The Rescue Artist

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The cops and robbers who specialize in art crime are few in number and wary of strangers. My guide to their ranks was Charley Hill. In a life marked by unlikely choices, Hill’s decision to take an outsider behind the scenes ranks as one of the most surprising. The most important access Hill provided was to his own thoughts. I pestered him with questions in long interviews in London, New York, and Washington, D.C.; in short stints on the Staten Island ferry, a double-decker bus in London, and at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington; and in endless e-mails. For his patience in putting up with so intrusive a visitor, and for his forbearance in agreeing from the start that he would have no say in whatever I eventually wrote, I’m deeply grateful.

I had wanted to write about thieves who steal art and the detectives who chase them since 1990, when two crooks snatched $300 million of art from the Gardner Museum in Boston, my hometown. Two of my good friends, Reed Hundt and Bill Young, helped me turn that vague hope into a specific plan. At every stage of the process, from the earliest outline through draft after draft, Bill and Reed served as unpaid but overworked advisers.

No writer can have better colleagues than grown children who are writers themselves. My two formidably talented sons, Sam and Ben, labored mightily to round their father’s prose into shape.

Michele Missner, a researcher who is herself a precious find, cheerfully unraveled countless mysteries both large and small. Katerina Barry, an artist and a computer savant, took time from her own projects to gather and arrange pictures from around the globe. Pat Barry, a writer and historian with an encyclopedic knowledge of English (as opposed to American) slang and usage, labored valiantly to help me dodge the pitfalls that bedevil an innocent abroad.

Rafe Sagalyn, my agent and my friend, shepherded this project along from the beginning. Hugh Van Dusen is as superlative an editor as his reputation would imply, and that is high praise indeed.

For Lynn, for bottomless reserves of inspiration, insight, and encouragement, my fervent and inadequate gratitude.