The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  Today, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, is back where she belongs. In 1994, the present Duke of Devonshire bought the portrait and installed it in his ancestral home, Chatsworth. In the grand dining room where Georgiana held court in life, she presides triumphantly once again.

  22

  Gangsters

  I Norway, Charley Hill didn’t figure he was dealing with a modern-day Adam Worth. Johnsen and Ulving seemed too small-time. But he did worry about who might be behind them. Criminal gangs have discovered that art is easy pickings, and a trail that started with bumblers could well end with gangsters. Let your guard down and you might get your head blown off.

  Violent and ruthless, the professionals have none of the endearing ineptitude of the small-time thieves. Worse still, from the police point of view, the pros may have more complicated motives for stealing than the amateurs do. If a gang steals a painting to send a message of some sort, and not simply to cash in, the odds of recovering it become even smaller.

  The involvement of gangsters in art crime dates from the 1960s and took off two decades later, when the art market exploded.* In May 1969, the Italian police announced the formation of the first-ever art squad. The mission of the grandly named Command for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, the government proclaimed, was to safeguard Italy’s paintings and sculptures.

  Five months later, thieves in Palermo, Sicily, broke into the Church of San Lorenzo, sliced Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence from its frame, and vanished. The church had no alarm system. A priest asleep in a nearby room heard nothing. The enormous painting, roughly six feet by nine feet, was one of the last that Caravaggio completed. (His life, filled with tumult, seems too crowded to have left any time for painting. In a six-year span, in his thirties, Caravaggio was arrested and tried eleven times, on charges ranging up to murder. In 1606 he killed a rival in a quarrel over a game of tennis; he died on the run in 1609 at age thirty-nine.) The Nativity had hung in Palermo since 1609. The painting is worth tens of millions, and it has never been seen again.

  At once came rumors—endorsed by the police—that the Mafia was behind the theft. Along with the Mafia tales, the headlines screamed the usual rumors of an elusive Dr. No. “Who would take a painting like that?” scoffed General Roberto Conforti, head of the Italian art squad. “What would even the most unscrupulous art collector do with it? It’s huge. You couldn’t hang it anywhere where it wouldn’t be seen. No, what we suspected from the start was that this was a message from the Mafia. They wanted us to understand that they could take whatever they wanted from wherever they wanted in Palermo, and no one—especially not the police—could stop them. And we think they held on to it as a symbol.”

  Finally, a quarter-century after the disappearance of the Caravaggio, word came from the Mafia itself. In November 1996, Italy’s former prime minister Giulio Andreotti was on trial for corruption. A Mafia pentiti—a supposedly penitent criminal who had agreed to testify against his former colleagues—was on the stand, hidden behind a screen.

  Francesco Marino Mannoia was a dangerous man with a harmless appearance. “Mozzarella,” he had been nicknamed, in mocking tribute to his bland manner and quiet voice. Mannoia had a storehouse of knowledge that made him a prized witness for the state. Hidden inside an armored car, he had taken police on a tour of Mafia hideouts and heroin-processing facilities in Palermo. He had turned over a thick account book listing payoffs to politicians and other local bigwigs. Mannoia knew, literally, where the bodies were buried and had flown over Palermo in a helicopter with police, pointing out Maña “graveyards.”

  It took a month for word of his cooperation with the police to leak. One November evening in 1989, Mannoia’s mother, aunt, and sister left their house and settled into the family car. All three women wore black, because they were in mourning for Francesco’s brother, a Mafia gunman, who had himself been gunned down by underworld rivals. Mafia lore has it that women are exempt from retaliation. Not so. Hitmen killed the three women and sped off.

  Now Mannoia, who was serving 17 years for narcotics trafficking, was on the stand in the Andreotti case. In a trial focused on political scandals at the highest level of government, the theft of a painting two decades before seemed almost incidental. “I’ve stolen some paintings in my time,” Mannoia told the court, in response to a question about his criminal career. “Some modern stuff, and Antonello da Messina. Oh, and remember that Caravaggio that disappeared in Palermo in 1969? That was me, too.”

