The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  Vermeer’s obscurity lasted from his death, in 1675, until 1866, when a French critic named Théophile Thoré wrote three articles hailing the work of the painter he dubbed “the Sphinx of Delft.” (Thoré went on to purchase, for prices in the range of a few thousand dollars in today’s terms, Woman with a Pearl Necklace, now in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin; The Concert, stolen from the Gardner in 1990; and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal and Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, today both at the National Gallery in London.) Fascinated by Vermeer’s use of light, the impressionists took up the cause, celebrating Vermeer as an ally two centuries ahead of his time. But not even the most fervent of those early admirers could have imagined that Vermeer would someday draw crowds who would wait in line for hours to see blockbuster shows devoted to his work.

  By 1813 Vermeer had fallen so far out of favor that the exquisite Lace-maker, now in the Louvre, sold for £7, roughly $400 in today’s terms. In 1816 his Head of a Girl, which depicts a different girl with a pearl earring, brought a mere three florins, about fifteen dollars in present-day terms. Today the painting hangs in the Met. A poster would cost more than the painting itself once fetched.

  In the years of Vermeer’s obscurity, no one quite knew which of several almost identically named Dutch painters was which. Was Johannes Vermeer, who painted women reading letters and suchlike, the same man as the portrait painter Johannes van der Meer? Which of the two Jan van der Meers was which, and was either of them Vermeer? Few knew and fewer cared.

  That confusion both contributed to Vermeer’s obscurity and reflected it. A bigger factor working against Vermeer was his tiny output. No one knows why Vermeer painted so little. The technical perfection of his canvases—his achievement in capturing the varied textures of cloth and bread and tile and skin, for instance—reduces even the coolest critics to invoking “miracles” and “mysteries” that lie beyond technique. In the face of such seemingly effortless mastery, it seems natural to assume that each canvas took countless hours. But scholars who have studied Vermeer’s brushstrokes, sometimes with the aid of X rays, believe that he did not work especially slowly; he often applied fresh paint on top of paint that had not yet dried. The biographer Anthony Bailey suggests that for long periods Vermeer did not paint at all. (He notes, too, that Vermeer was a painter obsessed with the play of sunlight, and gray and rainy Holland may often have left him waiting in frustration.)

  In the days before museums and mass reproductions, a painter who produced only a handful of works, and therefore almost never turned up at auction or in any other public venue, might disappear from view. The only consolation was that, if fashion ever shifted, the rarity that had once undermined an artist would suddenly work in his favor. The fewer the paintings, the more valuable was each one.

  So it has proved with Vermeer. Martin Cahill didn’t know much about art. He knew that much.

  Scouting Russborough House was no challenge, for the grand house had been open to the public since 1976. Nonetheless, Sir Alfred’s astonishing collection was grievously underinsured. The coverage totaled $2.4 million, less than a fraction of the worth of the Vermeer alone, to say nothing of the works by Goya, Rubens, Velázquez, Gainsborough, and Hals, among others. “They do not represent money to me,” Sir Alfred explained, “and no amount of money could compensate me for the loss of such beautiful objects.”

  For £1, visitors could buy a ticket and examine Vermeer’s Lady and Goya’s Portrait of Doña Antonia Zarate and the collection’s other prizes at their leisure. The ticket came with a brochure that served as a guide and instruction booklet for the curious visitor. For eight weeks in the spring of 1986, Martin Cahill spent his Sunday afternoons at Russborough House mingling with the tourists and studying the masterpieces.

  On the night of May 21, 1986, Cahill and a gang of a dozen accomplices pounced. Sir Alfred and Lady Beit were away in London. Cahill had devised an elegantly simple plan. Just after midnight, he and two accomplices would sneak across the enormous grounds and approach Russborough House from the back. They would jimmy a window. Cahill would deliberately step in front of a motion sensor, tripping an alarm connected to the police station in the nearest village. Once the alarm had summoned the police, one of the thieves would disable it so that it could not sound again. Then, before the police could arrive, the thieves would retreat, empty-handed, to a hiding spot nearby.

