click the balloon icon, and it will be sent right to David, so we'll give a minute for questions to come in. All right, who's the author of both books? Let's see, the Priceless book is written by Robert Whitman, W-I-T-T-M-A-N, and he co-wrote it with John Schiffman, S-H-I-F-F-M-A-N. The Legal Guide for Museum, and that's a very easy book to get a hold of. I think Simon & Schuster published it. The Legal Guide was edited. That was published by Roman & Littlefield and was edited by Julia Courtney, C-O-U-R-T-N-E-Y. And the next question, would a background check on Yeager have turned anything up? That's an interesting question. I have a two-part answer. One is, yes, it would have turned up the fact that his previous employer was a treasure hunter in Florida who was looking for submerged treasure. And, you know, that's not in and of itself illegal or anything, but if I had been looking at a background check that showed that in the background of somebody who wanted to be the curator at the Money Museum, I would have some questions about his motivation. And what it is he was really interested in. The other thing that the background check would have shown is that he didn't really have the kind of background you might expect from a curator. You know, he had his own coin collection, but he didn't have a lot of bona fides when it came to, you know, curating a large collection of coins. He didn't have any experience as a curator, for one thing. I don't recall, if our memory serves, I don't remember any formal training in the area of curating or coin collecting. So he was kind of thin in that regard. There were also some suspicious circumstances in terms of the reason for his leaving his previous employer that might have gotten my attention. So it wouldn't have been the background check would not have, you know, unequivocally proven that he was predisposed to steal, but it would have sent, at least for me, a couple, and of course easy for me to say with the benefit of hindsight, but it would have given me a couple of red flags. Oh, Sasha, that's a really interesting question. The new DNA tracking for paintings that are being developed. There are a number of different things. This is an example where technology, you know, keeps advancing and gives us more and more to put in our toolbox. There are a number of different technological advances that relate to tracking artwork. One is literally DNA, and actually one thing I should mention is that, you know, all it takes is a good sneeze to get DNA embedded into, you know, a painting or a hair, anything like that that's uniquely identifiable. Of course it's necessary to have the known DNA from the artist in order to make a perfect match. But just plain old DNA technology is a way of identifying art, but there are a lot of new technologies taking off from that, creating, for example, artificial DNA. In other words, it's not necessarily, you know, literally true natural DNA, but it's a synthetic DNA that can be embedded into the painting and can be used as a way of matching a known painting to an unknown painting. If something goes missing, you're able to show it's the same thing that went missing. There are a number of other technologies also ongoing, other ways of embedding markers into paintings that would enable identification down the line. And, yes, there's a question about the art loss register. And there are registers. The art loss register is a really good example of, you know, one register. There are others as well in which stolen art can be reported. It's also possible to report it to the FBI. You know, due diligence and provenance research should include checking any indices available to, you know, to see if a particular painting that somebody is – that a museum, for example, is interested in purchasing for a collection or an individual collector is interested in purchasing is part of those – is included in those databases. So, yes, I agree with the comment. I'm just reading it. It's a very long comment, but it doesn't actually have a question at the end. So if the question is, is it a good idea to use these databases, the answer is absolutely. But, you know, but also keep in mind that there's no – you know, the fact that something's not in a database doesn't necessarily mean it's not stolen, so beware of false negatives. And is there any one of the three pillars more important than the other? I would say no because it – I mean, in a particular circumstance, the answer could be yes if, you know, it just depends on what the circumstances of the collection are. For example, if you happen to be a private collector and you have a very valuable painting in your home, I wouldn't say written procedures, you know, are all that important and physical security is probably more important. But when it comes to, say, a museum, I would have a hard time saying one is more important than the other, that they're all – you know, they all perform different roles. I mean, physical security tends to be more directed at outsiders and internal controls are really about insiders, but they're all awfully important. I mean, you don't want to – even if you have really good internal controls, that doesn't mean you can afford to leave the front door unlocked. So I would say all of them are important. Excellent. Well, thank you, David. It is 3 o'clock, so you are excellent on time. And I thank our attendees for their great questions. And thank you, David, for a really excellent presentation. It's my pleasure. And everybody will receive an e-mail link to a survey, so please share feedback. We look forward to getting your feedback and hope to see you in a webinar soon. Thank you.

Fine Art Theft

Fraud

Loss Prevention

Cultural Property Ownership

Art Theft Risks

Art Theft Prevention

Physical Security

Human Resources

Insider Theft