  He and his fellow thieves knew nothing about art, Mannoia testified. The Caravaggio was so big that the thieves had folded it to make it easier to carry. “When our buyer saw it,” Mannoia said, “he burst into tears and wouldn’t take it.”

  Mannoia may have been lying, for reasons of his own. (The “illustrious figure” who wanted to buy the painting and wept when he saw how it had been damaged, according to Mannoia, was Giulio Andreotti, the former prime minister and the very man on trial for corruption.) Still, no one disputes the central claim that the Mafia was tied up in the theft in some way.* “We don’t believe that Mannoia was lying,” says Conforti, the head of the art squad. “He was telling the truth. Except that, according to our investigations, he was not referring to the Caravaggio but to a similar work that was stolen in a nearby church in the same period.”

  The lone indisputable point is that Caravaggio’s painting, if it still exists, has never reappeared.

  The involvement of the Mafia and other criminal organizations in art crime means that the risks have grown formidable. Once a respite from “real” crime and an almost cozy world unto itself, art theft now carries all the ugly trappings of organized crime.

  “These guys are different,” says one British art investigator with 30 years’ experience, newly returned from his first trip to the former Soviet bloc. “Your average criminal in England, even some of the nasty ones, if they’re stung by another criminal, then, yeah, they’ll kill him. But the Serbs and the Albanians will kill his family as well. And his kids, and the dog, and the cat. And then burn the house down.”

  The twin marks of the new era are more violence and more volume. “In Europe,” says Lynne Chaffinch, head of the FBI’s art theft program, “criminal gangs are moving just massive amounts of art. In Russia, the intelligence people told me they’d identified over forty organized crime groups involved in art theft. At the border, they’ve caught a whole train-load of icons and other stolen art.”

  With the collapse of the Soviet Union and then the opening of borders to the west, eastern Europe became a free-for-all. Thieves who had quickly caught on to the delights of private enterprise scrambled to loot churches and museums. In the Czech Republic, in 1996, Charley Hill helped break up a ring of art thieves run by former secret police officials who had held power in the bad old days. In the end, Hill and his detective colleagues recovered some two dozen old masters, including such hugely valuable works as Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Ill-Matched Lovers, which had been pulled off the wall of the National Museum in Prague. The venture climaxed in an armed confrontation between a German SWAT team and a band of Czech thieves headed by a gold-toothed killer named Kittler.

  In time, old-style gangsters like Kittler or Martin Cahill, the Dublin crime boss, may come to seem quaint. In 1994 in Frankfurt, Germany, for example, thieves stole two Turner paintings on loan from the Tate Gallery in London. The renowned paintings, Shade and Darkness and Light and Colour, near-abstractions on the theme of the biblical flood, had a joint value in the neighborhood of $80 million. At some point in the several years the paintings were in limbo, they apparently passed into the control of the Serbian gangster and warlord known as Arkan. The commander of a private army of several thousand men and a pioneer in ethnic cleansing, Arkan was an indicted war criminal.

  A century before, art thieves looked like Adam Worth, the dashing Victorian who fell in love with Gainsborough’s Duchess. By the end of the twentieth century, Worth had given way to the likes of A
rkan, who was, in the words of one UN diplomat, “a psychopathic mass murderer.”

  He met his end in fittingly violent fashion, gunned down with two bodyguards in the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade. The fate of the Turners was happier. Just in time for Christmas 2002, the Tate held a joyful news conference to announce that it had recovered both paintings, only slightly damaged.

  PART IV

  The Undercover Game

  23

  Crook or Clown?

  APRIL-MAY 1994

  The Norwegian police didn’t know what kind of crooks they were up against. While Charley Hill negotiated with Ulving and Johnsen, the police continued to work their own leads, to little avail. Looked at from one angle, the thieves—whoever they were—seemed professional. They had vanished at once, which showed planning, and then had stayed out of sight, which showed discipline. The police had squeezed their informants hard and come up empty. No booze-fueled bragging, no rumored deals, nothing. Weeks had stretched into months, and still the only clues the police had turned up, most notably the piece of The Scream’s frame, had been handed to them.

