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A thief or crew of thieves recently carried out one of the largest art heists in California history, breaking into a storage facility for the Oakland Museum of California under the cover of darkness and making off with more than 1,000 precious artifacts.
Oakland police said the burglary took place just before 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 15, which is four days before robbers stole a trove of priceless Napoleonic jewels from the the Louvre Museum in Paris.
(Oakland Museum of California / Oakland Police Department)
Items stolen from the Oakland museum included Native American baskets, jewelry, laptops, daguerreotype photographs and intricately carved ivory tusks.
The Oakland Police Department is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Art Crime Team to investigate the heist and retrieve the missing items.
“It was devastating. It feels like a real violation. It feels like somebody entering your home,” said museum Chief Executive Lori Fogarty.
Fogarty said staff were not working at the off-site storage facility the day of the burglary and discovered it the following morning, Oct. 16.
“Our job is to preserve and take care of and steward the cultural, artistic and natural heritage of California,” she said. “So it feels like not just a loss to me and to the collection staff, we also feel like it’s a loss to the public.”
The Oakland Museum of California features more than 110,000 square feet of gallery space and 2 million objects dedicated to telling the story of the Golden State.
(Oakland Museum of California / Oakland Police Department)
Retired Los Angeles Police Capt. John Romero, who led the department’s commercial crimes unit, said that if the break-in was completed without setting off alarms or alerting security, it’s possible that the person or people behind it had some internal knowledge, he said. The fact that the heist took place at an off-site storage unit also suggests that the suspect or suspects had access to privileged information, he said.
“If it’s a nondescript, all-brick building that’s very difficult for anybody to figure out [what it is] from the outside, it is almost always an employee, a former employee, a contractor or a vendor who sees it, and talks about it and gets approached to bring something out,” he said.
This is not the first time that items belonging to the museum have been stolen. In 2014, Andre Taray Franklin, a 46-year-old parolee, was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing and reselling a 19th century gold jewelry box from the museum. He was also a suspect in a 2012 break-in at the museum in which gold nuggets and Gold Rush-era pistols were taken but was not charged in that incident.
“Lightning has struck twice in my career,” said Fogarty, referencing the break-ins connected to Franklin and the recent heist.
“He [Franklin] was caught, identified and convicted … and we retrieved the most important and valuable works,” she continued. “So I am going to believe deeply that these items are going to find their way back to the museum.”
Given that the break-in took place two weeks ago, there is a good chance that many of the items have been sold, Romero said. Cultural-artifact thieves typically try to offload their loot before word gets out that the items are stolen.
“These people are interested in fast cash, not the full appraisal value,” he said. “They need to get rid of it quickly.”
Romero anticipates detectives will be looking closely at platforms such as Craigslist and Ebay, as well as groups that collect antiques or historic items, as they attempt to locate the Oakland museum’s stolen goods and identify those responsible.
Well-known stolen cultural items are difficult to resell due to the odds of running into undercover agents and buyers’ reluctance to purchase an item that may later be seized by authorities, Romero said.
Targeting a high number of lesser-known artifacts may make it easier to resell the loot, he said.
Romero said this month’s break-in represents one of the largest museum heists he’s heard of in California in terms of the number of items taken.
Former famous museum heists include a 2012 raid on the California Mining & Minerals Museum in Mariposa where thieves took an estimated $2 million worth of gold and gems, as well as a 1978 break-in at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco where four paintings, including a Rembrant, were pilfered.
Anyone with information is asked to contact Oakland police at (510) 238-3951 or submit a tip to the Art Crime Team online or by calling (800) 225-5324.
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Clara Harter
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