Hill is forever screeching his car to a halt to read aloud a plaque to fallen heroes or to enjoy a melancholy stroll through a military cemetery. He opposed the Vietnam War, but he craved the adventure and the danger. And since the fighting was going on in any case, it seemed unfair to leave it all to the poor and the poorly connected. In a burst of “sophomoric idealism,”
Hill dropped out of college and went off to war. “Anyway, I was a sophomore,” he notes happily.
Hill found himself the lone college boy in a platoon of poor blacks and rural whites. Twelve of the fifteen men in his squad were killed or wounded. Hill survived his tour in the jungle unhurt, and he learned what it was like to come under fire and hunt an enemy who melted away into the night.
He learned, as well, something about himself that he very much wanted to know. The journalist Michael Kelly, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq, once remarked that many men “go to great lengths in life to not find out the answer to the question, How brave am I? War presents you with specific opportunities to find out the answer to that question…. The question is asked for you and answered for you, in front of you and in front of other people. It’s interesting, because you see it in all the people around you and you see it in yourself. And that’s knowledge you have for the rest of your life.”
Kelly may have been right that most men do not want to know how brave they are, but Hill craved that knowledge. Curiously, though, he passed his self-imposed test but found he drew little comfort from that success. Physical bravery turned out to be just a fact, like being six feet tall or having brown hair. Moral courage—the strength to obey one’s conscience in the face of opposition—was rarer and more admirable. Kelly, it turned out, had asked the wrong question.
Vietnam abounded in moral choices. After one raid on an enemy camp, Hill and two fellow soldiers found the camp abandoned but for a wounded old man, a Montagnard who had presumably led North Vietnamese soldiers through the mountain passes. Hill’s two companions wanted to shoot the man, but Hill stepped in, sparing the prisoner’s life. Eventually a captain turned up and ordered the wounded man evacuated by helicopter. The next time there was a firefight, one of the thwarted soldiers warned Hill, he’d get even with him.
When his tour of duty ended, Hill left November Platoon and returned home to Washington, D.C. At loose ends, and sobered and dismayed by what he had seen, he was without a plan for what he would do next. It would not be too much to say that art saved him.
“They were showing that wonderful series put together by Kenneth Clark, Civilization, at the National Gallery on Sunday mornings,” Hill recalls. “I was working nights as a security guard, but I woke up early, stood in a goddamned line, watched on the big screen, and sat there mesmerized. I loved it. It just opened my eyes. I’d already seen a lot of things—my mother had dragged my sisters and me to Florence and the National Gallery in D.C. and the National Gallery in London, and I’d taken Art 101—but I’d never had a coherent idea about art.
“I’d just come from a year in the jungle and this was my reintroduction to civilized life.”
PART II
Vermeer and the Irish Gangster
7
Screenwriters
It would be years before Hill thought of somehow turning his love of art into a career. In the meantime, he tried on and quickly rejected an entire wardrobe of possible lives. After Vietnam, he moved on from his security guard job and studied history at George Washington University. Then he won a Fulbright scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin, taught high school in Belfast, studied theology in London, and eventually landed a job on the metropolitan police force in London. The police work led eventually to undercover work in general and to art cases in particular.
Hill made a most unconventional cop. The British bobby in the 1970s still looked like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan, in his tall helmet and with an inch-long brass whistle clipped to his chest. One grizzled old cop from Norfolk—in gruffness and taciturnity the rough equivalent of a Vermont farmer—never quite got over his first encounters with his new colleague. “Picture a portly fellow with big, tortoise-shell glasses and curly hair patrolling his beat”—here he squared his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and took a few swift strides—”and all the time talking in that American/Canadian/English accent about medieval history and wearing a coal scuttle on his head. That was Charley Hill.”
Hill’s friends—he has a large and loyal circle, on both sides of the Atlantic—saw the same quirks, but saw them in a far darker light. The question they debated endlessly with one another was whether Charley would ever find a way to turn his contradictions to his advantage, or if the strain would eventually tear him apart. “We never stopped worrying about if he could hold it together,” said a friend who had stayed close to Hill since they were both sixteen. “He wanted to be a priest, and at the same time he was prepared to beat people up and shoot them and kill them. That’s not about conflicting goals, that’s about the Three Faces of Eve.”
Now it was Hill’s job to dream up a way to return The Scream to its rightful owners. But before any scheme could be put into play, the Art Squad detectives would have to convince their superiors at Scotland Yard that the case was worth the effort. For Hill that was self-evident, a challenge scarcely worth dignifying with a response. What mission could be cleaner than recovering the loftiest creations of mankind from ignorant, violent louts? The brass were sure to plead poverty, but cost wasn’t the issue; the real problem was that the boys at the top pissed away money like water.
That wasn’t a view that won Hill many friends in high places, which only served to strengthen his conviction that he was in the right. Hill took a willful, sometimes adolescent, pride in offending anyone in a position to derail his career.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story called “The Imp of the Perverse,” about a compulsion that moves us to act precisely against what we recognize to be our own self-interest. We roll our eyes when the boss presents his pet idea; we snicker when we should praise; we blurt out the truth when a white lie would be just as easy and infinitely preferable. “With certain minds, under certain conditions,” wrote Poe, “it becomes absolutely irresistible.” The imp of the perverse has a permanent perch atop Charley Hill’s shoulder.
