There was another pin of light in Canada, and lines connected it to the Art Loss Register, Interpol, and Bonnie Czegledi. In one of the largest countries in the world, it was one of only a few points of light, and sat directly north of the largest art market in the world.
14.
MONTREAL
“Biker gangs have specialists for telemarketing for fraud, for credit cards, and now they have specialists for art too.”
ALAIN LACOURSIÈRE
ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1972, at 1:30 AM, the white hallways and galleries of Montreal’s Musée des Beaux-Arts were quiet save for the footsteps of one of three guards on duty, who had just finished his round on the second floor. Now he was ready for his break: a cup of tea, a moment of peace.
Three hooded men appeared and ordered him to the ground. The guard couldn’t move fast enough for them. One of the men fired off a round from his sawed-off shotgun to punctuate the command. The slugs lodged in the ceiling high above them. The two other guards on duty heard the gun and rushed to the room. They were overpowered, bound, and gagged.
All three guards were forced to lie down on the marble floor of Arthur Lismer Hall, listening and squirming. It took an hour for one of the guards to wrangle himself free and call police. The thieves were expedient: their nocturnal visit to the museum lasted only thirty minutes.
A skylight under repair had been their drop point into the galleries, where they removed 18 paintings, including Rembrandt’s Landscape with Cottages, then worth over a million dollars. Works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, two Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corots, two Jean-François Millets, a Gustave Courbet, an Honoré Daumier, a Eugène Delacroix, and a Thomas Gainsborough were also missing from the walls. In the museum’s 112-year history, there had never been a robbery of this magnitude. The men left no trace of their identities, and police had little to go on.
Then the thieves made contact. One of them called the museum and demanded a ransom of $500,000, which was later lowered to $250,000. The museum director wanted proof that the men had the goods; he asked for one of the paintings, as a gesture of trust. The thieves bit. The director was told to go to Montreal’s Central Station and open a specific locker. He did. And there it was: a Bruegel, and in good condition.
Police had tapped the telephone lines, but the calls were never long enough to be traced. Then another point of hope: a meeting was arranged to trade cash for art. The thieves were told that an insurance adjuster would bring money for one more painting. It was a standard police tactic; a Montreal police officer posed as the adjuster. The meeting was aborted when one of the thieves spied a police car near the rendezvous point. They never made contact again. It has been speculated that the paintings are in the hands of organized crime, and may still be in the Montreal area.
A few key criminal dynasties took root and flourished in Montreal after World War II. These included the Mafia, concentrated in a Montreal suburb, and the Hells Angels biker gang, a group of which had migrated from California, setting up headquarters in the nearby city of Sherbrooke but whose ranks and clubhouses spread across Montreal during the 1970s and 1980s. The Hells Angels’ reach extended to both Canadian coasts, but in Quebec, secluded by cultural barriers, they remained firmly discreet—except for the occasional gangland murder that added to the city’s criminal mythology and made for grim headlines in the Montreal Gazette, La Presse, and Le Devoir. It was the Hells Angels who came to dominate the black market of drugs, gambling, and prostitution in Quebec. They seemed to be unstoppable—an efficiently organized crime machine ruled by Maurice Boucher, president of the Montreal chapter. By the early 1990s, “Mom” Boucher was one of the most powerful crime lords in Canada, presiding over an army of biker soldiers. In 1994, Boucher decided to annihilate his competition—including rival gang Rock Machine. He sent two Angels affiliates into a motorcycle shop in downtown Montreal, where they murdered two Rock Machine members. A war began. It was bloody, and it attracted the full attention of the Montreal police, the Sûreté du Québec, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Alain Lacoursière was on the Montreal force when the biker war exploded. He’d grown up in rural Quebec, joined the police academy right out of high school, and risen quickly among his peers. In 1992, he was a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant in charge of twenty-two police officers working fraud cases. Lacoursière was intelligent, driven, skilled at reading con men, and miserable in his work—he fit the art-cop pattern. “I hated the job, and I was starting to hate myself,” Lacoursière told me.
The depressed young lieutenant had some vacation time saved up. He took two weeks off and went to Paris, which he’d visited as a teenager. Once again he got lost in the lush gardens, dim bistros, and sprawling museums and galleries. He loitered in the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre. The clean, organized art institutions were in so many ways the exact opposite of his regular beat across the ocean, touring the dirtiest corners of the human psyche. Time away from his life as a fraud investigator opened him up enough to fall in love with art again, just as he had when he’d studied it in high school.
Lacoursière felt rejuvenated when he returned home, but he knew the feeling wouldn’t last. He kept working fraud cases—and he promised himself to find a way of incorporating his love of art with his police work. He told his wife about his decision, and she was supportive. He enrolled in an art history night-school course at a local university.
