All three were large, forceful, outspoken men, with big egos and little inclination to defer to one another. They knew each other well, as friends, colleagues, and occasional rivals. When they told war stories about old cases, the talk tended to veer off-course into long disputes over who had originally thought of what, amid much eye-rolling and muttering and indignant cries of “Bollocks!”
On this night, though, the three policemen were in high good humor, delighted with what they were about to put in motion. The Getty! Christ, why hadn’t anyone thought of it before? This was going to be good.
Soon after, Ellis flew to California to make his pitch. He is an impressive figure, an inch or two under six feet but as solid and sturdy as a battering ram. Even his fingers are thick and strong; he pounds two-fingered on his laptop keyboard as if he were thrusting his fingers into the chest of an adversary in an angry argument.
In contrast with Hill, who had been odd man out in every group he’d ever joined, Ellis was the very image of a cop. He had joined the police at age nineteen and never risen to great rank, despite considerable talent, in good measure because he preferred a life of action to one behind a desk. His fellow cops, who had the foot soldiers’ suspicion of their commanding officers, trusted Ellis as one of their own.
A veteran of countless briefings, Ellis is clear and well-organized. He speaks in numbered points, as if reading from an outline, and he likes to sort out logistical tangles. Ellis explained The Scream plan. The Getty gulped hard but heard him out.
In Hill’s view, it was all a fine joke. “They were a bit tight-arsed at first,” Ellis reported. “They made clear that they wouldn’t do this for just anybody. They didn’t want the Des Moines, Iowa, sheriff’s department ringing them up to say, ‘Can you give us a hand here?’ But in the end they cooperated brilliantly.”
Ellis had brought a photo of Charley Hill to California with him, along with Charley’s birth date and other background information. If the Getty was going to lend its cover to this operation, Hill would need a new identity.
In short order, Charley Hill had vanished, and one Christopher Charles Roberts had arisen to take his place.* Most of the trappings were routine. Hill was provided with an American Express card in Roberts’s name, a Getty Museum employee ID with his photo, and, for flashing at the appropriate moments, business cards and personalized stationery. A second layer of preparation was more defensive in nature. The Getty’s internal records—notably the payroll files for the past several years—had to be doctored in case anyone began snooping into Christopher Roberts’s bona fides.
The risk wasn’t so much that a suspicious crook might phone the Getty and learn anything useful. Even in ordinary circumstances, most institutions clam up when strangers ask questions about their employees. “But criminals will always check out the people they’re dealing with,” says Ellis, “and you have to be prepared for them to pay somebody within the institution to get them the information they want.”
That possibility raised another danger. What if someone on the crooks’ payroll began looking for Getty employees who knew Roberts? How to explain that no one did? To ward off such trouble down the road, the Getty concocted in-house records that listed Roberts as a roving scout permanently assigned to Europe, and working directly (and exclusively) for the director.
Unless you were in the very top tier of management at the Getty, Hill saw delightedly, you couldn’t counter the argument that he was anything other than a proper employee. It was that good. Hill gave his new credentials an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Everything looks perfectly pukka … kosher.”
The translation of English slang into American was almost instantaneous, unusual only in that Hill spoke both idioms aloud. Usually Hill shifted on the fly, seamlessly denouncing some hapless twit as an “asshole” or an “arsehole” depending on whether his listeners were Americans or Brits. (Bilingual cursing was especially demanding, since so often it came in the heat of the moment. Hill’s time in the Army, when he had worked on sounding “like a redneck from Fayetteville, North Carolina,” had given him good practice.)
Hill is bilingual only in American English and British English, but within those narrow confines he is masterful. (On rare occasions he will venture as far afield as Canada. For an undercover job in the Czech Republic, Hill spent hours practicing broad vowel sounds so that he would sound authentically Canadian. Almost certainly this detail would be lost on the mobsters he was dealing with, but it reflected craftsmanship and professional pride, akin to a carpenter’s taking pains to align all the slots in his screwheads in parallel.)
