From a tiny office in southern India, S. Vijay Kumar scans case files on his laptop with the precision of a forensic scientist. To an untrained eye, the width of a bronze Shiva’s nose or the definition of its knuckles are invisible details. To Kumar, these are clues on a statue that unlock some of history’s biggest art heists.
For more than a decade, Kumar has devoted himself to a singular cause: recovering smuggled artifacts from the world’s richest collectors. Along with other civilian detectives scattered across time zones, he has roiled an insular art crowd, helping to seize scores