The Rescue Artist

5

The Art Squad

In the world of art crime, London is one of the great crossroads. (The United States, with the single colossal exception of the Gardner theft, is a backwater in comparison.) Every criminal knows that police in pursuit of thieves tend to lose interest (or authority) when the crooks leave their jurisdiction. Art, on the other hand, knows no borders; a van Gogh stolen from a gallery in Geneva and smuggled into Rome retains every dollar of its value.

The law varies from country to country, too, in ways that keep art on the move. In Italy, for example, if a person buys a painting in good faith from a legitimate dealer, the new owner immediately becomes the rightful owner whether or not the painting was stolen. Japan is nearly as permissive: after two years, all sales are final. Steal a painting, hide it for two years, sell it in Japan, and the buyer can freely hang it for the world to see. In the United States, in contrast, the rule is that “no one can sell what he does not own,” and the corollary is “buyer beware.” If an American buys stolen art, even unknowingly, the original owner is entitled to reclaim it.

The result is that stolen paintings and sculptures travel a long and circuitous route through the underworld. The transactions all take place out of sight because no reputable dealer would sell a stolen work. Years ago, even well-intentioned dealers might have done so unknowingly. Today, the advent of computerized databases of stolen art has made it nearly impossible, at least in the case of masterpieces, for dealers to plead ignorance.

So purloined objects pass from hand to hand and eventually link a cast of characters who, in ordinary circumstances, would barely recognize one another’s existence. Museum directors perched on the loftiest branches of the art world find themselves fielding phone calls demanding ransoms from thugs who have never ventured into a museum except to rob one. Paintings swiped from titled aristocrats who preside over centuries-old country houses end up in the hands of down-market drug dealers who hide them in plastic supermarket bags and cram them inside train station lockers.

It was the job of the Art Squad to know that dubious traffic in all its twists and convolutions.

The squad was tiny, and honored more in speeches than in practice. A small group within the much larger Serious and Organised Crime Unit, the Art Squad never numbered more than half a dozen, often fell as low as two or three, and occasionally was disbanded altogether. Within Scotland Yard, politics was a rough and complicated game. For a group whose toehold on power was as precarious as the Art Squad, the risk of being defined out of existence as part of an “internal reorganization” always loomed large.

Part of the problem was simply that “art” had to do with “culture,” and in the macho world of policing, anything so effete was suspect. The art detectives themselves hurried to deny any hoity-toity ways. “People often say to me, ‘You must know so much about art,’ “says Dick Ellis, one of the top men at the Art Squad for ten years. “The truth is, I know bugger-all about art.”

“The police won’t say so,” remarks Charley Hill, “but what they think is, ‘What’s so important about pictures, anyway?’ The attitude is, ‘You’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all.’

“Which is a difficult argument to counter,” Hill continues, “when you’re dealing with complete ignoramuses. You can take the high road all you want, and all they’ll do is write you off as some sort of aesthete who thinks that pictures are what it’s all about.”

Ordinarily, the police are quick to sympathize with crime victims. But a little old lady who has been knocked on the head is an entirely different creature from Lord Pifflepuffle, whose estate has a hundred rooms and whose grounds stretch a thousand acres, and who has lost a painting purchased by his great-grandfather a century ago. When the loss is a painting and there are dozens more still on the walls, the well of sympathy can run pretty dry.

In so grand a setting, the police are often ill at ease and primed to take offense. Lord P.’s posh accent may be enough to trigger their resentment, or perhaps his aides will make the fatal mistake of treating the police like servants. It doesn’t take much.

In rare circumstances—if the stolen painting was a national treasure, say, or if the thieves shot someone—the hunt for the missing artwork may become a priority. More likely, the police will reason (silently) that Lord P. was a toff who should be glad he got off so lightly. He was rich, the painting was probably insured, and, in any event, there are bigger fish to fry.

On the question of insurance, the commonsense assumption of the police—and of the thieves, too—is quite likely wrong. Hard as it is to believe, a great many paintings worth millions of dollars are not insured. In Britain, for example, the works of art in the permanent collections of the great public museums, including, notably, the National Gallery and the Tate, are not insured against theft. The rationale is that “You do not spend Treasury money twice.” In other words, the public, having provided the funds for the purchase itself, should not be further burdened with buying insurance.

When great paintings travel from one museum to another for an exhibit, they are insured, but the insurance is “nail to nail.” It applies only from the moment the works are taken off the wall of their home institution to the moment they are set back in place. At home the paintings are insured against damage but not theft. Fire, because it could destroy paintings wholesale, is the nightmare fear for museums. Theft, which rarely involves more than a painting or two at a time, is seen as a matter for guards and cameras rather than insurers. The Scream was not insured.

American policy is different from European, and American museums do buy insurance against theft. A small museum might have a policy that covers $5 million or $10 million worth of art; a world-renowned museum might have $500 million worth of coverage.

