Stealing the Show by John Barelli & Zachary Schisgal

Author:John Barelli & Zachary Schisgal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493038244
Publisher: Lyons Press

CHAPTER FIVE

The Magic Carpet Ride

MY EXPERIENCE IN LONDON GAVE ME A NEW PERSPECTIVE AS AN aspiring associate manager of the Met’s Security Department. Within five years, I became the manager in charge of the department. In a nine-year span, I was promoted from an assistant security manager to the manager in charge at one of the world’s largest museums. During this time—in 1985—my doctoral thesis was accepted at Fordham and I earned my PhD. Outside of academia, I used these experiences to advance a comprehensive and cutting-edge plan for the Met’s Security Department. Along with the museum’s administration and my security colleagues, I implemented these initiatives over many years. Key areas I developed to ensure that our Security Department was best in class were: an organizational structure with strong leadership and a professional management team that would develop, institute, and manage the security staff of six hundred; a state-of-the-art command center at the department’s core to monitor technology, communicate, and coordinate emergencies; and liaisons with outside local, state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies. These were the building blocks to which we constantly added as technology improved, as we uncovered new problems and challenges, and as we worked to upgrade and educate staff. The goal was always the total protection of the Met, its collections, staff, the public, and physical plant.

Even with ongoing efforts, on June 23, 1982, art thieves struck again, although it was not within the walls of our institution. This time it was the loss of two seventeenth-century Gobelins tapestries. They were owned by the Met but had been on permanent loan to the Fine Arts Institute (a part of New York University) since 1978. They were displayed just blocks away from the Met at 78th Street and Fifth Avenue in the Duke Mansion, a handsome limestone structure completed in 1912. In 1922, art history became a dedicated field of study at New York University, and ten years later, the graduate program moved to the Upper East Side in order to teach using the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections. In 1937, it was named the Institute of Fine Arts, and in 1958, Nanaline Duke and her daughter Doris Duke bequeathed the Duke Mansion to NYU. After a year of renovations by architect Robert Venturi, the Fine Arts Institute moved into the Duke Mansion. In addition to the masters and PhD programs, and in conjunction with the Met, the Fine Arts Institute also issued a certificate in curatorial studies. The Met has always had a close relationship with the institute and loaned many works of art that adorned the institute’s interior spaces. Upon his retirement in 2008, Philippe de Montebello, a graduate of the institute, was appointed the institute’s first Fiske Kimball Professor in the History and Culture of Museums.

On a slow summer morning, the administrator from the Fine Arts Institute called Met security. A short time later, Jack Maloney and I walked over to the institute and we met the administrator. After hearing her description of events, we started our investigation.

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