An old woman sat in a chair near a row of television screens filled with images from cameras. Bingo. It turned out that she had just come out of a coma and her health was delicate. A voice somewhere screamed, “Hello. Hello. Hello.” It sounded very much like Detective Lazarus. “It’s a bird,” said Hrycyk. And so it was, in a cage near the front door.
The detectives took an hour figuring out if the cameras had picked up anything useful, scrolling through tape. Nothing so far. They’d have to come back. Before they left, both Hrycyk and Lazarus had noticed what looked like a Picasso perched carelessly on a cluttered sofa. They inquired about it, and the woman told them it was a genuine Picasso worth a huge sum of money. Hrycyk surreptitiously took a photo of the painting with his cell.
By the time the detectives climbed back into their Chevrolet Impala, they had spent a total of four hours at the crime scene and canvassing La Cienega. During that four-hour period they had both been standing or walking, but even though they had started their day at dawn, neither seemed tired. The car slipped into a traffic jam on Sunset, which ate up more time. The light cut harshly across the rush-hour traffic. They would drive back to the office to transfer their written notes into a computer file, check messages and updates on other cases, and make a few calls.
THAT WAS LATE June. Three months passed. In September, Hrycyk received a call from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. They’d been following the activities of a gang of Armenians, through an informant working for the DA. The informant had identified the gang for the antique-store job on La Cienega. This was organized crime, not a simple break-and-enter: the Armenian gang was under surveillance because it was involved in a host of criminal activities. The da passed along an address to Hrycyk, for a house they believed the Armenians were using to store, among other material possessions like drugs and money, the antiques stolen from the shop on La Cienega.
After a search warrant was secured, the house was raided. The DA was right. The search turned up a cache of the stolen loot. It wasn’t everything, though. “We’ve seized that stuff and we’re still looking for the rest,” Hrycyk told me.
“This particular gang was known for stealing from tobacco stores, so the upscale antique store was new for them. The gang was using the Italian antiques as furniture. That’s the problem with stealing art or antiques. If you don’t know the art market—in this case the Italian antique market—then it’s going to be difficult to move it,” Hrycyk said. “The Armenians weren’t connoisseurs of antique Italian furniture. What they were interested in was money. They’re into anything that is a commodity and that can be sold.” The gang got sloppy and kept stealing from the same locations before they moved on to antiques. “If you keep hitting the same place, police put it together,” the detective said.
For Hrycyk, the case was a prime example of the strides made possible by co-operation and an efficient flow of information. It was also another indication that organized crime was interested in art. The trial took place in May 2009, and a number of the men were convicted. For the detective, it was a small victory.
Hrycyk had seen all the movies about art theft, but his experience was different from the films being churned out by the city he patrolled. According to Hollywood, art thieves are dashing, educated, incredibly rich, obsessive, and cunning, and the world is their playground. Art theft, in fact, is a sub-genre of heist films—films like Once a Thief, Entrapment, The Score, The Good Thief, Ocean’s Twelve, and, of course, Hudson Hawk, starring Bruce Willis and a gang of whistling fools out to steal an invention by Leonardo da Vinci. Mostly, these movies star the thief as sympathetic protagonist—and we want the thief to get away with the crime.
There is no film that has done more to push the myth of the dashing art thief—or the rogue collector—than the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan. As Mr. Crown, Brosnan embodies the ultimate art thief: a Wall Street mogul, lover of champagne, women, and fine art. Crown has money and toys but he is bored, so for fun he rips off a hundred-million-dollar Claude Monet from a New York museum (think the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Later, at his mansion, he knocks back some red wine and laughs in self-satisfied glee while gazing at the Impressionist master’s blood-orange sunset—now his alone to enjoy. Rene Russo plays the sexy insurance agent hot on his tail, but Crown seduces her as he seduces the audience, who, like him, are captured by Russo’s fiery beauty. The Monet, it turns out, isn’t the artistic centrepiece of the film; Russo is. Hollywood knew that fine art wasn’t enough to keep the public, or Crown, aesthetically engaged.
