50 YEARS OF HARVARD STOLEN COIN SEARCH

On a December night in 1973, five armed men broke into Harvard's Fogg Art Museum and stole more than 6,000 ancient Greek and Roman coins — an incident that The Crimson reported at the time was believed to be the largest art theft in U.S. history.

Minted between the seventh century B.C.E. and the fourth century C.E., the silver, gold, and bronze coins were worth approximately $2 million — more than $8.5 million today. A University press release after the theft said they were a fundamental and irreplaceable part of Harvard's teaching collection.

In the following months and years, the University and federal law enforcement mobilized to find and catalog the missing coins. With the work of more than 40 FBI agents assigned to the case, approximately 85 percent of the original collection has since been retrieved.

The Fogg Museum didn't know what would happen to the stolen coins: whether they would be distributed across the country, sold at auctions, buried in backyards, or even melted down for their gold and silver content.

A few months after the theft, authorities found more than 3,000 of the stolen coins buried in Rhode Island. Less than one month later, more than 800 coins were found in Montreal when police arrested an American art smuggler.

As coins were returned to the Fogg, museum staff and graduate students at Harvard worked to identify and catalog them — a difficult task given the lack of photo documentation or even a complete list of the original coin collection.

Meanwhile, the police investigation continued and, in 1976, the thieves were brought to trial and convicted. In 1979, five-month investigation culminated in the State Police working with an informant to uncover an additional 2,883 coins.

This brought the total number of recovered coins to 6,773, which has remained largely unchanged since.

Fifty years after the theft, the Harvard Art Museums has beefed up security and is now embarking on a new plan to retrieve the roughly 15 percent of stolen coins still missing today.

Phase one entailed working with graduate students to build an online inventory based upon photographs of part of the collection, while phase two involved hiring computer science students to comb through art auction listings from the past 15 years to find matches using artificial intelligence.

Len adds:

To read the complete article, see:
‘Largest Art Theft': 50 Years of Searching for the Stolen Fogg Coins (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/31/fogg-museum-art-theft/)

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