Art & Crime

Producer: Carlos Alperin
Writer: Bob Spiel
Director: Geoff Tanner
Length: 6x30

Annual losses due to theft of art and antiquities are close to $1 billion, second only to the cost of drug smuggling among international crimes. Art theft has increased in recent years with the enormous appreciation in the market value of art.

Museums and art galleries employ a variety of security measures: they install special alarms to protect their most valuable pieces, paintings are screwed to the wall, breakable items are locked in plexiglass cases screwed down to heavy bases, museums use bars on windows and detectors to monitor them, as well as doors and display areas. Those strategies prevent break-ins when a museum is closed, yet human ingenuity makes these measures sometimes ineffective against clever thieves.

ART & CRIME is a 6x30’ HD documentary series that will uncover the inner working of criminals who engage in the theft, robbery, deceit, vandalism, fraud, smuggling, looting and forgery of famous pieces of art and antiquities. We will use actors to re-enact stories based on real cases of how criminals overcame museums' and art galleries’ security measures and human ingenuity to protect high priced works of art.

ART & CRIME will investigate criminals’ methods, their weaknesses and strengths, their understanding of how to dispose of their stolen objects, their relationship with other criminal gangs, the methods used by the FBI, Interpol and other international agencies to pursue them, and the reasons for their successes or failures.

ART & CRIME will also give an historical context to the pieces of art that will appear in the series. We will show which techniques these artists used to paint, sculpt, print and draw, techniques that criminals must replicate when creating fake artwork.

ART & CRIME will explore the commercial chain in the art world that might also motivate people to commit these crimes. Art criminals are not only those who execute the crime but those who ask others to do it for them. We’ll investigate the inner work of international auction houses and their relationship with the artists, buyers and suppliers.

ART & CRIME will be targeted mainly at an audience intrigued about the nuts of bolts of security systems, planning of robberies, techniques of forgery, smuggling methods; in short, how criminals minds work and how we can protect ourselves from them.