The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  Is the stolen-to-order theory true? Brandy and smoking jackets aside, it certainly seems compelling. We know that stolen masterpieces can never find legitimate buyers. We know that masterpieces are stolen regularly nonetheless. We know that many disappear forever.

  We know, too, that a person who would spend $5 million or $10 million on any painting, stolen or not, is different from you or me. Ardent collectors talk as if they are obsessed, caught in the grip of an urge to acquire that holds them helpless. J. P. Morgan, the financier who reigned over American industry at the dawn of the twentieth century, accumulated treasures on so great a scale and in such variety—two Gutenberg bibles, acres of old masters, the last surviving manuscript copy of Paradise Lost—that the art historian Bernard Berenson compared his collection to “a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesus.”

  According to one biographer of newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, “it was understood everywhere that he could not take a normal view toward art, could not appraise a piece according to cold market value, set a top price and stick to it. When he bid for something, it was seldom with a hard-headed take-it-or-leave-it attitude, but with the idea that he must have it. The thought of losing a piece to another was sheer anguish. He was aware of his own weakness, but powerless to correct it.”

  J. Paul Getty, despite his miserliness, confessed himself “incurably hooked” and “an addict” when it came to art. An entry from his diary echoes the “and this time I mean it” tone of a smoker in the grip of a three-pack-a-day habit. “I think I should stop buying pictures,” Getty wrote. “I have enough invested in them. I am also stopping my buying of Greco-Roman marbles and bronzes. I’m through buying French furniture. My mind is set. I am not going to change it.”

  The next words in Getty’s diary are: “The best laid schemes …”

  And it is not merely that collectors in general are obsessed; art collectors in particular are at more risk than others of losing their bearings and vanishing into the stratosphere. Prices of luxury items like Ferraris and diamond necklaces can reach dizzying heights, but with art almost any price can be justified, because a work of art is an object virtually without peer. Buy a yacht, on the other hand, and someone else can always buy an identical one.

  The point is not to deny a family resemblance among, say, van Gogh’s sunflowers, but simply to note the difference between that similarity and the near-identity of such assembly-line objects as Ferrari cars. “Imagine how frenzied the world would be,” the art critic Robert Hughes has written, “if there were only one copy of each book in the world.” The art world is that frenzied and strange a place.

  When the Getty Museum bid $50 million for Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, in 2002, the art dealer Richard Feigen hailed the offer as “exactly what the Getty ought to be doing. It’s very smart to convert a bunch of pieces of green paper into a masterpiece. The green paper proliferates. The masterpieces evaporate.”*

  Joseph Duveen, the legendary art dealer, made his fortune with the identical sales pitch. Duveen specialized in selling old masters to new money. Henry Frick, J. R Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and the other tycoons who dominated the American skyline in the early twentieth century all relied utterly on his guidance. “Art is priceless,” Duveen would rhapsodize, as a client reached for his checkbook, “and when you pay for the infinite with the finite, you’re getting a bargain.”

  When items are too rare to go around, economists point out, the mere fact of that rarity may make them desirable. “Scarcity value,” the economists call it, and it can kick in even if an object has little else in its favor. A six-year-old taunting her brother by chanting “it’s mine and you can’t have it” has mastered the principle.

  Great art has immense scarcity value (and visual splendor besides). But scarcity and beauty are only part of the lure. It is not simply that there are fewer than three dozen Vermeers and there will never be another. A painting has an allure that even other one-of-a-kind creations cannot match, because a person who buys a painting can own it—can possess it exclusively—in a way he could never own a novel, a poem, or a symphony. The difference is that, in an important sense, anyone who picks up a dog-eared, paperback Shakespeare owns something every bit as good as an original Shakespearean manuscript. The glory of Shakespeare lies in the words he conjured up, not in the handwriting in which he set those words down. Shakespeare’s penmanship is irrelevant to his art; Rembrandt’s way with a brush is his art.*

  The most expensive words in any language, J. P. Morgan once said, are unique au monde—”the only one in the world.” For some collectors, the thrill of ownership so outweighs all other considerations that, once they have acquired their treasures and hidden them away, they themselves never look at them again. In seventeenth-century France, for example, one insatiable book collector, Marshall d’Estrées, gathered and immediately stashed away 60,000 volumes, every one of which remained unopened until after his death.

