The Rescue Artist

Epilogue

In Norway, the National Gallery put together a triumphant press conference. The Scream was the star, and photographers pressed close for pictures. A hugely relieved Knut Berg, the museum’s director, posed for photo after photo with his recovered masterpiece. Leif Plahter, the art restorer, beamed happily at the painting he knew so well. The Norwegian detective Leif Lier hailed his British colleagues. “We would never have got the picture back,” he said, “if it had not been for Scotland Yard.” John Butler made a few gracious remarks about the benefits of international police cooperation. Only Charley Hill and Sid Walker, phantoms whose visit to Norway was a state secret, missed the party.

Back in England, the press celebrated. “Yard’s Artful Dodgers Find The Scream,” the Daily Mail crowed, and in their own, more sedate way, the “quality” papers cheered, too. Scotland Yard stood on the sidelines and pouted. Butler’s television appearance in Norway had been replayed in Britain, and the police brass gave Butler a drubbing for his troubles. What was he doing flouncing around on television? What did that bloody painting have to do with police work? What did Norway have to do with London?

Two years passed before the trial began. In the meantime, Johnsen did his best to insure that Ulving, at least, would not forget him. The ex-con turned up at Ulving’s hotel one day, drunk and angry, with a snarling pit bull on a thick leash. He demanded that the clerk tell Ulving that a friend of his had come to see him, and then he took a room, kicked a few holes in the wall, and collapsed in a stupor on the bed. Months later, he was back, this time at Ulving’s summer cottage. Ulving was outdoors, sunbathing. Johnsen suddenly materialized, from a neighbor’s yard. He had traded in the pit bull for a rottweiler. “What are you going to say in court?” he demanded.

By the time of the trial, the state had long since fit the pieces of the story together. The plot had been the brainstorm of Pål Enger, the soccer player turned crook, who had planned the theft in the confident hope that a buyer would turn up.

At the trial, Enger was charged with theft, and Grytdal and Johnsen with handling stolen property. A fourth man, William Aasheim, who had been only eighteen years old at the time of the break-in, was charged with theft, too. According to the prosecution, Aasheim and Enger were the two men with a ladder who had set the whole story in motion on a February morning in 1994. Enger and Grytdal, it emerged, were old colleagues. The two had done time in prison together for stealing Munch’s Vampire.

Ulving, who had not been charged, saw to his relief that the prosecution case seemed strong even without him. For fear of retaliation, he did his best to keep his testimony vague and innocuous.

The trial began in Oslo, but Norwegian law forbade anonymous testimony. That seemed to rule out Hill and Walker. The two undercover detectives worked in a violent world; forcing them to reveal their true identities in open court would have left them (and their families) sitting ducks for any crook with a gun and a grievance. In a compromise, the Norwegian court agreed to move part of the trial to London. There Hill and Walker gave their testimony from behind a screen, as “Chris Roberts” and “Sid Walker.”

In January 1996, the judge read out his verdict. Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Enger, the ringleader, was sentenced to six years, three months; Grytdal, to four years, nine months; Aasheim, to three years, nine months; and Johnsen, to two years, eight months.

The four began serving their time but appealed their convictions. Conclusive as the evidence had been, a Norwegian appeals court ruled in favor of three of the four convicted thieves. All but Enger were set free. The court reasoned that, because Hill and Walker had entered Norway using false identities, their testimony about what they had seen there was inadmissible.

Hill, never much impressed by the law’s majesty (and always more concerned with paintings than with crooks), shrugged it off. With his customary refusal to allow mere logic to hem him in, he squeezed two contradictory responses into a single sentence and then dismissed the whole subject from his mind. “My personal view is that it’s complete bullshit,” he said, “but it’s the Norwegian system and you’ve got to respect it.”

Enger is still in Norway, still proclaiming his innocence. (He managed to get his name in the papers not long ago, this time by buying, rather than stealing, a $3,000 Munch lithograph at an auction.) Grytdal is reportedly a pimp in Oslo, and Johnsen has died of a heroin overdose. In February 2004, Aasheim was murdered on the streets of Oslo.

Ulving, the art dealer, came out of the story triumphant and officially vindicated. Charley Hill, unswayed, consoles himself with the bittersweet knowledge that, once again, the system worked as poorly as he expected it would. Hill refuses to believe that Ulving was an innocent caught in a mess not of his making. Ulving, Hill speculates, “wanted to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.” He wanted, that is, to have it both ways. If the money from the artnapping had come through, he would have taken his share of the proceeds. If the crooks’ plan fell apart, he would present himself as a patriot who had strived mightily to help his country recover one of its treasures.

The Norwegian authorities don’t see it Hill’s way. “I don’t think Ulving was involved with the criminals,” says Leif Lier, the detective. “He was used by the criminals.” The police had arrested Ulving on the day they recovered The Scream, but they released him later the same day. For that arrest, Ulving won a judgment of about $5,000 against the state.

