Meanwhile, Lemmon is proud of the university for boosting the police department's budget during the initial investigation, which lasted years. He worked full-time on the art case for three years.

Similar thefts happened all around the world. "We were not that unusual as an institution," Lemmon said.

But the full story was rare.

"While there may be many art thefts, the enormity of this inside job at one university was really exceptional, which is why we devoted an entire issue of our publication to it," IFAR's Flescher said. "And the man formally in charge admitted wrongdoing, which also was unusual. It was a very large collection, a good collection and a varied collection."

BYU also took the unusual step of going public rather than hide its embarrassment.

"We were a model of public trust," Lemmon said. "We'll never recover it all, and at first it wasn't pretty, but pretty soon people began to praise us for our integrity and said they trusted us because we were willing to talk about something this bad.

"Donors started to give," he added. "We built a museum in the middle of all this. To me it's a world-class museum with world-class security and world-class administrators."

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E-mail: twalch@desnews.com