I've got a weird story I want to tell
you. A true story! A true, weird,
weirdly true story. So there's this kid
named Edwin Rist. He's a talented kid.
And he gets into this extremely niche
subculture of tying fly fishing lures.
And this isn't even the weird part! But I
do have to explain it a little bit. So
when you're fly-fishing, you don't need
much of a lure because salmon can barely
see anyway. But despite this fish
blindness,
there was this hobby in Victorian times
of tying these incredibly complicated,
detailed, beautiful fly fishing lures. It
wasn't really about attracting the fish-
it was about the craft of it all, and
seeing how detailed and how beautiful
you could make your lure. Allow me an
analogy: it's kind of like putting RGB
lighting on your RAM. It doesn't make the
computer go faster, but boy does it make
the other boys jealous. Anyway,
Edwin gets into this hobby and he's only
14, 15 years old but he's tying things at
shows and all the older dudes in this
hobby are really impressed with him. He's
this breath of fresh air in what is an
extremely old and kind of stuffy culture.
But Edwin is frustrated with the limits
of his fly-tying, because back in the day
the people who did this tied with the
feathers of all these beautiful and
exotic birds, birds that were so
beautiful and so exotic that of course
humanity overdid it and now most of them
are endangered or extinct. So Edwin and
the other people on this hobby really
want to tie with these endangered bird
feathers, but they can't, because those
feathers are illegal to buy. It's kind of
like if the hot new thing in PC building
was coating your motherboard with polar
bear skin. "But MOM, it'll make the boys on
the subreddit so JEALOUS."
so Edwin feels like he's kind of stuck
without these rare and special feathers,
but he finds out there's a place with a
ton of them: the British Museum.
Specifically, a satellite of the British
Museum in Tring where they keep
specimens of thousands of kinds of animals.
in the museum there are birds of
paradise and cotingas and all of these
other highly sought after species of
birds, and they're just sitting there
doing nothing when they could be being
turned into expensive and useless fly
fishing lures!
So Edwin makes a plan the way we all do,
by creating a word document that's
called "Plan for Museum Invasion," and then
he goes to the british museum and
he breaks a window and he gets into the
hallway with all of these birds and-
They're dead. I didn't say that before,
the birds are dead. It's not a museum
where there are like, thousands of birds
flying around, though that would be
awesome. So he gets to these bird
specimens and he maybe meant to take
just one or two, but he sees these
drawers and he just kind of gets swept
up in the whole experience of all of it
and he just starts grabbing ALL of them,
all these endangered and extinct species,
and he stuffs them in the suitcase that
he brought and he fills up the whole
trunk and he drags his trunk back across
the museum and then he escapes out the
window. And museum security knows they've
been broken into, but because they have
so much stuff they actually don't know
what's been stolen until much later, and
by that time Edwin is just gone, he's
peaced out, and not only is he gone but
he's actually started selling these
feathers on the dark web or the black
market or however these transactions
take place. And I know what you're
thinking,
you're thinking "why is edwin selling the
feathers? I thought he was just in it for
the craft, I thought he just wanted to
tie fly fishing lures," and this is the
part where I tell you that Edwin didn't
just tie lures, he was also a trained
floutist at the Royal Conservatory of
Music in London, and he was selling
feathers because he wanted to buy a
golden flute.
WHAT?
When I think about a museum heist, I'm
thinking full "Oceans 11" style. You know,
you've got the detailed plans of the
museum, the blueprints, the gadgets, the
daring escapes, I- I just realized that
it's not actually "Oceans Eleven" that
I'm thinking about.
And what's weird is that some of the
most successful art thieves in history
have been simultaneously more and less
cinematic than those movies. Gerald
Blanchard stole the Koechert diamond
pearl from a castle in Vienna by skydiving
in and then swapping the pearl
with a replica he got from the Gift Shop,
like straight-up Indiana Jones. 
[Music]
But you've also got guys like Stephane Breitweiser,
who stole literal hundreds of
pieces of art, paintings, sculptures,
everything, and he did almost all of them
by just walking into a museum, waiting
until a guard was out of the room, and
then grabbing it and walking out. Stephane
is really interesting actually, because
by most measures, he's the most
successful art thief in history. He stole
239 pieces, everything under the sun and
also under protected panes of glass,
untold millions worth. And I actually
can't put a dollar value on it because
Stephane never sold anything! He was broke!
He lived in his mom's attic with his
girlfriend. But holy crap, what an attic.
