The Pocono’s Own (Stupid) Thomas Crown Affair
If you are keeping up with international art news, you may have caught that two thieves made off with three valuable Renoir paintings yesterday (they grabbed four, but dropped one while fleeing). Well, twenty years ago this fall, one of the strangest art heists in American history played out at a highway motel just off I-80 in Bartonsville. On the night of Nov. 7-8, 2006, Francisco Goya's 1778 painting “Children with a Cart,” insured for $1 million, was stolen from a locked art-transport truck parked overnight at the Howard Johnson Inn while it made its way from the Toledo Museum of Art to a Guggenheim exhibition. Why they stayed the night so close to New York remains a mystery.
The thieves were not art collectors. Steven Lee Olson, of Carlstadt, New Jersey, and his neighbor Roman Szurko broke into the truck hoping to find pre-Christmas electronics (the FBI's own working theory at the time was that they were after PlayStations) and instead found a nearly 230-year-old Spanish master. But that is where their luck ran out; turns out it is quite hard to fence a million-dollar painting. Olson said he didn't return the painting because, in his words, “it kind of grew on me.” Instead, Olson contacted federal authorities through an attorney, claiming he'd found the painting in his basement, and tried to claim the $50,000 reward for its safe return. That tipped off the FBI to their involvement. The painting was returned undamaged to the Toledo Museum of Art. The pair pleaded guilty in December 2007.
A strange footnote came 14 years later. Faizal Bhimani, the Howard Johnson's manager quoted by name in the New York Times' original coverage of the theft, was himself convicted in 2020 and sentenced in 2022 to 15 years in prison for running a sex and drug trafficking operation out of that same motel. But we will save that story from The Vault for yet another day.
A local landmark, an international art crime, and an unrelated conviction over a decade later. Who needs Netflix's Ozark when you have the Poconos?