  How natural to assume, then, that when a masterpiece vanishes, a real-life Dr. No—a collector as maniacal as Morgan or Hearst or d’Estrées but not as honest—has commissioned the theft. Robert Hiscox, a prominent insurance broker and art collector, believes that most stolen paintings end up on a rich man’s wall. “It really is a disease, and you want it almost as much as a heroin addict wants heroin,” he says. “And there are certain people who want to own it. Museums are just frustrating—you can go and look, but you can’t own it. That hunger is not only felt by good, honest, A-l individuals. It can be felt throughout society, and especially by villains. And why on earth bother to buy it when you can steal it?

  “People say, ‘But the only point of owning art is to show off,’ “Hiscox continues. “That is absolute paramount rubbish. There are paintings in my bedroom that no one ever sees, and never will see, and I have no interest in showing my friends or the great British public. I think a villain who’s stolen a painting and has, you know, Goya’s Portrait of Wellington sitting in his dressing room, would absolutely get a thrill from that. A greater thrill than just owning the Goya, the fact that he’d nicked it.”

  Even many legitimate buyers of the world’s most expensive paintings hide their trophies away forever, off-limits to all eyes but their own. Often the biggest purchases at auctions are cloaked in secrecy; the bidding is done by an agent on behalf of a buyer whose identity is never revealed. That is a modern development. In the Gilded Age, for example, tycoons gloried in flaunting their art collections, much as Donald Trump flaunts his buildings today. If consumption could not be conspicuous, what was the point?

  A century before the Gilded Age, Adam Smith made a similar observation as if he were citing a universal truth. “With the greater part of rich people,” he wrote, “the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.” But today’s tycoons are different, the historian Ben Macintyre observes, and “the ownership and whereabouts of the four most expensive paintings in the world are all unknown.”

  The four paintings Macintyre had in mind, lost to everyone but their owners, are van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which last sold for $82.5 million; Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette, $78.1 million; Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents, $76.7 million; and van Gogh’s Portrait of the Artist Without His Beard, $71.5 million. Since Macintyre wrote, a new painting, Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe (The Young Apprentice), has taken first place at $104.1 million. Its buyer, too, is anonymous.

  Until the early 1990s, the ownership of the two most expensive paintings was known. Then, in two hectic days in May 1990, a Japanese industrialist named Ryoei Saito bought both Gachet and Moulin de U Galette, packed them inside plywood boxes, and hid them away in a climate-controlled vault near Tokyo. Over the course of the next few years, Saito went bust—or nearly—and was found guilty in a corruption scandal. In 1996 he died of a stroke. Amid the tangle surrounding Saito’s financial a
ffairs, no one has yet unraveled the mystery of the whereabouts of his two masterpieces. (Saito had said that he wanted Gachet cremated and buried with him, but he reportedly changed his mind.)

  If billionaires whose title to their paintings is beyond question see fit to lock their art up where the world will never see it, is it conceivable that a billionaire thief might do the same?

  Venture a word of any of this to Charley Hill, and—depending on how energetic he happens to be feeling—he will withdraw into a prolonged and angry sulk or explode in a Rumpelstiltskin-style tirade. The whole Dr. No scenario is “Hollywood horseshit,” “bollocks,” “a complete and unmitigated load of crap.” To broach the subject, as Hill sees it, is to proclaim, “I’m an ignoramus and I’m here to waste your time.”