At the end of the film, Crown slips the Monet back into the museum, undetected. He has a conscience: the restless billionaire wreaked havoc on the museum, got away with his crime, and then made good—a happy ending. John McTiernan directed The Thomas Crown Affair, based on the 1968 Norman Jewison cult classic starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. McTiernan changed one important detail: Jewison’s Thomas Crown was a bank robber. McTiernan, though, felt that audiences wouldn’t be sympathetic to a hardened criminal knocking over your local teller, so he changed Crown’s crime of choice to something more palatable—stealing art from a museum. The new version got at least one fact right: police, mostly, do not rank stolen art cases as a high priority. In one of the last scenes of the movie, a New York City detective admits, “I don’t really give a shit. The week before I met you I nailed two crooked real estate agents and a guy who was beating his kids to death. So if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple swirls of paint that are really only important to some very silly rich people, I don’t really give a damn.”
Homicides, drugs, violence, sexual abuse, organized crime—those were urgent affairs. Art theft was the opposite. That was why Hrycyk was such a rare find: a detective who had spent years specializing in art-theft investigations and who worked his cases with the patience of a scientist—playing the long game.
On that late afternoon in 2008, driving back through the pink haze of L.A. gridlock, Hrycyk’s eyes flicked to the rearview. He’d been watching me take notes on the investigation all afternoon while he took notes at the crime scene. The detective asked, “So how did you get into all this?” He and Lazarus stared out the front window, listening to the former suspect in the back seat.
2.
LAW AND DISORDER
“Art is one of the most corrupt, dirtiest industries on the planet.”
BONNIE CZEGLEDI
IT WAS just after midnight when the phone rang.
A stranger’s voice said, “It’s ———. You’ve been looking for me.”
The name he’d given me clicked. Yes, I’d been looking for him.
“I thought you were in jail,” I said.
“I was,” he replied. “Now I’m out.”
Then the art thief listed off a few details about my education and my professional life. He told me he knew where I lived, and proved it by reciting my address.
“I’ve done my research,” he said.
He agreed to a meeting.
I was twenty-six in 2003 and working as a researcher for The Walrus, a Canadian magazine, earning enough to save some money while living with my parents. I was comfortable doing research, not being researched. I was also working on an article about a burglary at a small art gallery. It was supposed to be fun. Now the story was taking a turn I hadn’t expected. After the conversation I was apprehensive, but I still wanted to meet the midnight caller.
A few weeks later, on a crisp afternoon, we sat down at a small table on an outdoor patio in Toronto. The patio was unoccupied save for us. The man across from me was in his late forties, of medium height and medium build, and wore a yellow windbreaker. He was good-looking, but not movie-star handsome. In fact, he looked like a middle-aged father, except there was an almost invisible edge to him, some heightened sense of awareness in his eyes that vibrated with tension. I didn’t want to feel nervous, but I did.
“Hello,” he said. And we shook hands.
He opened our conversatio
n by threatening me. He told me that if I wrote anything about his involvement in the art gallery theft I would be physically hurt. Specifically, one of his business associates would be sure to cross paths with me. At best his associate would break my legs. No names, he said. Then he reached down beside his chair. I hadn’t noticed the long white papers rolled up in a red elastic band. He handed them to me across the table. The roll practically glowed in the afternoon sun. Not thinking, I reached out and accepted it. When my hand closed around the roll I knew I had made a mistake—fingerprints, possession of stolen property. His eyes flickered playfully.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“They’re for you. I can’t use them. They’re from the gallery,” he said.
I knew what I was holding, and I knew I shouldn’t be holding it.