Hill chose the name “Christopher Charles Roberts” as a mnemonic—the r sounds served as a reminder to himself to enunciate r’s whenever he came to them, as Americans do, rather than to swallow them English-style. The use of his own name as a middle name was a precaution; with some fast talking, Hill might be able to wriggle out of trouble if by bad fortune someone he knew happened to call out to him on the street.
“Hi there,” he’d say aloud to himself, like a singer practicing scales, “I’m Chris Roberts.” There were key sounds and phrases and mannerisms that you had to get right. Do it wrong or overdo it, like Dick Van Dyke playing an Englishman, and you’d be caught the minute you opened your mouth.
The role of Chris Roberts, Getty sleazebag, would soon put Hill’s skills to the test. The grading, it is worth bearing in mind, would be done by professional criminals.
9
The General
Hill was the natural choice to star in the Scream story because he had just scored a giant triumph. In 1986, seven years before the theft of The Scream, a brutal Irish gangster named Martin Cahill had pulled off what was then the biggest art theft in history. Among the eighteen world-class paintings that Cahill grabbed from a mansion outside Dublin, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid was the gem of gems. Its value on the open market can only be guessed at; $50 million would not be a surprise, and $100 million would not be out of the question. In 1993, Hill went undercover and brought it back, undamaged. The coup catapulted him to the top of his field and made him a star.
Six months later, The Scream vanished. For the Art Squad, the timing was ideal. If it could rack up a second huge success in a case sure to be splashed across the world’s front pages, the Art Squad would be safe (at least for a while) from the in-house attacks that always came its way. For Charley Hill, too, the timing was fortunate, and not only because he was at the top of his game. Hill had decided that his undercover work in the Cahill case could serve as a model he could apply to going after The Scream.
Short, bald, chubby, unkempt, Martin Cahill looked like a down-market bartender or the night clerk at a fleabag hotel. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was, in fact, the top man in Dublin’s underworld.
Decades ago, many art thefts were stylish, the province of smooth-talking villains with dubious morals and elegant manners. In recent years, the advent of big money has transformed a gentleman’s sport into a serious, and dangerous, business. Raffles, the “gentleman thief” of Victorian England, has been shoved aside by thugs and criminal gangs whose expertise is in drug peddling and money laundering. Cahill, an armed robber, a kidnapper, and a car bomber, was typical of the new breed. Thomas Crown would have run away screaming.
Before Cahill, crime in Dublin had been largely a helter-skelter affair. Martin Cahill, who had more organizational skills and fewer scruples than any of his predecessors, changed the rules. “The General,” as he was known, instituted weekly meetings to plan future robberies. He kept a sharp eye on the money that came in and how it was paid out. He took on giant jobs that had been deemed impossible; he headed, for instance, a 10-man team that pulled off what was then the biggest robbery in Irish history, a £2 million theft of gold and jewels from a closely guarded and fortress-like factory. In Dublin under Cahill, the term “organized crime” took on real meaning.
Just as important in consolidating his hold on power, Cahill took over terror tactic
s from the IRA and turned them on the police. This had nothing to do with politics—Cahill had no political views except that anyone in his way was a blood enemy—but it brought violence into territory that had always been off-limits. When prosecutors found evidence that placed Cahill at the scene of an armed robbery, for example, Cahill planted a homemade bomb under the car of James Donovan, the state’s chief forensic expert, who was slated to testify in court. For weeks before the attack, Donovan had been under siege. His phone rang at all hours with criminals mouthing threats or simply waiting, silently, on the line. As Donovan drove home from his forensics lab one night, with a policeman sitting in the car next to him for protection, he saw he was being followed. Donovan considered driving to police headquarters but decided that, no matter where he went, Cahill’s men would simply shoot him and flee to safety. “So I decided to drive home because I’d like to die at home, and it would be easier for my wife to have to identify the body in our own house.”
