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can be sold.” The gang got sloppy and kept stealing from the same locations before they moved on to antiques. “If you keep hitting the same place, police put it together,” the detective said.
    For Hrycyk, the case was a prime example of the strides made possible by co-operation and an efficient flow of information. It was also another indication that organized crime was interested in art. The trial took place in May 2009, and a number of the men were convicted. For the detective, it was a small victory.
    Hrycyk had seen all the movies about art theft, but his experience was different from the films being churned out by the city he patrolled. According to Hollywood, art thieves are dashing, educated, incredibly rich, obsessive, and cunning, and the world is their playground. Art theft, in fact, is a sub-genre of heist films—films like Once a Thief, Entrapment, The Score, The Good Thief, Ocean’s Twelve, and, of course, Hudson Hawk, starring Bruce Willis and a gang of whistling fools out to steal an invention by Leonardo da Vinci. Mostly, these movies star the thief as sympathetic protagonist—and we want the thief to get away with the crime.
    There is no film that has done more to push the myth of the dashing art thief—or the rogue collector—than the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan. As Mr. Crown, Brosnan embodies the ultimate art thief: a Wall Street mogul, lover of champagne, women, and fine art. Crown has money and toys but he is bored, so for fun he rips off a hundred-million-dollar Claude Monet from a New York museum (think the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Later, at his mansion, he knocks back some red wine and laughs in self-satisfied glee while gazing at the Impressionist master’s blood-orange sunset—now his alone to enjoy. Rene Russo plays the sexy insurance agent hot on his tail, but Crown seduces her as he seduces the audience, who, like him, are captured by Russo’s fiery beauty. The Monet, it turns out, isn’t the artistic centrepiece of the film; Russo is. Hollywood knew that fine art wasn’t enough to keep the public, or Crown, aesthetically engaged.
    At the end of the film, Crown slips the Monet back into the museum, undetected. He has a conscience: the restless billionaire wreaked havoc on the museum, got away with his crime, and then made good—a happy ending. John McTiernan directed The Thomas Crown Affair, based on the 1968 Norman Jewison cult classic starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. McTiernan changed one important detail: Jewison’s Thomas Crown was a bank robber. McTiernan, though, felt that audiences wouldn’t be sympathetic to a hardened criminal knocking over your local teller, so he changed Crown’s crime of choice to something more palatable—stealing art from a museum. The new version got at least one fact right: police, mostly, do not rank stolen art cases as a high priority. In one of the last scenes of the movie, a New York City detective admits, “I don’t really give a shit. The week before I met you I nailed two crooked real estate agents and a guy who was beating his kids to death. So if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are really only important to some very silly rich people, I don’t really give a damn.”
    Homicides, drugs, violence, sexual abuse, organized crime—those were urgent affairs. Art theft was the opposite. That was why Hrycyk was such a rare find: a detective who had spent years specializing in art-theft investigations and who worked his cases with the patience of a scientist—playing the long game.
    On that late afternoon in 2008, driving back through the pink haze of L.A. gridlock, Hrycyk’s eyes flicked to the rearview. He’d been watching me take notes on the investigation all afternoon while he took notes at the crime scene. The detective asked, “So how did you get into all this?” He and Lazarus