ON THE MORNING of September 11, 2001, Chad Wolfond had woken up, skipped breakfast, and left on his usual ten-minute walk to his Lonsdale Gallery, a two-storey semi-detached house on a picturesque street in Toronto’s upscale Forest Hill Village. At his desk on the second floor Wolfond tapped the keyboard of his computer, expecting it to power up. When the screen didn’t glow, he glanced down to see that his computer tower was gone. Then he noticed a paper trail across the gallery floor leading to the filing cabinets where he stored his vintage pinhole photography collection. As Wolfond looked through the drawers his heart sank. The best works he owned, including those by leading French photographer Ilan Wolff, were missing.
Wolfond was shaken. He phoned the police. Then he phoned his wife. She sounded panicked.
“Do you have any idea what just happened in New York?” she asked. It was after 9 AM, and the World Trade Center had been struck by hijacked passenger planes.
By noon officers were at the gallery, glued to their radios for the latest updates from New York and Washington. They dusted for fingerprints and inspected the hole that had been smashed through the drywall, from an attached store that was under construction. Before leaving, one of the officers told Wolfond that a detective would be in touch, and then added, “Chances are slim that you will ever see those photographs again.”
The detective never materialized. Wolfond remained on edge, and rightly so. One month later the thief returned and stole more art. All told, Wolfond had been stripped of photographs valued at over $250,000. This time a detective visited and took notes. He said he couldn’t do much.
Wolfond became paranoid. He had trouble sleeping and left his gallery every day with a sense of dread. He phoned a few other gallery owners for advice. Most told him not to alert the media or talk to anybody about what had happened. Some hinted that they too had been stung by theft but had mourned the loss in private. News of the break-ins, they argued, would only damage his reputation as an art-gallery owner.
One of them, however, suggested Wolfond call a lawyer named Bonnie Czegledi, who specialized in cultural property law. She gave Wolfond the opposite advice.
“Go to the media,” Czegledi told him. “Do everything you can to promote those stolen pictures. Publicizing your stolen art will make the works impossible to sell. Contact Interpol. Get listed on the Art Loss Register.”
Interpol? The Art Loss Register? Wolfond had never heard of them.
About a year and a half later, when I showed up at the Lonsdale Gallery to write a piece about the burglaries, Wolfond hadn’t taken Czegledi’s advice: he was still nervous about moving his story into the public arena. He had settled the insurance already and was fearful of the thief’s reprisal if he spoke openly about the burglaries. Still, I got the sense from him that he wanted to talk. He was warming up to the idea of a story but obviously needed more time. He told me to come back, and I did.
At our second meeting Wolfond disappeared into a back room and brought out the file he’d kept on the burglary—twelve inches of paperwork. He flipped through the file and showed me some photocopies of a few of the photographs that were still missing. He also told me that, by fluke, a man had been arrested who was in possession of some of Wolfond’s stolen art.
“I remember being simultaneously pissed off and mildly flattered after the first theft,” Wolfond told me. “The thief had left photos that I also thought were inferior. I doubt I’ll see the rest of them again. I really don’t know much about this world of art theft.” Before I left he scribbled down the phone number of the detective who was working on the case and of the art lawyer who had advised him—Bonnie Czegledi. “You should talk to her,” was Wolfond’s advice.
I phoned the detective a couple of times, and we finally connected. I told him I would be interested in talking to the thief’s lawyer and gave him my number. The detective said he would pass the message on. I figured I’d never hear anything; at best, if the thief’s lawyer got in touch, I could get a quote, maybe a little more information about the case. Instead I got the late-night phone call, and now I was apparently holding some of Wolfond’s stolen artwork and looking across the table at the thief.
“I can’t accept these,” I said, dumbstruck.
“They’re yours now,” he said. “Hang them up. Or hide them. If you don’t take them, I might have to destroy them.” That didn’t sound like the best choice. I imagined telling Wolfond that I’d seen some of his missing art and that it was now probably a pile of ashes.
“Isn’t there another option?” I asked. “You can return them to the gallery through a third party, anonymously. That way everybody is happy. Otherwise I might have to call the police.”
