The Rescue Artist

10

Russborough House

Charley Hill had been involved in the Russborough House theft not merely from the beginning but from before the beginning. In the fall of 1985, before the break-in, rumors had begun circulating in the London underworld that someone with a load of stolen industrial diamonds was looking for a buyer. An informant brought the story to Scotland Yard, and a detective contacted Charley Hill. “Would Hill be willing to play the role of a crooked American and see what he could find out?

Hill grabbed his chance and contacted the would-be seller at once. His name, he said, was Charley Berman (“a good American name,” Hill figured, “and it has the r’s”), and his work often brought him to London. Over the course of the next several months, the undercover cop and the diamond dealer sized each other up—Hill conveying his willingness to do business, the seller talking up his wares—and the two men struck up a friendship of sorts. More or less idly, in the course of one rambling conversation, Hill told his new acquaintance that his main business was dealing in art.

The man trying to peddle the diamonds was a crook named Tommy Coyle, based in Dublin. Over the course of the next several years he would go on to compile a record that would lead police to call him the biggest fence in Irish history. In 1990, he nearly scored a colossal coup. Shortly before, thieves had stolen £290 million pounds of treasury bonds from a courier in London. Coyle was arrested as he and two other men boarded a flight from Heathrow to Dublin. Police found £77 million of bonds in the men’s luggage. Put on trial but acquitted, Coyle celebrated his triumph by buying a racehorse and naming it 77 Mill.

Now, with Hill, Coyle went out of his way to emphasize what a big player he was. He had access to a lot of diamonds. “We’re talking about Aladdin’s cave here,” he boasted.

And then, out of the blue, something new. “I’ve got a picture you might be interested in,” Coyle said. Hill half-expected a pornographic photo. He took a look. Picasso, not porno. Or perhaps, as Hill suspected, a fake in Picasso’s style, though it wasn’t easy to tell from a color photo.

A bit of research confirmed his suspicions. At their next meeting, Hill delivered the news.

“Look, I’m not interested in that picture; I don’t think it’s real,” he said. “There are a lot more Picassos than Picasso ever painted.”

Surprisingly, Hill’s stock seemed to rise after his demurral. Soon after, in April of 1986, Coyle worked the conversation round to art once again.

“There’s going to be a big art job,” Coyle told Hill, in an urgent whisper. “Would you have any interest in looking at the pictures from it?”

“Yeah, of course I would. How big?”

“Really big. You’ll read about it in the papers.”

In Coyle’s Irish accent, “papers” was partway to “pipers.”

“It’ll be the big one,” Coyle said.

“Yeah, okay,” said Hill.

Then, bang! Russborough House was hit and off they went, the Vermeer, the Goya, the two Metsus, the Gainsborough, two Rubens, the works.

The next day Coyle phoned Hill.

“Gee,” Hill said, “that was a big one.”

Hill and Coyle arranged to meet in London to discuss the Russborough House bounty. Coyle flew in from Dublin, Hill (supposedly) from the States, and they rendezvoused at the Post House Hotel, near Heathrow Airport.

Coyle came up to Hill’s room. Hill had been told to offer drinks, and the two men filled their glasses and sat down to chat. “Yeah, I’d be interested in buying the paintings when the heat dies down,” Hill said. “Some of them, not all of them.”

They talked about the paintings and sipped their drinks. Coyle, pleased with his prospects, finished his drink and prepared to leave. Hill and Coyle shook hands. Someone knocked on the door. A waiter, with four glasses on a tray, room service stuff. “Afternoon, gentlemen. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, we’re good.”

The waiter took away the glasses Hill and Coyle had used and replaced them with clean ones.

The room service waiter was a cop, and he hurried the crook’s glass to a fingerprint lab. Within a day Scotland Yard had a positive ID on the man trying to peddle the Beit paintings. From there, the trail led straight to Martin Cahill.

The industrial diamonds, it turned out, came from a General Electric plant outside Dublin. Martin Cahill and his gang had been stealing them and selling them in Antwerp, and now they were looking for new business opportunities. Stolen art was a venture into a new market.

Cahill’s own taste in art ran to cheery scenes like the dime-store print in his living room of swans on a river, but he believed that Sir Alfred’s stolen paintings would bring him a fortune. “He’d been reading how there were all these really eccentric art lovers around the world who were prepared to pay millions of pounds for art and stash them in their basements,” said Paul Williams, Cahill’s biographer. “He reckoned he would get millions, countless millions, of pounds for them on the black market.”

