Hot Art

by Joshua Knelman

Paul had perfectly balanced himself high up on a branch that overlooked the game, with a view both of law enforcement and of the criminals and thieves who were doing such an expert job of evading the law. He seemed to enjoy being on the shadow line of those two worlds, but it was always a mystery how deep his relationships were on either side. Like Jonathan Wild, he moved in both networks. But beneath the veneer, Paul possessed a coherent view of the multi-billion-dollar industry that was sweeping across the planet.

  “It’s a marvellous time to be an art thief,” he said. “Art theft has become one big game. It’s just one big circular game. Art and antiques are objects that don’t change. They remain exactly as they were made. What changes is who owns them. People pay small fortunes to own them for a period of time. So the objects get passed around the country, and now the world. Their value increases. Ultimately, they outlive us all.” Paul found the game of international art theft both amusing and absurd. Police were always ten steps behind thieves, and for every art theft that was publicized in the media, hundreds never made the news. These thefts were practically invisible—as if they had never happened. “For every Picasso that is stolen, there are hundreds of lesser-known works of art that are never reported,” said Paul.

  If I hadn’t already spent time learning about art theft from Bonnie Czegledi and Rick St. Hilaire, I would have been disappointed that Paul hadn’t stolen from any major museums. But it was precisely because the two lawyers had both pointed toward the larger black market and the interplay among thieves, middlemen, and the network of international dealers that I became so interested in Paul, in the way he had operated as an art thief. He was a missing piece of the puzzle, and he confirmed much of what the lawyers and detectives feared was happening. He was exactly the kind of thief St. Hilaire had suggested I find—one who had perfected how to sneak through the system and make a profit without attracting attention.

  It was easy to make a living from stealing art, according to Paul, if a thief made intelligent choices, if he stayed below a certain value mark—about $100,000. Less was better. Don’t steal a van Gogh. To someone who knew how to work the system, the legitimate business of fine art became a giant laundry machine for stolen art. You could steal a piece and sell it back into the system without anyone being the wiser.

  “It’s called ‘pass the hot potato,’” Paul told me. “A dealer sells it on to the next dealer, and the next, until nobody knows where it came from. It’s a fantastic system! And that system is the same wherever you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about London, New York, or New Delhi,” he explained. “Art is something you have to think about as a commodity that goes round in circles. The only time it appears in the open is when someone tries to filter it into the legitimate art market—auctions, art fairs, gallery sales, dealers. Otherwise it’s hidden away inside someone’s home.”

  Paul loved to chat and seemed thrilled that someone who was following the international art theft dramas wanted to discuss them with him. I had hoped that Paul would be a good background source, someone to check details and theories with. But he turned out to be far more valuable.

  From a young age, Paul told me, he had received the training necessary to climb the criminal ladder. His career matured around the same time that art theft transformed from an eccentric criminal pastime into a multi-billion-dollar global industry, during the boom in fine art sales, in the 1980s. “It was always about supply and demand,” he said. “And during those years, demand had never been higher for fine art and antiques.”

  On that night in Plymouth, in 1980, after the failed burglary, the two boys drove through the dark to Brighton, where Paul had grown up. Paul told me that to understand the foundations of the global black market in art, it was necessary to take a closer look at Brighton as it was before all the art and antiques started to disappear. As he likes to say, “All roads lead back to Brighton.”

  Wasn’t Brighton a nice little resort town with a view of the sea?

  “Brighton and hot art fit hand in glove,” he said. He was a pro and knew exactly how to reel me in. “How did I learn to become an art thief? We have to go back to my teenage years. Most people live a mundane life, and the prospect of some kind of danger excites them. The general population doesn’t come into contact with criminals unless they put in a DVD.” On that note, he said that if his story were a movie, it might begin the same way that Goodfellas does, with the camera panning in from above to a close-up on his face as a kid on the streets of Brighton, his adult voice narrating the scene: “Ever since I was boy, I always knew I wanted to be an antiques dealer.” Just like any boy hungry to make his mark on the world, what Paul needed was an education.