“A third-party arrangement might work,” he said, after a moment. “Let me think about it.”
I handed back the roll, and he placed it beside his chair on the concrete patio. I wondered why the art thief would even consider destroying the prints. After all, he’d gone through the trouble of breaking into the gallery, sorting through the flat files in the dark, and stealing works he’d carefully chosen. He had what he wanted, didn’t he?
The thief told me that keeping the art was too much of a risk. He didn’t want to go back to prison, and he didn’t have a buyer lined up. Add to those problems the journalist sitting across from him asking questions. Clearly, he had agreed to meet with me only to neutralize one of many things that were going wrong.
He seemed to be educated in art history and to have a collector’s eye, because he’d stolen specific works and bypassed other, less valuable ones in the mess he’d left behind. He was also, I discovered, manipulative. At one point I went inside to the washroom. When I returned, the thief had vanished but the roll of stolen art was still on the concrete beside his chair, unattended. What should I do with it? I pictured myself showing up at the gallery and handing the artwork back to Wolfond, trying to explain how I’d got hold of it. Or ending up in a police station for a day while a detective questioned me. I wouldn’t want to mention the thief: my legs. I stood there staring at the roll of paper on the ground for a few seconds, and my face probably looked nearly as white as the paper.
Then there was a knock from inside the window, beside the patio. The thief hadn’t disappeared, only moved inside, but he’d left the stolen art for me. I picked up the roll and carried it inside to his new table. I placed it next to his chair, on the floor. He smiled. He was in control, said his smile.
He decided to change the subject. He wanted to tell me more about how art theft worked as an industry. He seemed to be trying to figure out ways to trade information with me, to get me away from the specifics of his story. There is a larger story, he explained. He discussed how poor the security systems were at most of the major cultural institutions and, of course, at mid-sized and smaller galleries. That made his job easier. So there was that angle—art galleries and museums weren’t adequately protecting themselves against pros like him.
Then he veered in another direction.
“Okay, this is how it works,” he said. “It’s like a big shell game. All the antique and art dealers, they just pass it around from one to another.” He moved his fingers around the table in circles and
then looked up. “Do you understand?” He looked very intense, as if he had just handed me a top-secret piece of information, but I had no idea what he meant. What did art dealers have to do with stealing art? But our meeting was over.
We got up from the table. He picked up his roll of stolen art. We paused at the door and shook hands. There were people inside the café, but even so, the thief repeated his earlier threat in a casual whisper and then looked at me coldly, in silence. I watched him walk up the street, just another shopper on a busy afternoon, and I never saw him again.
I’d now sat across from a criminal whose income was, at least partly, earned from the black market in stolen art. True, I didn’t know how that black market worked or who the players were or where stolen art went. I had learned that there seemed to be more to the booming illegal trade than just the Hollywood myth, but how did it all connect? Some fine art had been stolen from a gallery and the person who’d stolen it had tried to give it back to me. He had also said he might destroy it. It was confusing and didn’t add up to a coherent narrative. I walked away feeling as if I knew more about art theft but quickly came to feel as if I knew even less.
When in doubt, read. I started looking at articles from the BBC, the New York Times, the Guardian, and other papers from around the globe, articles usually written in response to the theft of a work of art from a museum. I encountered what seemed to be the opposite of Wolfond’s case—high-profile stories that chronicled the sometimes-violent raids on cultural institutions for famous artworks. These stories provided the basic facts: what had been stolen, in some cases how it was stolen, and always how much it was estimated to be worth. Millions of dollars stolen off a wall at gunpoint made for exciting copy. Usually there was a quote from a detective saying the authorities were “following all leads.” Sometimes a corrupt billionaire collector was mentioned—“Dr. No,” he was usually called, in homage to the James Bond villain. This was the fallback position for art-theft stories—a very rich, unscrupulous person had hired a thief to steal a work of genius. There was usually no follow-up reporting. The story vanished, just like the painting. And no billionaires were arrested.
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