From time to time, he also used smaller auction houses. They had even fewer checks and balances and were totally beneath the radar of London police. “If I didn’t feel confident going to a larger house I’d use a regional house. I could go there with a $10,000 painting. Name? M. Mouse. Address? Disney World, Florida. If the police got involved, well, the name is M. Mouse. Sometimes they didn’t ask for a name.”
Paul was now building an efficient network for his stolen paintings. And there wasn’t a system in place to stop him. In the early 1980s, the closest thing to a global master list of stolen art was Interpol’s database, but it wasn’t set up to be used by the international art community; it was for police forces. Without a list of stolen artwork to check against, those big auction houses had no way to protect against absorbing stolen art. In New York, the International Foundation for Art Research had started a list in 1976, courtesy of Bonnie Burnham, but its database was obsolete: paper files, plus a “Stolen Art Alert” newsletter published every once in a while for anyone interested. There were dozens of other lists: looted work in France, in Germany, and in Poland. Italy had one, and so did Egypt. But there was no list to rule them all. “Without a list, I could do what I wanted. I could sell stolen paintings straight into the auction house system. There were no defences,” said Paul.
IN 1986, JULIAN RADCLIFFE met with Marcus Linell, the director of Sotheby’s in London. Radcliffe wasn’t from law enforcement or the art establishment. He came from the world of big insurance. He’d graduated from Oxford in international relations and then spent time in Northern Ireland and Beirut, collecting information for MI5 and MI6, although he was not an official agent. He spent a summer working for Lloyd’s of London, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, where he quickly moved into risk management. He began consulting globally on kidnappings and terrorism, and in 1975 he was a founding member of a small company called Control Risks, which advises multinationals with staff and operations in danger zones. One of the patterns he gleaned was that crime was becoming more organized, moving into wider geographical circles, larger than any one government’s control. Control Risks grew to become a major international company with thirty-four offices on five continents, helping companies succeed in “hostile business environments.” When Iraq was invaded in 2003, the British government awarded Control Risks a contract to provide security for its diplomats and employees.
When Radcliffe met Linell as a Control Risks consultant, Sotheby’s was in the process of expanding its offices all over the world. Linell needed advice about risk management for staff members in exotic locales. During that meeting, the Sotheby’s director mentioned to Radcliffe, as an aside, that it would be useful to have a list of stolen artworks to check, one that was comprehensive. At that time, it was extremely difficult to check if an artwork the house was buying was stolen, said the director. The auction house had to contact dozens of organizations and police departments around the world, and even then it often couldn’t get a conclusive answer. As auction prices climbed, so did the interest of criminals. It was a conundrum. Couldn’t Control Risks do for art what it did for people and businesses?
After the meeting with Linell, Radcliffe couldn’t stop thinking about the idea: that the best way to curb international art theft was to create an international list of stolen artwork. Whoever assembled that list would be the master of the art world. It would work like this: every time a painting was stolen, any victim or police officer, from any country, could register the work on the list; once the work was on that list, art dealers, galleries, and auction houses could crosscheck what they were buying or selling. There was a catch, though: the system would work only if everyone in the art market participated—auction houses, dealers, galleries, everyone. Then thieves would no longer be able to use their current business model to launder stolen items back into the system. It was the logical solution—a global solution—and Radcliffe hoped it would be profitable. But where to start? Was there a list to build on?
Yes, there was. Radcliffe found a small organization in New York that had been compiling exactly the kind of list he was looking for—at the International Foundation for Art Research. After penning The Art Crisis, Bonnie Burnham had accepted the job of director of IFAR, and her first big project was to figure out how much art was being stolen in America. “I started a program at IFAR called the Art Theft Archives,” she told me. “We began collecting information and publishing a list of objects stolen. We conducted our museum survey and asked two hundred museums from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, other big cities, to submit records of losses.” Many of them did. “There was nothing official as a source of information at that time,” she said. “I would say that most institutions did say they had things missing from inventory—mostly smaller and more unobtrusive things.”