  On the night of May 21, Cahill set the plan in motion. Moments after the break-in, Cahill and his companions left the house and hid. The police raced the nineteen miles to the isolated country house. Together, the police and Sir Alfred’s overseer surveyed the premises. Cahill and his men looked on from the darkness. The paintings were all in place. The furniture was untouched, and so were the clocks and the vases and the silver. No sign of a break-in. Evidently the alarm had malfunctioned.

  The police drove off. Cahill waited a bit, and at about two o’clock in the morning, he signaled the rest of his crew. Up they drove, across the fields, to the dark and unprotected house. With Cahill clutching his £1 brochure as a guide, the gang raced from room to room grabbing paintings off the walls. Six minutes later, they roared off.

  Martin Cahill, a brute who had once nailed an underling’s hands to the floor, now had possession of eighteen of the world’s cultural treasures. The Vermeer was chief among them. Vermeer’s letter-writing lady, bathed in sunlight and utterly absorbed in her note, and her dutiful, timid-seeming maid, were both, of course, mere dabs of paint on canvas. Even so, it was hard to think of them in a gangster’s hands without flinching.

  On the day after the break-in, a group of schoolboys went fishing four miles from Russborough House. They saw something odd in a ditch, scrambled over for a close look, and found seven paintings flung in a heap. The seven, which included two Guardis, a van Ruysdael landscape, and a Joshua Reynolds portrait, were the least valuable of those Cahill had stolen. Tossed aside as too much trouble when the thieves changed cars, the paintings were nearly undamaged.

  That left eleven paintings missing. According to rumor, they lay hidden in a plastic-lined pit a bit bigger than a grave somewhere in the mountains south of Dublin. This was lonely territory, remote from prying eyes, and an area Cahill had long favored for burying stolen property or shooting his enemies.

  10

  Russborough House

  Charley Hill had been involved in the Russborough House theft not merely from the beginning but from before the beginning. In the fall of 1985, before the break-in, rumors had begun circulating in the London underworld that someone with a load of stolen industrial diamonds was looking for a buyer. An informant brought the story to Scotland Yard, and a detective contacted Charley Hill. “Would Hill be willing to play the role of a crooked American and see what he could find out?

  Hill grabbed his chance and contacted the would-be seller at once. His name, he said, was Charley Berman (“a good American name,” Hill figured, “and it has the r’s”), and his work often brought him to London. Over the course of the next several months, the undercover cop and the diamond dealer sized each other up—Hill conveying his willingness to do business, the seller talking up his wares—and the two men struck up a friendship of sorts. More or less idly, in the course of one rambling conversation, Hill told his new acquaintance that his main business was dealing in art.

  The man trying to peddle the diamonds was a crook named Tommy Coyle, based in Dublin. Over the course of the next several years he would go on to compile a record that would lead police to call him the biggest fence in Irish history. In 1990, he nearly scored a colossal coup. Shortly before, thieves had stolen £290 million pounds of treasury bonds from a courier in London. Coyle was arrested as he and two other men boarded a flight from Heathrow to Dublin. Police found £77 million of bonds in the men’s luggage. Put on trial but acquitted, Coyle celebrated his triumph by buying a racehorse and naming it 77 Mill.

  Now, with Hill, Coyle went out of his way to emphasize what a big player he was. He had access to
a lot of diamonds. “We’re talking about Aladdin’s cave here,” he boasted.

  And then, out of the blue, something new. “I’ve got a picture you might be interested in,” Coyle said. Hill half-expected a pornographic photo. He took a look. Picasso, not porno. Or perhaps, as Hill suspected, a fake in Picasso’s style, though it wasn’t easy to tell from a color photo.

  A bit of research confirmed his suspicions. At their next meeting, Hill delivered the news.

  “Look, I’m not interested in that picture; I don’t think it’s real,” he said. “There are a lot more Picassos than Picasso ever painted.”

  Surprisingly, Hill’s stock seemed to rise after his demurral. Soon after, in April of 1986, Coyle worked the conversation round to art once again.

  “There’s going to be a big art job,” Coyle told Hill, in an urgent whisper. “Would you have any interest in looking at the pictures from it?”

  “Yeah, of course I would. How big?”

  “Really big. You’ll read about it in the papers.”

  In Coyle’s Irish accent, “papers” was partway to “pipers.”

