Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschin

“In recent years there have been a number of undercover investigative journalists who have been involved in major recoveries of stolen works of art, in particular the journalist Peter Watson. For several decades Watson has done absolutely incredible work where he goes undercover, along with the police, to try to make headway with unsolved crimes. This began back in the 1980s when he worked with Rodolfo Siviero, a star of the Carabinieri art squad, when he went undercover to try to recover the so-called “Palermo Nativity”, the Nativity with St Francis and St Lawrence by Caravaggio, which was stolen from the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo in 1969. The theft prompted the establishment of the world’s first art police, the Carabinieri art squad. Watson wrote a book about that called The Caravaggio Conspiracy. And then more recently he has written, with co-author Cecilia Todeschini, another book called The Medici Conspiracy, which is an in-depth, very thoroughly researched investigation of the theft, looting and smuggling of antiquities by a chap called Giacomo Medici.” Read more...

The best books on Art Crime

Noah Charney, Novelist