  At about the same time that I began talking to Paul, I also began my phone conversations with Detective Donald Hrycyk. Paul was the flip side of the coin to Hrycyk.

  5.

  TRAINING DAYS

  “Suddenly I’m walking into museums and galleries asking questions. I was dealing with the rich and the powerful, the most influential people of the city.”

  DONALD HRYCYK

  THE LOS Angeles Police Academy is tucked into the hills of Elysian Park, around the corner from Dodger Stadium. From the window of the Impala, Detective Donald Hrycyk pointed out the sunny hills filled with cicada trees. He knew them well: he’d had to run up and down the slopes as a rookie. He spent four months training here after being accepted into the academy in 1974.

  “Police built this place,” he said, as he pulled into the grand driveway that cut through the trees and opened up into a spacious parking lot. At first glance the academy looks like a hotel. The grounds are protected from the city by the hills and shaded by soaring palm trees. There’s even a swimming pool, and at the gift shop the soundtrack to Top Gun was playing: “Danger Zone,” by Kenny Loggins.

  Hrycyk was born in New York but grew up in the L.A. suburbs. His parents came from an area on the border of Poland and the Ukraine, which they fled during World War II. They were pushed around a few different refugee camps, found a sponsor, and arrived in New York, where they stayed for a time. “My parents divorced,” Hrycyk told me. “I never knew my father, and, in fact, I think he ended up in Canada. My mother worked a number of menial jobs, everything from cleaning to dental assistant. She’s the one who moved us to Long Beach.” Hrycyk bought a muscle car—a meridian turquoise blue Pontiac GTO. He drove it to California State University, Long Beach, where he studied criminology, and then he applied to the academy.

  “When I went through here, there were a lot of Vietnam vets. The department wanted ex-military experience, and in fact it had a militaristic organizational structure. One of my instructors wore his LAPD uniform by day; by night he wore his Marine Corps uniform.”

  Down the hall from the gift shop, a half-empty diner was populated by beefy-looking young men in LAPD T-shirts, a few officers in uniform, and some older detectives in slacks and sports jackets. We sat at a table under a photograph of the first fleet of radio-equipped police cars, circa 1931. They looked like new toys, black and shining. There was no graffiti in the washroom.

  After he graduated, Hrycyk found himself in the middle of the gang wars raging across the southeast of the city, where he drove a black-and-white cruiser. He bounced around divisions for a few years working tough neighbourhoods, mostly in the south of the city. By the time he became a detective, it was the early 1980s—an era when the city had over a thousand murders a year: drug murders, gang murders, senseless murders, horribly violent murders—and he was in South Central Los Angeles. “Murders seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day,” he said. “I was part of an on-call team. My memory of those days is chaotic. You had to be on your toes all the time, and you couldn’t work those kinds of jobs alone.”

  Once I asked Hrycyk what he’d been doing in 1985. He emailed me a picture. It was of a younger detective, in brown suit slacks and a white shirt strapped with a gun holster; he was standing over a bloody body laid out in a morgue. We talked about some of th
e cases he remembered. One involved an ice-cream pushcart vendor. One day, a gang of kids decided to rob the ice-cream man. They organized themselves, got a gun, and decided that if he put up any resistance, they would shoot him in the arm. When the kids approached, the man resisted—so one of the kids shot him in the arm. Unfortunately, the bullet also tore straight through his arm and entered his chest. He died beside his ice-cream cart, and the kids took off.

  When Detective Hrycyk showed up, he saw an empty pair of running shoes near the ice-cream cart, in front of an alley. “One of the kids had run so fast he’d run straight out of his shoes, into the alley.” A few days later, driving around the neighbourhood, Hrycyk spotted a kid wearing a brand-new pair of shoes almost exactly the same as the ones that were in front of the alley. It was the ice-cream killer, of course.