He also contacted the FBI in New York and Interpol in France with an open-ended request: Any stolen art files that might have a connection in Canada? Lacoursière wasn’t sure what to expect, and he hadn’t obtained his superior’s permission to make those requests. The FBI answered first. The agent who replied was happy to send a few cases north. From the FBI’s point of view, it was rare for an officer from another country, much less from a municipal police force, to request information on cold cases about stolen art, or even to offer to lend a hand with any cases at all. The FBI sent the Montreal cop pictures of missing art.
Among the material, Lacoursière found a fuzzy photograph of an antique tapestry estimated to be worth $200,000. By this time his desk was strewn with dozens of catalogues from local auction houses. Just like Paul, he was scouring those catalogues to learn about the art market—what sort of pieces were selling, for what prices, and by whom. One of the catalogues advertised what seemed similar to the stolen tapestry, but the picture the FBI had sent was of poor quality, and the auction was slated for the next evening.
Lacoursière phoned his FBI contact and asked him to courier a high-quality photograph. The detective said he was pretty sure it was the stolen tapestry, but not absolutely. The FBI was skeptical but dispatched a courier north. The picture arrived in Montreal early the next evening. Lacoursière compared it to the one in the catalogue. It looked like a match. He tucked the picture into an envelope, got into his car, and broke the speed limit, but he arrived at the auction house too late. The auction had begun.
Lacoursière sat down in the audience. When bidding opened on the tapestry, he looked at it on stage and then eyed the photograph. Same tapestry, stolen out of New York, and now it was about to be sold to a legitimate buyer in Montreal. Lacoursière raised his hand and placed a bid. A few seconds later the gavel came down and the lieutenant was the proud new owner of the tapestry. “I bought it for $195,000.”
After the auction Lacoursière approached the proprietor. He took out his police badge, as well as the FBI file and picture. “I didn’t want to ruin your auction,” the detective told the owner, who was grateful, if disappointed by the lost sale. Lacoursière phoned his FBI contact the next morning, and they arranged for the tapestry to be returned to the FBI’s New York office. The agent told Lacoursière that nothing like this had ever happened before, and asked him if there was anything the agent or the FBI could do in return.
“Yes,” the Montreal lieutenant answered. “You can write a letter to my boss telling him this type of work is valuable.” It was straight out of the Richard Ellis playbook�
�get a letter circulating among management stressing the value of the work. The FBI did exactly that, and sent a letter of appreciation to Lacoursière’s superior officer and to the Montreal mayor’s office. Meanwhile, Lacoursière requested permission to investigate a few other leads in the art world. His boss said no; stolen art just wasn’t worth the time. But then Lacoursière’s superior received a phone call from the mayor, congratulating the department. The superior’s decision was overturned, and Lacoursière was granted permission to spend 25 per cent of his time on stolen art investigations, as long as he could keep up with his other casework.
Lacoursière started exploring the arts community and found the same patterns as every other art detective I interviewed. He was quickly overcome by too many cases to keep up with: art thefts and art frauds were, it turned out, rampant in Montreal. Lacoursière found himself going through the international learning curve. In 1995, for example, a burglar stole a huge abstract painting by Quebec artist Jean-Paul Riopelle from a house in Montreal’s wealthy Westmount neighbourhood. Before he stole it, the thief showed a picture of the painting to a prestigious French auction house, which expressed interest. By the time the family arrived home from a weekend at their cottage, the Riopelle and the thief were already on a plane for Paris. The painting was quickly auctioned off for $200,000 just as Montreal police were getting around to filing a report. Same pattern, different detective.
From the outset, Lacoursière’s mode of investigation was aggressive: deep submersion in the art community. The detective needed to meet the local art players. He also searched the international community for like-minded law enforcers who track stolen art across continents. Sound familiar?
It turned out that artwork in Canada, and in particular in Montreal, was prone to theft at all levels, but in this case there was an interesting variation to the pattern—the Hells Angels.
One destination for stolen paintings was the house of Joseph Ghaleb, a known associate of the Hells Angels with connections to the Mafia and to Colombian criminal organizations. In 2000, Montreal police raided his business. Lacoursière was called in to inspect a cache of art. The paintings were being stored in a stockroom with a suspended ceiling. At one point, the detective lifted one of the squares on the ceiling, just to see if anything was being hidden up there. He felt something weighing it down and, luckily, stopped himself.
Another officer lifted a ceiling square a few feet away and looked around. Lacoursière was holding up fifteen blocks of c4 explosives. Lacoursière had to maintain the same position for hours while the bomb squad did its work. Later, Lacoursière identified sixty-three paintings at Ghaleb’s house worth more than $1.5 million. “We know from his lawyer that this was about paying off a drug debt,” he said. In December 2000, Ghaleb pleaded guilty to an accusation of concealment of art works, for which he received a penalty of six months in prison. Ghaleb was murdered in November 2004, but his art collection indicated that stolen art was now a big business being used by organized crime. It was a currency, as already proved by Richard Ellis with the Russborough case, when he found the stolen Vermeer in the possession of a diamond dealer in Antwerp.
