If You Steal It, the Art Vigilante Will Find You

For days, Christos Tsirogiannis had been hitting refresh on his laptop, waiting for a chance to snatch ancient artifacts from one of the world’s biggest auctioneers. At the dining room table of his tidy house on a quiet street in Cambridge, England, the 45-year-old archaeologist was stalking Christie’s website, where the catalog for an upcoming antiquities auction in New York would soon be posted. It was important to his vigilante mission that he see the lots quickly. Tsirogiannis had work to do to repeat previous exploits in which he’d cost Christie’s and rivals Sotheby’s and Bonhams millions of dollars in sales—and the sale was in less than a month.

Then, on a sunny March morning, after dropping off his 2-year-old daughter at school and bicycling home, he returned to his laptop and tried again. The catalog appeared. He clicked through the pages, eyeballing the marble statues and clay vases as they flashed by. At Lot 26, he stopped. “That … is … an interesting one,” he said. He moved his cursor toward the image of an amphora listed as “Property from a Manhattan Private Collection” that was expected to sell for as much as $50,000.