The Rescue Artist

11

Encounter in Antwerp

As time passed, other informants picked up rumors of a Belgian connection. The story emerged piecemeal but the pieces seemed to fit together: Cahill’s gang, which had been selling stolen diamonds to a dealer in Antwerp for nearly a decade, had now handed that same dealer some of the missing paintings—no one was certain which ones. With the paintings as collateral, the dealer had loaned Cahill $1 million. Cahill planned to turn his newfound money into heroin and then back into more money.

A million dollars was nowhere near the paintings’ true value, but, after all, the thieves hadn’t paid a penny for them. Outsiders who ponder art thefts always get it wrong: they focus on the gulf between a number like Cahill’s $1 million and the $20 million that a masterpiece might fetch on the open market, and conclude that the thieves have blundered. Thieves sneer at reasoning like that. The proper comparison, as they see it, is not between $1 million and $20 million but between $1 million and zero, which is what the paintings had cost them.

The diamond merchant had locked the paintings in a bank vault in Luxembourg, knowing they would keep their value. (Unlike stolen cars or computers, which lose value by the week, stolen paintings by top-flight artists can safely be laid down as investments, like fine wines.) Presumably he intended to sell them someday, or to barter them for drugs or arms or counterfeit bills or some other black market commodity.

The problem for the police was finding a way to get those paintings out of the vault. On a tip, Charley Hill made contact with “a real crook of a lawyer” in Norway. Once again, Hill played a variant of his favorite role. This time he was an American art dealer working on behalf of a Middle Eastern tycoon bent on assembling, for his own delectation, a collection of world-class masterpieces.

His name was Christopher Charles Roberts, the identical pseudonym he would use in The Scream case. In this aspect of his life, as in every other, Hill was maddeningly inconsistent. In working undercover, he veered between obsessive attention to detail and carefree, well-then-fuck-’em casualness. Rebecca West once described someone as “every other inch a gentleman,” and Hill was every other inch a master of minutiae. On the one hand, he might lavish hours on creating false papers perfect in every detail. On the other, he was more than capable of launching into spur-of-the-moment descriptions of buildings and even cities he had never seen.

But if Hill’s improvisations sometimes landed him in predicaments that the rawest rookie would have avoided, he was equally capable of improvising saves that no one else could have come up with. The question was always, Which will it be this time?

In private life, too, Hill careened from extreme to extreme. He was cautious enough to have removed the street number from his front door after a spate of phone calls threatening him and his family, for instance, but so heedless of danger that on hot days he left that same front door standing wide open to all comers.

Hill’s story of a Middle Eastern mystery man was ludicrous on its face, but he had found that greed worked wonders in covering over the holes in a plot. His usual strategy was not to concoct elaborate tales but merely to drop a few broad hints. He figured that this latest gangster audience would do the bulk of the storytelling work themselves, in a dollar-fueled daze that combined ignorance of the art market, prejudice (visions of oil-rich sheiks), and Hollywood clichés (Mr. Big, in shadows, putting his feet up on the battleship-sized desk in his palatial office, lighting a cigar, and gazing fondly at the newest gilt-framed stolen treasure in his collection).

“You’ve got to find the weakness in their beliefs and then exploit it,” Hill says, “and crooks keep looking for goddamned Dr. No. That’s their fantasy—somewhere out there is Mr. Big or Dr. No or Captain Nemo, in his hideaway with all his treasures. It’s complete bullshit, of course, but criminals would much rather live in a fantasy world. They could easily learn how things really work, but they don’t want to listen to anything other than the sound of their own voices.”

The crooked lawyer told Chris Roberts, supposed Middle Eastern middleman, that he could help him buy the Russborough House paintings. Through the lawyer, Hill soon met a mysterious figure named Niall Mulvihill. The Antwerp diamond dealer and Mulvihill, it seemed, were partners of some sort.

Irish newspapers usually referred to Mulvihill as a “South Dublin businessman.” The nature of that business was never spelled out, but Mulvihill had evidently done well for himself. He collected antique cars and lived in a big, rambling house near Dublin and owned another home in Marbella, on Spain’s Costa del Sol. He was tall and flashy, resplendent in blazer, golf slacks, and tasseled loafers.

Hill liked nothing better than to play the same type. “I matched him tassel for tassel,” Hill crowed in an interview years later. “I turned on this bogus bonhomie bullshit, hail-fellow-well-met and all that.” The two men hit it off.

Hill’s first problem was to get the paintings out of Luxembourg, where undercover police operations were forbidden. The law wasn’t directed at Scotland Yard—it was a legacy of World War II, intended to insure that no Gestapo-style secret police could ever arise—but it made life more difficult for the Art Squad.

Hill spun a story that he hoped would take care of the Luxembourg hurdle. The Antwerp airport, he told Mulvihill, would make a convenient but slightly-off-the-beaten-track meeting spot. He would pay Mulvihill for the pictures and then fly out in a small plane, through France, on to Italy, and then to Lebanon. Though he didn’t say so outright, Hill hinted that that was where the people he was buying the pictures for lived, and that’s where they’d want to lay them down.