  “It’ll be the big one,” Coyle said.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Hill.

  Then, bang! Russborough House was hit and off they went, the Vermeer, the Goya, the two Metsus, the Gainsborough, two Rubens, the works.

  The next day Coyle phoned Hill.

  “Gee,” Hill said, “that was a big one.”

  Hill and Coyle arranged to meet in London to discuss the Russborough House bounty. Coyle flew in from Dublin, Hill (supposedly) from the States, and they rendezvoused at the Post House Hotel, near Heathrow Airport.

  Coyle came up to Hill’s room. Hill had been told to offer drinks, and the two men filled their glasses and sat down to chat. “Yeah, I’d be interested in buying the paintings when the heat dies down,” Hill said. “Some of them, not all of them.”

  They talked about the paintings and sipped their drinks. Coyle, pleased with his prospects, finished his drink and prepared to leave. Hill and Coyle shook hands. Someone knocked on the door. A waiter, with four glasses on a tray, room service stuff. “Afternoon, gentlemen. Everything all right?”

  “Yeah, we’re good.”

  The waiter took away the glasses Hill and Coyle had used and replaced them with clean ones.

  The room service waiter was a cop, and he hurried the crook’s glass to a fingerprint lab. Within a day Scotland Yard had a positive ID on the man trying to peddle the Beit paintings. From there, the trail led straight to Martin Cahill.

  The industrial diamonds, it turned out, came from a General Electric plant outside Dublin. Martin Cahill and his gang had been stealing them and selling them in Antwerp, and now they were looking for new business opportunities. Stolen art was a venture into a new market.

  Cahill’s own taste in art ran to cheery scenes like the dime-store print in his living room of swans on a river, but he believed that Sir Alfred’s stolen paintings would bring him a fortune. “He’d been reading how there were all these really eccentric art lovers around the world who were prepared to pay millions of pounds for art and stash them in their basements,” said Paul Williams, Cahill’s biographer. “He reckoned he would get millions, countless millions, of pounds for them on the black market.”

  With his new money, Cahill intended to make a major move into the drug importing and distributing business in Britain. The elaborate scheme involved setting up a “brass plate” bank in Antigua, a bank in name only, to launder the drug money that would soon be pouring in.

  For a year, all attempts to recover the stolen paintings fizzled. Then came a break, or so it seemed, though in the end it nearly proved fatal. It was February 1987. The Dublin detective in charge of the Russborough House case, Gerry McGarrick, had a contact in the FBI named Tom Bishop.* McGarrick was an old pro. Weathered, able, reserved, he reminded Charley Hill of John Wayne. Bishop was a much-admired undercover agent. He had scored his greatest coup in the Abscam sting in the late 1970s, playing an aide of a supposed Arab sheik and handing out bribes on the sheik’s behalf. The sting netted four congressmen and a senator, most memorably Florida representative Richard Kelly, caught on film stuffing $25,000 into his pockets and then asking an FBI agent, “Does it show?”

  McGarrick’s plan was for Bishop to play a big-shot American gangster who wanted some trophy paintings to hang on his wall. Hill, in his role as Charley Berman, served as go-between and vouched for Bishop to Cahill’s gang.

  Bishop flew to Dublin to meet Cahill’s men. He took with him a folder of photos showing him with Joe Bonanno and other Mafia big shots. The pictures had been snapped secretly by the FBI, but they looked like photos a crook might display on his desk.

  Included in Bishop’s show-and-tell pack were some pictures of stolen paintings he’d recovered, by Georgia O’Keefe and some others. Bishop planned to pass them off as things that belonged to him. Hill and Bishop went through the packet one last time. Impressive, they both agreed. Both men overlooked one crucial item.

  Bishop met Cahill’s crew. He handed over his photos. One of Cahill’s men flipped through it. The others looked on. Suddenly the crook stopped his flipping, pulled out a piece of stationery from the stack, and waved it in the air. The top of the page bore the FBI logo. Underneath was a handwritten note: “Tom, don’t forget these.”

  Cahill’s men stood up and left the room. The gangsters walked out without pausing to shoot Bishop, which was some consolation. (If the meeting had been held in the gang’s own territory rather than in Bishop’s hotel room, the outcome might have been different.)