  But viewed from a different angle, the same facts made the thieves look amateurish. True, they had been quick, but they had made climbing a ladder seem a feat on a par with walking on stilts. They had indeed kept silent, but was that silence a ploy designed to increase the pressure on the police or just a sign of befuddlement? Perhaps the thieves, now that they were in possession of their trophy, were in the predicament of the dog in the cartoon who has, to his astonishment, actually caught the car he was chasing. Now what?

  And what was the moral of the theft’s timing? Horning in on the publicity generated by the Olympics was a coup—and a thumb in the eye of the police—but did the thieves’ audacity show that they were pros who knew exactly what they were doing? That was the media’s theory, based on the idea that the thieves were showing off for their fellow crooks. But maybe the real audience was the great, sensation-loving public. In that case, the theft of The Scream was not a mark of professionalism but an amateur’s “Hey, look at me” bid for attention.

  And uncertainty about the thieves was only the first link in a murky chain. If the thieves who stole The Scream in the first place had since bartered or sold it to someone else, then any theories about who had originally done what, and why, were all beside the point.

  Once they had sorted through the false leads of the anti-abortion activists and a slew of time-consuming but fruitless tips, the Norwegian police focused on Oslo’s small criminal community. In comparison with London or New York, Oslo was cozy and safe—the city’s population hovered at around half a million—but serious crime, much of it heroin-related, had encroached even on Norway. At the center of the criminal scene in the 1990s was a group called the Tveita Gang, which was about 200 strong and closely linked with criminals outside Norway. At the center of the gang was a raffish young crook named Pål Enger.

  Enger, who was twenty-six when The Scream was stolen, had been well-known in Norway since his late teens. He wasn’t handsome—he had a big, bent nose and his ears stuck out—but he had a disarming grin and a friendly manner. No one would cast Enger as a movie’s romantic lead, but he would do nicely as a charmingly ne’er-do-well best friend. Enger had been a professional soccer player for Valerenga, one of Norway’s top teams, and had gone on to become perhaps Norway’s best-known criminal. “I was not one of the best [at soccer],” he once told the BBC, “but I was one of the best in the criminal world, and I thought it would be more fun to play on the team where I was best.”

  In February 1988 Enger and an accomplice stole a Munch painting, The Vampire, from the Munch Museum in Oslo. The police launched an all-out investigation. Within a few days they announced they were close to cracking the case. They weren’t.

  The months dragged on. Growing desperate, the police at one point even sought help from a psychic. Finally, a break: two men on a train had been spotted carrying The Vampire. The police raided their apartment. They spotted the supposed masterpiece at once and groaned in dismay. The painting that an excited tipster had identified as the work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most tormented artists was nothing of the sort. It was, the police soon learned, a spoof that someone had painted in a couple of hours as a prank, for a bachelor party.

  Six months after the theft of The Vampire, the police arrested Enger and a second man. He had stolen the painting, Enger said, in the vague hope that “maybe some Arabs would be interested” and he could sell it for a fortune. Enger and his accomplice were convicted and sentenced to four years in prison.

  That failed theft hardly seemed the work of a master criminal, but Enger did have at least one genuine skill beyond soccer. He had a gift for publicity, a talent for engaging the police in what amounted to street theater, with the ex-athlete himself in the starring role.

  In Enger’s glory days, he had featured regularly in newspapers and on television. Now, with his soccer career in the past, it took more ingenuity to gain notice. Enger had developed an array of tricks. One of his favorites was to phone the police anonymously and warn them that Enger was up to something shady: Pål Enger had been seen, Enger would whisper, with what looked to be stolen goods. If the police showed up, Enger would howl that he was being harassed. Then he would report the mistreatment to his lawyer, the lawyer would call in the media, and, if all went well, the ex-con would wake to find his name—and, better, his face—splashed across Norway’s newsstands and television screens.