Today, Charley Hill is working as zealously as ever to find stolen paintings. Still a detective, he is out of the undercover game. He is on his own now, a detective-for-hire free to operate without layers of bosses to second-guess him. Characteristically, Hill paints the catch-as-catch-can life of a freelancer in the brightest of colors. “I’m a hunter-gatherer now,” he exults, “and my family and I eat what I kill.”

Some days the eating is better than others. Though Hill is not the only detective working full-time on recovering stolen art, he may be the only one who focuses almost exclusively on great art. Given Hill’s nature, the decision not to hedge his bets was inevitable. The coups, when Hill can pull them off, are colossal. In the summer of 2002, for example, he recovered Titian’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, which had been missing for seven years. The painting, worth something in the neighborhood of $10 million, had been stolen from the Marquess of Bath, a seventy-one-year-old ex-hippie and flower child, the author of a six-volume (so far) autobiography titled Strictly Private, and the owner of a 100-room estate that has been in his family for four centuries and sits amid grounds that cover 9,000 acres.

The ponytailed, bearded Lord Bath is an exotic creature who favors velvet jackets, dangling jewelry, and the company of striking women. He has had seventy-one “wifelets” to date, by his count, and keeps a portrait of each one on display in Longleat House. (Several of the flesh-and-blood women live in cottages dotted around the sprawling grounds.) “To some extent,” Lord Bath boasts, “I pioneered polygamy in this country.”

Lord Bath’s insurance company announced that it would pay a £100,000 reward for the Titian’s return. Every swindler and nutcase in Britain phoned in tips. For seven lean years, Charley Hill chased leads. Eventually he pieced together a trail that led from one Irish Traveler clan to another and then to a dicey sports promoter whom someone in the second gang had had the bad judgment to shoot. Titian’s exquisite painting, which depicts Mary holding the infant Jesus while Joseph looks on approvingly, was apparently handed over in an attempt to smooth things over. (Hill likes to imagine the scene around the victim’s hospital bed: “Sorry about the bullet. How about a picture of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus for all you’ve been through?”) The promoter eventually decided he could do without this particular get-well card and shipped the Titian off to a gang somewhere south of London. In the summer of 2002, Hill met an informant who claimed he knew where it had washed up. The story seemed to check out, though the thieves themselves were long gone, and Hill and his contact worked out a tentative deal.

On a hot August afternoon, Hill and the informant set out together. “So off they went,” recalled Tim Moore, the manager of Longleat House, who had been working with Hill, “and I thought, ‘Unless poor old Charles Hill is going to end up with a knife in his back or in a sack in the Thames, maybe we’re on to something.’ “

Hill drove. The informant gave directions. Eventually they pulled up to a bus stop. “There it is,” said the informant. “The bag at the old man’s feet.”

Hill grabbed the bag, a shabby, blue-and-white plastic thing with a cardboard-wrapped package inside. He climbed back in his car, made a U-turn, and double-parked. He tore off a piece of the cardboard. Joseph’s head, Titian’s brushwork. Bingo!

For his efforts, Hill earned £50,000, half the reward money. The other half went to the informant. And how did Lord Bath feel about the recovery? “I felt several million pounds richer.”

Hill’s decision to leave the police force was not a matter of walking away from a thriving enterprise. Police interest in art crime, never intense (except in Italy), is nowadays tepid at best. Undercover operations, in particular, take so much planning and involve so many people that they gobble up time and money in great chunks. The sting involving The Scream was not quite the grand finale of the undercover era in art crime, though it was close. That melancholy title will likely rest with a sting in Madrid in June 2002, in which Spanish police and the FBI recovered $50 million worth of paintings that had been stolen from the home of a billionaire named Esther Koplowitz.

Now that he is off the police force, Hill’s acting days are over. His job these days is to work his underworld contacts in search of news about stolen paintings and then to negotiate their return. He knows who works which territory, which gangs steal paintings themselves and which hire local thieves to do the breaking-in, which gangs go for ladders and which prefer “ram raids” in which a driver crashes a car through locked doors.

His competition have gone about things in a different way. The best-known are not individuals but small companies. One is called Trace; a competitor is Art Loss Register. Both work roughly on the model of matchmaking services. At the heart of each company’s business is a vast, computer-searchable list of stolen paintings and furniture and the like, compiled from police reports and insurance claims. That list is compared, automatically, against the art and antiques on offer at countless auctions and art fairs and galleries. (Trace employs armies of typists on the Isle of Wight, where wages are low, to feed the computer listing after listing from an endless array of art catalogs and brochures.) When the computer red-flags a suspect item for sale, the companies step in to investigate. To find work better calculated to drive Charley Hill mad would take a long search.