  “We had another case that started when the storm drains overflowed after a heavy rain. The city sent out street maintenance crews, who lifted a manhole cover and couldn’t see to the bottom. They went to a neighbouring manhole cover, and tried to unclog the pipe. They pulled something through this one-foot pipe—it was a body. So somebody killed somebody else and hid the body in a manhole.”

  He had other stories: crack houses being targeted by rival drug gangs, who sent hit teams in to spray the place with bullets, leaving bodies behind; a man waiting at a bus stop, shot dead, apparently just for wearing the wrong colour of shoelaces.

  Hrycyk was often working three separate murder cases at once. “We were constantly running out of time. No computers, no databases, everything was handwritten,” he said. “The advantage of that work, as opposed to art investigations, was that there was a strong tradition—a body of knowledge and history to fall back on. There are schools for homicide investigation, and plenty of other detectives available to get advice from. I developed sources of information, talked to witnesses. There were a lot of people skills involved—cajoling people to get information out of them, people who are scared to talk.”

  By 1986 Hrycyk was feeling worn out. “I got tired of dealing with dead bodies,” he said. An opening came up in Burglary Special–Auto Theft, and he applied. He got the job, but instead of heading to Auto Theft, he was transferred to a new Burglary Special unit under the command of Detective Bill Martin. That unit’s mission, it turned out, was to explore a new area of crime: stolen art.

  Inside Burglary Special, in the downtown headquarters of the LAPD, rows of pigeonhole boxes lined a wall, and those boxes were stuffed with accumulating crime reports generated from across the city. One of the boxes was dedicated to cases involving stolen art, an area no detective in the department knew much about, or wanted to. The box was so full that paperwork was falling out of it.

  Detective Martin was curious. Once in a while he’d take a few minutes to peek at some of the cases. What he found was that, unlike the other property-crime boxes, these cases sometimes involved enormous sums of money—half a million dollars in some instances—but, also unlike the other property-crime boxes, no detective was paying attention to them. It was as if major bank robberies were tearing up the city and no one could be bothered to investigate.

  There were a few good reasons for detectives to be hands off when it came to art. Many of the case files had no suspects. In the politics of a police department, that meant little incentive to spend time hunting around. No closed case, no glory. LAPD detectives with a desire to climb the ranks want a high clearance rate for the crimes they investigate. Stolen art cases remained the X-files in Burglary Special—too strange to touch.

  Martin got hooked, though, and began staying late to read through the case files. The more he read, the more he started to see the cases in a new way. Property crimes meant stolen goods: televisions, jewels, cars, watches, and so on. A lot of the material goods that went missing in the city were duplicates— there were other material objects that looked just like them. Sure, they had serial numbers, but those could be changed or destroyed.

  What Martin was seeing in these files were paintings, drawings, and sculptures: unique pieces of property. His theory was that these artworks should be easier to identify than a stereo made in Japan by the millions and sold all over the world, identifiable only by a serial number. These artworks had histories to them, and instead of serial numbers, they had personal signatures. The detective decided to follow his hunch and work a few of the cases. From them, Martin developed a set of principles to guide his investigations, principles that were often counterintuitive to standard property-crimes protocol.

  For example, up to that point in Burglary Special most cases got hot once they had a witness and a suspect. A suspect could be hunted down, and even if the stolen items had passed away from him, he could divulge their whereabouts. Because art theft cases usually had no witness and no suspect, Martin reversed the process. He started with the community and followed the trail to the person who might have had a motivation to sell the artwork. It was more Sherlock Holmes than Lethal Weapon. “Traditional methods for finding property do not lend themselves to finding stolen art,” Hrycyk told me. “There are no schools for learning this stuff, so you learn from cases.”

  In Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, art theft was a hidden crime, blending many different worlds. It cut across socioeconomic lines and could move in a heartbeat from blue-collar to white-collar criminals. A thug who knew nothing about art except that it was valuable could steal a painting; that same afternoon, the painting could wind up in the possession of an auction house; within the week or the month, it could be sold to one of the Los Angeles art elite.

