The Accidental Picasso Thief

In 1969, during a Boston snowstorm, a crate containing Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of a Woman and a Musketeer vanished from Logan Airport. It should have gone to a Milwaukee gallery—but instead ended up in the closet of Bill Rummel, a young forklift operator.

What followed was a stranger-than-fiction chain of events: FBI agents on the hunt, whispers of Whitey Bulger’s mob, and a daring “reverse heist” devised by Bill’s father to secretly return the painting.

But the mystery didn’t end there. After its return, the Picasso disappeared again—vanishing into private hands, unseen by the public for more than fifty years. Part true crime, part memoir, The Accidental Picasso Thief uncovers the Rummel family’s incredible brush with art history, crime, and secrecy—and one man’s decades-long search for a lost masterpiece.

Author Biography

Whit Rummel Jr. is a filmmaker with a Master’s in Film from Boston University. His first documentary, TATTOO, aired nationally on PBS. His first screenplay, Secret Boy, won the Nicholl Fellowship from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He established WITCOM Associates, a Boston-based production house.

Noah Charney is an art historian, author of The Art Thief, and founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a non-profit focused on art crime prevention. Publications such as the New York Times, Italy’s Ventiquattro, and TIME have written about him, and he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, and CNBC.