  Hill’s anger is not a simple matter of reflex disbelief. The media’s constant invoking of hideaways lined with old masters infuriates him because it invests “scumbags” with glamour. More maddening still, Hill sees the assumption that stolen masterpieces are destined for the secret galleries of untouchable criminals as providing the police with a perfect excuse for giving up on art crime. Why spend time and money in a doomed search for paintings that are locked away forever? It is, after all, only art.

  Most of the experts share Hill’s scorn of the stolen-to-order claim, but in one crucial way, their opinion is beside the point. Hill and his peers may not believe in the existence of art-loving billionaires willing to pay top-dollar for a stolen van Gogh, but what’s important is that the thieves do believe it.

  And as long as they do, masterpieces will continue to disappear.

  20

  “This Is Peter Brewgal”

  Great paintings will disappear, as well, because when thieves steal great art some of the luster of the masterpieces spills onto the thieves themselves. This gilt by association is almost entirely undeserved, but the notion of the dashing thief is so appealing that it thrives even without any evidence to support it. Art thieves look like Pierce Brosnan or Sean Connery, Hollywood tells us; they are an “elite, artsy SWAT brigade,” the Chicago Tribune informs its readers, a “highly daring and, let’s admit it, cultured coterie of malefactors.”

  In real life, nearly all art thieves fall into two categories, both of them decidedly nonelegant. Either they are bumblers out of an Elmore Leonard novel or gangsters like Martin Cahill. The gangsters are far more dangerous, but the two categories can bleed into one another as stolen paintings pass from criminal to criminal.

  “The commercial dealings can become quite labyrinthine,” says Mark Dalrymple, an insurance investigator based in London who specializes in art cases. “It needn’t always be a cash purchase. The thief might swap the painting for a shipment of drugs, or for a share in another, bigger deal. Or the thief might owe £10,000 and say, ‘Take the picture and we’ll clear the debt.’ “

  Dalrymple is a thin man with a world-weary manner and deep bags under his eyes. He peeks out at the world from inside a swirl of cigarette smoke and delivers his judgments in a syrupy drawl that seems to imply that humanity is, for all its foibles, undeniably amusing.

  “I have great respect for many criminals,” he remarks. “They’re very clever, very clever indeed, very streetwise in their dealings with their colleagues. They’ll buy a mobile phone and throw it away the next day [to foil eavesdroppers]. They can smell your standard undercover cop a mile away.

  “But when it comes to these big-time paintings, they smell money and a profit and they get a hard-on, as we say”—Dalrymple raises his eyebrows as if to acknowledge the lapse in taste—”and the streetwise approach goes right out the window.

  “These people come up with the most extraordinary ideas,” Dalrymple marvels. “They’ll think they can sell the painting to a drug baron in South America, or to a friend who’s in with some mafioso in Miami. Or they’ll think, Ah, well, I know some Albanians who like this sort of stuff, and they’ve got some handguns. Maybe we can do a deal.’ Or they might try to ransom the painting back to the original owner. Or keep it for a year and then see if they can collect from the insurance company. Or they may be in it for the reward.”

  Dalrymple affects a tough guy accent. “‘If they’re offering 100,000 quid, I’ll tell ‘em where it is, and I get the reward, and they get their bleedin’ painting back.’

  “Even so,” Dalrymple continues, “many of them get away with it. Along the line, there are people making money. There are always going to be people making money. That’s why they do it.”

  Cops and their allies, like Dalrymple, prefer the bumblers to the pros. They love to swap tales of hapless amateurs, especially if they are meeting colleagues from far-off jurisdictions. Sitting over drinks in crowded bars, the cops play can-you-top-this. They tell true stories like the one about the Los Angeles thief who, in 1998, stole a $10,000 abstract metal sculpture and ended up selling it to a scrap dealer for $9.10.

  The police tell the stories for laughs, but the laughter is bittersweet because the underlying message is so dismaying. Art theft is such an easy game and the penalties for getting caught are so low, the stories make plain, that the most hopeless sap can play. Take Anthony Daisley, who, one fine December day in 1991, staggered into the Birmingham [England] Museum and Art Gallery almost too drunk to walk. He pulled Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton off the wall, stuck the six-inch-by-ten-inch painting under his arm, and reeled out the door with a £75,000 prize. (The museum had recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on electronic security, but the alarms were designed mainly to foil thefts at night, when the building was empty.) Another museum visitor saw the theft and called a guard, but it was too late.

