The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  “When the second man came over the wall,” the couple later told police, “we felt something was going on.” Then came a third man over the wall, “carrying something under his arm.” The thieves ran past the pair of gawking tourists (who filmed the entire encounter), climbed into a VW Golf in the visitors parking lot, and disappeared.

  The value of the stolen Madonna, one of only a dozen oil paintings by Leonardo, is almost incalculable. The experts’ guesses range from a low of $50 million to a high of $235 million, a figure that more than doubles the current record for the highest price ever paid for a painting.

  A museum of stolen masterpieces would rival any of the world’s great treasure houses of art. The Museum of the Missing would fill endless galleries; the collection of paintings and drawings would include 551 Picassos, 43 van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts, and 209 Renoirs. Vermeer would be there, and Caravaggio and van Eyck and Cézanne and Titian and El Greco.

  The assaults on art come from every direction. In Paraguay, in July 2002, thieves tunneled for 25 yards beneath the street, surfaced in the National Fine Arts Museum, and disappeared with five old masters with a combined value of well over $1 million. In Oxford, in December 1999, a cat burglar smashed a skylight in the Ashmolean Museum, slithered down a rope, and ran off with a Cézanne worth $4.8 million. In Rome, in May 1998, thieves opted for a “stay-behind,” one of the simplest and most widely employed tactics. Late in the day, three men entered the National Gallery of Modern Art and hid behind an exhibition curtain until after closing time. When the visitors had gone home, the thieves emerged from hiding. Brandishing guns, they grabbed three guards, forced them to shut off the alarms, and tied them up. Fifteen minutes later, the thieves walked out the front door. They carried with them two van Goghs and a Cézanne, with a combined worth of $34 million, as well as $860 in cash, from ticket receipts.

  If a stolen painting does reappear, it tends to surface in an incongruously humble setting, like a bewitched princess in a Brothers Grimm story who wakes up in a woodcutter’s cottage. In 1989, for instance, the superintendent of an apartment co-op in Queens found a stolen Manet still life called Bouquet of Peonies, valued at up to $5 million, hidden in the basement behind a washing machine.

  But most stolen art is gone forever: the overall recovery rate is about ten percent. The lone bit of good news is that the better the painting, the better the odds it will someday be found. For the greatest paintings of all—which are the hardest for thieves to unload, since they can never find legitimate buyers—there is the most reason to hope.

  Most often, thieves leave the pizzazz to Hollywood. The pros go more for brute efficiency than for style. The biggest art theft of modern times could hardly have been simpler. On March 18, 1990, in Boston, two armed men in police uniforms and dime-store black mustaches showed up at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum at 1:20 in the morning. The museum is small and elegant, and maintained today almost precisely as it was a century ago. The thieves pounded on a side door and shouted to the guards that they were investigating reports of a disturbance inside the museum grounds.

  The guards opened the door, and the two “policemen” rushed in and overpowered them. It took only a minute. The guards were art school students with scarcely any security training, earning $6.85 an hour. (In the excitement of the moment, they forgot the central lesson they had been taught: “In the middle of the night you don’t open that door for God himself.”) The thieves left the guards handcuffed and gagged in the museum basement. The guards calmed down quickly, so much so that investigators later suspected they were high at the time of the break-in. One guard fell asleep while bound in the basement.

  With the guards out of the way, the thieves disabled the alarm system—which was not much of a safeguard in any case, since it sounded only inside the museum itself—and wandered through the galleries for eighty minutes on a private shopping spree. They helped themselves to a dozen paintings and drawings, among them Vermeer’s Concert; three Rembrandts, including his only seascape and an exquisite, stamp-sized self-portrait; Manet’s Chez Tortoni; and five charcoal sketches and water-colors by Degas. (They stopped a moment to take the video cassette from the security camera, as well.) The choices were eccentric, or ignorant—the thieves snatched a bronze eagle from atop a Napoleonic flagstaff but left Titian’s immensely valuable Rape of Europa untouched. Even so, they fled with treasures worth $300 million.

  “Tell them you’ll be hearing from us,” the thieves called to the guards as they left, but no one ever has. In the world of art crime, the Gardner paintings are the holy grail.

  Thieves are opportunists, always on the lookout for goods lying around unprotected. Museums, churches, art galleries, and isolated country houses make tempting targets, and not only because art connoisseurs respond to art crime with the fluttery dismay of a Victorian hostess whose guests have unaccountably spoken of sex.

  The point of museums, the reason they exist, is to display their treasures to as many people as possible. Banks, which safeguard literal treasure, have it far easier. They can hide their money in underground vaults with foot-thick doors and protect it with armed guards and fortress-like security, and no one will complain. In comparison with even middling banks in midsized cities, the world’s best museums are as open as street fairs.

  Security is neglected, too, because even the greatest museums face chronic money shortages. In the autumn of 2003, at the Tate Modern, the most popular art museum in Britain, restroom cubicles displayed a notice thanking an anonymous benefactor for the funds to buy toilet paper. Britain’s National Gallery is scarcely better off. “We do not get from government even the basic operating costs of this place, what it costs to open the doors, turn the lights on, and look after the collection,” the director laments. Museums can always choose to invest in more guards and better alarms, but money spent on security is money not available for the museum’s true mission.

