(FORTUNE Magazine) – By some estimates, as much as $5 billion of artwork a year is pilfered, and much of that is impossible to trace. Unless a piece is stupendously valuable, there is little coordination among authorities.

Into this breach steps James Mintz, who has run a corporate investigation firm for ten years. Mintz, along with TRACE, a British database outfit, recently set up a joint venture called Art Recovery. Art Recovery compares TRACE's two databases: a listing of stolen art and another itemizing some 4.5 million lots annually at 1,000 auction houses across the globe. When a match comes up--bingo! Art Recovery employs two former Scotland Yard detectives who recover the work. There's a small fee to list a stolen item, and retrieval can run into the tens of thousands.

One of Art Recovery's biggest scores to date involves Sir Tatton Sykes of Sledmere House in Yorkshire. In December 2002, he noticed that a life-sized, 1,000-pound statue known as "Goddess of the Harvest," worth some $30,000, was missing from his garden. Gone. He called Mintz, Mintz put the statue on the cover of company magazine TRACE, and within days a caller in a nearby village reported having seen it being packed for shipment. Art Recovery traced the goddess to Illinois and sent her back to Sir Tatton. Says Mintz: "This gives you a fighting chance of recovering your property." --Andy Serwer