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The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob
In 1969, a Picasso painting titled Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer vanished from Logan International Airport's loading dock in Boston and ended up in the home of Merrill "Bill" Rummel, a forklift operator. Unaware of its contents, Rummel took the crate home, discovering that it contained the painting only later. Not appreciating the art, he hid it in his closet. As the FBI began investigating the missing Picasso, Rummel and his fiancée panicked. They panicked further when they learned that the Winter Hill Gang, the Boston mob run by Whitey Bulger, had also learned about the Picasso and was on the hunt for it. Could this accidental Picasso thief avoid both the mob and the FBI? What happened next was a sort of reverse heist. Stealing this painting was easy-it was actually an accident. The tricky part was to devise a foolproof plan to return it without getting arrested or killed.
Bill's father, Whitcomb Rummel Sr., a respected figure in Waterville, Maine, devised a plan to return the painting anonymously. He instructed his son, Whit Jr. (co-author of this book), to write an untraceable note, which he signed "Robbin' Hood." The Rummels pulled off this reverse heist, successfully returning the painting. But that wasn't the end of the story. Despite its return, the Picasso's whereabouts remained unclear. Decades later, Whit Rummel Jr., now a filmmaker, hired an investigator to trace the painting. It was found that the painting had been part of a 1971 exhibition in Milwaukee and was owned by Sidney and Dorothy Kohl, prominent art collectors. The current status of the painting remains unknown, but it is presumed to be part of the Kohls' private collection. This story was featured in a New York Times article that went viral. But that only skimmed the surface.
This book, co-authored by Whit Rummel Jr. and best-selling author and art crime expert Noah Charney, will tell the full story, while also looking at incidents of art theft in the United States, thus putting this particular, quirky crime into context.
Book Details
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Publish Date: Nov 13rd, 2025
- Pages: 168
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 1.11in - 1.11in - 1.11in - 1.11lb
- EAN: 9798765188262
- Categories: • Heists & Robberies• European - General• History - General
About the Author
Noah Charney is an art historian by training and is the founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), a non-profit think tank and consultancy group on art crime prevention and solution. He has been written about internationally, including feature articles in the New York Times Magazine, Italy's Ventiquattro, Time Magazine, and has made appearances on National Public Radio, MSNBC, CNBC and ITV television, and many other news outlets. His novel, The Art Thief, was published in 2007 and has sold in sixteen other languages to date.
Dr. Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group (www.artcrimeresearch.org) and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He has written for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer and The Art Newspaper. His recent books on art include The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock and Rivalry Shaped the Art World, Making It: The Artist's Survival Guide, The 12-Hour Art Expert: Everything You Need to Know About Art in a Dozen Masterpieces, and Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, several of which were Amazon #1 best-sellers in their category. He also published the critically-acclaimed The Slavic Myths (Thames & Hudson) in the fall of 2023 and The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World's Most Famous Artwork (Rowman & Littlefield, February 2024), which was praised in The New York Times Book Review and The Telegraph among others. He recently fronted an influencer campaign for Samsung, in 2022 he presented a BBC Radio 4 documentary, China's Stolen Treaures, his TED Ed videos (some on art crime) have been viewed by millions each, and he featured in a recent Amazon Prime documentary, The Picasso of Thieves. A course of his, "Lost Art," featured this summer for The Teaching Company's Great Courses/Wondrium, the first of several that are scheduled, and he teaches online courses for Atlas Obscura, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery UK, and Yale University on art theft and forgery. He lives in Slovenia with his wife, children and their hairless dog, Hubert van Eyck (believe it or not).