Shortly before Christmas 1998, around the time that Bonnie and Gary Lindberg were finalizing plans to go to Rio, a man came into an art gallery in Philadelphia with two Norman Rockwell paintings. He wanted them authenticated, appraised, and possibly sold.
“I can’t remember his name or what he looked like—it’s been such a long time,” says the gallery’s owner, George Turak. “But I do remember what he told me.”
The man said he was originally from Philadelphia and had come to town from Brazil for the holidays to visit his brother, a city policeman. He claimed he worked for a bank in Brazil and explained that the Rockwell paintings had been pledged as collateral against a loan by someone who died while the loan was outstanding. He had brought the paintings with him in hopes of recouping some of the bank’s money.
The two paintings were Bob Horvath’s “She’s My Baby,” and “Lickin’ Good Bath,” which had belonged to Brown & Bigelow. They had been rolled up in a briefcase, but they appeared to be in good condition.
Turak consulted a two-volume catalogue raisonné of Rockwell’s work published by the Rockwell Museum and discovered that those two paintings, along with five more, were stolen from Elayne Galleries in 1978.
“I called Bob Wittman over at the FBI right away,” says Turak.
A few years before, Turak had helped special agent Robert Wittman when he was working on a theft from a Philadelphia museum, and the two had struck up a friendship. Wittman went on to found the FBI’s art crime team. He was aware of the Minneapolis case, although he hadn’t worked it.
Wittman arranged to have the two Rockwell paintings confiscated. It fell to Turak to inform the banker from Brazil.
“I called him right after Christmas and gave him the bad news. I said, ‘You’ve got a couple stolen paintings here, and I have to turn them over to the authorities. Sorry, but I don’t mess with this stuff.’ He said, ‘Do the right thing,’ which to me meant ‘Hand them over to the Feds,’ but I got the feeling that to him it meant, ‘Give them back to me.’”
Turak never heard from him again after the paintings were seized. The Philadelphia office of the FBI issued a press release announcing their recovery. It noted that the unnamed individual who brought them to Turak’s gallery cooperated fully with the return of the art work and would not be charged with a crime.
The release goes into some detail about the paintings. “‘She’s My Baby’ graced the cover of the June 4, 1927, issue of the Saturday Evening Post,” it says. “‘Lickin’ Good Bath’ was used in a calendar designed by Brown & Bigelow for the winter scene (January-February-March) 1954.”
The paintings were displayed in a conference room at the FBI’s offices. The public was invited and encouraged to take photos.
In September 1999, the Minneapolis office of the FBI returned the paintings to their owners. Phil Jungwirth, senior vice president of Brown & Bigelow, expressed his gratitude publicly, saying, “This is a treasure. Norman Rockwell is a piece of Americana that can’t be duplicated.”
The owner of “She’s My Baby” sent Minneapolis attorney Dennis Peterson to pick up his painting. Peterson told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that his client preferred not to be identified. Contacted recently, Peterson says he is still not at liberty to disclose the owner’s name. Bob Horvath owned the painting when it was stolen.
Shortly after the paintings were seized in Philadelphia, Wittman read the bureau’s files on the Elayne Galleries theft (sans redactions, of course, but he steadfastly and good-naturedly refused to fill in any blanks throughout three interviews). He decided to ask a federal prosecutor about reopening the investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hall was assigned to work with Wittman. They soon found out that the remaining paintings were in the possession of a Brazilian art collector named Jose Carneiro.
They contacted law enforcement authorities in Brazil and began making plans that would require their cooperation. Discussions were then under way about a mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Brazil. Wittman assumed that those talks would work in their favor. The treaty, which gives the FBI leverage in situations like the one posed by Carneiro’s possession of the stolen Rockwells, wasn’t finalized until 2001.
The Minneapolis office of the FBI got Wittman and Hall up to speed on the Lindbergs’ plans, which Wittman found alarming, especially the part about the TV station. He feared the publicity that a U.S. TV crew would stir up in Brazil would spoil his investigation, and maybe even torpedo the treaty negotiations.
“Bonnie almost ruined that case for us,” he says. “Bringing a TV station down there was certain to cause an uproar, and it was just a marketing stunt.”
Bonnie laughed when she heard that. “I ruined their case? I’d been looking for those paintings for twenty years, and all they’d been looking for were reasons to quit. An FBI agent came to the gallery and told me I was on my own six years before Bob Wittman ever got involved. It wasn’t their case. It was our case.”
Bonnie recalls several phone calls from Wittman, as she and Gary were preparing to leave for Brazil. “He asked lots of questions about the theft, and he was very discouraging about our involvement in trying to get the paintings back. He kept pressing me for information. I was busy, and of course to the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought, ‘Isn’t it ironic that after all these years the FBI has developed this sudden interest in the case, and now they want me to drop everything I’m doing in order to help them.’”
An insurance investigator came to the gallery. “Wittman must have told him what we were up to because he knew all about it,” Bonnie says. “I certainly didn’t try to hide anything. He asked why we were going, and we told him.”
The Lindbergs told a trusted friend about the visit, and at his recommendation they hired a criminal attorney, just in case.
The last call from Wittman came the day before Bonnie and her brother left for Brazil. “I wouldn’t talk to him, I was so mad,” she says.
The feeling was mutual, although they’ve both mellowed a bit since. Bonnie now gives Wittman credit for a level of resolve about the case that other investigators lacked. “He’s done some tremendous work recovering stolen art,” she says.
Wittman sticks by his claim that the TV coverage was designed to goose the market for the Date Paintings, but he doesn’t dispute Bonnie’s assertion that she stuck with the search long after the FBI gave up. He admits that he didn’t go to work on the stolen Rockwells until Turak called him. He says he vaguely recalls the Detroit contacts from his review of the files but cautions that tipsters and purported go-betweens often contact the victims of art thefts, and they’re usually scammers.