  In the United States especially, museum guards are poorly paid and poorly trained. One large security company looks at how much McDonald’s pays its employees in a given region and then offers its museum guards fifty cents an hour less than that. “The people protecting our art,” says security specialist Steven Keller, “are the ones who couldn’t get jobs flipping burgers.”

  Some museums have swallowed hard and installed costly state-of-the-art alarm systems and motion detectors and taken on more guards. But as security has grown more robust, thieves have grown more brazen. If museums are locked and monitored by electronic alarms at night, thieves don’t give up; they simply walk through the front doors during the day. Or, depending on the setting, they smash their way through ground-floor doors in SUVs. They may well carry guns, and horrified visitors and shocked (and unarmed) guards scarcely slow them down.

  From a criminal’s point of view, a world-renowned painting is a multimillion-dollar bill framed and mounted on a poorly guarded wall. On a blustery spring day in May 1998, at about lunchtime, a visitor to the Louvre entered room 67 and approached a small oil painting by Corot, a landscape called Le Chemin de Sèvres that depicts a quiet country road. Working quickly but calmly in the seldom-visited room, the thief removed the painting from its frame, left the frame and its glass intact on the wall, and hurried off. (For a thief, the size of a painting is crucial. The great majority of stolen paintings are small, because they are easy to hide and to carry.)

  About an hour later, a tourist noticed the empty frame and informed a guard. Security ordered all the doors of the sprawling museum shut. Springing that slow-motion trap took ten minutes. Then, with the thief long gone, museum guards searched each of the museum’s thousands of visitors. The thief has never been found.

  The daylight theft of the $1.3 million painting spurred an official investigation and the firing of the Louvre’s chief of security. (Two years later, as the bureaucratic battle dragged on, he was still living rent-free in an apartment in the Louvre.)

  The investigators’ findings would have made Pollyanna despair
. The Louvre had only an approximate idea of how many artworks it owned and how many people it employed. Built 800 years ago as a palace and converted to a museum two centuries ago, the immense complex is an endless and hard-to-patrol maze. Closed-circuit cameras did not cover the entire museum (room 67 was not monitored), and the camera systems in different wings of the museum worked independently and could not be scanned from a central location. Security at the Louvre was so poor, the report noted, that “it would be easier for a thief to steal one of its 32,000 exhibits than it would be to take an item from a department store.”

  Why bother with banks?

  3

  Whodunit?

  FEBRUARY 12, 1994

  In Norway, it seemed as if every police officer in the nation was searching for the thieves who had taken The Scream. Exactly how the crooks planned to cash in on the masterpiece was unclear, but one of their motives was unmistakable: the theft was a jeering insult, a raised middle finger directed at Norway’s cultural and political elite. No mere economic crime, this was personal, a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it taunt from criminals flaunting their cleverness.

  That was the point, police assumed, of timing the crime for the Olympics, when 2,000 reporters were jostling for a story. It explained the choice of The Scream, one of the modern world’s most recognizable images. It accounted for the mocking note and the ladder—a gleaming, twelve-foot-long calling card—left defiantly in place.

  For the thieves this was multimillion-dollar fun. Just forty minutes after the break-in, the phone rang at Dagbladet, one of Norway’s major newspapers. It was 7:10 A.M. The caller asked for the news desk. “You have to get to the National Gallery,” she said. “Something amazing has happened—somebody stole The Scream and they left a postcard that said ‘Thanks for the poor security’ “

  “Who is this?”

  No reply.

  “Who’s calling?”

  The tipster hung up.

  At 7:30, the National Gallery’s security chief made a melancholy phone call to Knut Berg, the museum’s director. “There’s been a burglary. They took The Scream.” Neither man needed to spell out for the other just how bad the news was.

  At the same moment, many of Norway’s highest government officials were together on a private bus headed to Lillehammer to participate in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. The mood was cheery and, bearing in mind how early it was, almost festive. Then came the crackle of a news bulletin on the radio. When the bus pulled in to Lillehammer, it was besieged by reporters shouting questions about The Scream.

  Answers were scarce. Back in Oslo, television reporters flocked to the National Gallery to film their stories. “All we know for certain,” a stunned Knut Berg admitted, “is that, to our sorrow, what could not happen has happened.”

  It had happened before, although never to The Scream. In 1980, only a few years into Berg’s tenure, a drug addict had walked into Norway’s National Gallery in the middle of the day and walked out with a Rembrandt. He found a buyer for the drawing, a small study of a man’s head, and pocketed about $10,000, some five percent of the work’s true value. French police recovered the drawing in Paris six weeks later.

  In 1982 thieves once again entered the National Gallery during the day. This time they hid in a storeroom and emerged in the middle of the night when the guards were in another part of the museum. They grabbed a Gauguin, a Rembrandt (not the one stolen in 1980), a Goya, and five other works, passed them out a window to colleagues, and escaped. The theft led National Gallery officials to install additional alarms and outside cameras and to build the basement alarm station where the guard would later sit, unmindful of the television monitors, as The Scream was passed out the window.

