After college, I did a law degree at Fordham Law School in New York. I loved the law but I didn’t want to be a lawyer. A lawsuit is like a post mortem, everything is done and you just dissect the body. I wanted to get out there and catch the bad guys.
In 1968, fresh out of Fordham, I joined the FBI. After my training, the bureau said it needed undercover agents, assigned to the art crime team. Most of the guys weren’t interested. They wanted to kick in doors, arrest bank robbers and catch spies. But to me, undercover sounded like a dream job. I could get right next to the bad guys. I could go to all the famous hotels - The Plaza, The Warldorf - and wear fancy clothes.
It took me two years to learn to be convincing. I had a mentor and I used to watch how he did it. He took me to see a multi-millionaire art world informant. I went in to his office and he had all these phones on his desk in every colour: red, black, blue, green, yellow. He said: ”This is your phone,” and handed me a green one. ”You are going to be Tom Bishop and I am gonna back you up,” he told me.
To help me play the part, he gave me fancy suits, real diamond rings and even lent me a $20,000 Rolex. He gave me a lot of confidence. I learned how to pretend to be this other person, Tom Bishop, a crooked art dealer.
In 1977, I got my first case. As Tom Bishop, I had to buy a stolen Jackson Pollock from the notorious conman Harold von Maker. First, I had to learn about Jackson Pollock so I could tell if I was being sold a fake. I went to the foremost Pollock expert in the world, who was at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and in one week I learned everything about Pollock, even the way he tacked the canvas on to the frame.
On the morning of the deal, I left to meet Harold’s attorney, Martin Schwartz. I was dressed as Tom Bishop and asked my wife how I looked. ”You look like a pimp,” she said. ”Thank God!” I replied.
I sat in Schwartz’s Park Avenue office talking about the painting for a few minutes. I then revealed myself as an FBI agent and arrested him. It was exciting - I had convinced him I was a wealthy buyer, got him to trust me and then: bingo!
Most of the time, my meetings with the bad guys were in public places. Everything was well planned. There was backup in case the situation turned violent. But if they wanted me on their turf, that could get hairy. Once, I was with an informant doing a deal with a bunch of Mafioso people. One of them said: ”The whole place is surrounded by FBI. You guys must be cops.” I had to think on my feet. I said: ”We’re not the cops. You guys must be the cops.” And they started laughing. They were just testing us. Another time, I was put in a tiny room with my partner before we did a deal. After 10 minutes an 11-year-old boy jumped out of the closet and ran to his Mafioso father: ”Dad, they’re OK. They didn’t say anything. They’re not cops.”
Once the deal was done, I would have to pretend to be arrested along with the bad guys to keep up the disguise and of course to protect the informant. We would sometimes have to spend a night in a cell just in case there were any leaks within the police department.
At one point after I had recovered a Rembrandt in Buffalo, my name got out to the media. When I came home my neighbour said: ”Hey Tom, I saw you on TV today.” My wife was hysterical. She thought that we were all going to be killed and we had to leave New York for a few weeks until it all died down. She hated me going undercover.
I liked my alter ego, Tom Bishop. I wore Gucci and Rolex, I had limos and went to the best places in the city. I convinced the bureau to let me use J Edgar Hoover’s old Cadillac for undercover jobs, so some days I was driving around in that. In my last case, I even conned the then FBI director’s Learjet out of him. He and his wife got out of it, I got in and flew down to Phoenix to convince two Mafioso guys I wanted to buy a stolen Picasso from them.
I retired from the FBI in 1994 having recovered $300m-worth of stolen art. It was a let-down, retiring. One day you are an FBI agent, the next you are Joe Citizen. I am an attorney now but stolen art is in my blood.
I still investigate the fate of stolen paintings in my spare time, and my book Loot: Inside the World of Stolen Art is published this month. With that done, I’m determined to solve one of the FBI’s top 10 crimes: the theft in 1990 of 12 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston.
As told to Sarah Duguid.
