These days, thieves are also stripping buildings of their paneling, plasterwork, ironwork, statuary, window shutters, doorknobs, doorcases and even entire staircases.

Other thieves, many of them corrupt Kurdish officials, are stripping the economy of everything that can be carted over the frontier to Iran and sold, from bulldozers to electrical wire.

The Dixons and 14 employees were herded into money storage cages and held at gunpoint as the thieves stripped the depot of cash.

But within two months, thieves stripped the garden of most of its azaleas, rhododendrons and trees.

"Not to mention trivia like Courter Slauce getting himself killed on his way down to see me last night, or the fact that thieves have stripped the daPena warehouse."

Neither Mr. Cronin nor the F.B.I. would comment on how the thieves stripped the paintings from the mueuem's walls or how they transported them after leaving.

"I had my peanut cooker and my icy machine, and the thieves would have stripped all that for sure," he said.

Two thieves have stripped a Paris auction house of a painting by the French Impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir valued at $260,000.

The most startling example of the Chief's insights and influence came earlier this year, when a woman reported that thieves were stripping aluminum siding off her boathouse.

One night in Brooklyn, after thieves stripped an abandoned Bushwick building of its copper plumbing, everybody on the block began piling their belongings in cars, fleeing in anticipation of a fire.