Donovan pulled into his driveway. Cahill’s man drove up behind him and waited. And eventually drove off. But three weeks later, at 8:30 on a January morning, Donovan pulled onto the highway on his way to work and the heat of his car’s engine detonated a crude bomb. “I suddenly saw a mushroom cloud in front of my eyes, and at the center a great big tongue of flame,” Donovan recalled. “I saw the smoke first, then the fire, and then I went blind. My eyes had been scored by the pieces of metal and then I heard a massive explosion. I tried to move my right hand and I couldn’t. It was paralyzed. I put my left hand down and just past my knee found bits of squelchy material—tissue.”
Astonishingly, Donovan lived. He returned to work after enduring a series of operations, maimed and partly blinded. Cahill was never charged in the attack.
Cahill had started out as just another thug. He had been convicted for the first time at age twelve, of larceny. A few years later, in the hope that it would straighten out his wayward boy, Cahill’s father sent the young man to a Royal Navy recruiter. Cahill and the other applicants were asked to scan a brochure that listed various posts they might train for. Cahill’s eyes lit on “bugler,” an unfamiliar word. He hadn’t known the Navy needed burglars, Cahill told his interviewer, but he had plenty of experience.
In years to come, the stories that swirled around Cahill’s name would be decidedly darker. Cahill was hugely feared, a Dublin legend discussed mostly in nervous whispers. “People remember pain,” he once said. “A bullet through the head is too easy. You think of the pain before you do wrong again.”
Cahill delighted in handing out punishments that fed the rumors. He once crucified a member of his own gang he suspected of treachery: while henchmen held his victim down, Cahill nailed the man’s hands to the floor. When he was not terrorizing friends and rivals, Cahill lived a life of twisted domesticity, in a happy ménage à trois with his wife and her sister. The household spilled over with nine young children, all fathered by Cahill, five with his wife and four with his sister-in-law.
In Cahill’s professional life, contempt for authority played as large a role as lust for money. His aim was never merely to outdo his enemies but to humiliate them, to proclaim his “fuck you” disdain to the world. In 1987, for example, thieves broke into the public prosecutor’s office in Dublin and stole hundreds of the state’s files on pending criminal cases. No one doubted whose handiwork it was.
Cahill savored even the pettiest triumphs over the powers that be. Through his years atop the criminal underworld, he took time each week to queue up for his weekly unemployment check, so he could thumb his nose at the state that denounced him as a public enemy but had no choice but to keep him on its payroll. The £92 checks were beside the point—Cahill owned two homes, five cars, and six motorcycles—but he thrived on the game-playing.
All the gangster’s pranks proclaimed the same message: “I’m smarter than you are, and you can’t touch me.” He formed a group called Concerned Criminals, which advocated the right to “earn a dishonest living.” A favorite Cahill ploy, on nights when his gang was engaged in a theft or a kidnapping, was to barge into a busy police station and make a scene, so that the police themselves would become his alibi.
On one occasion, when tax authorities sent an inspector to go over Cahill’s accounts, the gangster played the genial host. At one point he excused himself to make a phone call, then returned to his guest and made a few remarks about vandalism and other dispiriting aspects of the modern world. Cahill gestured out the window to the street. “Now, d’ya see what I mean, just look out that window and look what those bloody vandals have done now.” The tax inspector’s car was in flames, burning like a bonfire.
Cahill’s assault on Russborough House, a palatial mansion outside Dublin that housed one of the world’s greatest private art collections, was his first venture into art crime. The robbery was doubly tempting, for it allowed Cahill to indulge both his greed and his hatred of the upper crust. The house, with a façade stretching 700 feet, was, by some accounts, the handsomest in Ireland. Built in the eighteenth century for a prosperous Dublin brewer (later the first Earl of Milltown), Russborough House had since 1952 belonged to an English couple, Sir Alfred and Lady Beit.