On a spring morning in 2001, Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Sûreté du Québec, and the Montreal police conducted a sweeping raid on the Angels. Later that day, Lacoursière was called on to tour an array of biker residences and clubhouses. The forces were sorting through drugs, guns, and cash, but they’d also found caches of art, which the task force didn’t know what to do with. Lacoursière “recuperated a lot of stolen art,” and often found two receipts for each painting. “One was a bill to declare to the government, the other had the real value of the artwork. There are a lot of fake papers for artwork.”
At one biker mansion where the police were confiscating items of interest or value, Lacoursière noticed a particularly opulent doorstop. He emailed a picture of it to a few art experts and got a response almost immediately. He then instructed one of the officers to remove the doorstop. The police officer looked at him and asked, “Why? It’s just a doorstop.”
Lacoursière replied, “It’s a bronze statue by Riopelle.”
The Riopelle turned out to be worth $75,000, and was one of the most valuable items seized that day. The 2001 raid was the culmination of months of surveillance. The bust resulted in dozens of arrests and convictions. Lacoursière’s cases on the Montreal force had attracted the attention of the Sûreté; he’d proved the link between organized crime and stolen art. In 2003, Quebec’s provincial police force recruited him to lead an art theft unit. They gave him additional resources, and allowed him to pick a partner. He chose a young detective named Jean-François Talbot. Talbot would be trained as a successor to the new Quebec stolen art unit.
The same year, in 2003, another raid on a biker’s house yielded a Cézanne painting locked up in a safe. Lacoursière emailed a picture of the Cézanne to a renowned Swiss-based expert on the artist. The next day, the expert emailed back. He recognized the work; he’d seen it years before and thought it was in Miami. According to him, the painting was one of the most famous forgeries of a Cézanne ever created.
“You need to know the people who know the culture, and most of the time they’re not local,” Lacoursière said. “Even though it was a fake, an auction house in New York—and I won’t say which one, but it was one of the big ones—had already agreed to put it up for sale. We knew about the Cézanne from wiretaps. The plan was for them to sell it at the New York auction house for $16 million.”
“The way this works is that criminals sell it through the auction house to another criminal buyer in the audience at the auction,” he explained. “It makes sense, because the auction house gets a percentage—say, a million dollars. But the criminal organization has just laundered $15 million. Not bad.” The detective added, “The painting weighs one pound and is sixteen inches wide. That’s a lot easier than travelling with cash.”
Another case he worked involved two seventeen-year-olds who were breaking into galleries along Sherbrooke Street. “They broke in eighteen times in a year and a half. They would steal a painting, and they would also steal the price off the wall. I think they were using the art to pay off their drug debt.”
The evidence linking art theft and organized crime piled up. In 2006, in Quebec City, two drug dealers were arrested for being in possession of 50 pounds of cocaine. But the more surprising find was a stash of over 2,500 paintings in their warehouses. “Every month these guys were placing hundreds of paintings in auction houses across Quebec. They were using the system to launder their blood money. Place a man in the audience who inflates the price and buys the painting. Auction house gets its percentage, money is cleaned,” Lacoursière noted.
I had first met the detective on an overcast afternoon in Cairo, in early March 2007, on the trip I took with Bonnie Czegledi. Lacoursière, then forty-seven years old, and his partner, Jean-François Talbot, thirty-five, were about to take the podium in a conference room at the Marriott Hotel, speaking to the specialized audience gathered under the umbrella of the International Council of Museums. Also at that session were two senior investigators with the Netherlands government, Jordan’s deputy minister of antiquities, and a handful of others, including Czegledi and New Hampshire county attorney Rick St. Hilaire. We had just come back from touring the Egyptian Museum, and the three of us were sitting together. Czegledi had often mentioned Lacoursière, the only dedicated art detective in Canada. “We have this giant place, and there’s one guy,” she pointed out.
Just moments before the Montreal detectives addressed the group, they stood on a terrace overlooking the softly curved swimming pool of the Marriott below, from which wealthy tourists climbed out before a gathering summer storm. Lacoursière had a messy wave of curly dark hair and dark, fierce eyes. Talbot had an athletic build, shaved head, and a quiet, penetrating gaze—he looked like Lacoursière’s bodyguard. In suits they looked like characters out of Miami Vice, a rare stormy Egyptian sky
and sprawling Cairo as their backdrop.
At the podium, Lacoursière took the lead and outlined the unit’s victories and frustrations. He said that smuggling art from one country to another was far easier than smuggling bank notes or drafts. Customs officials weren’t properly trained to identify stolen art, and paintings were a breeze to move across the world. That was good news for organized crime groups, he said, because paintings were being used more frequently as currency for the purchase of drugs and as payment on loans.
The detective made it clear that paintings were being used to launder money through auction houses; one person traded paintings for drugs, and the recipient could simply auction off the painting for the cash value. Lacoursière also noted that money from drugs was being used to buy paintings. Art, it turned out, was an efficient way to funnel blood and drug money through a legitimate source, so it worked both ways.
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