  Daisley pulled himself aboard a passing bus and showed his fellow passengers the painting. He had just stolen it, he explained, and now it could be theirs for a mere £200. The thief asked where the bus was headed. “Selly Oak,” he was told. That was no place for him, Daisley cried out, because his ex-wife lived there. He stumbled off the bus, taking his painting with him. Five days later, police following up a tip found the stolen painting hidden in a house in Birmingham. A judge let Daisley off with a warning to stay out of trouble for twelve months, and the head of the Birmingham Museum issued him a public invitation to come back and visit the art he so clearly admired.

  Charley Hill relishes such stories, partly because they buttress his view that the human race is composed largely of ninnies but mainly because he takes personal offense at the widespread belief that art thieves are masterminds who spend their days plotting elaborate heists. “The thieves who steal works of art,” he says, “were usually stealing hubcaps a few years earlier.”

  Hill’s hubcap remark was, in one £2 million case, the literal truth. In 1982 a thief ran out of London’s Courtauld Institute Galleries clutching Bruegel’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery to his chest. (Bruegel produced a great many paintings, but in the nearly four and a half centuries since his death all but forty have been lost.) For the next eight years, the painting passed from thief to thief.

  Somehow it fell into the hands of four small-time crooks. Two were failed businessmen who had run into debt; a third stole cars and credit cards; the fourth stole hubcaps.

  One of the four had stumbled on the Bruegel, but he’d had no idea that it was special, no inkling at first that here in his hands was the big ticket he and his mates had all been dreaming of. The painting is an odd one, quite unlike Bruegel’s famous, sprawling, colorful depictions of everyday life. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery is a small, somber work painted in grisaille, entirely in shades of gray. Christ and the other figures look almost like stone carvings. A layman might glance at the dark biblical scene and quickly pass by. “Our great fear during all those years,” recalled the director of the Courtauld, “was that whoever had it would get bored of the whole thing and chuck it into a dustbin.”

  The four crooks rounded up an art expert to tell them whether the painting was worth anything. At this point some of the gang had yet
to lay eyes on it. One of the four, a car dealer named Bobby Dee, took his first peek. “I picked it up to look at it and said, ‘You got to be joking!’ I was worried because I thought these people would think we were idiots. I thought this picture was nothing, just a wind-up.”

  The art expert arrived. “Then this old bloke came in. He was blabbering on about something. He turned round to look at the picture and then he fainted. I thought, ‘Bleeding hell, it must be something proper.’ “

  Armed with the delightful knowledge that they had landed something big, the gang recruited a front man to do the talking for them. On a Friday afternoon in April 1990, the director of the Courtauld, Dennis Farr, was working at his desk. The phone rang.

  “This is Peter Brewgal,” the caller said. “I’ve got something you haven’t seen in a long while. I think you’ll be interested.”

  “Brewgal” rhymed with “bugle.” The caller’s odd name and his south London accent threw Farr for a moment—when Farr tried to mimic the caller later, he sounded like Alistair Cooke impersonating Sylvester Stallone—but then he caught on: Pieter Bruegel.

  Mr. Brewgal offered Farr the chance to buy back his own painting. The price was £2 million.

  Farr called the Art Squad. They devised an elaborate sting, starring Charley Hill as a rich and loudmouthed boor who wanted to buy himself a “trophy painting.” All such subterfuges proved beside the point. Unbeknown to both the Art Squad and the thieves, a second group of cops had been tipped off as to the painting’s whereabouts. They raided a house outside London. In a bedroom, they found the Bruegel wrapped in a pillowcase on top of a chest of drawers, and undamaged despite its wanderings.