The Rescue Artist

22

Gangsters

I Norway, Charley Hill didn’t figure he was dealing with a modern-day Adam Worth. Johnsen and Ulving seemed too small-time. But he did worry about who might be behind them. Criminal gangs have discovered that art is easy pickings, and a trail that started with bumblers could well end with gangsters. Let your guard down and you might get your head blown off.

Violent and ruthless, the professionals have none of the endearing ineptitude of the small-time thieves. Worse still, from the police point of view, the pros may have more complicated motives for stealing than the amateurs do. If a gang steals a painting to send a message of some sort, and not simply to cash in, the odds of recovering it become even smaller.

The involvement of gangsters in art crime dates from the 1960s and took off two decades later, when the art market exploded.^* In May 1969, the Italian police announced the formation of the first-ever art squad. The mission of the grandly named Command for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the government proclaimed, was to safeguard Italy’s paintings and sculptures.

Five months later, thieves in Palermo, Sicily, broke into the Church of San Lorenzo, sliced Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence from its frame, and vanished. The church had no alarm system. A priest asleep in a nearby room heard nothing. The enormous painting, roughly six feet by nine feet, was one of the last that Caravaggio completed. (His life, filled with tumult, seems too crowded to have left any time for painting. In a six-year span, in his thirties, Caravaggio was arrested and tried eleven times, on charges ranging up to murder. In 1606 he killed a rival in a quarrel over a game of tennis; he died on the run in 1609 at age thirty-nine.) The Nativity had hung in Palermo since 1609. The painting is worth tens of millions, and it has never been seen again.

At once came rumors—endorsed by the police—that the Mafia was behind the theft. Along with the Mafia tales, the headlines screamed the usual rumors of an elusive Dr. No. “Who would take a painting like that?” scoffed General Roberto Conforti, head of the Italian art squad. “What would even the most unscrupulous art collector do with it? It’s huge. You couldn’t hang it anywhere where it wouldn’t be seen. No, what we suspected from the start was that this was a message from the Mafia. They wanted us to understand that they could take whatever they wanted from wherever they wanted in Palermo, and no one—especially not the police—could stop them. And we think they held on to it as a symbol.”

Finally, a quarter-century after the disappearance of the Caravaggio, word came from the Mafia itself. In November 1996, Italy’s former prime minister Giulio Andreotti was on trial for corruption. A Mafia pentiti—a supposedly penitent criminal who had agreed to testify against his former colleagues—was on the stand, hidden behind a screen.

Francesco Marino Mannoia was a dangerous man with a harmless appearance. “Mozzarella,” he had been nicknamed, in mocking tribute to his bland manner and quiet voice. Mannoia had a storehouse of knowledge that made him a prized witness for the state. Hidden inside an armored car, he had taken police on a tour of Mafia hideouts and heroin-processing facilities in Palermo. He had turned over a thick account book listing payoffs to politicians and other local bigwigs. Mannoia knew, literally, where the bodies were buried and had flown over Palermo in a helicopter with police, pointing out Maña “graveyards.”

It took a month for word of his cooperation with the police to leak. One November evening in 1989, Mannoia’s mother, aunt, and sister left their house and settled into the family car. All three women wore black, because they were in mourning for Francesco’s brother, a Mafia gunman, who had himself been gunned down by underworld rivals. Mafia lore has it that women are exempt from retaliation. Not so. Hitmen killed the three women and sped off.

Now Mannoia, who was serving 17 years for narcotics trafficking, was on the stand in the Andreotti case. In a trial focused on political scandals at the highest level of government, the theft of a painting two decades before seemed almost incidental. “I’ve stolen some paintings in my time,” Mannoia told the court, in response to a question about his criminal career. “Some modern stuff, and Antonello da Messina. Oh, and remember that Caravaggio that disappeared in Palermo in 1969? That was me, too.”

He and his fellow thieves knew nothing about art, Mannoia testified. The Caravaggio was so big that the thieves had folded it to make it easier to carry. “When our buyer saw it,” Mannoia said, “he burst into tears and wouldn’t take it.”

Mannoia may have been lying, for reasons of his own. (The “illustrious figure” who wanted to buy the painting and wept when he saw how it had been damaged, according to Mannoia, was Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister and the very man on trial for corruption.) Still, no one disputes the central claim that the Mafia was tied up in the theft in some way.^* “We don’t believe that Mannoia was lying,” says Conforti, the head of the art squad. “He was telling the truth. Except that, according to our investigations, he was not referring to the Caravaggio but to a similar work that was stolen in a nearby church in the same period.”

The lone indisputable point is that Caravaggio’s painting, if it still exists, has never reappeared.

The involvement of the Mafia and other criminal organizations in art crime means that the risks have grown formidable. Once a respite from “real” crime and an almost cozy world unto itself, art theft now carries all the ugly trappings of organized crime.

“These guys are different,” says one British art investigator with 30 years’ experience, newly returned from his first trip to the former Soviet bloc. “Your average criminal in England, even some of the nasty ones, if they’re stung by another criminal, then, yeah, they’ll kill him. But the Serbs and the Albanians will kill his family as well. And his kids, and the dog, and the cat. And then burn the house down.”

The twin marks of the new era are more violence and more volume. “In Europe,” says Lynne Chaffinch, head of the FBI’s art theft program, “criminal gangs are moving just massive amounts of art. In Russia, the intelligence people told me they’d identified over forty organized crime groups involved in art theft. At the border, they’ve caught a whole train-load of icons and other stolen art.”

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the opening of borders to the west, eastern Europe became a free-for-all. Thieves who had quickly caught on to the delights of private enterprise scrambled to loot churches and museums. In the Czech Republic, in 1996, Charley Hill helped break up a ring of art thieves run by former secret police officials who had held power in the bad old days. In the end, Hill and his detective colleagues recovered some two dozen old masters, including such hugely valuable works as Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Ill-Matched Lovers, which had been pulled off the wall of the National Museum in Prague. The venture climaxed in an armed confrontation between a German SWAT team and a band of Czech thieves headed by a gold-toothed killer named Kittler.

In time, old-style gangsters like Kittler or Martin Cahill, the Dublin crime boss, may come to seem quaint. In 1994 in Frankfurt, Germany, for example, thieves stole two Turner paintings on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The renowned paintings, Shade and Darkness and Light and Colour, near-abstractions on the theme of the biblical flood, had a joint value in the neighborhood of $80 million. At some point in the several years the paintings were in limbo, they apparently passed into the control of the Serbian gangster and warlord known as Arkan. The commander of a private army of several thousand men and a pioneer in ethnic cleansing, Arkan was an indicted war criminal.

A century before, art thieves looked like Adam Worth, the dashing Victorian who fell in love with Gainsborough’s Duchess. By the end of the twentieth century, Worth had given way to the likes of Arkan, who was, in the words of one UN diplomat, “a psychopathic mass murderer.”

He met his end in fittingly violent fashion, gunned down with two bodyguards in the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade. The fate of the Turners was happier. Just in time for Christmas 2002, the Tate held a joyful news conference to announce that it had recovered both paintings, only slightly damaged.