Here, too, there are exceptions, and the Gardner was the exception of exceptions. The museum and the mock-Italian palace that houses it were the legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the eccentric Boston socialite and patron of the arts. “Mrs. Jack” died in 1924, but she lives on in the famous portrait by her friend John Singer Sargent, in countless appealing but dubious anecdotes—she supposedly took a lion cub on a leash for a walk down Tremont Street—and, above all, in her museum. For years the museum also served as Mrs. Jack’s home; she lived on the fourth floor, above three floors of carefully gathered treasures. Gardner’s will stipulated that her paintings be displayed just as she had arranged them. None was to be sold or even moved. No new works were to elbow their way into the collection.

One consequence was that, though Boston grew ever more bustling as the decades passed, 2 Palace Road remained an oasis of tranquility. Another was that the museum trustees decided to forego theft insurance. The customary rationale for insuring art, after all, is to make it possible to replace objects that have been stolen or damaged. But if any such replacement is forbidden, why pay insurance year after year? Insuring the collection might even draw thieves who believed they could steal paintings and hold them for ransom. (So the trustees reasoned. A contrary view—that, in the event of a theft, the museum would be better off with a check from an insurance company than with a dead loss—lost out.)

So when thieves broke into the Gardner in the winter of 1990 and walked away with $300 million worth of art, not a single penny of the loss was covered by insurance.

Private owners are often just as reckless. Some are shortsighted. Others, especially those who have inherited paintings worth a fortune, may lie low in fear they will draw the notice of the taxman. Still others are once-grand aristocrats, nowadays rich in land and property but poor in cash, who choose to put their money into replacing a two-acre slate roof or modernizing centuries-old plumbing rather than into insuring dozens of dusty canvases passed down through the generations.

Surprisingly, in light of how many people choose to do without it, insurance for art is a bargain. The going rate is a few tenths of a percent, roughly on a par with homeowner’s insurance; the premium on a million-dollar painting is a few thousand dollars a year. But the rates are low because the risk of theft is low, and many owners take a chance. The Duke of Buccleuch, for example, owns an art collection worth some £400 million. One painting alone, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder, stolen in the summer of 2003, was worth perhaps £50 million. The duke had insured his entire collection for £3.2 million.

The disdain for art crime on the part of the police is not simply philistinism. The police, always strapped for money and facing crises on every front, have to choose which crimes to pursue. They confront a real-life counterpart of the dilemma from freshman philosophy class: Do you rescue the man crying for help in the window of the burning house, or do you save the Rembrandt hanging above the mantel?

The public, too, prefers that the police focus on “real” crime rather than on stolen art. Unsolved assaults are scandals; missing paintings are mysteries. The police have little choice but to show they are fighting all-out to control the crimes that dominate the television news and the tabloid headlines. “If we should find a drug dealer who’s also a pedophile and who’s involved in arts and antiques, maybe we’d get something done,” complains one detective who has been chasing art crooks for thirty years. “But if a villain is involved in arts and antiques on their own, the police don’t care.”

On the same morning that John Butler, the head of the Art Squad, phoned Charley Hill to talk about The Scream, the Times of London ran an editorial on the theft. “Who could sell such a painting?” the newspaper asked, bewildered. “Where could it be hidden? Who would dare receive such stolen property, unless it was an obsessive millionaire admirer of Munch, ready to risk all for a furtive midnight peep into his darkened cellar where the icon might be hidden?”

Legitimate questions all, but art detectives snarl at anyone who dares ask them. One reason is impatience; they have work to do, and outsiders posing questions are a nuisance, like toddlers endlessly demanding, “Why, Daddy? Tell me why.” An honest answer, moreover, would necessarily be long and involved. An art thief’s motives are a toxic brew, and psychology is as important as economics. To reduce a thief’s motives to money is as mistaken as to say that a connoisseur’s sole reason for spending a million dollars on a painting is beauty.

Yes, for a start, thieves steal because they believe the risks are so low and the potential rewards so high. Just where they will find a buyer, they leave as a problem for another day. Perhaps a dishonest collector, or the distraught owner, or the owner’s insurance company. (Often, when a masterpiece is stolen, notices appear promising a reward for information leading to its return. The iron belief in the underworld, based on the size of those rewards, is that the black-market value of a painting is ten percent of its legitimate value.)

Judged purely on its business merits, stealing top-flight paintings is a game for suckers only. The temptation is plain: like heroin and cocaine, masterpieces represent millions of dollars of value squeezed into a tiny volume. And though smuggling drugs is dangerous, transporting art is easy. Any shipper would happily carry a painting halfway around the world. If a crook wanted to bypass UPS or Federal Express, that would be easy, too. He could quite likely saunter through customs with a Rembrandt in his luggage. On the off chance that an inspector betrayed the slightest interest, the thief could pass it off as a copy he’d bought for his living room from a struggling student.

But the seeming advantages dissolve like mirages. Other items that combine colossal value and small size—such as drugs, diamonds, jewelry, and gold and silver artifacts—are either “faceless” or readily disguised. Rubies and pearls can be plucked from a stolen necklace and thereby rendered unidentifiable. Diamonds can be recut. Antiquities looted from archeological digs—and therefore not yet known to scholars or the police—can be sold without fear that an aggrieved owner will demand the return of his property.