Sir Alfred had inherited a fortune—and a dazzling art collection—from an uncle who was one of the founders of the De Beers diamond company in South Africa. Lady Beit—Clementine Freeman-Mitford—occupied a high rank in the English pecking order and was a first cousin of the Mitford sisters, glamorous, aristocratic siblings (six altogether) notorious for their personal and political misadventures. The Beits had lived in South Africa for several years but had decided, in the early 1950s, to return to Britain. While flipping through the pages of Country Life magazine, Sir Alfred saw a photograph of Russborough House. He purchased the 100-room house without ever having seen it in person.
In 1986 Sir Alfred announced a plan to donate 17 of the masterpieces of his collection to the National Gallery of Ireland. Cahill pricked up his ears. The opportunity to make a fortune for himself and to deprive the state of a gift it coveted set him to planning in earnest. Sir Alfred’s gift included Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, a stunning painting that was by far the best, and the best-known, in the Beit collection. “Everything of Vermeer is in the Beit Letter,” one enraptured scholar had written.
Lady Writing a Letter was one of only two Vermeers in private hands; the other belonged to Queen Elizabeth. The painting was valued at £20 million. (After Vermeer’s death, his widow had given it and a second of her husband’s works, Lady Playing a Guitar, to a baker in Delft to settle a debt. The Vermeers owed the baker 617 florins, just under $80 in today’s currency.)
Vermeer, like Shakespeare, is a genius whose biography is almost completely unknown to us. (Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl with a Pearl Earring is a triumph of imagination that succeeds because of Chevalier’s artistry in building up a plausible world from a handful of scattered facts.) The little information we do have only deepens the mystery. The artist who created paintings that embody quiet and calm lived and worked in a house with 11 children (four others died in infancy). The house belonged to his mother-in-law, who lived there, too, and at first had opposed her daughter’s marriage. Amid the noise and bustle, Vermeer devised masterpieces that the historian E. H. Gombrich aptly described as “still lifes with human beings.”
Vermeer’s professional life seemed no more likely than his domestic arrangements to promote serenity. At his peak Vermeer was one of Delft’s more successful artists, but painting never provided nearly enough to live on. Though many of his peers painted perhaps fifty works in the course of a year, Vermeer turned out only two or three. His work brought in about 200 guilders a year, about as much as a sailor’s pay. Throughout his life, he worked a second job, as an art dealer, and selling other people’s work proved far more profitable than selling his own.
Late in life, Vermeer sank into debt. For the last three years of his life, he sold no paintings at all. He fell into “de
cay and decadence,” his wife later recalled, in a statement that was a mandatory part of the process of declaring bankruptcy, and then “in a day and a half he had gone from being healthy to being dead.” He was forty-three.
The rest of the story is scraps and gaps. Vermeer’s grandfather, one scholar has learned, was a watchmaker who strayed into coin-forging. He managed to leave town a step ahead of the police, but two of his accomplices were convicted and beheaded. Of Vermeer’s career, almost nothing is known beyond what the paintings themselves reveal. He seems to have painted mainly for individual patrons rather than for the market at large: a printer named Jacob Dissius owned nineteen Vermeers. (They were auctioned off, for an average price of about $500 in today’s money, after the printer’s death.)
Vermeer left no diaries or letters. His personality, his motivation, his judgment of his own achievement—mysteries all. Perhaps we know what he looked like as a young man: some scholars believe that a figure in an early work called The Procuress is a self-portrait. Vermeer served a six-year apprenticeship to an older artist—this was a requirement for membership in Delft’s art guild, which he joined in 1653, at age twenty-one—so we know that someone taught him. No one knows who. Vermeer himself took no pupils. No one knows who posed for him, though some historians speculate that his wife may have modeled for Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window or several other works, or that one or another of his grown daughters may have modeled for Girl with a Pearl Earring or Girl with a Red Hat, among others.
“The greatest mystery of all,” in the words of the historian Paul Johnson, “is how his works fell into a black hole of taste for nearly two hundred years. He is now more generally, and unreservedly, admired than any other painter.”
The Rescue Artist Page 6