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Mona Lisa Smile
No matter how he tries, Charley Hill has never managed to dispel the Dr. No stories. What do you expect? People always prefer glamorous bullshit to mundane truth. They still trundle off to Scotland, for Christ’s sake, to look for a sea serpent in Loch Ness.
But a taste for the exotic is not the sole reason that the belief in stolen-to-order art persists. Another is that people are suspicious of naysayers who are, like Hill, perfectly happy to romanticize the good guys but insistent that crooks are nothing more than violent, grubby men. Hill is, after all, a cop. Maybe thieves come in more varieties than he is willing to concede.
And if Hill has never seen anyone who would qualify as a Dr. No, that’s hardly conclusive. A billionaire who collects stolen paintings would be unlikely to invite the neighbors in. Even so, names do surface occasionally. “Idi Amin was one of the biggest collectors of stolen art,” according to Allen Gore, onetime head of security at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He had a French connection and took stuff out of Marseilles. He commissioned people to do it.”
Maybe. But no one ever produced any evidence to back Gore’s claim. (Masterpieces have occasionally turned up in the homes of South American drug lords, but there is no evidence that they were stolen to order rather than purchased legitimately; the paintings seem to be trophies on a par with the helicopters and hippopotamuses that ornament these private kingdoms.)
Even Hill admits that there have been thieves who were also collectors and who stole art they particularly coveted. The problem is deciding what to make of such tales. We know that (a very few) thieves have stolen paintings for themselves. Does it follow that there are collectors who commission others to steal particular paintings on their behalf?
Consider the case of Stéphane Breitwieser, a French waiter who made headlines around the world in the winter of 2003. Breitwieser was arrested for stealing perhaps $1.4 billion worth of paintings and other art objects for his own pleasure.* Over the course of seven years, he robbed 179 museums in seven countries. He concentrated on small museums, which tended to be poorly guarded, and small objects, which he could tuck inside his coat.
Breitwieser operated in daylight, and his approach could hardly have been simpler. While his girlfriend kept watch or flirted with any guard who happened by, Breitwieser took out his knife, cut a painting from its frame, rolled it up, and walked off with it. The most valuable item in his collection was Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Sybille of Cleves, valued at $8 million.
Cranach’s painting showed her as a beauty, with red hair to her waist, in an elegant red gown. Sybille had two younger, unmarried sisters, Anne and Amelia. In 1539, in search of wife number four, Henry VIII sent Hans Holbein, his court painter, to paint the sisters’ portraits. Henry chose Anne; her portrait now hangs in the Louvre. Holbein may have done his work too well. When Anne arrived in England, Henry was horrified by the true appearance of this “Flanders mare.” Only moments before the wedding ceremony, he paused to bemoan his fate. “My lords, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do what I must do this day for any earthly thing.” Six months later Henry had the marriage annulled and pensioned Anne off, notably with a castle that had belonged to Anne Boleyn.
Breitwieser stole Cranach’s portrait on his twenty-fifth birthday, as a gift to himself. He never tried to sell it or anything else he stole. The art-loving thief stored his loot in his mother’s apartment. Often, before he brought his paintings to her, he took them to a local shop where the owner admired Breitwieser’s latest “purchases” and helped him choose new frames.
Breitwieser was finally caught when a museum guard in Lucerne, Switzerland, saw him trying to steal a bugle. To protect her son after his arrest (or, by some accounts, to keep authorities from revoking her work permit), Breitwieser’s mother set out to hide the evidence. She threw 100 objects into a canal and destroyed sixty oil paintings—including the Cranach—by chopping them into tiny pieces and throwing them out with her kitchen garbage, buried under coffee grounds and egg shells.
What about a low-rent Dr. No? Would the existence of a character who ordered up small-time thefts make it more likely that somewhere in the shadows lurks a full-fledged version?
Listen a minute to Jim Hill (no relation to Charley), one of the most respected art detectives in Britain. A soft-spoken Scot, Jim Hill has spent the last 20 years doggedly chasing stolen art. Most of it is good but not spectacular, perhaps in the $10,000 range, but his résumé includes such coups as the recovery of a £100,000 grandfather clock.
