The Rescue Artist

27

Front-Row Seat

Undercover work is not a spectator sport. Almost always, the only eyewitnesses are the participants themselves, and both cops and robbers have biases that distort their view. Dennis Farr, who was director of the Courtauld when thieves stole its £2 million Bruegel—this was the “Peter Brewgal” affair—is one of the rare laymen who have seen an undercover operation.

Farr is a tall, thin man with elegant manners. He looks like a fluttery type, a bird-watcher perhaps, the sort of scholar who would go pale at the sight of a typo. As the Bruegel case played out, though, it fell to Farr to string crooks along on the phone (while Art Squad detectives at his elbow listened in and scribbled him instructions). He found he had a flair for the task. “One discovers one has a bit of a thespian bent,” he acknowledges shyly.

Charley Hill and Dennis Farr hit it off at once. Hill put on his best manners at their first meeting, deferring to “Dr. Farr” and chatting away about the Courtauld collection and art in general. Bruegel was one of Hill’s favorites. He grew animated when he discussed how Bruegel had painted the shaft of light that descends from the left and illuminates Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, the stolen painting. Farr took up the theme, and both men went on to a happy discussion of similar uses of light in Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Farr is no snob, and he had been taken with the other Art Squad detectives, too, but Hill intrigued him. “As soon as I met him,” Farr recalls, “I saw there was a maverick quality in Charles Hill. I said to myself, ‘He’s either going to end up commissioner of the metropolitan police, or he’ll quit the force altogether.’ “

The second time they met, Farr found Hill considerably changed. The plan was to rendezvous with the crooks, and Hill was in character. “I was a loudmouthed ‘Hey there, you old son of a bitch’ kind of guy,” Hill recalls. For this role, the point was not to come across as an art connoisseur but as someone so smug and ignorant that he was ripe for the plucking. “I wasn’t arty, but I was a trophy art type, some J. Ralston Ridgeway type from Dallas, Texas. Those guys are legion. They’re the ones who buy fakes and spend big bucks on overpriced paintings. They’re extremely wealthy chumps who see art as a way to establish their bona fides in society. So that was me, some asshole who’s got more money than sense.”

The meeting with the crooks was set for the Savoy, a grand old hotel on the Strand, overlooking the Thames. Ideally, the thieves would produce the painting, Hill would hand over a ransom, and a gang of cops would burst from hiding to make the arrests.

Farr was thrilled with his insider’s peek at all the planning and deception. Hill and Farr walked into Hill’s hotel room—a large and handsome suite, with a river view—and Hill started yelling almost at once. He’d been in a foul mood all day Hill was a big-picture thinker, not a detail man, he liked to say, but sometimes details did catch his eye. The police had showed up earlier in the day with the ransom money, £100,000 in £20 notes, stuffed in “a crappy police cardboard kind of thing.” Any crook would immediately start wondering what kind of high-roller he was dealing with. Hill insisted the police buy him a proper leather bag. Hill had won that battle, but his superiors had been horrified at the cost of a leather case intended as a one-time prop.

Now, in the suite, he saw at once that the carpet had been tamped down by the cops in the surveillance team. Size 12 footprints were everywhere, because the cops had been stuffing wires down every crevice they could find. “It looks like the Serengeti after the gnus have gone thundering past,” Hill complained to Farr.

Hill called for the cops. “Get somebody in here to get rid of these fucking footprints,” he shouted. “Those guys are going to come in here and see that, and then we’re all fucked!”

Once the telltale footprints had been vacuumed away, Hill relaxed. He picked up the phone and ordered a bottle of champagne and a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches. Farr scanned the room to decide which sofa would be the best to hide behind, if anyone started shooting. (“Now, dear,” his wife had told him that morning, “don’t come home perforated.”) In the meantime, he rehearsed his assigned line time after time. “This is what we’re after,” Farr was to shout, and on that signal the cops in the next room would rush in.

Hill asked Farr if he had ever seen £100,000 in cash.

“No, let’s have a look.”

Hill unlatched his new case, which burst open, spilling money everywhere. The maid knocked on the door, with the smoked salmon. “And Charles Hill and I were sitting on this bloody briefcase,” Farr says, “trying to squash it flat.”

“The whole thing was marvelous,” Farr bubbles. “Hill was totally convincing. He dressed elegantly, not flashily, but he exuded money, shall we say. He just had this presence. You’ve met Charles Hill? So you know he’s a big, broad-shouldered chap, and he just… well, when he chooses, he can throw his weight about.”

Bullies like the one Hill was playing were new in Farr’s experience. He himself was fond of expressions seldom heard outside a boy’s adventure magazine of the type popular three-quarters of a century ago—his stories are full of “blighters” and “frightful chaps” and even “four-flushing swine”—and he watched Hill’s performance goggle-eyed.

Years later, he could still recite many of the exotically ugly phrases Hill had thrown around so casually. “I remember, he leaned over and tapped the case with the marked bills and said. ‘This money will stick to ‘em like dog shit,’ “Farr says gleefully. The line holds such appeal that he tries it a second time, like a mischievous schoolboy reading aloud a smutty scribble on the wall.

“Charles Hill knew just how to play a big, swaggering, loudmouthed American, if I may say that, saving your grace,” Farr says. “‘I can’t waste my time with this, I’m off to Europe tomorrow, I’ve got business all over the world, I can’t be dealing with little twits like you.’ “

Farr frets that his cultured accent drains this “good, coarse stuff” of virtually all its menace, but he replays his favorite lines nonetheless. “I’ve had it about up to here with your horseshit,” he growls, mimicking Hill.

Though Farr didn’t know it, that seemingly offhand line was far from casual. The key was the word “horseshit.” It is an Americanism, first of all, and reinforced Hill’s American persona. In the taxonomy of nonsense, “bullshit” is universal, but “horseshit” is unique to America. Second, the r sound emphasized Hill’s American accent and reminded him to keep hammering those r’s.

At the Savoy, Hill abused the thieves for the better part of an hour and then threw them out, even though he had yet to see the stolen Bruegel. Dick Ellis was hidden in a hotel room next door, eavesdropping as the tape recorders whirred.

Even Ellis and his fellow cops, as experienced with scenes like this as Farr was new to them, feared Hill had overdone it. “We were saying, ‘Charley, steady down. We’re gonna lose these guys.’ “

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be back,’ “Ellis recalled.

“And he was absolutely right. They came back. They came back, they got arrested, and they got convicted.”