The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob

The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob - Hardcover

$35.00
$35.00
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The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob
  • The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob
The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob - Hardcover

The Accidental Picasso Thief: The True Story of a Reverse Heist, Outrunning the Fbi, and Fleeing the Boston Mob - Hardcover

by Whit Rummel , Noah Charney
$35.00
$35.00

Book Overview

by Whit Rummel (Author), Noah Charney (Author)

In 1969, during a Boston snowstorm, a crate containing Pablo Picasso's Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer vanished from Logan Airport. It should have gone to a Milwaukee gallery-but instead ended up in the closet of Bill Rummel, a young forklift operator.

What followed was a stranger-than-fiction chain of events: FBI agents on the hunt, whispers of Whitey Bulger's mob, and a daring "reverse heist" devised by Bill's father to secretly return the painting.

But the mystery didn't end there. After its return, the Picasso disappeared again-vanishing into private hands, unseen by the public for more than fifty years.

Part true crime, part memoir, The Accidental Picasso Thief uncovers the Rummel family's incredible brush with art history, crime, and secrecy-and one man's decades-long search for a lost masterpiece.

Author Biography

Whit Rummel Jr. is a filmmaker with a Master's in Film from Boston University. His first documentary, TATTOO, aired nationally on PBS. His first screenplay, Secret Boy, won the Nicholl Fellowship from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He established WITCOM Associates, a Boston-based production house.

Noah Charney is an art historian, author of The Art Thief, and founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit focused on art crime prevention. Publications such as the New York Times, Italy's Ventiquattro, and TIME have written about him, and he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, and CNBC.

Number of Pages: 168
Dimensions: 0.61 x 9.27 x 6.41 IN
Publication Date: November 27, 2025
ISBN9798765188262
Author Whit Rummel , Noah Charney
PublisherBloomsbury Academic
GenreArts and History
FormatHardcover
PublishedNovember 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages168
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Art History Nonfiction True Crime

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About Noah Charney

Noah Charney, PhD, is internationally best-selling author of more than twenty books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana.

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