On March 19, 1990, in typeface suitable for the start of a war or the assassination of a president, a front-page headline in The Boston Globe announced: "$200m Gardner Museum Art Theft." Accompanied by large color photographs of paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt, the articles that appeared that day and over the following weeks were full of speculation and questions, but little information. One question that was repeatedly asked was why anyone would steal pictures that were so famous they obviously could not be sold.

Three years earlier, an article in Connoisseur magazine revealed that dozens of modern sculptures produced by a Mexican had made their way into the legitimate art market as authentic pre-Columbian statues. The forgeries were owned by respected museums and esteemed collectors, and they had been written about in scholarly publications. How could the experts have been so thoroughly fooled, and how had the forgeries been marketed so successfully as ancient works of art?

In 1985, a sixty-four-year-old New Jersey woman was convicted of accepting paintings on consignment, selling them, and then failing to pay the pictures' owners. Why had collectors trusted her with their valued possessions, and how did she perpetrate her profitable fraud?

Vandals occasionally attack works of art. In 1972, a man claiming to be both Jesus Christ and Michelangelo smashed a marble sculpture by Michelangelo with a hammer. In 1914, British suffragettes slashed paintings as a protest against a social system that denied women the right to vote. Why did these people choose artworks from among all the property they could have attacked? What, if anything, did they have in common?