  In 1988, thieves broke into the Munch Museum in Oslo, only a mile or two from the National Gallery. There they stole The Vampire, perhaps Munch’s second best-known painting. Women in Munch’s work are sometimes desirable, often dangerous, and usually both at once. The Vampire depicts a red-haired woman biting, or perhaps kissing, the neck of a dark-haired man sprawled face-down before her.

  The thief had none of the artist’s subtlety. He simply broke a window, grabbed the painting, and ran. The alarm sounded, but by the time the guard had hurried from the far side of the building, he found only broken glass and a blank spot on the wall.

  In 1993, the National Gallery was hit again. With the Olympics less than a year off and plans for the blockbuster exhibition already underway, this was a hard-to-miss warning. The thieves struck on August 23, in daylight. While one shift of guards replaced another, and while a television crew filmed in another room, someone walked off with Munch’s Study for a Portrait, which depicts a sad-eyed young woman looking abstractedly into the middle distance.

  The work, valued at $300,000, was not protected by an alarm, nor was it in a room watched by security cameras. In response, the National Gallery beefed up its security yet again. This time the museum was safe, Knut Berg declared. During the day, the guards would spot any thief trying to make off with a painting, and at night the museum was as secure as a fortress.

  With The Scream gone and the world watching, the Norwegian police faced enormous pressure. They searched for fingerprints but came up empty: the thieves had worn gloves. There were no footprints inside the museum and no identifiable prints or other marks near the ladder. For a brief moment, it seemed that a tiny, dark stain on a piece of broken glass might be blood. Nope.

  Police technicians scanned the museum’s surveillance tapes over and over again, frame by frame. The quality was frustratingly poor. The thieves did not seem to be wearing masks, but even blown-up pictures of their faces were too fuzzy to be of any use. A security camera trained on the front of the museum had filmed the thieves’ car, but the vague shape could not even be identified as a particular make.

  The police did crack the tiny mystery of where the ladder had come from, but no one at the building site had seen anything. The postcard was scarcely more help. The scribbled message on the back was in colloquial Norwegian, so the police guessed that the thieves were from Norway, but that was hardly conclusive. Maybe some overseas Mr. Big had planned the job and hired local talent for the actual break-in.

  Police appeals for help did not yield a single eyewitness. No one had seen two men carrying a twelve-foot ladder down the street or driving a car with a ladder lashed to the roof. Hope surged momentarily when police found a taxi driver who had been parked near the museum while the thieves came and went, but he insisted that he had been busy counting his take for the night. If anyone had come running from the museum carrying a painting, he had missed it.

  He had looked up long enough to notice and describe in considerable detail a fair-haired woman, about 25, who had been walking down the street in front of the museum. Was this the mystery woman who had phoned Dagbladet? The police issued an urgent plea for help. Would the young woman in the red coat and red slacks, with a long braid, please come forward?

  Silence.

  While the police raced in frantic circles and National Gallery officials wrung their hands, the Norwegian public looked on with glee. A nation that placed a higher value on dignity and propriety might have reacted with outrage, but Norwegians treated the episode as slapstick. Even the figure skating farce at the Olympics—this was the year of Tonya and Nancy and the Great Kneecapping—was less entertaining.

  Video footage of the thieves and their pratfalls on the ladder played endlessly on the news, like a scene from a silent comedy. The film looked all the sillier because the security cameras somehow made moving figures look as if they were racing at double speed and in herky-jerky lurches.

  In living rooms and pubs across the nation, Norwegians stared delightedly at the tiny, black-and-white figures propping their ladder up against the wall. They watched the blurry figures slip and slide with their newly acquired treasure, and they guffawed with delight.

  Score Round One for the bad guys.

  4

  The Prie
sts

  FEBRUARY 1994

  At police headquarters, at the National Gallery, at Oslo’s newspapers and television and radio stations, phones rang day and night. Someone waiting for a bus had seen a man carrying a large plastic bag with a heavy wooden frame peeking out of the top. A man in a bar had overheard a suspicious conversation between two men sitting nearby. An ex-con had crucial information that he would happily share with the police in return for a small consideration.

  Norway’s tabloids bayed for blood. What had the National Gallery been thinking? What were the police doing? Who was to blame for this fiasco? Journalists from around the world posed similar questions in a dozen languages.

  The minister of culture and the leaders of the National Gallery disappeared to plot strategy, only to reemerge desperate and forlorn. What were their options? The state could not pay to get the painting back, even if someone knew whom to deal with, because Parliament would never agree to pay millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to thieves. And if somehow such a deal could be justified politically, it would set a terrible precedent that would mean open season on every art treasure in a national collection.

  With public money ruled off-limits, the chance of a big money reward seemed lost. Reasoning that even a small reward might be more enticing than none at all, the National Gallery decided to reach into its own threadbare pocket. For information leading to The Scream’s recovery, the museum announced, it would offer a reward of KR 200,000, about $25,000. The painting, the newspapers repeated incessantly, was valued at over $70 million. Nobody bit.