Bureaucrats, above all others, moved him to indignation. “Whingeing, plodding, paint-by-numbers dullards,” their only pleasures were kissing ass and getting in the way. Of course they’d want to leave The Scream to someone else.
It fell to John Butler, head of the Art Squad, to sell the mission to his bosses. He could argue sincerely that art crime was international and therefore called for an international response, but this was a tricky assignment even so. The international argument would have been easier to sell if somewhere along the line one of the nations involved was Britain. “What Butler had to do,” says Art Squad detective Dick Ellis, “was convince the hierarchy at the Met [ropolitan Police] to pay for an undercover operation to recover somebody else’s property”—here Ellis’s voice rises in admiration and incredulity, as if he were a sports commentator describing a skater’s triple axel—”even though it hadn’t come from London, and wasn’t in London, and wasn’t likely to come to London.”
Over the years, the men (and, rarely, women) in charge of the Art Squad had learned not to burden their superiors with too much information. “We liked to give them something of a fait accompli,” says Ellis, who ran the squad for most of the decade between 1989 and 1999. “Usually we’d already decided to go ahead and we’d had the first couple of meetings before we told anyone what we were up to. That was by and large how we got things off the ground. Then, once you’re flying, their only choice is to force a crash.”
Ellis spelled out the sales pitch he favored. The first approach to the higher-ups was easy. “If this works—if we can get The Scream back—the Art Squad will look golden, and you’ll look golden.” Smiles all around. Then came the twist. “We’ve already committed to this. If w
e pull out now we’re going to look bloody ridiculous. Or not we—you, in management, are going to look bloody ridiculous.” Too late now.
And then, unexpectedly, an English criminal came along and made everyone’s life easier. His name was Billy Harwood, and he had served seven years in prison in Norway for trafficking in heroin. The Norwegians had sent Harwood back to England to serve the remaining five years of his prison term, and the English had released him on parole.
Now Harwood contacted the Norwegian embassy in London with an intriguing story. From contacts he’d made in prison in Norway, Harwood said, he knew who’d taken The Scream. He knew the thieves and they trusted him. These were hard and wary men. No outsider could lure them into the open; at the first hint that something was up, they would protect themselves by destroying the painting.
But the crooks would deal with their old friend Harwood. He offered to oversee The Scream’s return to the National Gallery. In return, he wanted £5 million.
The Norwegians quickly contacted Scotland Yard to tell them about Harwood’s proposal. The English police didn’t put any stock in Harwood’s story—they figured him (correctly, it turned out) for an opportunist looking to spin some fast talk and big promises into a bonanza—but this was good news nonetheless. With Harwood inadvertently serving as a bridge between the English police and the Norwegians, Scotland Yard finally had a legitimate entrée into the case.
For Hill and all the other Art Squad detectives, planning stings was one of the best parts of the job. Recovering stolen art was different in crucial ways from most other police work. Finding a painting and hanging it back on the wall where it belonged was the main goal; throwing a crook in jail was secondary. (By the time the police found the trail, in any case, the original thieves might well be long gone.) The hope was to find a way to tempt a criminal who had stashed a painting in an abandoned warehouse or a locker at a train station to bring it into the open, where the police could grab it. That required, first of all, cultivating informants to pick up news and rumors. Many times a direct approach was futile: Kicking down a door and shouting “Police!” was all very well, but where was the painting?
For the Art Squad, making up stories was as much a part of the job as making arrests. In the 1980s and early 1990s, for example, when mysterious Japanese buyers paid record-setting prices for brand-name artists—$54 million for van Gogh’s Irises, $78 million for Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, $82.5 million for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet—the Art Squad kicked around schemes for taking advantage of those headlines. Could they find a Japanese-speaking detective to play a gangster or a tycoon who wanted a masterpiece to hang above his fireplace?
“You’re a bit like a scriptwriter,” says Dick Ellis. “It’s a challenge to come up with something that has a genuine feel to it. You bounce it around and ask, ‘Is this actually going to stand up? Are people going to believe this? Is it too outlandish?’ “
A good plan for a sting needs to combine several elements that don’t fit together easily. The best cover stories are simple because they have to work first time out. There is no dress rehearsal—just opening night. Since things inevitably go wrong, the trick is to find undercover cops who can ad lib. (Compounding all the hazards that come with too little practice time is a difficulty that real scriptwriters never face: the detectives only write the dialogue for half the performers.)
At the same time, the plot line has to be complex enough to be plausible. Crooks are jumpy, always on the watch for set-ups and double-crosses. If a come-on is too blatant, they’ll walk away. Game over.
“First of all,” says Ellis, “you sit down and look at the theft, and you try to figure the type of criminals you’re dealing with. You need to put yourself in their shoes and come up with a scenario that they’ll feel comfortable with. That means they have to feel in control of the situation, when in fact what you’ve done is feed them into a scenario where they’ve actually lost control to the police who are running the operation.”
