NONFICTION
Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue The World’s Stolen Treasures
by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman, $25Robert K. Wittman wasn’t an ordinary FBI agent. Instead of tracking terrorists or busting drug kingpins and mobsters, he carved out a niche as an art-crime specialist.
During his 20-year career, Wittman recovered more than $225 million worth of artwork and historical artifacts in undercover stings all over the globe. His memoir, “Priceless,” written with John Shiffman, is an account of how he planned and pulled off some of his high-stakes operations, rescuing treasures like an original copy of the Bill of Rights and paintings by Rembrandt and Renoir.
Almost every case he recounts has enough intrigue and suspense for a Hollywood screenplay. Describing a time he worked in Madrid to retrieve a collection of paintings by artists like Goya and Pissarro, Wittman writes:
“Tomorrow, if everything went according to plan, I’d be entering another hotel room across town. To meet a desperate, possibly homicidal gangster eager to close a $10 million deal. Unarmed. Dangling a million euros cash as bait. Working with an FBI partner on his first undercover case. Negotiating in French, a language I didn’t understand. Swell.”
Less exciting but no less interesting are the details of how this former salesman and journalist fell into such a unique job and came to excel at it.
He had to develop an expertise in art and antiques that would convince thieves he was a serious buyer. And he had to learn the nuts and bolts of going undercover, which meant being patient, winning a criminal’s trust and fine-tuning an ability to detect and avoid danger.
This behind-the-scenes look at the immense skill and knowledge required to execute such an operation makes his stories even more gripping.
NONFICTION
Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc. — How the Working Poor Became Big Business
by Gary Rivlin, $26.99
Remember the episode of “The Sopranos” when that sad-sack poker player, awash in debt, must let Tony take over his sporting- goods store and repossess his son’s car?
From about 1990 through the economic crisis of 2008 and beyond, many poor Americans had to submit to similar practices with the blessing of Wall Street as the federal government looked away.
“There are any number of strange but seemingly lucrative splinters that are part of the poverty industry,” Gary Rivlin writes in “Broke, USA.” It’s an exhaustive expose of pawnshops, check-cashing rip-offs, payday loans, auto title loans, rent-to-own schemes, subprime mortgages and other “equity stripping” — in other words, ways of getting poor people into debt they can’t carry, then taking their houses and cars while derivatives backed by those bad loans are sold to investors.
Rivlin, a former New York Times reporter who has also written a book about Bill Gates, tries to remain objective as he interviews the usurious architects of payday lending (one, who operates 1,300 outlets, complains that making $10,000 an hour isn’t enough) and the activists trying to protect impoverished communities from their influence.
Eventually, however, he must take a side. “I began to liken the entire Poverty, Inc. industry to those energy companies whose strip-mining destroyed vast tracts of wilderness areas,” Rivlin writes.
“Short of government intervention, the consumer-advocacy side didn’t stand a chance.”
Some desperate person somewhere is always ready to pay $1.20 next week to borrow $1 today, and the recession may end up boosting the business Rivlin so painstakingly details.