With his new money, Cahill intended to make a major move into the drug importing and distributing business in Britain. The elaborate scheme involved setting up a “brass plate” bank in Antigua, a bank in name only, to launder the drug money that would soon be pouring in.

For a year, all attempts to recover the stolen paintings fizzled. Then came a break, or so it seemed, though in the end it nearly proved fatal. It was February 1987. The Dublin detective in charge of the Russborough House case, Gerry McGarrick, had a contact in the FBI named Tom Bishop.^* McGarrick was an old pro. Weathered, able, reserved, he reminded Charley Hill of John Wayne. Bishop was a much-admired undercover agent. He had scored his greatest coup in the Abscam sting in the late 1970s, playing an aide of a supposed Arab sheik and handing out bribes on the sheik’s behalf. The sting netted four congressmen and a senator, most memorably Florida representative Richard Kelly, caught on film stuffing $25,000 into his pockets and then asking an FBI agent, “Does it show?”

McGarrick’s plan was for Bishop to play a big-shot American gangster who wanted some trophy paintings to hang on his wall. Hill, in his role as Charley Berman, served as go-between and vouched for Bishop to Cahill’s gang.

Bishop flew to Dublin to meet Cahill’s men. He took with him a folder of photos showing him with Joe Bonanno and other Mafia big shots. The pictures had been snapped secretly by the FBI, but they looked like photos a crook might display on his desk.

Included in Bishop’s show-and-tell pack were some pictures of stolen paintings he’d recovered, by Georgia O’Keefe and some others. Bishop planned to pass them off as things that belonged to him. Hill and Bishop went through the packet one last time. Impressive, they both agreed. Both men overlooked one crucial item.

Bishop met Cahill’s crew. He handed over his photos. One of Cahill’s men flipped through it. The others looked on. Suddenly the crook stopped his flipping, pulled out a piece of stationery from the stack, and waved it in the air. The top of the page bore the FBI logo. Underneath was a handwritten note: “Tom, don’t forget these.”

Cahill’s men stood up and left the room. The gangsters walked out without pausing to shoot Bishop, which was some consolation. (If the meeting had been held in the gang’s own territory rather than in Bishop’s hotel room, the outcome might have been different.)

“The Tom Bishop screwup put an end to Charley Berman,” Hill recalled years later, “because if Tom Bishop is a Fed, then Charley Berman, who brought him in, is a no-good son of a bitch, no matter where they think he’s from, okay? End of Charley Berman.”

Three years went by. Then, in May 1990, Turkish police in Istanbul arrested a Scottish criminal from Dundee who was trying to buy a shipment of heroin to sell in Britain. His down payment for the attempted purchase: Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter, stolen from Russborough House. Over the next few years, more of the stolen paintings surfaced. In April 1992, detectives in London working on a drug case happened on Gainsborough’s Madame Baccelli, in the back of a truck. In March 1993, police chasing drug leads found a painting by the Dutch artist Anthonie Palamedesz in a locker at London’s Euston train station. In the same month, British police acting on a tip raided a nondescript house in Hertfordshire and discovered, behind the sofa, Rubens’s Portrait of a Monk. (The story of the last recovery had a bizarre twist. Before it made its way to Hertfordshire, the Rubens had been hidden in a house in London. By coincidence, a run-of-the-mill thief, not connected in any way with the thieves who had hit Russborough House, happened to break into that very house. Finding the Rubens but not knowing what it was except that it looked posh, he grabbed it and ran off.)

The London recoveries left four paintings still missing, including the Goya and, most valuable of all, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.

In the meantime, Charley Hill had kept in touch with Gerry McGarrick, the Dublin detective heading up the Russborough House case. At some point in the early 1990s, Hill was in Dublin, and the two detectives met over a drink. By now some of the Beit paintings, though not the best, had begun turning up in London. McGarrick told Hill that he’d heard from informants that all the paintings had left Ireland and that the ones that had already been recovered in London were the only ones still in Britain. He’d heard rumors that the rest were somewhere in Belgium.

“At the time he said it to me,” Hill recalled in 2002, “it was as good as saying, ‘Kiss ‘em goodbye.’ “