The Art of the Steal
November 04, 2025 at 03:30PM
Jack Rodolico | The Atavist Magazine | October 2025 | 2,181 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 168, “The Blue Book Burglar.”
The phone inside the mansion rang relentlessly—five times, twenty, forty—echoing from the spacious kitchen to the bedrooms upstairs. The house was a 5,200-square-foot Georgian Colonial constructed of red brick. It had a pool and a tennis court, and it stood at the end of a long wooded driveway, off a secluded cul-de-sac in Greenwich, Connecticut. The town was the crown jewel of the state’s so-called Gold Coast, a swath of wealthy enclaves where Prescott Bush—father of George H. W.—was buried, where Robert F. Kennedy got married, and where Donald Trump would soon purchase his starter mansion. The owners of the red-brick mansion were a banker and his wife (herself the daughter of another banker) whose wedding had been written up in the New York Times. It was Independence Day 1980, and like many people in their social set, they were vacationing on the South Shore of Long Island.
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That’s exactly what the caller was hoping for. As the phone rang again and again, his two accomplices listened outside the home. The caller hung up after fifty rings. The men hiding in the dark were confident that the home was empty, but they took one more precaution to be absolutely sure. Once the ringing stopped, they snipped the phone line clean through, setting off a silent alarm that notified police of a break-in. The men then hid in the trees near the house and waited. A Greenwich patrolman pulled up, surveyed the property, assumed it was a false alarm, and left.
It was time. The two men broke a pane of glass near the back door, entered the mansion, and proceeded to plunder its contents. From a linen closet they took several pillowcases and filled them with approximately 350 pieces of silver: salad forks, fish knives, and bouillon spoons; a pair of grape shears and a cold-meat fork; a baby’s hairbrush and an ashtray; something called a star-footed muffineer. In the master bedroom, they emptied drawers of pearls, a gold watch, and a diamond-and-platinum band. They were thorough, searching cabinets in the library and lowering a pull-down ladder to ransack the attic. They took choice baubles, such as a porcelain umbrella stand and a tea caddy with an ivory finial.
In the living room, the men did something out of the ordinary for most house thieves: They removed a handful of paintings from the walls, but stole just two. These were landscapes by eighteenth-century Dutch and American painters whose names were unlikely to appear in an art history textbook. They were valuable pieces of art, but obscure ones.
Once the thieves had collected what they came for, they exited the house and walked to the end of the driveway. The third accomplice, who had been circling the block in a getaway car since calling the residence, picked them up there, and together they drove off into the night.
When the adjusters at Tiffany & Co. later appraised what had been taken from the mansion, the inventory stretched to five pages. The robbery was valued at more than $100,000, a figure that, when adjusted for inflation, nearly quadruples in today’s dollars—although the art has likely increased tenfold in value.
Greenwich detective Jim Hirsch had become somewhat inured to such crimes when he first heard about the burglary. Home robberies peaked nationally in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Greenwich, where many houses were essentially poorly guarded museums, attracted talented thieves. There was the Silver Bandit, who snuck into the dining room of a home while its occupants were sleeping to steal antique silver. There was the Dinner Set Gang, who, while the rich entertained in the dining room, tore apart the bedrooms in search of jewelry. These thieves were a “pain in the ass,” Hirsch told me.
It would take Hirsch some time to discern what was exceptional about the crew that pulled off the Independence Day heist. For one, their M.O. was supremely cautious. Even more unusual was that this crew had an eye for quality, be it silver, jewels, antiques, or art. “They knew when they saw something,” said Hirsch. “They knew value.”
Actually, just one of the thieves knew value. And he was not yet done stealing the prized possessions of the East Coast elite. Not even close.
While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.
I came across the Greenwich case in 2017. At the time, I was part of a team producing an investigative podcast about the 1990 robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Gardner burglary is a case of utmost superlatives. It ranks as the largest property theft in U.S. history, and has been called “the greatest art heist ever.” More than half a billion dollars’ worth of masterpieces were stolen, including Rembrandt’s only seascape. None of them have been recovered, and no one has ever been charged for the crime.
And yet I couldn’t help but wonder: Greatest art heist compared with what?
In searching for an answer, I learned everything I could about art robberies big and small, from the decades before and since the Gardner heist. I interviewed cops and crooks, academics and insurance adjusters. I pulled news clips about museum jobs across the U.S. and Europe. I read papers about organized-crime syndicates looting archaeological sites in Asia and the Middle East. I learned a lot about this rarified corner of the crime world—for instance, that the black market values stolen art at about 10 percent of the legitimate market price, and that authorities are most likely to recover missing pieces at the point of sale, whether that’s a Christie’s auction or a handoff in a hotel room to an undercover cop pretending to be a cash buyer. While stealing art is a challenge, selling it—and making a profit—is much, much harder.
So when I read a news story about the thief who had led the crew behind the Greenwich robbery, I wanted to know more. The red-brick mansion burglarized in 1980 was just one hit on a long list of them. Dozens of homes owned by members of America’s moneyed class were raided by the same thief and his crew. They were after art, but not the sort that would draw interest from the press. They wanted lesser-known works, and lots of them—the kinds of pieces that would be relatively easy to sell because the entire world wasn’t looking for them.
Over the course of my reporting, I came to believe that the ringleader of these crimes was in a class by himself. I doubt there’s such a thing as the greatest art thief of all time, but I don’t know of any burglar who worked so hard.