According to Burnham, “When we did the survey of dealers, same thing. That survey was sent to about two hundred dealers. We negotiated with them to release this information. Then auction houses began to support our effort. We also went to police sources. I had old connections with Interpol. We went to the New York Police Department, the FBI. It was never anything official, because there was no way to get to that level back then.” Burnham left IFAR in 1985, but ten years after she’d started to catalogue stolen works, the list held twenty thousand items—a mix of missing paintings, sculptures, antiques, and antiquities.
Radcliffe decided he wanted to use IFAR’s Art Theft Archives as the foundation for his new company. In New York, he met with the new head of IFAR to talk about his new company. He even had a name for it: the Art Loss Register. IFAR had been successful in recording the details of losses, but recoveries were slim. Radcliffe told IFAR, “There are a few missing pieces to your approach: a commercial understanding of the market, technology, and capital.”
After the meeting in New York, Radcliffe flew back to London and, using his connections and his track record, raised $100,000 from insurance companies and the art trade—the big auction houses—and used it to commission a feasibility study. The question Radcliffe wanted answered: How much would it cost to computerize the IFAR list and create a searchable database? The answer came back a year later: about a million dollars in start-up capital to computerize the database, as well as to add a very important component: digital pictures of the artwork. “In that era, the study was groundbreaking,” Radcliffe told me. “Putting photographic images on computers! Remember, this was the late 1980s.”
Armed with the study and IFAR’s list, Radcliffe went back to the insurance companies and auction houses. If they wanted to close the stolen-art loophole, he told them, they each had to kick in the capital. In exchange, they’d receive shares in the company and a seat on the board. The big boys bit: Sotheby’s for 20 per cent; Hogg Robinson, an insurance company, for 13; Lloyd’s for 10; Rosenthal, a bank, for 10; and Christie’s for 8. IFAR also got a piece. Radcliffe set to work. He opened an office in London, bought some hardware, and brought the IFAR list to life. In 1991, the Art Loss Register opened for business. Bonnie Burnham remembers looking at the newly launched ALR database and thinking, “This is a quantum leap forward from what we were doing.” The price of a search was one pound, and law enforcement could use the service for free. The auction houses started checking their sales catalogues against the register.
The ALR yielded immediate results.
One out of every three thousand items searched by Sotheby’s and Christie’s turned out to be stolen. And this was based only on the initial list, limited to what IFAR had managed to piece together. Scotland Yard and the Sussex, Thames Valley, and Gloucester police forces all started using it too, as did a number of other detectives from around the world. The list started growing, first by the hundreds and soon by the thousands. In principle, the ALR should have thrived, but it barely survived.
“I thought that no one wanted to sell stolen art,” said Radcliffe. “I was wrong. Income from the insurance industry was right on track, but dealer searches and private searc
hes were way down.” Instead of being celebrated, Radcliffe found himself at the centre of an ideological skirmish among art-world insiders. On one side was the insurance industry, taking huge hits from stolen art. “Insurance was telling the dealers they had to clean up their act, and that they had to pay to clean up,” said Radcliffe. “But dealers were saying, ‘We have a clean act. We don’t have to clean up.’ I was persuaded that logic would prevail, but a lot of dealers said to me, ‘I’ve been in business for fifty years, and I’ve had two stolen items in fifty years. I only buy from people I know. I don’t need you, Julian.’”
By 1995 the ALR was in danger of going out of business. “The system was working but the art trade wasn’t paying. There was also a recession in the art trade.” Sotheby’s and Christie’s, both with seats on the board of the ALR, took advantage of their leverage and drove down the price of searches. “It was, in a sense, another form of price fixing,” said Radcliffe. “The two powerhouses said they would pay half of what they’d been paying.”
A major stream of income was suddenly sliced off, and in the four years since he’d started the company, less stolen art was being found at major auction houses, not more. “Stolen work was often consigned to the auction houses by the criminal or someone near the criminal,” said Radcliffe. “We thought that as the database grew, we would find more stolen art. But not in London. We also had to expand our net, to other countries. But that takes time.”