Every square inch coated in color, in
Renaissance paintings and goblets and
plates and silverware. It's about the
closest thing to a real-life dragon's
lair as I can possibly imagine him. And him and
his girlfriend live in this one
beautiful, lavish, off-the-charts 
illegal room, and his mom lives under him,
allegedly with no idea of what he was
hiding up there. And this "strategy," if you
can call it that, actually makes Stephane 
pretty much impossible to track. Most art
thieves are picked up when they're
selling it. The black market isn't
exactly airtight. But because all of his
paintings and sculptures and everything
else just stayed in one place, enjoyed by
exactly two people, investigators were
pretty much stumped. And it all stayed
there- at least for a while.
Before that, another story. Have you ever
heard of the Kingdom of Benin? I hadn't.
But it's important! For hundreds of years
in modern-day Nigeria, the Kingdom was
this advanced and powerful center of
trade and culture. It had a collection of
earthen walls that were literally longer
than the Great Wall of China! It had one
of the first-ever examples of street
lights, sculpted metal lamps that blazed
a trail for traders at night. It honestly
sounds kind of like Atlantis- except, you
know, in Nigeria. One of the things they
were best at was metalworking. The people
created these beautiful and complex
masks and sculptures. Some of the
Kingdom's best known work are the Benin
Bronzes, created from five hundred to a
thousand years ago. They're bananas cool.
The skill with which these were made is
off the freakin charts, and even more
than that, they're a vital look into the
practices and culture of the
civilization.
What did they do to develop this level
of metalworking? How did this extend into
the rest of their day-to-day life and
culture? What's the legacy of this art?
These are unbelievably important in the
history of Nigeria, and for hundreds of
years they decorated the Kingdom of
Benin's palace. But for the past hundred
years, the best place to see them was the
TripAdvisor number four place to visit
in London, The British
Museum! Why did these end up here? 
It's actually worth going into a little bit
more detail, because the story is pretty
nuts. So the British Empire is in the
process of colonizing everything they
can get their hands on, but in the 1800s
the Kingdom of Benin is still powerful
enough to refuse this control. It was
powerful, and well protected, and
obviously not wild about falling under
someone else's jurisdiction.
Unfortunately, this only made them a more
desirable target. Brits sent in basically
an assassination squad targeting Benin's
king. Unfortunately for that squad, word
got out that "the white men are bringing
war." If I had a nickel. 
Accordingly, Benin military went out and absolutely
obliterated this assassination squad.
Unfortunately, the Brits respond by
sending back a thousand Marines and
other forces, and over the days of bitter
fighting, they basically burned Benin to
the ground. And then they looted it. The
Benin Bronzes, as well as countless other
pieces of art, ended up in the British
Empire's hands. The only ones that they
didn't hang on to were the ones that
they sold to make up for the cost of the
ransacking! Because apparently destroying
cultures doesn't pay the bills.
The Benin Bronzes, when brought back
with the troops, actually faced a
disbelief. Because they were just TOO
complex, too advanced. The British Empire
couldn't believe that this could have
come from a culture that they had
convinced themselves they were superior
to. And summarily, the legacy of the
Kingdom of Benin has basically faded
into obscurity. But just give them back,
right? Return the stolen art, shake hands,
all in a day's work. Well, not quite.
Because returning what's stolen is rarely
a clean process.
Edwin Rist, bird boy thief
extraordinaire, was eventually caught. But
a boy in the hand wasn't worth birds in
the bush... look, he'd already sold the birds.
And more than that, he had disassembled
the birds, plucking many of them clean
to sell the feathers individually for
greater profit. He had already removed
and thrown out the handwritten tags that
were attached to them, that held
priceless scientific information about
where and when they were found.
Ultimately, any sense of justice in
catching Rist feels unimportant next to
the loss of so much knowledge, so many
irreplaceable specimens. Because these
birds weren't just collected to have!
They were a century-old recognition by
Alfred Wallace that these species faced
an existential threat in humanity, and
one day, these specimens might be all we
have of birds of paradise and cotingas
and all the rest. And guess what? He was
right! There's not much left of these
birds environments- it's shrinking every
day- and thanks to people like Edwin Rist
and the illicit buyers of the fly-tying
community, there's not much left of those
specimens either. Edwin Rist's story isn't
half as bleak as Stephane Breitweiser's
though. Remember him? The one with a Smaug-like
collection of art in the attic? So
he also gets caught, eventually. For a
minor theft, a bugle from a museum in
Switzerland. And the police arrest him
and Stephane immediately confesses to
everything, hundreds of thefts, even
though the police hadn't even realized
they were connected. But eventually, 
the police make their way to Stephane's
house, throw open the doors to his attic
and... nothing.