Jim Hirsch admired the titans of finance, politics, business, and industry he was sworn to protect. “Loved ’em,” he said. I interviewed Hirsch in a conference room at a Greenwich hedge fund where he’d taken a job as head of security after retiring from the police force. “Old money is tremendous. New money stinks. They seem to think they’re something special,” Hirsch said.
He told me about a friend of his: Andrew Rockefeller, of the Rockefellers, who passed away a few years ago. “Nicest guy you ever want to meet. Khaki pants, Top-Siders, and a sport shirt.” Hirsch was proud to know Rockefeller and his ilk. “Super, super people who remained friends with you after you left the job,” he said.
So when more than eighty homes in Greenwich were stripped of riches on Hirsch’s watch between 1980 to 1982—and that’s not counting the dozens more that happened in nearby communities—he took it a little personally. “It was embarrassing,” he said.
What the burglars stole was as impressive as who they stole it from. From the home of a political strategist Richard Nixon once included on his “enemies list,” they took a collection of oriental rugs (worth $19,400 at the time) and cracked a safe to find a sizable collection of antique stamps ($60,249). From the palatial estate of a family so rich they gifted a library to Yale University, the thieves stole three Tiffany floor lamps ($31,000). “These are not lamps, these are lamps,” Hirsch told me. “Highly identifiable tempered lampshades. They’re magnificent.”
From an insurance executive, the thieves took a nineteenth-century Swiss music box ($20,000). From a Rockefeller—not Andrew, another one—they took a platinum bracelet embedded with 280 diamonds ($15,300). They broke in to the homes of a pioneering cardiologist, the chairman of the National Audubon Society’s board of directors, and a descendant of an early investor in Thomas Edison’s light bulb. They stole a pair of handheld fans originally owned by an emperor of France ($2,000) and a full-length raccoon-fur coat ($2,000). They stuffed an untold fortune’s worth of silverware into countless pillowcases.
And then there were the paintings. The thieves homed in on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oils, each canvas small enough to fit inside a briefcase. The works had humdrum titles such as A Hawking Party Resting at a Wayside Inn ($2,400), Hunter in Pink Coat on Brown Horse Jumping Fence ($3,000), and H.M.S. Duncannon 120 Guns ($5,000). They were painted by long-dead British, American, and Dutch artists for whom there was a boutique market of small galleries catering to the tastes of the very types of people the art was stolen from. It was uncanny what the thieves recognized as valuable. For instance, from the widow of a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence they stole an 1842 painting by a French artist, a work that had not been on the open market in generations because it was passed down through the family.
Victims of these thefts returned from vacations in Europe, Martha’s Vineyard, or the Virgin Islands to find their homes ransacked—although one police report stated, “The entry was not immediately noticed due to the enormity of the house.” Losing family heirlooms was bad enough, but the violation of privacy and security was something else. “The property’s always insured,” Hirsch told me. “The problem that your home was invaded is a whole different world. There were some people that sold their houses. Some people used to greet you at the door with a baseball bat after that.”
DNA evidence was not yet a forensic tool, which was unfortunate since the thieves left behind plenty of it, often on cigarette butts stubbed out in the course of the robberies. Once, in a guest bathroom, a burglar defecated in the toilet and did not flush.
As the rate of the robberies picked up, from about one per month in 1980 to several per weekend in 1982, police began to notice patterns: the pillowcases used as loot bags, the broad array of high-value spoils, the timing (always after dark and on weekends). “You could take the complainant’s name off any of these burglary reports and exchange it with any other one,” Hirsch once told a newspaper reporter. “They were all identical.” Law enforcement concluded that the burglars cut the phone lines in the homes they targeted to deliberately trigger alarm systems, most likely to watch hapless patrolmen visit and then leave the scene.
Who was buying all the loot from the thieves? The cops figured it was someone with art-world savvy. “A burglar is only as good as his fence,” a detective from Bedford, New York, just across the state line from Greenwich, told a New York Times reporter. “A junkie doesn’t have a good fence—he goes to a pawnbroker. But someone who steals paintings, he has a good fence. You know you’re not dealing with something run-of-the-mill.”
Law enforcement also became convinced that there was a link among the victims. Not just their wealth and the location of their homes—something more singular. Detectives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, cross-referenced their cases. Did the victims belong to any clubs? Only the most exclusive yacht and country clubs in the country, but there wasn’t one they all belonged to. What about academic affiliations? Collectively, they’d been to every elite boarding school and Ivy League university, but they weren’t all, say, graduates of Yale. Did they use the same arborist? Was the same individual collecting their trash? No and no. The police did notice one thing: Many of the victims’ phone numbers were not publicly listed, which made the fifty-ring calls odd—to say nothing of the hang-up calls some targets had received prior to being robbed.
Two years into the crime wave, investigators were no closer to identifying the burglars, who were more prolific than ever. Over Memorial Day weekend in 1982, they hit five houses in Bedford alone. In Greenwich, they were returning to rob homes they’d previously struck. Police decided to cast a wider net via teletype, a messaging system used by law enforcement around the country, in the hope that someone, somewhere, knew something useful. According to Hirsch, the teletype spelled out the thieves’ methods and asked any department experiencing similar crimes in its jurisdiction to contact the Greenwich police.
The next morning, Hirsch got a call from a cop in Massachusetts who wanted to know: Had he ever heard of a book called the Social Register?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/04/blue-book-burglar-art-heist/
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