  “The Tom Bishop screwup put an end to Charley Berman,” Hill recalled years later, “because if Tom Bishop is a Fed, then Charley Berman, who brought him in, is a no-good son of a bitch, no matter where they think he’s from, okay? End of Charley Berman.”

  Three years went by. Then, in May 1990, Turkish police in Istanbul arrested a Scottish criminal from Dundee who was trying to buy a shipment of heroin to sell in Britain. His down payment for the attempted purchase: Metsu’s Woman Reading a Letter, stolen from Russborough House. Over the next few years, more of the stolen paintings surfaced. In April 1992, detectives in London working on a drug case happened on Gainsborough’s Madame Baccelli, in the back of a truck. In March 1993, police chasing drug leads found a painting by the Dutch artist Anthonie Palamedesz in a locker at London’s Euston train station. In the same month, British police acting on a tip raided a nondescript house in Hertfordshire and discovered, behind the sofa, Rubens’s Portrait of a Monk. (The story of the last recovery had a bizarre twist. Before it made its way to Hertfordshire, the Rubens had been hidden in a house in London. By coincidence, a run-of-the-mill thief, not connected in any way with the thieves who had hit Russborough House, happened to break into that very house. Finding the Rubens but not knowing what it was except that it looked posh, he grabbed it and ran off.)

  The London recoveries left four paintings still missing, including the Goya and, most valuable of all, Vermeer’s Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid.

  In the meantime, Charley Hill had kept in touch with Gerry McGarrick, the Dublin detective heading up the Russborough House case. At some point in the early 1990s, Hill was in Dublin, and the two detectives met over a drink. By now some of the Beit paintings, though not the best, had begun turning up in London. McGarrick told Hill that he’d heard from informants that all the paintings had left Ireland and that the ones that had already been recovered in London were the only ones still in Britain. He’d heard rumors that the rest were somewhere in Belgium.

  “At the time he said it to me,” Hill recalled in 2002, “it was as good as saying, ‘Kiss ‘em goodbye.’ “

  11

  Encounter in Antwerp

  As time passed, other informants picked up rumors of a Belgian connection. The story emerged piecemeal but the pieces seemed to fit together: Cahill’s gang, which had been selling stolen diamonds to a dealer in Antwerp for nearly a decade, had
now handed that same dealer some of the missing paintings—no one was certain which ones. With the paintings as collateral, the dealer had loaned Cahill $1 million. Cahill planned to turn his newfound money into heroin and then back into more money.

  A million dollars was nowhere near the paintings’ true value, but, after all, the thieves hadn’t paid a penny for them. Outsiders who ponder art thefts always get it wrong: they focus on the gulf between a number like Cahill’s $1 million and the $20 million that a masterpiece might fetch on the open market, and conclude that the thieves have blundered. Thieves sneer at reasoning like that. The proper comparison, as they see it, is not between $1 million and $20 million but between $1 million and zero, which is what the paintings had cost them.

  The diamond merchant had locked the paintings in a bank vault in Luxembourg, knowing they would keep their value. (Unlike stolen cars or computers, which lose value by the week, stolen paintings by top-flight artists can safely be laid down as investments, like fine wines.) Presumably he intended to sell them someday, or to barter them for drugs or arms or counterfeit bills or some other black market commodity.

  The problem for the police was finding a way to get those paintings out of the vault. On a tip, Charley Hill made contact with “a real crook of a lawyer” in Norway. Once again, Hill played a variant of his favorite role. This time he was an American art dealer working on behalf of a Middle Eastern tycoon bent on assembling, for his own delectation, a collection of world-class masterpieces.

  His name was Christopher Charles Roberts, the identical pseudonym he would use in The Scream case. In this aspect of his life, as in every other, Hill was maddeningly inconsistent. In working undercover, he veered between obsessive attention to detail and carefree, well-then-fuck-’em casualness. Rebecca West once described someone as “every other inch a gentleman,” and Hill was every other inch a master of minutiae. On the one hand, he might lavish hours on creating false papers perfect in every detail. On the other, he was more than capable of launching into spur-of-the-moment descriptions of buildings and even cities he had never seen.