“Another problem built into a business-on-a-handshake model is the issue of provenance. The first thing we tell a new agent to do is to find out whether or not the work of art that has been stolen is, in fact, real. Where does it come from? Where are its records? We don’t know until we do a background investigation on the piece of art.” She continued, “Looking at the authenticity of a piece is always detective work. Unlike most other material items manufactured today, art does not have serial numbers. Lack of a serial number is one element that really distinguishes art from other types of property theft. The only parallel is jewellery and gems—difficult to trace because they don’t have a serial number either, and so they are particularly valuable to thieves,” she said.
“The middlemen and the dealers don’t want other people to know their sources. This can stem from a legitimate business concern, because if other dealers find out who their sources are, they could use those same sources.”
I asked Magness-Gardiner about the myth versus the reality of the international problem. Early on, Paul and I had discussed the motivations of art thieves, and he had stuck to his point that criminals steal art for money, first and foremost. The Dr. No theory had dogged everyone, but did Magness-Gardiner agree with the British thief?
“Thieves usually steal art because they want the money. They are burglars, not art specialists. They need to have a method of turning the objects they steal into money. They’ll take it to a pawnshop, a flea market, or walk into an art gallery and try to sell it. They don’t have a sophisticated network,” she said. “But when you’re dealing with high-end art, there’s a network. It moves from the thief to a middleman. It’s the middleman who knows how to get it to the market without tipping off the market or the police.” She described Paul’s middleman model perfectly. If that was the case, and thieves were so easily exploiting the holes in the unregulated market, why did the market itself not bend to regulations? After all, wouldn’t that go a long way toward fixing the problem?
“They don’t want to be regulated,” Magness-Gardiner said. “Nobody wants to be regulated. Anyone who is faced with regulation will resist it. In the U.S. we’ve made a case for regulating weapons, and there were people who complained. We still do it. In the art world they would say, ‘There’s no harm in these transactions. This is a free market economy, an open market, and we’re exercising our right to sell something.’” It was the same speech the Art Loss Register’s Julian Radcliffe had heard, ad nauseam, from dealers and galleries that didn’t want to pay his search fees. “But the system has its consequences,” Magness-Gardiner pointed out. “You can sell works of art, and they cross state and international boundaries fairly easily. We do demand importation documents, but we do not regulate.”
The actual transportation, she says, isn’t the issue. “It’s the transaction—when you sell it, transfer it, trade it, or give it to someone else. That’s why art has become an excellent vehicle for money laundering. For example, you can take a Picasso out of the country and sell it at an auction. The person who sold it might have earned $20 million and put it into a Swiss account that we don’t know about. With other objects, like a car or a house, a person has some sort of document that identifies them as being the legitimate owner. That does not exist with art. You wouldn’t sell a $5-million plane without a document, would you? With art, there is no document. I’m constantly amazed.” She sounded just like Hrycyk.
I veered the questions toward the interaction between dealers and thieves. From my discussions with Paul, it seemed as though the crucial point of contact between the crime and the legitimate market was the first trade. “The dealer who handles stolen art usually buys it from somebody he knows. He may suspect that this work of art is not quite legal, but he is not required to ask if what he is buying is stolen,” Magness-Gardiner said. “As long as that dealer doesn’t ask the question, the seller doesn’t have to tell him. There is no law that requires a dealer to ask if something he is buying is stolen. So now he’s bought a work of art for a bargain-basement price, and there is no evidence that he knowingly bought it as stolen property. How do we prosecute him?”
Then she pointed out, “It’s very easy to move lesser-known paintings into the legitimate market. Once it gets to the second person, and they handle it, nobody will notice that painting moving further into the market. It’s the thief, and that first contact he sells it to, who knows that the artwork has been stolen. By the second transaction nobody knows anything, and nobody asks questions.”
