Heading Up North for the weekend? Take a copy of "Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures" (Crown Publishers, 336 pages, $25), Robert K. Wittman's entertaining memoir detailing how he launched the FBI's tremendously successful Art Crime Team, only to see it fade to obscurity amid bureaucratic self-interest.
With the help of Philadelphia Inquirer investigative reporter John Shiffman, Wittman recounts years of undercover work that led to the recovery of $225 million in stolen art treasures and historical artifacts, including an original copy of the Bill of Rights pillaged during the Civil War.
Those tales would be entertaining enough on their own, but a subtext roils beneath the surface about the ineptitude of bureaucrats who seem to value their careers more than their duty to solve crimes and protect their agents.
Wittman cautions in an author's note that "Priceless" is a memoir, "not an autobiography or exposé. It's my version of what happened -- no one else's." Then he cleverly itemizes the measures he and Shiffman took to ensure accuracy. Make no mistake, Wittman's having his cake and eating it, too.
Both as an exposé and a true-crime narrative, "Priceless" falls a bit short of "The Infiltrator," Robert Mazur's gritty retelling of how he infiltrated Colombian drug cartels and brought down their money-laundering operation. Like Wittman, Mazur dressed down some of his former superiors in his book, which was published last year.
Reading "Priceless" and "The Infiltrator" back-to-back, as I did, will leave you a bit disheartened about our federal investigative agencies. Not only do the agencies work in isolation from one another, but within agencies, investigators work in isolation from each other -- a point drilled home by Wittman as he describes the internecine rivalries that hampered his efforts to recover $500 million in art stolen in a spectacular 1990 heist from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Minnesota art connoisseurs will take parochial pleasure in reading about Wittman's international ploy to recover $1.2 million in Norman Rockwell paintings stolen in 1978 from the Elayne Gallery in St. Louis Park.
But the book isn't just war stories. Wittman also probes his own motivations and attitudes, as befits a memoir. He describes the racial prejudice he felt growing up in the United States after World War II as the son of a white father and a Japanese mother, for instance. The telling informs his passionate pursuit of artifacts important to Hispanic, African-American and Native American cultures.