  In 1986, when Donald Hrycyk started to work cases with Bill Martin, the two detectives picked up a phone book and extracted long lists of art galleries, auction houses, museums, and private art dealers. Their goal: to visit all of them. That’s a tall order in a city where every time detectives take out a car they have to deal with long distances and traffic. It was also a risk, because it could be a huge time-waster.

  Each time the detectives visited a new gallery, they asked for suggestions, for other contacts in the art world they should talk to. This also advertised the LAPD Art Theft Detail’s existence. It was the oldest form of marketing a new product— going door to door and knocking.

  Hrycyk also hunted for any reading material that might help. The only thing close to a manual was a book by Laurie Adams called Art Cop. “That book was about a New York detective called Robert Volpe,” Hrycyk said. “It wasn’t designed as a playbook for other detectives to use. It was written as a fast read, as entertainment.” Hrycyk bought a copy and ripped through it.

  I KNEWART COP. It had been one of the readings assigned to me by Bonnie Czegledi, and here’s what I learned from it. In the early 1970s, calls were coming in to the NYPD from museums, galleries, and art dealers. Paintings were going missing. The city was battling more urgent crises, though—the surge of violent crimes related to drugs. Homicide rates were way up.

  One detective was picked for a quick assignment: venture into the art world and figure out what was going on. Everyone on the force knew about Robert Volpe, the eccentric cop who loved art, who painted portraits of nudes in his spare time and was teased for it by his peers. They called him “Rembrandt.”

  Volpe never fit the standard profile of an NYPD detective. He wore blue jeans and a black leather jacket, had shaggy hair and a thick handlebar moustache. Anyone who bothered to get to know him understood that his passion was painting— and the passion went deep. Born in Brooklyn in 1942, Volpe wanted to become a visual artist. As a teenager he had a few exhibits of his work at smaller NYC galleries: scenes of tugboats—the view from his childhood home. He graduated from Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design and went to the Parsons School for Design. Then his life took a sharp curve: he joined the army. When he was released, he applied to the NYPD.

  Volpe worked undercover in narcotics in late-1960s New York, when heroin was the drug to hunt. One of his cases became famous. Known as the French Connection, it centred on a ri
ng of heroin dealers importing the drug from France (the case became the film The French Connection, starring Gene Hackman). But Volpe never abandoned his childhood dream of becoming an artist, although he’d graduated from tugboats to women. His favourite model was a woman called simply “Tiger.”

  His new assignment was mostly a stab at PR with the Madison Avenue set. It was a smart, easy play for the department and cost them no resources except one detective’s hours for a couple of weeks. It was supposed to be reconnaissance: survey the art scene, gather information, and find out if there was an easy fix. Basically, file a report. When Volpe ventured out he was probably the first detective in North America ever to investigate art theft full-time, even if it was supposed to be a short tenure. To his fellow officers, the art investigation was the equivalent of working for the Bureau of Paranormal Activity. But Volpe jumped at the chance. After all, he was still allowed to wear blue jeans and a leather jacket. Even better, he was getting a paycheque to look at paintings. Instead of writing a report, though, Volpe started to open cases.

  He arranged to meet with a curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), which had reported missing work to the NYPD, including works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, and Edward Hopper. MOMA’S print department welcomed a steady flow of public visitors—anyone who wanted to spend an afternoon looking at original prints could simply sign out boxes of them to examine in a room at the museum and then bring back the box when finished. But since they had to book an appointment, there was a list of names.

  Volpe examined the list of people who had signed out boxes of prints and came up with a shortlist of names that coincided with the dates the prints had gone missing. Then he went through the motions that the thief would have gone through: he signed out boxes of prints and spent an afternoon leafing through them. The prints were brought to him in large cardboard boxes full of dozens of works, and he was left alone with them. He returned them when he was finished.