Not so for art. A great painting shouts out its identity (not to sleepy customs agents, perhaps, but certainly to would-be buyers), and to disguise a masterpiece would quite likely be to destroy it. A painting’s identity, moreover, extends beyond the canvas. Every important painting trails behind it a written record, in effect a pedigree, that traces the history of its passage from one owner to the next. No legitimate buyer would believe for a moment that an undocumented work could be the real thing, any more than he would believe the tale of a fast-talking stranger who claimed to be the rightful king of France.

If thieves reasoned like ordinary people, these drawbacks would push them away from art. As the theft of The Scream and countless other paintings demonstrates, though, thieves carry on undaunted. Beyond the financial motive, the Art Squad has learned over the years, thieves steal art to show their peers how nervy they are, and to gain trophies they can flaunt, and to see their crimes splashed across the headlines, and to stick it to those in power. Thieves steal, too, because they use paintings as black-market currency for deals with their fellow crooks. For the police, it becomes a game of Follow the Bouncing Ball: a Picasso stolen from a weekend house in the Dordogne passes through the hands of a French gang, which sells it to one based in Amsterdam, which in turn sells it to drug dealers in Turkey, where it serves as a down payment for a shipment of heroin that ends up on the streets of London.

Especially when it comes to the most famous paintings, thieves’ motives often have as much to do with bragging rights as with anything tangible. Stealing an old master wins the thief kudos: he gains the envy and admiration of his set. The painting as a work of art is beside the point; crooks are seldom, if ever, art connoisseurs. A Rembrandt with a £5 million price tag is desirable because it is the ultimate trophy. In other circles, a man might achieve the same goal by buying a Rolls Royce or climbing Everest or shooting a lion and mounting its head on the wall.

The longer the odds, the greater the coup. In 1997, for instance, a thief in London strode into the posh Lefevre Gallery and asked if a particular portrait was by Picasso. Told that it was, he took out a shotgun, grabbed the painting, and hurried into a waiting taxi. The risk and the pizzazz were the point—an armed robbery, in midday, in midtown, with the ultimate brand-name as the prize. What ambitious young thief could resist the challenge?

Questions about why thieves do what they do grate on detectives’ nerves because they imply, as the detectives see it, that criminals are complex, misunderstood, intriguing figures. Why do thieves steal art? Detectives bark out a short answer, which is more a warning to back off than an explanation: “Because they do.” Why do bullies beat up weaklings? Why do gangsters shoot their rivals?

Come back to it again. Why do thieves steal masterpieces?

“Because they want to and they can.”

When The Scream disappeared, the Norwegian police asked themselves the usual questions about who might have done it. As the days went by, they added one more: Why haven’t we heard from the thieves?

From the start, the Norwegians had assumed that the thieves who had taken The Scream intended to hold it for ransom. “Artnapping,” after all, offers the advantages of kidnapping without all the fuss. No one needs to feed a stolen painting or keep it quiet or watch over it day and night; a painting cannot put up a fight or scream for help or testify in court. And if everything goes wrong and the police begin closing in, a painting can always be flung into a trashcan or tossed onto a bonfire.

But first days passed, and then weeks, and still the thieves kept silent.

Scotland Yard had begun mulling over the case as soon as the story broke, before it had any official role to play. The first challenge, the detectives on the Art Squad reckoned, would be to devise a way to lure the thieves out from hiding.

“What can we use as a plan?” John Butler asked Charley Hill.

“Give me a quarter of an hour, and I’ll think of something.”

It was a Monday morning in February 1994, a cold, bleak day. Butler was in London. Hill happened to be on assignment to Europol, the European counterpart of the international police organization Interpol. He was based in The Hague, Holland, in a dank slab of a building by a busy road and a frozen canal. In World War II, it had served as a regional Gestapo headquarters.

For a restless, moody man like Hill, life tethered to a desk was purgatory. On the other hand, few pleasures matched the thrill of dueling with a crew of cunning, malevolent thieves. Hill put down the phone and leaned back contentedly in his chair. He stretched his long legs, closed his eyes, and tried to put himself inside the mind of a crook who had snatched one of the most famous works of the twentieth century.

How to coax a thief like that into the open? Hill reviewed some of his undercover roles. Typically he played a shady American or Canadian businessman, a wheeler-dealer who traveled in expensive but flashy circles, an outgoing man who liked to talk and drink late into the night and who might reveal, as the hours slipped by, that he could snarl as well as smile.

The tone of these intimate performances—and the audience—varied from job to job. One week, Hill might find himself playing a swindler looking to buy counterfeit bills, and the next, he might be passing himself off as a crooked collector in the market for a stolen painting. As a swindler, Hill would likely curse and carry on. Playing a connoisseur, he would turn down the bluster and threats and instead conjure up a bit of what he calls “art chat.” A soliloquy on Turner’s use of light and shade might do nicely.

Perhaps Hill’s allotted quarter-hour had gone by, but not by much. He smiled to himself and picked up the phone to tell Butler his plan.