This makes for a high-stakes game of “he thinks that I think that he thinks….” Lose your bearings, and you lose everything.
8
The Man from the Getty
FEBRUARY 14, 1994
Charley Hill’s first thought was that the thieves who had The Scream knew that it would be impossible to sell it openly. Unless they had stolen the picture in order to destroy it, they had some other purpose in mind. What purpose? Ransom, most likely.
Could the Norwegian government pay for the return of a national treasure? No, that would just encourage the scumbags. What was a variation on that theme? Somebody else could pay on the government’s behalf. “Blatant casuistry, of course,” Hill thought, “but there you are.”
Now, who in the hell would do that?
The way to lure the thieves into the open, Hill figured, was to dangle money. Who could come up with millions to retrieve someone else’s painting? In the art world, one name in particular means money. Even crooks know the Getty Museum, the sprawling southern California museum named for its founder, J. Paul Getty, the oil billionaire. Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, had endowed the richest museum in the world.
Getty himself had been a sour, pinched, bad-tempered cuss, a Dickensian villain who looked a bit like Homer Simpson’s boss, Mr. Burns. He lived outside London on an estate that was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by twenty attack dogs. A pathological cheapskate despite his riches, Getty kept a pay phone in his mansion for his guests and squirreled away bits of old string to reuse later. In 1973, Getty made news across the world when he refused to pay ransom to an Italian gang that had kidnapped his grandson and demanded $17 million for his release. Only after the gang cut off the boy’s right ear and mailed it to a newspaper in Rome did Getty relent a bit. He negotiated his grandson’s release for $2.7 million, which was, he said, as much money as he could put his hands on.
The Getty Museum, in contrast, spent money like a lottery winner on a binge. U.S. tax laws require that foundations spend five percent of their endowment each year, and for the Getty that meant a mandatory $250 million a year. Older, poorer museums cringed with envy as they watched their nouveau riche rival gobble up treasure after treasure. Today the Getty’s see-it-and-buy-it frenzy has eased—the museum opened a new, six-building, dollar-devouring “campus” in 1997—but after years of conspicuous consumption, mention of the Getty produces a response that is almost Pavlovian in everyone who hears it.
It was the one institution a villain would know about, Hill figured. No other museum conjured up images of money spilling out of pockets. Beyond that, the Getty could do what it wanted without fretting about the rules and red tape that slowed down tax-supported dinosaurs. Above all else the name had cachet. You couldn’t tell the crooks, “Uncle Fred’s going to pay your ransom.” It wouldn’t carry any weight. But a mention of “the Getty” would catch their attention.
The rest of Hill’s story almost wrote itself: He would claim to be a representative of the Getty Museum, negotiating sotto voce on behalf of his colleagues at Oslo’s National Gallery. The Getty would ransom The Scream and in return for their hush-hush rescue work, Norway would loan it the painting.
Hill would play a big, fast-talking American, a wheeler-dealer accustomed to getting what he wanted and not too fussy about how he got it. For an undercover cop with a hammy streak, it was the role of a lifetime. “It’s perfect,” Hill thought. “I’ll be the Man from the Getty.”
Hill phoned John Butler, his Art Squad colleague, and spelled out his plan.
“Nice idea,” said Butler. “Let’s try it.”
Butler phoned back a few minutes later. “I’ve spoken to the Norwegians. They like it. What do you picture as our next step?” “First,” said Hill, “I guess we’d better talk to the Getty.”
This would take some delicacy, since it was a bit late to ask the Getty for permission to invoke its name. And though the Getty wasn’t actually putting any money at risk, it was
unlikely to welcome even the suggestion that it was a kind of ATM to the art world. Hill insisted that there was no problem. Most people were glad to do Scotland Yard a favor, and everyone in the art world wanted to help the Norwegians out of a jam. The people at the Getty might huff and puff, but they’d get over it.
By good fortune, the Art Squad’s Dick Ellis had worked on several cases with the Getty over the previous half-dozen years. By happenstance, too, Hill had visited the Getty on his honeymoon twenty years before. He didn’t know any more about the museum than any other tourist might, but he figured he had seen enough to avoid any egregious faux pas. That was astonishingly nervy, or foolish, and completely typical of Hill. Since his long-ago visit to California, the Getty had begun building a lavish new museum that was located a dozen miles from the one Hill had seen and bore no resemblance to it. Hill waved all that aside.
Ellis had a good relationship with the Getty’s director and with its head of security. When the time came for the Art Squad to make its pitch, Ellis would be the man to fly to Los Angeles and make nice with the California museum.
Ellis, Charley Hill, and the head of the Art Squad, John Butler, met to fine-tune their strategy. It was early evening; the three men were at Scotland Yard. Butler called Ellis into his office. He had just opened a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish whiskey, which happened to be Ellis’s favorite. Hill was already there. The three detectives sat down and went over the whole scenario.
The Rescue Artist Page 5