In a business full of men who love telling stories—and love most of all telling stories where they themselves play the starring role—Jim Hill is that rare character who shuns the spotlight. (“Jim doesn’t go in for any kind of self-aggrandizing bullshit,” Charley Hill once observed, in a tone of mingled admiration and puzzlement, as if he were describing a cop who drank nothing stronger than ginger ale.) In the old, swashbuckling movies that Charley likes so much, full of cavalry charges and doomed last stands, Jim Hill would be perfectly cast as a soldier in the ranks, true to his mates and steady at his post. He would have only a line or two of dialogue and would manage a tight smile as a medic fished in his shoulder for a bullet. The injury was, he might concede in his gentle burr, “a wee bit of bother.”
So when Jim Hill does venture on a story, no one disputes him. Twice in his career, he says, he has seen a collector with a private gallery of stolen art. “One gentleman had a secret room off a big workshop, and only he had access to it. Over the years he’d received a lot of stolen property—silver, bronzes, paintings—and he put them in glass cases all around the room, and he’d sit there, all alone, with nice, quiet music on, in a lovely armchair, and he would just sit amongst all this property, and enjoy having it in his presence. Never used it, never tried to find a buyer. He was quite a wealthy man, and he just enjoyed being in the company of valuable and lovely items.”
What about six Dr. No’s, all contemporaries, who were so far from smalltime that each one owned (or so he believed) the world’s best-known painting? Early on the morning of August 21, 1911, an Italian carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia crept out of a storage closet in the Louvre where he had hidden overnight. This was a Monday, the day the museum was closed to the public. Perugia had once been employed by the Louvre, and over his clothes he wore one of the floppy, nearly knee-length tunics issued to the hundreds of workmen who maintained the sprawling museum. The outfit rendered Perugia so innocuous as to be nearly invisible. He walked toward the Mona Lisa in the Salon Carré and checked to see that no one was nearby. Then he removed the painting from the wall, tucked it beneath his smock, and walked out of the museum.
That much is undisputed fact. The rest of the story, depending on the teller, is an illustration of either the perfect crime or perfect nonsense.
As recounted by Seymour Reit in The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa, Perugia was merely a hired hand. The mastermind behind the Mona Lisa theft was an Argentinean con man who called himself the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno. In tandem with a brilliant French forger named Yves Chaudron, the marqués had made a nice living peddling fake old masters to foolish collectors.
In Buenos Aires, the two swindlers had moved beyond the simple selling of fakes and had cooked up an elaborate scheme to sell paintings “off the wall” of the national museum. The marqués, who had bribed a guard to keep away, would lead the dupe to an especially fine painting and ask, in a whisper, if he would like it. He recognized, of course, the marqués would go on, that he was dealing with a savvy businessman who knew a thing or two about how the world worked. And therefore, to make sure there was no funny business—here the marqués drew a handsome pen from his pocket—the customer should take this pen and make some small marks or write some secret cipher on the back of the canvas so that later, when he received his painting, he would know that it was this very one.
One dupe waved the pen aside and instead took out a
pocket knife and cut an oddly shaped scrap from the edge of the canvas, in the back, beyond the boundary of the painting proper. When the time came, the man explained, he would check to see if the newly delivered canvas was missing a piece that fit precisely with the one he had just removed. The marqués was struck almost dumb with admiration. Never had he encountered such cunning.
The scam was that Chaudron had already painted his fake before the dupe ever showed up, and Valfierno had mounted the two paintings together, in the same frame. The real one was in front, where visitors to the museum could admire it, and the fake one behind, where gullible strangers could sign (or cut) it.
Out for bigger game, Valfierno and Chaudron had come to Paris. There Chaudron perfected fake Mona Lisas while Valfierno cultivated new clients. When he had six suckers with big enough bankrolls and small enough brainpans, Valfierno made his pitch: What would you think of owning the greatest painting in the world? It went without saying, the marqués went on, that no one but you could ever see the masterpiece, but, on the other hand, you would know that you alone possessed what no one else could ever own. So the marqués said, six times, to six customers.