Radcliffe needed to refinance the company in order to save it. IFAR couldn’t refinance, so its share in the company had to drop. But IFAR wanted veto power on the board. “Once IFAR had veto power, everyone wanted veto power. So, everybody with 10 per cent got veto power,” said Radcliffe, who himself bought 10 per cent of the company, just so he could have a veto as well. He was now actively pressing dealers to sign up, but they weren’t budging. Instead, he came up with another way to make up for lost revenue: ask for a 10 per cent recovery fee on any stolen artwork found through the ALR.
The auction houses were against that idea and, it seemed, against Radcliffe. “Auction houses wouldn’t give us the names of the consignors when a red flag came up,” he said. “We were making matches on a regular basis but not getting any resolutions. They were still applying that code of secrecy to our work.”
Radcliffe, meanwhile, was sensing danger signs all over. An outside consultant was brought in to assess the company. “The consultant who was hired told me that they were going to try to fire me. Sotheby’s had initiated it. They did not want the company to be active in recovery,” Radcliffe said. “Things became very unpleasant between 1998 and 2000.” It seemed certain that Radcliffe would be ejected from the Art Loss Register, but somehow he managed to strong-arm the board into accepting the idea of a recovery charge. Then he caught a big break.
One of the cases the ALR inherited from the IFAR list involved a group of valuable paintings stolen in 1978 from the Massachusetts home of Michael Bakwin, heir to a meat-packing fortune. Bakwin was on a holiday when $30 million worth of art was stolen from his home, including Paul Cézanne’s Still Life with Fruit and a Jug. The theft was one of the largest in the history of Massachusetts. In 1999, those paintings came up on the radar, courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Sotheby’s asked the ALR to run a search. Bingo—the system worked. The Cézanne was being sold by a mysterious entity called the Erie International Trading Company. Erie was registered in Panama, but no one knew who the owners were. Radcliffe jumped on it, and Erie agreed to hand over the stolen Cézanne, but only in exchange for a deal—as a reward for the Cézanne, Erie wanted legal title to the other stolen works from the burglary. Radcliffe was in a moral bind, so he engineered his own loophole.
The ALR would accept the deal on one condition: that the owners of Erie sign a legal document stating that they were not involved with the theft in Massachusetts. Erie agreed, and the document was signed and delivered to the office of a London-based lawyer who was acting as middleman.
The Cézanne was returned to Bakwin, by then in his eighties. Bakwin auctioned the painting off at Sotheby’s for close to $30 million, and Radcliffe received a percentage of that, as a finder’s fee—around $3 million. It was the payday he’d needed. The finder’s fee allowed him to buy the company outright, for $2.5 million, and in 2000, Radcliffe was back in control. The ALR was now more than a stolen-art database; it had evolved into an active detective service, and Radcliffe was persistent— just like Richard Ellis, he stayed on the trail of a stolen work for years, waiting, keeping his eye on the prize. But even as the ALR database grew and he made other recoveries, Radcliffe watched for those other missing Bakwin paintings.
In 2005, Erie International tried to sell four of them at Sotheby’s in London. Erie believed that, because of the deal struck with Radcliffe, it was immune to criminal charges. Radcliffe pushed back. He hired a lawyer and halted the auction, arguing that the deal to pass legal title to Erie was void because it was made under duress. A judge agreed. Erie hired its own legal team and requested that the matter be moved to arbitration in Switzerland. But Radcliffe wanted the envelope opened—the one that stated Erie was not connected to the initial burglary. Again, a judge agreed. Inside that envelope was a document signed at the bottom by a man named Robert Mardirosian.
Robert Mardirosian was a Massachusetts-based lawyer who, in 1978, was representing a man named David Colvin on a criminal matter. One night Colvin turned up at the lawyer’s house with Bakwin’s millions worth of art in a bag. He told Mardirosian he was planning to send the stolen paintings to a fence in Florida who could sell them for a decent price. Mardirosian told him it was a bad idea—if Colvin got caught with the paintings, it wouldn’t look good. Colvin took his lawyer’s advice. He left the art upstairs in Mardirosian’s attic, where he slept that night. The next morning Colvin left, but the paintings stayed in the attic. Less than a year later Colvin was shot dead.