The companies have different business models, but, in theory at least, they can make money in several ways: by charging a fee for listing stolen property in their database, by collecting a finder’s fee if they make a recovery, by charging art dealers for access to their records (dealers are required to exercise “due diligence” to make sure they are not selling stolen goods).

It hasn’t paid off yet. Trace is the pet project of an English billionaire and art collector, who can afford to swallow the considerable losses he has racked up. Art Loss Register says that its own losses will soon come to an end.

Both companies are small, but they are mega-corporations in comparison with the one-man band that is Charley Hill. (When he first left the police, Hill went into business with a partner, another ex-detective. The venture fared as poorly as anyone but Hill would have expected. The only relic of that short-lived era is a sign that Hill brought home and mounted on his bathroom door, identifying “The Charles Hill Partnership Meeting Room.”)

Hill figures that the freedom to set his own priorities is worth the financial risk he is running. Let someone else chase after silverware and stolen clocks. But the flip side of independence is isolation. Crooks are naturally not pleased to have Hill on their tail, and the cops are only marginally cheerier. The police see Hill as trying to show them up, and, in truth, that is not a role that would cause him many sleepless nights. “The police had seven years to get the Titian back. And the simple fact is, they didn’t get it back. Nor did the insurers through their various means. And I went out and cultivated people and got it back.”

This is treacherous territory, pocked with ethical traps, as Hill is quick to acknowledge. Hill’s underworld sources expect to be paid for their help. (The money comes from insurance companies or from the robbery victims.) The problem is getting those payments in the right hands or, more to the point, keeping them out of the wrong ones. Paying a reward to a source who has heard a rumor is one thing; paying a ransom to a criminal to buy back property he himself stole is another.

The police pay informants as a matter of course. The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, for example, dangles rewards on the order of $1 million (and, in the case of Osama Bin Laden, $25 million). But in the case of stolen property, tradition held that money was paid only if arrests were made. Many police officials believe that rule should apply to stolen art. Do that, Hill insists, and stolen paintings will never be seen again. The police may talk about integrity, he says, but their real credo is indifference.

Hill’s view, which is that in today’s world freelancers will have to do what the police cannot trouble to do, has won him slews of enemies. Who is he to authorize rewards? More important, how can Hill know if his “informant”—whose own hands are supposedly clean—was in truth one of the thieves who stole the painting in the first place or, almost as bad, a fence who bought it from the thieves?

Despite his swashbuckling ways, Hill steps carefully here. He consulted Sir John Smith, the University of Nottingham law professor who was Britain’s leading authority on the laws governing stolen property, and he has the great man’s imprimatur. The two key principles, as spelled out by Smith, are that Hill must act on behalf of the owner of the stolen painting—he cannot go running around the country on his own authority—and he can’t interfere with the police—he cannot make a deal where a crook hands over a painting in return for a Get Out of Jail Free card.

The black-and-white moralist has landed in a world of grays, but Hill lives with that contradiction as happily as with all the others. Far from waiting for a go-ahead signal from the police, he has his eye fixed, at any one time, on half a dozen major cases. At Christmas 2003, for example, he was looking for Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s White Duck, stolen from Lord Cholmondeley and worth £5 million, and Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarn-winder, worth perhaps £50 million, and Cellini’s gold and ebony saltcellar, worth $57 million, and a variety of treasures in Belgrade and Sicily.

Always lurking in the background—often shoving its way into the foreground—are the $300 million worth of paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum. Hill has pondered the theft since the news broke, on March 18, 1990. He believes he knows who took the paintings, and why, and what they did with them. Most important, he believes Vermeer’s Concert, Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Manet’s Chez Tortoni, and the others, are still intact and unhurt.

In search of the Gardner paintings, Hill has spent endless hours cultivating contacts and chasing leads and pursuing men who very much do not want to be pursued. He is up against formidable competition; the advertised reward for finding the Gardner paintings (put up by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Chubb Insurance) is $5 million.

The FBI is by far the most prominent player in the hunt. The bureau has already followed up 2,000 leads in the Gardner case, it says, and has sent agents to Japan, South America, Mexico, and Europe. To no avail. At the ten-year mark, the FBI supervisor in charge of the case acknowledged that “we haven’t got a clue.” Today, another three years on, the picture is just as grim. “All logical leads have been followed through to conclusion,” the FBI admits, through clenched teeth, “with no positive investigative results.”

For a proud loner like Hill, no triumph could be sweeter than outwitting scores of rule-following, memo-writing FBI agents, all dutifully following “logical leads.” In the end, it may not happen. Hill’s efforts could all end in fiasco. It’s happened before.

But, then again, it might work. Hill has thought it through a thousand times. First a proper drink and a long, private look at the pictures. Then it will be a matter of picking up the phone and calling the director of the Gardner.

“It’s Charley Hill,” he’ll say. The tone will be light, casual, all in a day’s work. “I believe I’ve found some things you’ve been missing.”