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are not street criminals. They are sophisticated, polished, and certainly they are successful.”
    As if to prove Czegledi’s point about ineptitude, a Toronto lawyer was busted with a condominium full of stolen art. Czegledi attended some of the court proceedings. The Crown had flipped one of the lawyer’s associates, who in turn agreed to testify against the accused lawyer. During the trial, it was revealed that the man who had been flipped was a convicted art thief. His credibility as a witness was destroyed by the defence. In exchange for his testimony, though, the art thief had secured immunity. The judge acquitted the lawyer, and because of the deal with police, the art thief was free to go. “So there’s a condo full of stolen art, but everyone gets off the hook,” Czegledi said.
    â€œThere are only a handful of detectives in the entire world who have the experience and the training to investigate art thefts properly,” she told me, and most of them were in her Rolodex. In the United States there was a unit of two in Los Angeles; in Canada, a unit of two in Montreal; in England, Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad; in Italy, a unit with the Carabinieri charged with preventing the theft of Italian antiquities, which was rampant. Paris had a unit, and some officers in the Netherlands kept a list of stolen work. The fbi had a famous undercover agent named Robert Wittman, with whom Czegledi consulted once in a while. The “Problem,” though, ignored borders and jurisdictions. Countries across the globe were being drained of cultural loot for the markets in New York and London, which in turn served collectors in wealthy enclaves across the planet.
    â€œChina, Afghanistan, all of Eastern Europe, now Iraq,” said Czegledi. “The statistic for looting actually went down in the Czech Republic recently. You know why? Because everything has been stolen. It’s like a bad joke.”
    In 2006, she flew to Brussels to speak on a conference panel about what Europe was doing to stem the tide of illegal imports, and discovered the answer: “Not much.” After the conference she met with a Brussels police investigator, who took Czegledi to a chic part of the city, where they toured antique stores. At one shop specializing in Chinese antiquities, they chatted up the owner. He explained how he got his merchandise. Sometimes he travelled to China, to a warehouse where all the looted antiquities were stored, and picked out whatever he wanted. He used a special cargo company to transport the illegal items to the borders of Belgium. It cost one euro per kilo. At the border he met the cargo himself, put the loot in his trunk, and drove it back to his shop. Sometimes, though, he went to China for longer to participate personally in excavating an archaeological site. He could buy items as they were lifted out of the ground. The dealer did not realize that he was speaking to an international art lawyer and a criminal investigator. The Belgian investigator was shocked at how comfortable the dealer was telling them how he ripped off China’s cultural heritage. Nothing surprised Czegledi anymore.
    Everything about the Problem was opaque: the relationships between the players, the cash transactions, the collision between high and low culture, between street thugs and elite collectors, between detectives’ quest to learn and their access to information, between the urge to protect a work of art and the urge to possess it—all little pieces of the mysterious puzzle scattered across the globe. According to Czegledi, the war on art theft was being lost, and nobody even knew how big the war was or where the lines of battle were. She told me she came to see the Problem in terms of information—more specifically, as a lack of credible information. “How do we know how large the illegal economy in art is? There’s simply not enough data,” Czegledi said. “Hello.