The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  For an art historian or a restorer, recognizing the painting as a fake might have been a routine day’s work. But they would have had expertise on their side and all the time they wanted. Hill, armed only with nerve and a good eye, was an amateur who had to make a snap judgment while a pair of crooks glowered at him.

  It came out eventually that the thieves had stolen the painting twenty-five years before and put it away. For a quarter of a century, they had looked on it as a retirement fund worth millions.

  “Well, everyone was bitterly disappointed,” Hill recalled, “because they were so desperate to put these guys away for something big. But my reputation soared; it made me. From then on, I was the Yard’s art ‘expert.’ And Sid suddenly realized that I could do the job. He said, in that growl of his”—here Hill put on a tough guy accent—” ‘Chollie, the thing I like about choo is, you got charisma.’ “

  Charisma wasn’t quite the right word—nerve or flair would have been closer. But the point was that Charley had won Sid’s endorsement. Years later, he still glowed at the memory. “I was flattered by that. No fucker had ever said anything like that to me before. Sid was a really hard-nosed cop, whom I’d heard a lot about but never met, the foremost of all police undercover officers. And from that moment, I became one of his protégés.”

  26

  The Trick of It

  Hill, who had spent a lifetime in dissatisfied flight from career to career, found a home in undercover work. Art jobs in particular were a perfect match, one of the few vocations in the world that called for someone who would be equally glad to study the brushstrokes in a 300-year-old painting or to kick down a robber’s door.

  For Hill, the pattern never varied. Talent and brains would lift him up, and restlessness and rebelliousness would send him tumbling back down. He had nearly managed to flunk out of college, despite his taste for books. In the army, he no sooner earned a promotion than he picked a fight with an officer who busted him back to private. At Scotland Yard, nearly every higher-up was a “complete dunce who talked through his ass.” On the ladder of career success, Hill broke every rung.

  Hill saw the pattern himself, but he took it as proof of integrity rather than of self-destructiveness. “Pissing people off is what I’ve done best in life,” he has said more than once, and his tone when he says so is boastful rather than wistful. He is, after all, a lone wolf, not a creature made to work in harness. “I was a real ‘fuck the army’ kind of guy, but I enjoyed fighting, and the people I was with enjoyed having me with them,” Hill says defiantly. “I was a good fighter but not a good soldier, and later on I was a good thief-taker but not a good police officer.”

  Undercover work, with its emphasis on making it up as you went along and on working in small teams rather than in large groups, set him free. Suddenly the very traits that had set Hill apart and made him an odd fit in the police—the chafing at authority, the posh accent, the tendency to drip polysyllables, the arcane interests, the “outsiderness” in general—all turned to his advantage. The starting point in undercover work was the ability to go unrecognized. Hill was the last person anyone would identify as a cop.

  “English detectives all look alike,” says Mark Dalrymple, the insurance investigator. “They’re always in suits—always the same inexpensive suits. Very plain ties, with a neat knot. Short hair, neatly cut. Polished shoes.” Dalrymple puts down his wineglass and swings his eyes around the crowded pub where he is holding forth, in search of a live example. “The minute they come in the room, every villain in a place like this knows who they are. Nobody ever makes Charley Hill.”

  It is not because he is a man of a thousand disguises. Hill’s range is narrow. One of his undercover colleagues once worked his way inside a neo-Nazi gang and thwarted its plan to firebomb a synagogue. Hill could no more pass for a skinhead than could John Cleese. (Hill is typecast partly because his acting skills go only so far. But vanity comes into play as well. Hill brushes aside certain roles as not for him. He is a leading man. If all that’s wanted is a brute, plenty of others can fill the bill.)

  “Most police operations are for drugs or arms,” says Dick Ellis, the Art Squad detective who specialized in putting together undercover teams, “and those tend to work out quite nicely. Those deals are done on a villain-to-villain basis, and we have some very well-trained, very astute police officers we can insert into those scenarios. But they could never, ever pose as anything other than a villain.”

  The man who brought down the neo-Nazi gang, for instance, was a highly regarded detective named Rocky, who looks like a bigger, tougher Charles Bronson. In police circles, he was renowned for such feats as throwing a desk at a sergeant (and, more surprisingly, getting away with it). Rocky’s partner was supposedly the only person who could handle him. Charley Hill, a friend of both men, referred to them as “the monster and his manager.”

