Piece of Iconic Cross Believed Stolen in Boston

July 13, 2010— -- A small piece of wood believed to be a relic from the cross on which Christ was crucified has been stolen from Boston's Holy Cross Cathedral, police said.

Experts said the stolen relic could be destined for a private art collection.

The piece is one of the oldest possessions of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. It disappeared sometime between 10 a.m. June 30 and 8 a.m. July 1, according to a police report.

"The case holding the relic in place at the bottom of a crucifix had been pried open and the relic was removed along with a large piece of the case," the police report said.

Chris Marinello, head of the recovery team at the Art Loss Register, which tracks stolen art, compared the Catholic relic's disappearance to the theft of the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" (Work Shall Set You Free) sign from the main gate at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 2009. The sign was later recovered.

"There are ecclesiastical collectors out there and something like this could have been stolen to order," Marinello said. "There are just certain things you're going straight to hell if you steal and this is one of them."

New York Police Department Det. Mark Fishstein, who has investigated art theft for seven years, said it was difficult to predict what the thief would do with the relic.

"Each one of these cases is individual; we can't really generalize," he said. "It's not like there's a clearinghouse where these people go. Some people take things because they want to hold onto them. They never intend to sell them. Some people take things because they want to make a profit."

Dan Karson, an executive managing director at the security firm Kroll, said stolen artifacts often end up being in the hands of private collectors.

"They do try to sell it off into a black market that lies beneath the surface of the art collecting world," he said. "You can't deal in this stuff in the way that you used to be able to deal with it decades ago."