The Rescue Artist

8

The Man from the Getty

FEBRUARY 14, 1994

Charley Hill’s first thought was that the thieves who had The Scream knew that it would be impossible to sell it openly. Unless they had stolen the picture in order to destroy it, they had some other purpose in mind. What purpose? Ransom, most likely.

Could the Norwegian government pay for the return of a national treasure? No, that would just encourage the scumbags. What was a variation on that theme? Somebody else could pay on the government’s behalf. “Blatant casuistry, of course,” Hill thought, “but there you are.”

Now, who in the hell would do that?

The way to lure the thieves into the open, Hill figured, was to dangle money. Who could come up with millions to retrieve someone else’s painting? In the art world, one name in particular means money. Even crooks know the Getty Museum, the sprawling southern California museum named for its founder, J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire. Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, had endowed the richest museum in the world.

Getty himself had been a sour, pinched, bad-tempered cuss, a Dickensian villain who looked a bit like Homer Simpson’s boss, Mr. Burns. He lived outside London on an estate that was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by twenty attack dogs. A pathological cheapskate despite his riches, Getty kept a pay phone in his mansion for his guests and squirreled away bits of old string to reuse later. In 1973, Getty made news across the world when he refused to pay ransom to an Italian gang that had kidnapped his grandson and demanded $17 million for his release. Only after the gang cut off the boy’s right ear and mailed it to a newspaper in Rome did Getty relent a bit. He negotiated his grandson’s release for $2.7 million, which was, he said, as much money as he could put his hands on.

The Getty Museum, in contrast, spent money like a lottery winner on a binge. U.S. tax laws require that foundations spend five percent of their endowment each year, and for the Getty that meant a mandatory $250 million a year. Older, poorer museums cringed with envy as they watched their nouveau riche rival gobble up treasure after treasure. Today the Getty’s see-it-and-buy-it frenzy has eased—the museum opened a new, six-building, dollar-devouring “campus” in 1997—but after years of conspicuous consumption, mention of the Getty produces a response that is almost Pavlovian in everyone who hears it.

It was the one institution a villain would know about, Hill figured. No other museum conjured up images of money spilling out of pockets. Beyond that, the Getty could do what it wanted without fretting about the rules and red tape that slowed down tax-supported dinosaurs. Above all else the name had cachet. You couldn’t tell the crooks, “Uncle Fred’s going to pay your ransom.” It wouldn’t carry any weight. But a mention of “the Getty” would catch their attention.

The rest of Hill’s story almost wrote itself: He would claim to be a representative of the Getty Museum, negotiating sotto voce on behalf of his colleagues at Oslo’s National Gallery. The Getty would ransom The Scream and in return for their hush-hush rescue work, Norway would loan it the painting.

Hill would play a big, fast-talking American, a wheeler-dealer accustomed to getting what he wanted and not too fussy about how he got it. For an undercover cop with a hammy streak, it was the role of a lifetime. “It’s perfect,” Hill thought. “I’ll be the Man from the Getty.”

Hill phoned John Butler, his Art Squad colleague, and spelled out his plan.

“Nice idea,” said Butler. “Let’s try it.”

Butler phoned back a few minutes later. “I’ve spoken to the Norwegians. They like it. What do you picture as our next step?” “First,” said Hill, “I guess we’d better talk to the Getty.”

This would take some delicacy, since it was a bit late to ask the Getty for permission to invoke its name. And though the Getty wasn’t actually putting any money at risk, it was unlikely to welcome even the suggestion that it was a kind of ATM to the art world. Hill insisted that there was no problem. Most people were glad to do Scotland Yard a favor, and everyone in the art world wanted to help the Norwegians out of a jam. The people at the Getty might huff and puff, but they’d get over it.

By good fortune, the Art Squad’s Dick Ellis had worked on several cases with the Getty over the previous half-dozen years. By happenstance, too, Hill had visited the Getty on his honeymoon twenty years before. He didn’t know any more about the museum than any other tourist might, but he figured he had seen enough to avoid any egregious faux pas. That was astonishingly nervy, or foolish, and completely typical of Hill. Since his long-ago visit to California, the Getty had begun building a lavish new museum that was located a dozen miles from the one Hill had seen and bore no resemblance to it. Hill waved all that aside.

Ellis had a good relationship with the Getty’s director and with its head of security. When the time came for the Art Squad to make its pitch, Ellis would be the man to fly to Los Angeles and make nice with the California museum.

Ellis, Charley Hill, and the head of the Art Squad, John Butler, met to fine-tune their strategy. It was early evening; the three men were at Scotland Yard. Butler called Ellis into his office. He had just opened a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey, which happened to be Ellis’s favorite. Hill was already there. The three detectives sat down and went over the whole scenario.