  “Have you met Rocky?” asks Dick Ellis. “You aren’t going to get Rocky posing as a representative of the Getty.” Ellis is so struck by the image that he wheezes with laughter, as if he has a slow leak.

  “Rocky does not come across as a well-educated, aesthetic, well-to-do person,” he goes on. “Rocky is your rough-and-tumble black market dealer, and he’s very good at it. But when you come up against something unusual, you need someone else.”

  You need, in fact, Charley Hill.

  Nearly always, Hill plays a swaggering American or Canadian with a loud mouth and a thick wallet. His characters are invariably light on scruples and, when it seems the best way to tempt a crook into the open, sometimes low on brainpower as well.

  Despite Hill’s years in the United States, posing as a North American is trickier than it sounds. Getting the accent right is the first requirement, and the easiest. Capturing the melody of American speech, as opposed to the sound of individual words, is slightly more of a challenge. The pitch of an American’s voice tends to fall at the end of sentences; an Englishman’s voice falls less steeply, or even rises, almost as if he were asking a question. Hill must remember, too, not to cap his sentences with the rote questions—”He’s not really up to the job, is he?”—that the English use to soften their judgments.

  Speed bumps pop up everywhere. Hill needs to purge his speech of countless English words and idioms beyond the familiar “lift” for “elevator” and “underground” for “subway.” The hardest to remember are words where the difference in pronunciation seems idiosyncratic, like the American “CONtroversy” and the English “conTROversy.”

  A few differences are specific to art. Americans pronounce “van Gogh” like “van go,” for instance, while the English choke out something closer to the guttural Dutch original, as if the speaker has a fishbone caught in his throat.

  The greatest danger hides in expressions that are more verbal reflexes than products of conscious thought. Say “cheers” rather than “thank you” to a waiter who has brought a drink, and you have blown your cover. In similar fashion, habits deeper than thought—like the proper way to deploy a knife and fork—pose grave risks. Unlike the English, Americans at the dinner table set their knife down between bites and switch the fork to their right hand. When he plays Americans, Hill sometimes feigns arguments during meals so he will have an excuse to jab the air angrily and, perhaps, draw attention to his fork-wielding right hand.

  The problem is not that the differences between England and the United States are so vast. They aren’t. The problem, which is familiar to every tourist in London who has looked left instead of right and stepped blindly into traffic, is that the consequences of a moment’s carelessness can be disastrous.

  For undercover cops, the need to be on guard is constant. Thieves and gangsters confronted with a stranger immediately begin trying to size him up. The process is not subtle. In contrast with ordinary encounters, where etiquette forbids challenging a new acquaintance with belligerent questions, crooks encountering someone new probe him openly and aggressively.

  “People are always testin
g you to find out if you’re a cop or a taxman or if you’re who you say you are,” Hill says. “Are you a wrong ‘un or the right guy to deal with? They ask about your background, what you did before this. It could be anything. In my case, maybe some question about art or a painting.”

  It is not a game for the timid, which is, for Hill, a great part of the appeal. Whether out of courage or foolhardiness or a never-outgrown faith in his own invulnerability, Hill feels most alive when most in danger. Even under fire in Vietnam, he insists, he was never scared but at most “concerned.” This smacks of Daniel Boone’s remark that he was never lost in the wilderness though he was once “confused” for three days, but the larger point holds: Hill places a high value on physical courage, believes that he is at his best under pressure, and delights in putting himself in harm’s way.

  When it comes to undercover work, those are essential traits. If Hill were handed a script and told to read it, his performance would be no better than that of many others. A great many actors, after all, can switch with ease between American roles and English ones. Throw away the script, though, and then raise the stakes, and Hill would come into his own.

  For it is the setting rather than the acting per se that sets the undercover craft apart. Acting is easy if the greatest danger is that someone in the audience will walk out or a stagehand will miss a cue. But try it when the penalty for flubbing a line is a shotgun to the head. “All undercover work comes down to mental ingenuity,” Hill says. “It’s a matter of quickwittedness, imagination, the capacity to lie on the hop.” Beverly Hills Cop was a silly movie, Hill remarks, but in its emphasis on talk rather than gear, it came closer to conveying the realities of undercover work than any of the legion of earnest, grim cop films. “You’ve got to have something to say, all the time, that’s sharp and plausible and says ‘This guy can’t be a cop.’ The villains don’t necessarily have to like you, but they have to accept you and feel they can trust you.”

