Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even

earn the label Crime of the Century.

But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author, and in each episode of this show, I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened.

This is Crimes of the Centuries.

Music This is Crimes of the Centuries. In the criminal world, art theft skates a fine line between, oh my God, and get a grip, no one died. Some people find the theft of it

an abomination, and others figure that's a rich person's problem. It's either a cultural disaster

or something easily fixable by inserting another picture in its place in the museum. I fall on the

side of disaster. I mean, yes, no one died,

but art can tell us so much about our history and our society. It's a window into civilization.

It matters when it disappears. Law enforcement generally falls on the other side of the spectrum.

Nine out of every ten paintings that are stolen, never see the light of day again.

They just disappear into someone's home or their attic or the ether, apparently, to

delight a very small audience of maybe one. Or maybe they're traded endlessly by drug cartels is collateral.

Hard to say, but the statistic holds. That's the FBI statistic, ferreted out by their art crime

team, which does, in fact, have an index of reported stolen art cross-referenced with art

recovered and returned.

The same 10% rule holds for the world's largest database that is run by the Art Loss Registry in Manhattan,

something created by an international consortium of art researchers in the 1970s.

Now, the statistic is misleading because so much art theft is not reported or not

even noticed, we should all have that problem. And deeply overburden law enforcement usually only

gets involved in such messes when the art stolen is worth more than $50,000, or if it looks

...