Whit Rummel presents THE ACCIDENTAL PICASSO THIEF, with Daniel Wallace

Name: Whit Rummel presents THE ACCIDENTAL PICASSO THIEF, with Daniel Wallace
Start: 2026-03-12T17:30:00-04:00
End: 2026-03-12T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 752 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (Historic Airport Rd, Next to The Root Cellar), Chapel Hill, NC, United States, North Carolina 27514

Schedule

Thu Mar 12 2026 at 05:30 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

752 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (Historic Airport Rd, Next to The Root Cellar), Chapel Hill, NC, United States, North Carolina 27514 | Chapel Hill, NC

In 1969, a Picasso painting was stolen by mistake. This book explores how the accidental thief pulled off a reverse heist while avoiding the FBI and the Boston mob.
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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.
Whit Rummel Jr. is an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. After graduating with a Master’s in Film from Boston University, he began his career as a documentarian. His first project, TATTOO, was a quirky 16mm film about heavily tattooed people that aired nationally on the PBS series, Independent Focus. His first screenplay, Secret Boy, was awarded the Nicholl Fellowship from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was contracted by DisneyToon studios to script an animated feature called Pigs Might Fly. He went on to establish WITCOM Associates, a Boston-based production house specializing in innovative programming for corporate and commercial clients.
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, his first, published in 1998, and Extraordinary Adventures, in 2017. In 2003 Big Fish was adapted and released as a movie by Tim Burton and then in 2013 a Broadway musical directed by Susan Stroheim. A memoir, This Isn’t Going to End Well, was published in April, 2023. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.