Stolen art — BYU searches the world to recover pilfered pieces

Some who find out they own a BYU work don't cooperate. For 20 years, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art has refused to return a BYU painting, a work by J. Alden Weir. An attorney for the museum didn't dispute BYU's previous ownership but told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that BYU abandoned its claim because the painting had been shown repeatedly over the years without any complaint from the university.

The museum's position hasn't changed. Neither has BYU's.

"We will never give up pressing them," Lemmon said. "We'll never stop hounding them."

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After O'Wyatt had the Monet and Homer forged, he quickly sold the originals. The recovery of the Homer original is one of Lemmon's favorite stories.

Before O'Wyatt even returned the forgeries to BYU, he had sold the original Homer, a drawing called "The Shepherdess" or "Portrait of a Girl," and the original Monet, known as "The Boat Ride" or "Two Women in a Boat," to the Hammer Galleries.

World-famous physician, business tycoon, philanthropist and diplomat Armand Hammer and his brother organized the Hammer Galleries in 1930 to sell Czarist works of art Hammer bought from the Soviets.

In October 1969, four months after purchasing the Monet and the Homer, the Hammer Galleries sold the stolen items to a private collector who showed them in exhibits around the country. The Monet also traveled to shows in England, Ireland and Russia.

BYU didn't know any of this. Then, in 1986, university police created a task force. Lemmon and Sgt. Dan Clark wrote a crude computer program to audit the entire campus collection. They found 2,000 missing pieces of art. They narrowed the number to 1,286 and then determined that more than 900 had been stolen, were missing, had been sold or traded without authorization or had been returned improperly to the original donor.

Lemmon began to track the Homer and Monet. He found an uncooperative O'Wyatt and met a New York police detective named Tom Moscardini. NYPD had art cops, and Moscardini mentored Lemmon on the dark side of the art world.

O'Wyatt appeared out of reach because, as Lemmon said, "the statute of limitations had tolled on most of these cases." But then Lemmon realized that O'Wyatt's crime crossed state lines, giving police a longer reach.

Armed with a warrant from Utah's governor and an extradition order from New York's, Lemmon and Moscardini met with O'Wyatt and his attorney in the fall of 1987.

"The attorney said, 'We don't have to do anything,"' Lemmon recalled. "Then I laid out the arrest warrant and the extradition order with the governors' signatures and said if he didn't confess, we would arrest him and take him to a downtown Manhattan jail. He was 70."

Lemmon wanted a confession so he could hunt for the drawings. O'Wyatt agreed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count of theft by deception.

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