Empty walls, not a painting or goblet or
engraved fork to be seen. Because while
Stephane's been in jail, his girlfriend has
been freaking out. So she hightails it
home, and she finally takes Stephane's 
mother up to the attic, and they stare
for a minute and maybe the most illegal
room in the history of art. And then
Stephane's mom takes all the sculptures
and jewelry, everything carved and blown
and engraved, she takes them all and she
throws them in the Rhone-Rhine canal. And
then she takes all of his renaissance
paintings, all of the beautiful colors
and brilliant shapes and detailed
characters that had wallpapered his
room.
She takes the Brueghels and the Teniers
and the van Kessels and the Cranachs,
she takes them all, dozens of works,
hundreds of years old, she throws these
Renaissance paintings in a pile in the
forest and she sets them on fire.
[Music]
There were some that were able to be
recovered, thankfully. A river might rust
up an old plate, but it won't destroy it.
One man found some old bronzes thrown
out on the side of the road by Stephane's 
mother and he nailed them to the roof of
his house to fix leaks. But once he heard
the story he returned them. There's no
returning those ashes though. Stephane, for
his part, was absolutely shattered by the
news. He was put on suicide watch in jail.
And unlike Edwin or the British Empire,
he really did seem to steal things out
of some compulsive unstoppable love of
the material. During his trial, he
actually interrupts several times
because he felt the paintings weren't
being adequately described. But still.
Where does this leave us? "Museum theft is
a land of contrasts." But that feels like a
cop-out. What connects them? Can we draw a
line between Edwin Rist and Stephane 
Breitweiser and the countless colonial
thefts of the British Museum? I guess the
thing that grabs me and strikes me so
tragic about all these cases is just the
sense of what's lost. We know who took
them, we can have a fleeting sense of
justice. But none of that can really fill
the hole of what's gone. The bird
specimens that Edwin stole provide far
more than historical knowledge- they
could actually bring back lost species,
like a not ill-conceived version of
Jurassic Park. They could actually help
us reverse some of the damage we've done
over the past hundred years. Stephane's
mother didn't just burn his paintings
actually- she also stuffed some of them
down her garbage disposal. And her
destruction reveals how fragile a lot of
art history actually is. I adore the
artist Pieter Bruegel, who drew these
enormous detailed paintings of the Tower
of Babel and marketplaces and
battlefields and everything else.
Telegraph lists one of the paintings
destroyed as "Cheating benefits his
master" by Bruegel,
and I haven't even been able to find a
picture of the thing! It's weird in the
age of the internet to grapple with the
fact that some things are still finite
and irreplaceable. Once it's gone, it's
gone.
I was reading a post about the walls of
Benin on a Nigerian forum called Nairaland,
and someone named Rossik posted
about the scale and impact that the
walls once had, and what's left now.
"Imagine if this monument was in England,
USA, Germany, Canada, or India. It would be
the most visited place on earth and a
tourist mecca for millions of the
world's people. But instead this monument,
the world's largest man-made monument,
lies bruised battered neglected and
forgotten in the Nigerian bush." 
This is a story of the horrors of colonialism far
bigger than the theft of any individual
bronzes, but for me they're impossible to
separate. Because unlike Edwin's feathers
or Stephane 's burnt paintings, these
bronzes still exist! Even if the walls of
Benin had naturally crumbled to dust
these sculptures should have been a
permanent fixture in the country's
cultural memory, a reminder of how
powerful and accomplished their
ancestors had been. Instead, they sat for
a hundred years in a box in London
completely removed from their context,
detached from the historical legacy
they're a part of. Unlike the feathers or
the ashes, these bronzes can be returned-
and they're actually going to be! ON LOAN.
But that's a band-aid over a much larger
scar, one that all colonialism-built
museums need to reckon with. It's easy
for us to understand the tragedy of
individual events like Edwin's or
Stephane's, but thefts like the Benin
Bronzes fall across so many lines of
institutional power that it can be hard
to even wrap your head around.
But you should try. Because what all of
these stories tell us, birds and thieves
and lost civilizations, is how hard it is
to truly replace what's been taken.
[Music]
My favorite thing that I read while
writing this essay was "The Feather Thief
by Kirk Johnson. It's on, as you can
probably guess, Edwin Rist and his
feather theft, but it's also on so much
more. On Alfred Wallace and how he
collected all those specimens and how
his ship burned and sunk to the bottom
of the sea, and the bizarre black market
of selling bird feathers, and how much
the museum was actually able to recover.
There's a major turning point in the
book that centers around, I kid you not
Simon Baron-Cohen, Sacha Baron-Cohen's
brother. And look, you've heard every
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button, you get "The Feather Thief by Kirk Johnson. That's it.
Free book bada bing bada boom. "bada bing
bada boom." I can't tell you what to do
with the rest of your life but I can
tell you how to get one free book. And
that's pretty good! AudibleTrial.com/JacobGeller 
[Music]
