Today's speaker was Deborah Pierce, retired former Director of the FBI's Art Crimes Unit. Ms. Pierce was with the FBI for 27 years and for a time was the Special Agent In Charge of their Minneapolis Office. This was an interesting look at a subject that is totally foreign to most of us. We were surprised to learn that more than 50,000 art works are stolen each year with an estimated total value of $8 to $10 billion dollars. The rate of recovery of these items is only about 10%. The "Top 10" list of most valuable artifact losses in the world include the 2018 looting of artifacts from the Iraqi National Museum, the Gardner Museum Heist in Boston in 1990, and the 2014 theft of a 300 year old Stradivarius violin in Milwaukee worth $5 million. Most museum thefts are "inside jobs" and occur when security and inventory controls are weak.