Free Priceless by Robert K. Wittman Page B

“I’m hungry, I want to get lunch.”
    I kept a straight face, and we went back inside to see Larry. I tried the direct approach.
    “Was there anything else that you just happened to find when you found the statue?”
    “Anything else, like what?”
    “A glass ball.”
    “A glass ball? Yeah, yeah. It was a big heavy thing, but I thought it was one of those lawn globe things. It was pretty ugly, so I just left it in the garage for about a year. Then I gave it away.”
    As nonchalantly as I could, I uncapped my pen and drew my notebook. “Gave it away?” I said. “To whom?”
    “Kim Beckles. My housekeeper. For her birthday, September 1989. She was into crystals and pyramids and stuff like that. She joked that she was a good witch.”
    I told Larry to call Beckles, to say that he’d just learned that the crystal might be valuable, and that he was sending a couple of appraisers over to take a look. “Tell her that if you sell it, you’ll split the money, OK?”
    Larry made the call and we headed for the witch’s house in Trenton, New Jersey. As soon as we arrived, we dropped the ruse. I banged on the door and yelled, “Police!” She answered quickly. From Larry’s description we were expecting a hag, but Beckles was a lithe beauty, twenty-nine years old, blond curly hair. We showed our badges, explained what we were looking for, and she seemed genuinely surprised. She told us she kept the orb in her bedroom. We followed her upstairs.
    I’ll never forget the anticipation I felt climbing those stairs. It was the same kind of nervous anticipation I got whenever I went ona drug raid, or helped collar a fleeing suspect—but better. I felt my heart pound. I wasn’t searching for common drugs or guns. I was searching for lost treasure.
    We found the Dowager’s crystal ball on the witch’s dresser, under a ball cap.
    When Bazin and I returned the orb to its rightful place under the rotunda at the Penn museum, I felt as proud of myself as an agent as I ever had, even though no one was charged with a crime. These art cases offered a different kind of satisfaction. And because Bazin and I were the only ones working them, we won a degree of independence rare in the by-the-book world of the FBI.
    It didn’t hurt, either, that the case made big headlines. The day before the scheduled FBI press conference, someone leaked the story to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the paper put its exclusive on the front page. After the press conference, the story made all the evening news programs and appeared in four other papers the next morning. A few years later, when Bazin and I recovered a long-lost painting stolen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the story landed on the front page again. Fellow agents who pursued the more traditional FBI crimes, like drugs and robbery, might not seem too interested, but journalists appeared eager to write about art crime and give the stories good play. Each art crime inevitably carried a “hook,” a bit of intrigue, and the public ate it up. The attention was nice, but most important was that it made our local bosses look good, making it easier for them to green-light our next art crime case.
    I led one other significant investigation while awaiting my trial in the early 1990s. Violent gangs were hitting high-end jewelry stores in smash-and-grab heists, bolting into the likes of Tiffany, Black, Starr and Frost, and Bailey Banks and Biddle in broad daylight, taking hammers and tire irons to display cases, and dashing off with fistfuls of diamonds and Rolex watches worth tens of thousands of dollars. The hoods came from Philadelphia but had hit more than one hundred stores in five states. I created and led a special task force that not only won federal indictments against thirtygang members but also snared the ringleaders who fenced the stolen loot—two corrupt merchants from Philly’s Jewelers’ Row. Our work made the front page again and I developed long-term sources on Jewelers’