In mid July, those following restitution news might have read about the United States and Italian authorities happily announcing the restitution of a stolen 15th-century letter written by Christopher Columbus.  Most of the many news articles which covered this particular restitution, were fairly pro forma.  They focused on the historic significance of this precious incunabulum, written by the controversial Italian explorer in 1493 upon returning from his first voyage to the so called "New World".  In his epistolary announcement, Columbus described his momentous journey to his royal patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who financed his expedition.

Portrait of Christopher Columbus  By Ridolfo Ghirlandaio

While the series of news articles discussed that the document had been stolen before 1988, from the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, most were written in a perfunctory way, with many simply echoing the spartan details regarding the historical significance of this document, alongside the object's circulation as outlined in the US government's July 2023 announcement, ie., that the stolen document had been found in "the collection of a privately owned library located in the United States" after having been purchased via "a rare book dealer in the United States."

Why government press announcements on the restitution of historic artefacts can be rather "vanilla".  

Normally the investigative agency announcing a restitution begins by describing why the painting or artefact is significant, and when and/or where it has been stolen.  Press announcements then move on to state when, or sometimes how, the object in question has been identified, and then might, or might not, mention who the buyer or seller were.  Usually at the conclusion of these briefs, the announcement wraps things up by thanking key individual investigators and the agencies involved, wrapping things up by naming all of the ceremonial VIPs who would have been present during the handover ceremony.

But as participants of ARCA's PG Certification Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection learn during their studies with us.  Sometimes these types of press statements leave us asking more questions than are answered.  One question being, why are these announcements intentionally vague. 

The writers of these briefings may choose to say less, as saying more might inadvertently impact other ongoing investigations. Other times, the agreed-upon press statement skims over the nominal information involving the handlers of the object for privacy considerations, or when the return is of a voluntary vs. criminal forfeiture.  

Names can also be left out when the collector or museum who previously held ownership of the artefact or artwork has consented to its seizure and civil forfeiture, but has insisted on confidentiality provisions as part of their agreed-upon settlement whereby they relinquish all rights and titles. In tandem, sometimes these settlements can carry stipulations which clearly state that by relinquishing said object, doing so in no way should be deemed as an admission of culpability, liability, or guilt. 

But what if you want to know more? And why we teach our researchers that OSINT gathering is a useful tradecraft, not reserved for the sneaky world of spies.  

One of the things ARCA strives to impart to its art crime trainees is the need to explore and research beyond what seems obvious.  To look beyond the low hanging fruit of a happy, but perfunctory, going home press release to what you might be able to find and interpret from unrelated sources.  This is useful for provenance researchers as knowing more about an object's handlers can (sometime) tell us more about other artworks or artefacts which should also be explored. 

To advance their provenance research skills, we teach our trainees how to conduct structured intelligence analysis, using a variety of techniques to efficiently gather and utilise the wealth of information readily accessible from disparate news sites, academic articles, blog posts, social media sites, search engine result pages (SERPs), and other public-facing digital assets.  We do so because true OSINT is more than just taking a stab at scrolling-through the first page of ranked Google hits. 

The European Commission defines open-source intelligence (OSINT) as the practice of collecting and analysing information gathered from open sources to produce actionable intelligence. 

At ARCA we provide our participants with opportunities to test their abilities in practical and advanced image and video analysis and verification, as well as fact-checking and analysis of information, disinformation, and misinformation.  These types of intelligence gathering can support, for example, national security, law enforcement investigations and even due diligence when vetting potential art and artefact purchases.  At its very core, OSINT investigations look for open (source) data which was created for one purpose but when combined with other data, shed's additional or unforeseen light on otherwise hidden topics. 

To illustrate how our researchers can glean more details on an object's circulation within the art, antiquities, and rare book market utilising only open source techniques, last month we had them start with the clues found in the July 18, 2023 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announcement on the restitution of the  Columbus letter titled Epistola de insulis nuper inventis, Rome, Stephan Plannck, after 29 April 1493, Goff C-757 

I asked our researchers to explore a rudimentary hypothesis of whether this object's handlers might or might not be problematic art market actors and to back that up with their explorations.  I also asked them to try and explore who the collector might be who discreetly relinquished the Columbus document, and was he (or she) of the ilk known to satisfactorily vet potential acquisitions such as this historic document.

We started by documenting the July 2023 HSI-ICE announcement which featuring Special Agent Mark Olexa, who served as the lead case agent in this ten+ year investigation into the thefts of several historic incunabula stolen from Italy. 

His post appeared on Twitter on July 18th. 

For over ten years, #HSI has collaborated with international partners to investigate a rare stolen 15th Century Christopher Columbus letter.

On Wednesday, they return it to its rightful owners – the people of Italy. pic.twitter.com/j555wjeSnl

— Homeland Security Investigations (@HSI_HQ) July 18, 2023

In this video we see footage of the what has come to be referred to as a Columbus Plannck I incunabulum, included the screen shot captured below.  Pay attention to the annotations marked in red, as these will provide confirmations that we will come back to later. 

From a November 14, 2019 Stipulation and Order IN RE: Columbus, Christopher, Epistola de Insulis Nuper Inventis, Case No. 20- ROME, Stephan Plannck after 29 April 1493, Goff C-757, we learn that: 

"In or around May 2003, INDIVIDUAL purchased the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana's Columbus Letter-Plannck I from a rare book dealer in the United States for a sum of money."