All three were large, forceful, outspoken men, with big egos and little inclination to defer to one another. They knew each other well, as friends, colleagues, and occasional rivals. When they told war stories about old cases, the talk tended to veer off-course into long disputes over who had originally thought of what, amid much eye-rolling and muttering and indignant cries of “Bollocks!”

On this night, though, the three policemen were in high good humor, delighted with what they were about to put in motion. The Getty! Christ, why hadn’t anyone thought of it before? This was going to be good.

Soon after, Ellis flew to California to make his pitch. He is an impressive figure, an inch or two under six feet but as solid and sturdy as a battering ram. Even his fingers are thick and strong; he pounds two-fingered on his laptop keyboard as if he were thrusting his fingers into the chest of an adversary in an angry argument.

In contrast with Hill, who had been odd man out in every group he’d ever joined, Ellis was the very image of a cop. He had joined the police at age nineteen and never risen to great rank, despite considerable talent, in good measure because he preferred a life of action to one behind a desk. His fellow cops, who had the foot soldiers’ suspicion of their commanding officers, trusted Ellis as one of their own.

A veteran of countless briefings, Ellis is clear and well-organized. He speaks in numbered points, as if reading from an outline, and he likes to sort out logistical tangles. Ellis explained The Scream plan. The Getty gulped hard but heard him out.

In Hill’s view, it was all a fine joke. “They were a bit tight-arsed at first,” Ellis reported. “They made clear that they wouldn’t do this for just anybody. They didn’t want the Des Moines, Iowa, sheriff’s department ringing them up to say, ‘Can you give us a hand here?’ But in the end they cooperated brilliantly.”

Ellis had brought a photo of Charley Hill to California with him, along with Charley’s birth date and other background information. If the Getty was going to lend its cover to this operation, Hill would need a new identity.

In short order, Charley Hill had vanished, and one Christopher Charles Roberts had arisen to take his place.^* Most of the trappings were routine. Hill was provided with an American Express card in Roberts’s name, a Getty Museum employee ID with his photo, and, for flashing at the appropriate moments, business cards and personalized stationery. A second layer of preparation was more defensive in nature. The Getty’s internal records—notably the payroll files for the past several years—had to be doctored in case anyone began snooping into Christopher Roberts’s bona fides.

The risk wasn’t so much that a suspicious crook might phone the Getty and learn anything useful. Even in ordinary circumstances, most institutions clam up when strangers ask questions about their employees. “But criminals will always check out the people they’re dealing with,” says Ellis, “and you have to be prepared for them to pay somebody within the institution to get them the information they want.”

That possibility raised another danger. What if someone on the crooks’ payroll began looking for Getty employees who knew Roberts? How to explain that no one did? To ward off such trouble down the road, the Getty concocted in-house records that listed Roberts as a roving scout permanently assigned to Europe, and working directly (and exclusively) for the director.

Unless you were in the very top tier of management at the Getty, Hill saw delightedly, you couldn’t counter the argument that he was anything other than a proper employee. It was that good. Hill gave his new credentials an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Everything looks perfectly pukka … kosher.”

The translation of English slang into American was almost instantaneous, unusual only in that Hill spoke both idioms aloud. Usually Hill shifted on the fly, seamlessly denouncing some hapless twit as an “asshole” or an “arsehole” depending on whether his listeners were Americans or Brits. (Bilingual cursing was especially demanding, since so often it came in the heat of the moment. Hill’s time in the Army, when he had worked on sounding “like a redneck from Fayetteville, North Carolina,” had given him good practice.)

Hill is bilingual only in American English and British English, but within those narrow confines he is masterful. (On rare occasions he will venture as far afield as Canada. For an undercover job in the Czech Republic, Hill spent hours practicing broad vowel sounds so that he would sound authentically Canadian. Almost certainly this detail would be lost on the mobsters he was dealing with, but it reflected craftsmanship and professional pride, akin to a carpenter’s taking pains to align all the slots in his screwheads in parallel.)

Hill chose the name “Christopher Charles Roberts” as a mnemonic—the r sounds served as a reminder to himself to enunciate r’s whenever he came to them, as Americans do, rather than to swallow them English-style. The use of his own name as a middle name was a precaution; with some fast talking, Hill might be able to wriggle out of trouble if by bad fortune someone he knew happened to call out to him on the street.

“Hi there,” he’d say aloud to himself, like a singer practicing scales, “I’m Chris Roberts.” There were key sounds and phrases and mannerisms that you had to get right. Do it wrong or overdo it, like Dick Van Dyke playing an Englishman, and you’d be caught the minute you opened your mouth.

The role of Chris Roberts, Getty sleazebag, would soon put Hill’s skills to the test. The grading, it is worth bearing in mind, would be done by professional criminals.