Paul had always said that a British thief received about 10 per cent of the value of a work in that sale to a dealer. I wondered if that figure applied in the United States as well. “As far as I understand, the price you’re going to get for a stolen work will be 10 per cent or less of its auction value. The person who’s doing the first transaction knows that the painting is stolen. And it’s that knowledge that makes him vulnerable to prosecution. There’s a discount price, and he knows it. The handler or the middleman, who sells it to somebody without telling them it’s stolen, is going to try to sell it for full value.”
The underground economy for stolen art, according to Magness-Gardiner’s statement, seemed to adhere to certain base rules that applied across North America and the United Kingdom. Dealers were receiving great discounts on price, which they could earn large profits from, by selling directly either to a collector or to another dealer up the chain of supply. If the FBI understood that the pressure point was in that first transaction, moving from middleman to dealer, why were they not more focussed on prosecuting dealers?
“Most of those cases fall under the National Stolen Property Act,” Magness-Gardiner answered. “What this means is that the person dealing with the stolen object must have knowingly done so. It’s about the element of knowledge. The FBI has to prove that the person knew that the object was stolen. That is a significant hurdle. How do you prove that someone knew something was stolen when it’s hard to prove who owns the work of art in the first place?”
Magness-Gardiner had heard all the excuses from dealers and gallery owners caught in possession of stolen pieces. “I found it in my grandmother’s attic, I bought it at a flea market, somebody came in off the street and offered this to me, I bought it at a small auction house.”
Auction houses were the other easy way to deliver stolen art straight into the legitimate market. Radcliffe had recognized this problem and hoped to close that loophole, but there were hundreds of mid-sized and small houses that did not consult with the ALR. And thieves could always take a chance with the big houses. In the FBI’s view, I asked, what kind of a role did the houses play in feeding the black market? “They are a vital part of moving stolen art back into the legitimate market. Sometimes the FBI will get a tip about a valuable painting that has turned up at a small auction. For example, there’s a [Henri Fantin-]Latour out in Virginia, being sold with some old furniture. We’ll go and have a look. There’s always a chance it’s legitimate, but usually you would want to bring a painting that’s worth a lot of money to a big auction house,” she said.
“In other cases, private sales continue until a piece of art gets through so many hands that it can move to Sotheby’s or Christie’s. At that point it’s almost impossible to trace it back to a crime. The person who stole it will probably never be caught.”
I asked her how many times a year the FBI found stolen art at auction houses in the United States. “Ballpark figure: fifteen or twenty times a year. It could be a victim or an agent, or I could see a notice in the art newspaper,” she answered.
“Art tends to go into collections for long periods of time. A painting that is stolen could be out of circulation for a generation until it turns up again. Many of these objects go into a collection and remain there until that collector dies.”
I circled back to the idea of the rogue collector—the Thomas Crown myth that had captured the world’s imagination—but Magness-Gardiner remained firm that this was not the issue that the FBI’s
cases had revealed. It was the opposite problem— Paul’s golden rule of staying under the radar—that the bureau was most concerned with, and the effect of that model on the entire system, from dealer to collector to museum. “There is no Dr. No,” she said. “Or if there is a Dr. No, I haven’t come across him. A collector has a responsibility to know where his next purchase has come from. The collector, ultimately, is responsible. If a collector buys something that is stolen, it’s stolen. Good title cannot be passed to stolen property in the United States. So it’s the collector’s responsibility to provide the next buyer with information on the ownership, to the best of his ability. Collectors can be really helpful in demanding that dealers provide them with the information that they need—with provenance. There are no laws to be enforced, so it’s simply an ethical way of dealing. It’s not a requirement,” she said. “Collectors are the consumer, though in some cases, museums become the ultimate consumer, because they are often the recipients of art donations when a collector dies or when he wants to downsize his art collection.”
Czegledi had discussed this issue with me. Museums and larger art institutions were regularly the beneficiary of donations for which they sometimes gave large tax credits. So, at its worst, the black market funnelled stolen art into the hands of collectors, and then those collectors passed those stolen works into our most esteemed institutions and were rewarded by the government for it. If that was the case, I asked Magness-Gardiner, wouldn’t the Internal Revenue Service be interested in the connection?
