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art world, as you probably know, is very secretive, and that only makes it easier for criminals. It’s the Wild West out there.”
    Czegledi wasn’t talking just about the violent museum thefts that seemed to be occurring with irritating frequency across the globe, and it wasn’t just Rembrandts and Picassos that were attracting thieves. “It’s everything,” she said. The world’s cultural heritage had become one big department store, and thieves of all kinds, at all levels, were shoplifting with impunity, as if the one security guard on duty was out on a smoke break. When artistic genius, money, and ego collided, morality quickly fell by the wayside. And sometimes criminals wore suits and ties and acted as if they were respectable members of the establishment.
    â€œGood, you have an empty notebook,” she noticed. Then she jogged through a list of travesties besieging the world’s cultural heritage: thousands of Holocaust-looted artworks still missing; the pillaging of antiquities from Egypt, China, Afghanistan, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Turkey; the spectacular thefts of multi-million-dollar artworks from museums; thousands more unreported thefts from galleries and residences; the looting of underwater cultural heritage— shipwrecks and the like; the looting and destruction of Native artifacts; the use of donations to galleries and museums to launder stolen artwork into prominent institutions; the inability of dealers, galleries, and museums to adhere to a sensible system of provenance checks on the artwork they acquire; the total disregard of the legitimate art market for the big mess.
    â€œHave you looked at auction houses!” she boomed. Major auction houses played a role in laundering stolen art, she said, as did smaller ones and art dealers. They all served the demand of the market—the hunger of collectors.
    Czegledi was respectful of most art collectors but insisted that a cabal of them acted like psychopathic stalkers: they would do anything to get their hands on a specific work of art. Collecting art, she explained, had started as a hobby of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century and had grown into a multi-billion-dollar business driven by obsessive behaviour. “Some of these collectors and dealers operate like a cult. If you possess something that is special, you become special,” she said. “It’s about power. And there are no checks and balances in the art world. Police aren’t trained to investigate art thefts, and lawyers aren’t trained to prosecute them. Meanwhile, the criminal network is international, sophisticated, and organized.”
    The “Problem,” as Czegledi called it, had been building for decades and had infected the entire global system. “If the legitimate business of art were to suddenly be made transparent, the entire industry would simply collapse,” she said. What Czegledi meant was that over the course of the last century, so much stolen art had been absorbed by the legitimate market, and so much was continuing to be absorbed, that if the stolen goods were identified, the industry would be forced to reevaluate the entire way it operated. I thought back to the art thief, his fingers circling the tabletop.
    Czegledi’s passion had personal roots. Her family came from a famously bloody region of Eastern Europe, near Dracula’s birthplace—Hungary’s Carpathian Mountains. The mountains were once populated by hundreds of small tribes, and Czegledi is descended from one of those. The Székely were almost wiped out in what Czegledi calls a slow, torturous genocide by Romania. Her tribe’s language, art, music, and traditions were destroyed.
    â€œThere’s almost nothing left of my people except a few songs collected by Béla Bartók,” she said. “The best way to destroy a civilization is to erase their cultural heritage. The Nazis, for example,