In 2003, four college students in Lexington, Kentucky orchestrated a DIY heist, hoping to steal four folios of John James Audubon’s Birds of America from the Transylvania University Library’s Special Collections.  The group failed at their intended mission and resorted to grabbing a first edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and tasing a female librarian instead. Transylvania University, Lindsey Owen’s alma mater, tied Central Kentucky to one of the largest art heists in FBI history. Transy boasts being the ‘oldest college on this side of the Alleghenies,’ and since its founding in 1780, the university has gone on to educate two U.S. vice presidents, two U.S. Supreme Court justices, 50 U.S. Senators, and more. But in addition to its successes, Transy has been subject to its fair share of oddities, mysteries, and even curses. 

In 1819, Constantine Rafinesque became a professor of botany at Transy, and although brilliant, some of his more unorthodox views left the University and scientific peers questioning his practices. In 1826, he had a falling out with University president Horace Holly, and promptly cursed Transy, only for said curse to be met with doubt. Yet, soon after Rafinesque’s proclamation, Holly died of Yellow Fever, the Transy administration building burned down, and in an effort to inspire peace, the university opted to bury the mad professor’s body on campus in a crypt room inside Old Morrison Hall. Transylvania University assumed they were safe from the curse at this point, but the heist at Special Collections might prove otherwise. 

In American Animals, the Transy heist is followed from beginning to end, cut with interviews from real-life counterparts and detectives who maintained that nothing in the boys’ backgrounds suggested they could do something like this. Like most art crimes, the four students were tempted by what seemed like an easy task with a hefty reward, underestimating the difficulty in getting a stolen artwork to a major auction house. The Transy heist serves as an example of just how easy it can be for things to turn criminal in the selling and buying of high-value art. All kinds of motives attract art criminals, who can easily separate the social, artistic, and even political value from a work, choosing to view the object as a very lucrative means to an end. Established art traffickers would know not to take a stolen work to a reputable seller, seeing as their resources would identify the work as suspicious almost immediately. However, there are cases in which auction houses, galleries, and even museums take on artworks with dubious origins out of competition with other institutions. These major players often feel pressure to risk their reputation for what might end up being an exclusive opportunity to buy or sell rare works.

Art criminals tend to think stealing art is an easy way to get funding, and as far as criminal acts go, stealing and destroying art comes across as relatively non-violent and harmless from their perspective. Thieves and forgers share the idea that they have an upper hand over societal and art world structures, acting on their own moral compasses. But like all crime, art crime often happens when peoples’ needs aren’t being met. For looters, digging up cultural heritage for money is a way to find financial security where governmental structures won’t, and forgers and art thieves hope for financial gain as well. The foursome that stole from Transylvania’s Special Collections were appealing to a higher power in their minds. Spencer Reinhard claimed he was seeking a life-altering experience, and as an artist, felt there had to be more than “my life is great and I’m good at drawing” that informed his practice. Warren Lipka felt similarly trapped in his life, and although the two co-founders of the heist were only in it for the transformative power, they likely never realized the networks and systems they would have to navigate for their work to actually pay off. Despite how simple their mission was in their minds, the boys were blissfully unaware that most successful art criminals are born from within the systems they abuse. 

In the Transy heist, auction house Christie’s acts as a buffer, asking questions surrounding the provenance and prior acquisitions of the Darwin book to protect both the object and their own reputation. Noting that it was extremely rare, specialist Melanie Halloren suggested Christie’s would do more research and get back to the boys, who had posed as high-end sellers associated with a false art dealer, Mr. Beckman. Even in 2003, the Art Loss Register would make it nearly impossible to sell a work that had been recorded as missing, and soon after the heist, the boys were arrested with the books once the FBI traced the phone number they used at Christie’s to one of their personal cell phones.

Much like the boys’ attempt to pass off the Darwin as a family heirloom, there was a case in which a UK auction house approached the Art Loss Register when a painting someone had brought to them seemed out of the ordinary. The potential seller bought the work at a yard sale, and when they registered the painting into their database, it was discovered that it was a match with a picture that had been stolen from a North London estate in 2000. The ALR, established in 1990, is the world’s largest private database containing lost, stolen, or looted art, antiques, and more. Just this year, state law required New York museums to disclose if certain artworks had been stolen during the Nazi era, in addition to registering them with the ALR. The ALR's collection of over 700,000 items is updated as needed to ensure nation states, law enforcement agencies, insurers, and more can participate in due diligence, ensuring they are working with objects uninvolved in any risk, something the Transy heist instigators would have liked to make use of. 

from the desk of Madison Kelley

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Animals. Film. The Orchard, 2018.

Art Loss Register. “The Art Loss Register Recovers Cherished Family Heirloom after Nearly 15 Years – Art Loss Register.” Accessed September 8, 2022. https://www.artloss.com/the-art-loss-register-recovers-cherished-family-heirloom-after-nearly-15-years/.

Charney, Noah. The Art of Forgery : The Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers. London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2015.

Falk, John. “Majoring in Crime.” Vanities. Vanity Fair, February 13, 2015. https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/02/transy-book-heist.

NBC News. “New York Museums Required to Acknowledge Art Stolen under Nazis.” Accessed September 8, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-museums-required-acknowledge-art-stolen-nazis-rcna44116.