“I’ve talked to the irs about this. The irs doesn’t care about good title on those pieces that are donated. The irs cares about value,” she said.
I told Magness-Gardiner that I was interviewing Donald Hrycyk and wanted to know what kinds of interactions the FBI had with detectives on other local police forces. “The FBI relies on them for information,” she said. “The first thing they have to do is file a police report, and then get in touch with us. In some cases, the local police force knows that there is a National Stolen Art File, and they will send me the information directly.” Of course, there were hurdles in terms of communication and the quality of information that was relayed to the FBI. In the same way that Paul had to dumb down his orders for the thieves he hired to go into houses to steal art, most police officers did not possess the specialized knowledge to properly file a report on the pieces that had been stolen. It was a conundrum she faced on a regular basis, from her national perch. “Sometimes a local police officer looking for help or guidance will call me, and say something like, ‘We have this painting that’s been stolen. It has some trees, a hill in the background. What is it?’ More than 75 per cent of the time there are no photographs of a painting that has been stolen,” she said. When owners have not photographed their collections, police are left grasping for the right vocabulary. “If you’re an agent investigating a specific work of art that’s been stolen, you might only have a piece of paper that says, ‘Oil Painting, $10,000.’ Okay, great, so it’s an oil painting.” Magness-Gardiner laughed.
“I will take the info and put it in the National Stolen Art File. I don’t take any proactive steps to circulate the information, though. That’s not the purpose of the National Stolen Art File,” she said. “Months later I might get a phone call from a different local police force. This could be in another state. They will send me photographs and information on the art that they’ve found. I check the National Stolen Art File. In that one-in-a-hundred case, I’ll say, ‘Hey, that was actually stolen from a couple in California.’”
Rarely, though, did the FBI manage to track down the criminal responsible for the crime. “You don’t usually find it in the possession of the thief. It would go from the thief to a fence, a pawnbroker, an antique shop, a gallery owner, a furniture store, a bar, a restaurant, a private person. I’m naming all the ones I’m familiar with. Then immediately, or after twenty-five years, someone will bring it to auction. We often find stolen art when it comes up for auction because there’s publicity. It might change hands two or three times before it becomes public,” she said.
“Once stolen work gets into an institution it just stays there. Then someone who knew the painting was stolen will see it and inform us. It could be ten years later, or twenty. At that point, you can recover the work of art, but you can’t identify the thief.”
Magness-Gardiner paused as she thought about the ways in which the FBI is alerted to stolen art cases. “One of the most frequent ways we find stolen art is when somebody knows a person has a piece of stolen art. That somebody might be an irate neighbour or wife or boyfriend, or someone going through a divorce. It’s often a relative. ‘My sister has X. My husband, whom I’m fighting for custody of the children right now, I know he took it.’” She smiled. “Hell hath no fury.”
In some cases artwork was smuggled out of the United States, and the FBI handled those as well. These were Wittman’s specialty, but he wasn’t the only agent to work those types of cases. “There was a case in St. Louis. A couple of collectors put their art in storage, and the company went out of business. The collectors just kept paying the storage bills, but their two hundred pieces were gone—works on paper, sculpture. One Mark Rothko was sold to a Japanese collection—it made it through a dealer to a legitimate buyer in Japan. I think it took two years to get it back. The FBI did get most of those works back. It was quite an undertaking,” she said.
“The same agent in St. Louis who’d worked that storage company case also worked on the case of a stolen Norman Rockwell painting. It turned up in Steven Spielberg’s art collection. The agent had received some information that suggested he could track the Rockwell down, decades after it had been stolen. We did a cold-case investigation and prepared a press release, which went up on our website,” she explained. “When Spielberg’s dealer was preparing to loan the piece, he Googled it. Our FBI art-theft page turned up. I’m sure it was a shock to them—that the painting was stolen from a private collection in 1978.” The FBI informed Spielberg that one of the paintings in his Beverly Hills mansion, Rockwell’s Russian School Room, had been stolen. “The director took it off his wall immediately. We were the element that allowed that painting to be found.”
