The detective’s description of cases that can take decades—that can be reopened by a new tip years after the initial report—reflects a philosophy of investigation that differs from the more familiar model of crime investigation. In most criminal cases, the investigation that doesn’t produce results within a few months is effectively closed, the evidence boxed, the case file stored. Art theft cases have a different logic: the stolen object remains the same object, its description doesn’t change, and it can surface in the market at any point if someone decides to sell it. A case file maintained and updated is a case that can produce a recovery even years later, if the right expert recognizes the right object.
The 2002 Tennessee safe-deposit box tip that turned out to be a false lead illustrates both the persistence of the investigation and the unreliability of tips in this domain. Someone believed, or claimed, that the stolen Action Comics No. 1 was in a specific location in Tennessee. Investigating that tip required resources and produced nothing. Tips in art theft cases are often wrong—submitted by people who genuinely believe what they’re reporting or, occasionally, by people trying to misdirect investigators. The ability to evaluate and pursue tips without being deflected by false ones is a basic skill of this kind of investigation.
The eleven-year timeline of the Cage case is not unusually long in the context of major art theft. The Gardner Museum theft of 1990—thirteen works including paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, with an estimated value that has been placed at various times between $300 million and $500 million—has still not been fully resolved as of available reporting. The recovery of stolen art is genuinely difficult, and the high-profile cases that do resolve do so through the operation of expert networks of the kind that Fishler and Hrycyk represent, not through the dramatic investigative breakthroughs that film and television have made the dominant cultural model for how crimes are solved.