Mulvihill, impatient to see some money, quickly agreed. Antwerp was fine. What about the money that Hill kept talking about?

Hill told Mulvihill not to worry. The money would be there. What about the paintings?

All illicit exchanges proceed warily because the two sides distrust one another and, at the same time, need one another. The question for both sides is, in effect, this: when a hand disappears inside a jacket, will it reemerge holding a check or a pistol?

On an August night in 1993, in Antwerp, over dinner at the DeKeyser Hotel, Mulvihill told Hill he had something to show him. Seven years had passed since the break-in at Russborough House. The two men walked to a parking garage nearby and rode the elevator to the third floor. The garage was full, and Mulvihill and Hill took several minutes to walk up and down, making sure they were alone. No one was around.

Mulvihill led the way to a parked Mercedes sedan, gestured Hill close, and opened the trunk. Inside was a black plastic trashbag. Hill gingerly rolled back the top of the bag. There, unharmed, still on its stretcher rather than rolled up, was Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid. Hill picked up the priceless painting.

“It’s an astonishing thing to hold in your hands,” he recalled a decade later. “No question it was the Vermeer. An amazing thing about a painting like that is you don’t have to think, ‘Is this a masterpiece or isn’t it?’ It just leaps out at you, bang!”

Mulvihill was “very matter-of-fact. He could have been selling me a truckful of sheepskin coats. This was just a straight business thing for him.”

Hill clucked and fussed over the Vermeer, as befit an art buyer face-to-face with a treasure. The main thing was to look as if he knew what he was doing and to make the right noises. Hill talked about the history of the painting and what good shape it was in, and he made a big point of holding it with handkerchiefs on either side, to protect it. When Mulvihill wasn’t paying attention, Hill made sure to leave his fingerprints on the back.

That was a precaution. Hill’s underworld acquaintances were happy to drink with him, but he knew perfectly well that if it suited them, they would shoot him just as happily. When Hill talked about “stolen masterpieces in barbarian hands,” as he sometimes did, his listeners tended to assume he was talking about thieves who lacked any appreciation of what they had stolen. And so he was, but that was only part of his point. Gangsters like Cahill were not only as uncouth as barbarians, but also as violent. Now he pressed his fingers against the back of the painting. If Hill were to vanish but the police eventually recovered the Vermeer in any case, the fingerprints might at least provide a lead to his disappearance. Hill handed the painting back to Mulvihill.

A week later, it was Hill’s turn to play show-and-tell. With the cooperation of CitiBank, Scotland Yard had arranged to have two cashier’s checks prepared in Mulvihill’s name. One check was for $1 million, the other for $250,000. Just how Mulvihill intended to spread that money around, or why he wanted two checks, no one asked.

Hill and Mulvihill drove to a CitiBank branch in Brussels. Hill led the way. The bank manager, who had been briefed by headquarters, scurried out.

“Hello, Mr. Roberts. Delighted to see you.”

The bank manager did his unctuous best, and Hill acted as if the fawning was merely his due. When the glad-handing had gone on long enough, it was time to brandish the checks. The bank manager produced them with a flourish, like a headwaiter presenting a rack of lamb on a silver tray. Mulvihill took the two checks in his hands, examined them closely and lovingly (“one million dollars and no cents”), and reluctantly turned them back to the bank manager.

With the preliminaries completed, Hill and Mulvihill both figured that the next meeting would be for real. Next time, Mulvihill would drive away with his money, and Hill would fly off with his paintings.

Hill and Mulvihill happily drove back to Antwerp. On the way, Hill, not paying attention, nearly missed the Antwerp exit. At the last instant, he swerved across the highway and careened across the merge lane, cutting off an eighteen-wheeler hauling a load of tomatoes. With the trucker’s air horn still blaring, Mulvihill looked approvingly at Hill.

“Good work,” he said. “There’ll be no one following us now.”

The two men, now fast friends, made final arrangements for the swap. The deal would go down at the Antwerp airport on September 1.

On the appointed day, Hill drove to the rendezvous. A Belgian undercover cop called Antoine played the role of his bodyguard. Hill knew Antoine and liked him. More important, he looked like a bodyguard. Antoine was “a hairy-arsed, super-fit gendarme,” Hill would say later. “Doesn’t drink, lives on orange juice and yogurt”—Hill’s tone made plain that he would as soon live on goat urine and locusts—”and he was tooled up, not ostentatiously but obviously, so you’d be sure to know he was armed. He had real presence; he looked the part of a serious minder. And he had a briefcase with the cashier’s checks in it.”

Antoine, a classic-car buff, drove a vintage, lovingly maintained Mercedes. As he and Hill made their way through Antwerp and out to the airport, an elderly woman on a bicycle rattled her way across a set of tram tracks. The bell fell off her handlebars and onto the street. It was mid-morning, and traffic was heavy.