According to Magness-Gardiner’s intelligence data, the black market had systematically infected the legitimate art market, and local police forces were not trained to patrol the billion-dollar unregulated market. Information was rare, and stats were almost non-existent. Wasn’t it vital, then, for knowledge, as scarce as it was, to be passed on from one generation of FBI agent to another? I pointed out that Robert Wittman had recently retired. Was there a system in place to transfer that flow of experience and information on? “I can make recommendations and try to ensure continuity, but continuity is not built into the system.” She paused. “Some of the talents required are not those that can be taught. An agent that’s good at this work has to possess a profound interest and knowledge in artworks. I can bring agents to seminars and explain art history to them in an intellectual way, but that only goes so far,” she said.
“It’s the agent that has to have the willingness to spend his or her spare time going to museums, learning about certain artists, the sorts of things that would allow that agent to ask certain questions, the right questions, when they’re investigating. Both Bob Wittman and Jim Wynne, our agent in New York, have that quality and those talents. It’s not a question of waving a wand and saying, ‘Replace those agents with younger agents who have a love and passion for art and can investigate well.’ The best I can do is suggest they work closely with someone, to teach them.”
On that note, we discussed the evolution of the Art Crime Team. “It’s thirteen agents now. Scattered across the country. Each one is in a different city. They deal with specific regions. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. New York is the busiest of the three, and second is a toss-up between Los Angeles and Chicago,” she said. Once a year Magness-Gardiner assembles the act agents for a week to discuss active cases, get
advice, and get to know each other. Sometimes she invites guest speakers: gallery owners, art dealers, cultural lawyers. In 2008, she held the meeting in a Customs department facility in Santa Fe, and for the first time included a detective from a municipal force to train with the team—the LAPD’s Stephanie Lazarus.
“I hope it was useful for her, to see what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. It was very useful for us, because we had the opportunity to ask her how a municipal force works, what its limitations are, what it can provide.” The LAPD Art Theft Detail and the FBI Art Crime Team had already collaborated a few times. Once, when the FBI raided a television art-auction office, it confiscated thousands of artworks, many of them fakes. There was so much material that the FBI needed help storing it, and Donald Hrycyk gave the federal agency access to the LAPD storage space, in the warehouse I toured there.
Magness-Gardiner spent about two hours relaying information and answering questions that afternoon in Washington. She was polite and direct, and I got very little sense of an ego at play—she came across as a straight arrow. In many ways, she was the opposite of Special Agent Wittman. Wittman was an aggressive, balls-to-the-wall kind of agent, always ready to leave his desk and hop on a flight to infiltrate a criminal organization. Magness-Gardiner was the quiet scholar who stayed at the desk, sorting through information. The picture she drew of the black market was a perfect match for the system that Paul had described, in Brighton and London, and the one in Los Angeles that Hrycyk had perceived.
When I’d first sat down with Bonnie Czegledi in Toronto and she’d outlined all of the issues and challenges at play in the black market, I knew that even if she was right, it would be a challenge to clearly define the shape of the international problem she was describing. Over the course of interviewing Paul and Richard Ellis in the United Kingdom and Hrycyk and Wittman in the United States, I felt as if I was beginning to see that shape and its scope. An image began to form in my imagination—a map of the world, with the continents as dark forms. Little pins of light were scattered across the continents, representing sources of information on art theft. Every time I made contact with someone who had a piece of information, a little light would pop up on my mental map. There were now glowing pins in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, in London, in Brighton. There was one in Toronto—Czegledi. The point in Washington was especially bright, and represented the highest authority on art theft in the United States. I also imagined dotted lines that stretched between those points, representing communication. A line led from Czegledi to Bonnie Magness-Gardiner. Another connected Magness-Gardner and Hrycyk. There was a line between Paul and Richard Ellis. In a perfect world, all the points of light would be connected to every other point of light, but that wasn’t happening. Information flowed, but not at the speed or in all the directions that it should.
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