Then Valfierno told Perugia, the carpenter, that it was time for him to do his bit. (The theft itself was so easy because the Louvre in 1911 was focused on vandals, not thieves. The Louvre was heavily guarded during visiting hours and virtually defenseless after hours.) Spooked by an attacker who had slashed an Ingres in 1907, the Louvre had decided to build a glass-fronted box to house the Mona Lisa. Perugia knew his way around the Louvre because he had been one of the workmen who built the box.
News of the theft stunned Paris, and then the world. The headline in Le Matin was a single word in giant letters: “INIMAGINABLE!” Soon after, Valfierno approached his six clients. Still game?
“Yes” came the answer, six times. Valfierno sold six fakes, each for $300,000, roughly $6 million a copy in today’s currency. Then, having perpetrated the perfect crime, he vanished. None of the buyers—supposedly six Americans—knew Valfierno’s real name. Nor did Perugia. More than that, the marqués had never confided a word to Perugia about the con he had dreamed up. All that Perugia knew was that a well-spoken stranger had hired him to steal the Mona Lisa—payment to be made later—and he had done so. But, then, not a word of instruction and not a penny in payment! For two years, Perugia fretted and waited. During all that time, the Mona Lisa lay hidden in a box under the stove in Perugia’s apartment.
Chaudron, the forger, had good reason to keep quiet. And the buyers could not go to the police without acknowledging that they had tried to purchase stolen goods. Nor did Valfierno have to worry about what would happen if the real Mona Lisa ever surfaced. His victims had no idea how to find him, but what if they did somehow track him down? “Now let’s just calm down for a minute and think, shall we?” Valfierno could say. “What would you expect the Louvre to do, after they lost their most valuable painting, except to announce that they had marvelous news and they’d found it again? But you and I know who has the real Mona Lisa, don’t we?”*
Is the story of the six fakes true? No one knows. By definition, perfect crimes are beyond detection. The source of the story was a journalist named Karl Decker, a flamboyant and much-acclaimed Hearst reporter, who published the tale in the Saturday Evening Post in 1932. Decker claimed to have known the marqués, who told him the story on condition that it not be published until after his death.
Half a century later, in 1981, Seymour Reit’s book filled in the picture that Decker’s magazine article had sketched. Reit was a well-regarded writer, and the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Art News, among others, praised his book. Robert Spiel, a 20-year FBI veteran who specializes in art crime and the author of Art Theft and Forgery Investigation: The Complete Field Manual, cited Reit’s book in his bibliography and wrote that “if you can read only one true story of art crime, read this.”
Decker and Reit died years ago, and neither left behind any hint that he had pulled off a hoax of his own. Even so, Reit’s credits are curious enough that a skeptic might raise an eyebrow. Though Reit published such straightforward, well-received works as a history of camouflage in World War II, he also wrote children’s books. He was, as well, the creator of Casper the friendly ghost. Donald Sassoon, a historian whose Becoming Mona Lisa tells the story of how the painting became an icon, dismisses Reit’s story as an urban legend.
In any case, Perugia was arrested in 1913, when he tried to sell the real Mona Lisa to a well-known art dealer in Florence. His motive was unclear. (Perhaps he had despaired of ever receiving any money from the marqués.) The dealer contacted the head of the Uffizi, and the two men met Perugia at his shabby hotel in Florence. Perugia rummaged in a homemade wooden trunk, lifted out a bundle wrapped in red cloth, and handed over the Mona Lisa. Bowled over, the dealer and the curator stammered something about needing to take the painting to the Uffizi for a closer look. Perugia was to stay in his room and wait. As the two men rushed out the hotel door, the receptionist hollered at them to wait a minute. What was that they were carrying? They hadn’t stolen one of the hotel’s paintings, had they?
