Someone at The Atlantic was clever enough to call up former FBI agent Robert Wittman after the Dutch museum theft to find out what happens to stolen art. Jordan Weissman discovered the awful truth that art thefts are pointless crimes. Wittman entertains with a number of war stories about elaborate heists with no plan to sell the works. He explains why the works cannot be sold and will be recovered . . . eventually. He closes by saying where he thinks the 13 paintings from the Isabel Stewart Gardner Museum are today:

 I think that they’re stored. And the reason I say that is towards the end of my career in 2008, I was undercover on an investigation involving Miami, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris. And we identified a group in Marseilles that had 75 paintings that they had stolen from all around Europe, and they wanted to sell them. And none of them had been sold. These were obviously paintings that had been stolen from many different heists. And nobody had made any money on them.