NY Waits For Stolen Art

New York is often the destination for art silently whisked from museums and personal collections As the center of the art world, the city has more than its share of cautious eyes watching for suspicious sales, missing links, and unusually rare offerings for relatively inexpensive art prices. With the disclosures in the past week that hundreds of pieces of art have been stolen from two prominent Russian museums, New Yorkers in the art business and the law enforcement officials who investigate art crime have been watching to see if any of the pieces make their way through this major throughway for the multibillion-dollar art industry. The FBI's top 10 list of stolen art includes many works that were highly publicized after their theft but still haven't been recovered. Paintings like Edvard Munch's "The Scream," which was stolen two years ago this month in a daytime armed robbery, and Leonardo Da Vinci's "Madonna of the Yarnwinder," stolen from a castle in Scotland in 2003, are so well-known that any attempts to sell them would get back to law enforcement fairly quickly, The international police organization Interpol does not have statistics on worldwide art crime, but based on reports from member countries, the top four places for art thefts are France, Italy, Russia, and Germany. For the full story - click the title Irish Art