Mardirosian later said that he’d thought about returning the paintings in his attic. Instead, in 1988, he moved them to Monaco, and then to a Swiss bank, where they sat for years. Meanwhile, he defended drug dealers, violent offenders, and a few white-collars. In 1995 he retired and split his time between France and the town of Falmouth, Massachusetts. It appeared that he incorporated the shell company in Panama—Erie International—specifically to hold the paintings from the Bakwin theft. But when Mardirosian tried to move those paintings to London in 1999, he popped up on the radar, because of the ALR. He weaselled his way out of that situation but popped up again in 2005, the second time he tried to sell the stolen art. When a court date arrived, Mardirosian was a no-show and the judge ordered the paintings returned to Bakwin. Mardirosian was also ordered to pay $3 million in court fees. By then he was also being investigated by the FBI.
In 2007 Mardirosian was indicted on charges of transporting, possessing, and trying to sell stolen goods that had crossed U.S. borders. He was arrested as he was getting off a plane from France. A few months later he was found guilty.
That single case had a lifespan, from theft to conviction, of almost thirty years, and it demonstrated the power that a global institutional memory could serve in recovering stolen art. Even so, prying back those paintings from Erie required many players: Radcliffe and the ALR, the FBI, London police, and Michael Bakwin, who shouldered most of the legal costs.
On a rainy evening in 2008, I met Julian Radcliffe at the ALR office on Hatton Garden, a street that houses London’s Diamond Row. At dusk, its shop windows are aglow with iron bars, bulletproof glass, and glittering diamonds. It’s a fitting location, and the ALR operates with the same security as the diamond traders. Visitors are announced and buzzed through a locked, windowless door. Inside, under a low ceiling, are a few computer terminals, filing cabinets, and three glass-windowed offices with their shades drawn. In an adjacent room more computer terminals are staffed by young workers, feeding and searching the ever-growing database of stolen art. Radcliffe’s assistant led me into a large room, bare sa
ve for a table with a few chairs and a steel safe that looms in the corner.
When Radcliffe entered a few minutes later, he took the chair closest to the safe, such that during the interview he seemed to be guarding its contents. He looked like a character out of a John le Carré novel: tall, lean, a wisdom-lined face, a grey pinstripe suit, crisp white shirt, and red tie.
Radcliffe said that his rogue entrepreneurial streak had led him on a crooked career line through the worlds of intelligence, insurance, and finally to this delicate junction of criminals, the business of fine art, and the world’s richest collectors. The ALR’s record stands for itself: over $200 million in art-theft recoveries, including the Cézanne stolen in 1978 and recovered in 1999, an Edouard Manet still life stolen in 1977 and recovered in 1997, and Pablo Picasso’s Woman in White Reading a Book, stolen in 1940 and recovered in 2005.
The Picasso was a Holocaust loot case that came up in 2002, when a French collector about to purchase the painting asked the ALR to run a search on its provenance. Sarah Jackson, an ALR staffer at that time, examined two lists: the ALR’s and the Repertoire des biens spoliés en France durant la guerre, 1939– 1945, comprising art looted from France during World War II. Nothing came up on the ALR search, but the Repertoire held a grainy photograph of Woman in White and said that the painting had been stolen from the home of Justin Thannhauser, a prominent Paris art dealer. The same Picasso was now being slated for sale by David Tunkl Fine Art in Los Angeles, consigned by a family that had owned it for twenty-six years. Over four years, Jackson traced the history of Woman in White, and this is what she found.
Woman in White had been painted by Picasso in 1922 and bought from the artist’s Paris dealer by Alfred Flechtheim, who later sold it to Carlota Landsberg, a German Jew. Landsberg fled Germany during the war but left her Picasso in the care of a friend, the art dealer Thannhauser. A letter from Landsberg to Thannhauser proved the transaction. The ALR obtained a photograph of the Picasso in Thannhauser’s estate files. On the back of that photograph were the words “Stolen by Germans” and “Landsberg.” Jackson then found a letter Thannhauser wrote to Landsberg in 1958, where he confessed to her that in 1938 or 1939 his family had fled the country, leaving her Picasso hanging on their living-room wall. In 1940, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, the Thannhauser home was looted; the painting vanished.
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