A later United States Attorney's Office for the District of Delaware press release, dated January 22, 2020, states that this Plannck I edition of the Columbus letter has been valued in excess of $1,300,000, and is an exceptionally rare first edition that only mentions the King of Spain, while the second edition, commonly known as Plannck II, acknowledges both King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.   This press release speaks to the good faith purchase of the document by the collector, stating:

"a collector acting in good faith unknowingly purchased the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana’s Columbus Letter-Plannck I letter from a rare book dealer in the United States."

Also useful, Italian newspaper Corriere del Veneto geolocates the collector's home when describing where the Columbus document was discovered: 

"ritrovati i racconti di Critoforo Colombo rubati alla Marciana: erano a casa di un collezionista di Dallas"

 The key phrase being "in the house of a Dallas collector." 

Added to our earlier data of the document being found in "the collection of a privately owned library" we now can assume, if the Italian article is accurate, that the collector maintains a private library, in a home, located in the city of Dallas.

An excellent article by Nicholas Schmidle published on December 8, 2013 in The New Yorker gives us a pretty thorough rundown of Richard Lan, of Martayan Lan Inc., in New York City, who sold at least Christopher Columbus incunabulum in and around this same period. Talking about Lan's controversial relationship with notorious Italian book thief and forger Massimo Marino De Caro, writing 

"Despite these incidents, De Caro’s rise in the rare-book market continued largely unimpeded, as he obtained one remarkable book after another. Perhaps his most important client was Richard Lan. De Caro told me, “He was paying a high price for books, and he had the best customers in the world.” In 2004, Lan paid two hundred and forty thousand dollars for two of the Vatican books—first editions of Galileo’s “Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences” and “The Assayer”—and a 1611 copy of Johannes Kepler’s “Refraction.” Around this time, Lan also paid De Caro five hundred and eighty thousand dollars for a copy of the letter that Christopher Columbus sent to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1493, announcing the discovery of the New World. De Caro was beginning to think that Lan would buy anything from him."

In May 2012, De Caro, the former director of the Girolamini Library in Naples, was sentenced in Italy to 7 years imprisonment and a lifetime exclusion from public office following an expedited trial in Italy for the embezzlement of hundreds of stolen volumes from the Girolamini Library in Naples as well as thefts and forgeries impacting other libraries throughout Italy. 

Given that a Columbus incunabulum, stolen from the Vatican Library had already been identified as sold by De Caro to a New York dealer who turned out to be Richard Lan, then on to collector Robert David Parsons, an actuary from Atlanta, the anonymously described book seller involved, who is now deceased, becomes more interesting. 

But what about the Texas collector with a private library in him Dallas home?

Further exploration turns up several articles describing the expansive, and sometimes controversial, art and historical documents collection of Harlan Crow, a conservative billionaire, who recently gained unwanted attention for having been the secret benefactor of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.  Many articles refer to his ownership of an unique Christopher Columbus letter, but none of them, that we reviewed, provided imagery for comparison purposes.  

In one article, posted to the website InCollect discussing some of Crow's extraordinary pieces, we find another important clue, as the website describes the Texan's rare Columbus incunabulum as follows:

The document collection contains a first edition of the much sought-after “Columbus Letter.” Printed in Rome on April 29, 1493, this firsthand account of Columbus’s 1492 voyage of discovery was translated from his letter to the Spanish court. The Crow copy is the only version in private hands in North America; eleven other copies are located in institutional libraries in the U.S. such as the New York Public Library and twelve more are in European collections including the Vatican’s.

Given that the Harlan Crow Library copy is reported (and not proven) to be the sole extant Latin Stephan (Stephanus) Plannck (Planck) quarto written “To the Most Invincible King of the Spains” [Ad Inuictissimum Regem Hispaniarum] listed as being in private hands, our next step was to confirm through OSINT means, if it was  possible, that the one described and depicted in various restitution announcements could be the same document reported as being part of Crow's private collection in Dallas. 

Circling back to our screen grab from the HSI- ICE restitution tweet, we already had clear, high resolution images of the object which had been returned to the Italian authorities.  Now we just need to see if we could find an available image of the Columbus letter which was part of Crow's collection.  

Retrieving a 2019 web page, hosted by the Bullock Texas State History Museum, we were able to document, through images, exactly what Harlan Crow's Columbus incunabulum looks like.  In a comparison of the two, we can see that both the HSI-ICE image and the museum's photos of Crow's incunabulum both have matching traits, including a unique blue binding and slight page blemishes visible on two of the respective folio leaves.

Likewise a video presented of the object's return home published on Youtube also shows similarities in the fading of the ink's patterns.

Through this exercise, we can demonstrate that taking the time to scratch a bit beneath the surface of press announcements, and then systematically collecting analysing, and interpreting publicly available information from a wide array of sources, we can begin to further explore some interesting puzzle pieces.  Ones that might lead to an interesting thread or two worth pulling regarding how many other suspect manuscripts and rare books, stolen by De Caro, were purchased by Richard Lan, and in turn, did Lan sell other material to Harlan Crow, or others which can be traced back to thefts traceable to Massimo Messina De Caro's crime spree, or might still be in circulation in the rare text and manuscripts market in the United States.  

By:  Lynda Albertson, CEO of the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art

OSINT Bibliography