  With his conviction for stealing The Vampire, Enger was a natural suspect when The Scream vanished. He had an alibi for the time of the theft, though, and the police had no evidence against him. Enger thrived on the attention. At the National Gallery, he posed for photographers by the spot where The Scream had hung, next to the poster and the handwritten “Stolen” notice that had replaced it. “I didn’t steal The Scream,” he insisted. “I had nothing to do with the theft.”

  But as the police scanned tapes from the National Gallery’s security

  cameras, they noticed a familiar figure in the swirling crowd of visitors to the Munch exhibit. Five days before the theft, there was Enger.

  Perfectly true, the thief happily agreed, when the police brought him in for questioning. Why shouldn’t he visit an exhibit that was the biggest thing to hit Oslo in years? He was, after all, on record as an admirer of Munch.

  The cops sighed wearily. Sooner or later, they had learned, Enger was sure to do his best to thrust his way into any case that was likely to draw attention. Like the parents of an incorrigible toddler, the Norwegian police had grown to tolerate what they could not seem to prevent.

  Over the years Leif Lier, the detective in charge of the Norwegian end of the Scream case, had come to know Enger well. A patient man whose forbearance would be remarkable even if he were not a cop, Lier shrugged off Enger’s antics. “Enger was a pain in the neck from time to time,” Lier acknowledged, “but he was funny, too.”

  On April 12, two months after the theft of The Scream, Enger’s wife gave birth to a baby boy. The proud father placed a notice in Dagbladet. The baby had arrived, the birth announcement declared, “With a Scream!”

  24

  Prop Trap

  MAY 6, 1994

  Charley Hill had more pressing problems to deal with than Pål Enger’s games with the Norwegian police. Hill’s primary goal was to retrieve The Scream. Everything else, including finding someone to arrest, was less important. That was Hill’s approach to all his art cases. The question that truly engaged him was whereisit, not whodunit. His Art Squad colleagues tended to agree, but many cops did not. Hill’s focus on pieces of canvas rather than on criminals, they insisted, amounted to condoning theft. Even a hint of that argument launched Hill into a tirade on “bureaucrats in blue” and police shortsightedness.

  Life would be easy if you could recover the painting and arrest the thieves. But it didn’t usually work like that. Which do you want, Hill would shou
t, a hubcap thief thrown in prison for six months or a Bruegel back on the wall where the world can admire it?

  Just how the art dealer and his arsonist companion had come to be involved with The Scream in the first place was something Hill could sort out another day. For now, Hill’s job was to get things back on track. His first meetings with Johnsen and Ulving had gone well enough, he figured, and Johnsen had certainly swallowed hard when Walker showed him the money. But what had the Norwegian duo made of the police convention at the hotel and the plainclothes cop in the bulletproof vest?

  Johnsen had left the Plaza in a hurry, saying he would return in midafternoon, leaving Hill to twiddle his thumbs. Hill hoped the Norwegian crook was busy with his partners, whoever they were, sorting out the logistics of handing over The Scream. If the deal was still on, that is. The fiasco with the police convention had certainly spooked Johnsen, and it might have scared him away altogether.

  Hill tried to look at things from Johnsen’s point of view. On the one hand, the money. On the other, a hotel crawling with cops and a deal put together by two strangers. Who were Roberts and Walker?

  With time to kill before Johnsen reappeared, Ulving suggested that he show Hill around town. Before they set out, the art dealer gestured to Hill to join him at the back of his Mercedes station wagon. Ulving opened a big box full of prints, including some woodcuts of The Scream. Hill couldn’t tell if they were genuine, but they looked good. Then the two men headed off for a bit of gallery-hopping. Ulving, in his element, bounced along proudly. He was a “slimeball,” Hill thought, cocky as hell and oblivious to the sneers and scowls directed his way by his fellow dealers as he sauntered through Oslo’s galleries.