“Stop the car!” Hill barked, and then he hopped out of the Mercedes, halted traffic, retrieved the bell, and presented it to the woman on the bicycle.

“She gave me this wonderful smile of thanks,” Hill recalled long afterward, “and when I got back in the car, Antoine had this ‘what the fuck was that?’ look on his face.”

For Hill, who is in many ways akin to the small boy who imagines himself the star of the big game (“bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, all eyes on Hill as he strides to the plate”), this tiny scene was a not-to-be-missed chance to play the hero. “It was a pure Walter Raleigh moment,” he recalled long afterward, basking in the memory. “That’s all it was. And poor Antoine sitting there thinking, ‘You ought to be concentrating on the job, not fooling about playing the gallant knight to some old biddy whose bicycle has gone bust.’ “

At the airport, Hill and Antoine parked the car and walked into the small restaurant. It was noon. Hill ordered a coffee and cognac. In waltzed a dozen flight attendants, and, just behind them, Mulvihill and a crony. “You got everything?” Mulvihill asked.

“Yup,” said Hill.

The trickiest, most dangerous part of any deal is the exchange itself, when money and goods finally change hands. Hill and Mulvihill had each brought an ally, for muscle and backup. While Hill sat in the restaurant with Mulvihill’s man, Mulvihill and Antoine walked outside toward Antoine’s car. Both men were car buffs, and the Mercedes served as an ice-breaker. Mulvihill studied the cashier’s checks and assured himself that they were the ones he had seen in the bank in Brussels.

Satisfied, Mulvihill returned to the restaurant. He turned to Hill.

“Want to see the pictures?”

Hill walked out to the parking lot with Mulvihill’s partner, to a rented Peugeot. The bodyguard opened the trunk. Hill saw a sports bag, about big enough to hold a tennis racquet and a pair of sneakers. Next to it sat a black plastic bag wrapped around something rectangular and several large objects hidden inside layers of wrapping paper. The plastic bag was the same size and shape as the one Hill had seen in Antwerp, when Mulvihill had shown him the Vermeer. Hill put it to one side for a moment. He unzipped the sports bag. Inside, he saw a rolled-up canvas that he recognized as Goya’s Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate. Glad as he was to see the painting—the thieves wouldn’t have brought it if they were running a scam—it was horrifying to see a two-hundred-year-old oil painting rolled up like a ten-dollar poster. Hill set the sports bag down gently. Turning to the bag that he hoped contained the Vermeer, he brushed a hand across his shirtfront, as if he were sweeping away a piece of lint.

Silently, two large BMWs alerted by Hill’s signal sped into place, one in front of the Peugeot, one behind. Each car was “four up,” with a driver and three men. This was the Belgian SWAT squad, big guys with Dirty Harry specials. They shouted commands in Flemish, presumably to drop everything and lie down. In case they had been misunderstood, the cops helped Hill and Mulvihill’s bodyguard to the ground.

Shoved facedown onto the asphalt, Hill and his companion were handcuffed and searched and then hustled into a car and whisked off to a local police station. Mulvihill was taken into custody, too, and so was Antoine. To Charley Hill’s great delight, the commotion had drawn the attention of everyone in the coffee shop, and the whole scene played out to a satisfying chorus of shrieks from the gawking flight attendants.

Once arrived at the police station, Hill and Antoine, the gendarme-cum-bodyguard, were freed from their handcuffs, congratulated, and left to celebrate. Mulvihill was charged with handling stolen goods, but, as the Irish Examiner later reported, “he miraculously managed to escape prosecution.”

The miracle was, in fact, mundane enough, though it did demonstrate that no one took art crime too seriously. A Belgian court dropped the charges against Mulvihill on the grounds that the robbery had taken place in Ireland, outside Belgian jurisdiction.

The trash bag did indeed contain the Vermeer. In all, the Belgian police recovered four of the Russborough House paintings (as well as three fake Picassos): the Vermeer, the Goya, an Antoine Vestier portrait, and Gabriel Metsu’s Man Writing a Letter. The Metsu was a companion piece to the same artist’s Woman Reading a Letter, the painting that police had found in Istanbul, where thieves were trying to barter it for heroin. The two works are considered Metsu’s masterpieces.

Today, all but two of the eighteen paintings stolen from Russborough House in 1986 have been recovered. The missing works are Venetian scenes painted by Francesco Guardi, which some rumors have placed in Florida.

Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid hangs safely in Dublin’s National Gallery, serene still, despite all she has seen.

Martin Cahill, the engineer of the Russborough House theft, was killed in August 1994, shot through the driver’s window of his car by a gunman dressed as a Dublin city worker. Cahill had slowed to a halt at a stop sign; a man with a clipboard approached the driver’s window to ask a few questions about traffic.

In January 2003 Niall Mulvihill was shot in a gangland attack in Dublin. Mulvihill took four bullets but managed to drive two miles toward the nearest hospital. He crashed just short of the hospital, causing a four-car pileup. No one was charged with his murder.