Each day ARCA is made aware of between five and fifty art crimes, and those are only the ones which are reported.  Here is a sample of headlines from the past week in art crime.

Selected Art Crimes from the week ending Jan. 15, '08:

- Theft and recovery of paintings from Brazil. 20 December masked men stole Picasso’s “Portrait of Suzanne Bloch” and Brazilian artist Candido Portinari’s “The Coffee Worker,” worth an estimated £28m, from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art (Masp). The museum’s only security consisted of unarmed guards. No alarms were employed. Police arrested one of the suspects, Francisco Laerton Lopes de Lima, and his capture led them to Robson de Jesus Jordao, 32. The thieves claimed that they were to be paid £1.5m for the paintings. On 3 January a ransom demand came to the museum’s president, demanding £5m. Three subsequent telephoned ransom demands came in for lesser sums, which police think were hoaxes. The thieves ignored other valuable works. A crow bar, hydraulic jack, and earpiece were found at the crime scene, suggesting an accomplice outside the building. The thieves broke into the museum before dawn on December 21 and grabbed the paintings in three minutes. They used a hydraulic jack to force open the main door and a crowbar to smash a glass door. The paintings were recovered and arrests made when a third suspect led police to the undamaged paintings.

- Return of the Euphronios Krater. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will finally relinquish the prized Euphronios Krater, a 2,500 year old vase purchased for $1 million. The artifact was illegally excavated from a tomb in Cerveteri, near Rome. The Met bought the krater in 1972 for $1 million from Robert Hecht, an antiquities dealer who is now on trial in Rome on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted artifacts. The vase will be returned to Italy, from where it was illegally removed. This continues the Italian government’s proactive moves to repatriated art objects illegally excavated or exported. The Met alone is returning 21 objects that Italy said were looted.

- Virgin, thought Destroyed, Returns to Dresden. A painting of the Virgin from the school of the Florentine artist Carlo Dolci (1616-86), once in the Old Masters Gallery of the Dresden State Art Collections and thought to have been destroyed in World War II, has been returned to display in the gallery following its discovery in a Munich flea market. In 2003, the painting was ?discovered in a Munich flea market by a painting restorer who repaired the damaged work and in 2004 consigned it for auction at Nagel in Stuttgart.

- UVA returns two Greek sculptures to Italy. The University of Virginia plans to return two ancient Greek sculptures to Italy nearly three decades after tomb raiders looted them from Sicily. The acroliths of the Greek goddesses were created about 525 B.C. out of cloth, wood and marble. They have been on display at the university's art museum since being donated to the institution in 2002. The life-size statues were originally displayed inside a temple in Morgantina, an ancient Greek settlement near what is now the Italian city of Aidone. They are thought to represent Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture and grain, and her daughter Persephone, the queen of the underworld. Since their discovery in 1978, the two acroliths have traveled the world via the black market of looted antiquities. According to the New York Times, they were smuggled through Switzerland and surfaced in a London showroom in 1980. The man who donated them to the museum bought the acroliths from the London dealer for $1 million.

- Samsung Chairman Accused of Misappropriation of Funds to Collect Art. Over $64m from a slush fund set up by Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung, was allegedly used to buy art for his wife Ra Hee Hong Lee who is director-general of the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, according to the Korean corporation's former house attorney. None of the art has been exhibited in Korea and its whereabouts is presently unknown. Samsung denies the allegations.

- Return of more rare maps stolen by Smiley. More than 30 rare, antique maps stolen from the Boston Public Library by a Martha's Vineyard map dealer were returned to the library in 2007, library president Bernard Margolis said this week, part of the conclusion of an international scandal that rocked the staid world of map collecting. Not all has been resolved, however. More than 30 other missing maps, losses that have not been linked to confessed map thief E. Forbes Smiley III, have yet to be recovered by the Boston library more than a year after their disappearance was discovered.

- Ancient Statues Stolen and Destroyed in Hope of Finding Gems Inside. The two ancient statues of Hindu god Vishnu were stolen and destroyed last month because they were thought to have precious stones inside, the leader of a smuggling racket has confessed to the Bangladeshi authorities. But there was nothing inside the clay statues. Rapid Action Battalion (Rab) yesterday arrested Md Abbas Ali and Nasir Uddin, the ringleaders of "Abbas-Nasir" smuggling group who allegedly had two Vishnu statuettes stolen at Zia International Airport and destroyed. Investigators yesterday recovered four more broken pieces, which seemed to be parts of the two stolen statuettes, but experts are yet to confirm these pieces as fragments of the 1500-year-old terracotta Vishnu and Bust of Vishnu statuettes. The two artefacts along with 143 others were awaiting shipment to Paris for an exhibition at the Guimet Museum. They were stolen at the airport on December 22.

- Israeli Exhibition of WWII Looted Art In a landmark exhibition, more than 50 paintings and drawings stolen from France by the Germans during World War II will go on display at the Israel Museum in February, in an effort to trace the works' owners, the museum announced Sunday. The exhibition, organized by the French Foreign Affairs and Culture and Communications Ministries, features the work of major European artists, including Eug?ne Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. It is scheduled to open February 19 and run through June 3. About 60,000 pieces of art taken from France and brought to Germany during WWII, either looted or sold, were repatriated to France after the war.

ARCA recommends the excellent service provided by the Museum Security Network for compiled, in-depth information about art crime every day.