Museum Crimes and Misdemeanors
When a museum's name is in the news, it usually spells trouble for the institution. And there's been plenty of it lately. There was a theft at my beloved Hermitage in St. Petersburg: 221 pieces of Russian silver were missing from the museum storage room. When this was discovered, museum officials had the smarts to immediately go public about the theft. As a result, dealers and collectors who had unsuspectingly acquired some of the stolen silver have already returned a few of the missing items. And here's a Hollywood-worthy plot twist: suspicion initially fell on the Museum curator who died last year, and now Russian authorities have announced the arrest of her husband and son, implicating them in the theft. The Director of the Hermitage, Mikhail Piotrovsky, called the crime "a stab in the back" and promptly acknowledged a deficiency in the Museum's security...