At his trial, Perugia defended himself on patriotic grounds. He had taken the Mona Lisa because it offended his Italian pride that France had possession of such a treasure. Perugia’s lawyer maintained that no harm had been done—no one had been hurt, and the painting was intact and even better-known than it had been. The public went along. Perugia was briefly a hero, lauded for his devotion to his native land. The court imposed a sentence of only twelve months, which was reduced to seven on appeal.
The Mona Lisa story comes with more than enough holes for a cynic like Charley Hill to dismiss it. But Hill has too much respect for history to ignore one story, this one indisputably true, from roughly the same era as the Mona Lisa theft.
Adam Worth was the greatest thief of Victorian England. He provides the single unimpeachable example we know of a thief who stole a beloved masterpiece and kept it locked away, for his eyes only. More than a century ago, Worth stole the world’s most expensive painting and kept it with him, without ever trying to sell it or telling a soul, for twenty-five years.
The story of Worth’s obsession, brilliantly told in Ben Macintyre’s Napoleon of Crime, began in 1876, when an American visitor to London bid a record-setting $600,000 (in today’s dollars) for Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
Georgiana, an ancestor of Princess Diana, was sexy and scandalous, by reputation England’s greatest beauty. As notorious in eighteenth-century England as Princess Di would be two centuries later, Georgiana was a novelist, a compulsive gambler, the wife of the stunningly wealthy Duke of Devonshire (in a ménage à trois that also included Lady Elizabeth Foster), and mistress to a future prime minister. Georgiana died young, though she outlived her days of glory. “Before you condemn me,” she wrote near the end, “remember that at seventeen I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess.”
A century after Georgiana’s death, her portrait came up for auction. To judge from the commotion, she might never have been away. Crowds of gawkers clutched their tickets and waited in line at the Thomas Agnew & Sons art gallery on Old Bond Street to glimpse the painting. The Earl of Dudley coveted it, as did Ferdinand de Rothschild. In the end, no one could compete with Junius Spencer Morgan, the American banker, whose winning bid secured the Gainsborough as a gift for his art-loving son, J. P. Morgan. One condition of the sale, which hardly seemed worth mentioning, was that Morgan leave his new acquisition on exhibit a short while before taking it away.
A few weeks later, on a May night in 1876, a small man pried open a window of the Agnew Gallery and climbed inside. He cut Georgiana from her gilt frame, rolled her up, tucked her beneath his coat, and retreated as he had come.
The thief was Adam Worth, an American-born crook of such elegance and elusiveness that he served Arthur Conan Doyle as the model for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Worth had a young
er brother, John, who shared his lack of morals but not his savvy. At the time of the theft, John Worth was in Newgate Prison on a forgery charge. Adam’s scheme was to work a trade: the painting that all London was hunting in exchange for his brother’s freedom.
But the plan skidded off course. John Worth’s lawyer proved better than anyone had anticipated. Before Adam Worth had even opened negotiations for his brother’s release, John’s lawyer had him out on the street on a technicality, a free man.
That left Adam Worth in a most peculiar spot.
For the next quarter century, Worth kept Georgiana with him. Even when he desperately needed money and the police seemed to be closing in and various shady characters came whispering that they had heard rumors about a certain item that perhaps they might help him with, Worth refused to consider a deal. “He turned them all down, preferring to face disgrace, penury, and imprisonment rather than part with the Duchess,” Macintyre writes. “The painting became his permanent companion…. When he traveled, she came, too, in his false-bottomed trunk.” At home in London, Worth slept with the portrait under his mattress.
In his old age, when Pinkerton detectives finally had him cornered, Worth at last handed his mistress over. Penniless despite a lifetime’s illicit income, Worth bartered the Duchess away for a never-disclosed sum—one account put it at $25,000—and a promise of immunity. The painting, then in the United States, was turned over to the son of the art dealer it had been stolen from originally. The rightful owner took custody of the long-missing portrait and set off for home with it, on the steamer Etruria, bound from New York to London. Among the passengers was one small man with a sad air, no longer able to acknowledge his beloved but secretly accompanying her on one last voyage nonetheless.
The Rescue Artist Page 16