  An arsenal of high-tech gizmos like James Bond’s is beside the point. “You survive by your wits,” Hill insists. “Hardware will only let you down.” The bare-bones approach, it should be noted, applies only to things, not words. When it comes to the stories he spins, Hill begins with the simplest of premises and then tacks on as many unlikely and over-the-top embellishments as pop into his head.

  Characteristically, Hill takes his “the less gear the better” view to an extreme. Guns are out, first of all. He never carries a weapon, even when he knows he will be dealing with killers. Out, too, are any kind of hidden recording devices and any disguises beyond some new clothing. No beards or mustaches. No contact lenses or new eyeglasses or changes of hairstyle. No bullet-proof vests. The gallant knight will ride into battle bareback and unarmed.

  Even Hill’s false identities are willfully, almost perversely, thin. His tycoons and wheeler-dealers start out as cardboard cutouts, stereotypes cobbled together from old movies and corny television shows like Dalls. In the Czech Republic job in 1996 that involved a gang of ex-secret police turned criminals, for instance, Hill created a ludicrously unlikely role for himself.

  He had decided to play a sleazy Canadian and had it in his head, for no very good reason, that the ideal outfit would be “a tam-o’-shanter hat, a really garish orange-colored blazer, and yellow trousers. I tried to look like a complete Canadian asshole. I told them I was going to sell all these wonderful medieval objects and paintings stolen from various churches to people who owned yachts in the Bahamas.

  “You’d have to be some kind of eastern bloc jackass to believe the crap I was coming out with,” Hill gasps, red-faced with laughter. “But they loved it; they went for it.”

  Nervy though he is, Hill chooses outlandish roles not to spice up the game but because he thinks he knows what crooks expect an art sleazeball to look like. “You have to feed the art crook arseholes’ fantasies,” Hill says. “You have to be what they want you to be.” Their notions are almost guaranteed to be wildly off, since they are based on guesswork and stereotype, but that’s fine with Hill.

  His job is to hit the notes that signify authenticity to his crook audiences. If a posh accent or a plush hotel room spells credibility, so be it. In the world of natural history, scientists have spent years exploring such triggers. When birds bring food to their nests, for example, they meet a host of gaping beaks pointed at the sky. If scientists take away a hungry chick and substitute even the crudest replica of an open beak, the hardworking parents will labor mightily to feed it. Charley Hill is the least scientific of men, but the performances that he calls his “amateur theatrics” are essentially experiments to find the triggers that cajole crooks into responding the way he wants them to.

  Mark Dalrymple, the insurance investigator, is a far less impetuous man than Charley Hill. But even though he shakes his head at Hill’s lack of prudence, Dalrymple is quick to acknowledge the detective’s undercover skills. “Charley Hill,” Dalrymple says, “has more brains and more balls than the rest of the police combined.”

  Hill’s aversion to any gear beyond the most basic is partly a personal quirk and partly a matter of experience. “Brits don’t do guns,” Hill will say, if he is pressed, but that is patently insincere. If he happened to favor going armed, he would just as happily chalk his preference up to his American heritage. More to the point, Hill’s anti-gun bias is a legacy of his time in Vietnam. When guns are around, things go wrong, and not just for the person at the wrong end of the barrel. “Going unarmed doesn’t put me in extra danger,” Hill insists. “It puts me in less danger, because carrying a gun gives you a false sense of security.”

  Guns foster a “shoot first, think later” approach that can only mean trouble. In Vietnam, Hill himself had nearly killed one of his own men by accident. “He was a little guy, named Peewee. He was Hispanic but he looked almost Vietnamese. He was one of those assholes who liked to put his helmet on the wrong way around, like wearing your baseball cap backward.” One morning Hill spotted something in a clump of elephant grass. “Suddenly this head popped up, and the helmet was the wrong shape. I stopped just short of blasting him full in the chest. He must have been fifteen yards away, no more than that. ‘Oh, fuck,’ I thought. ‘Jesus! Peewee!’ I nearly blew him away, and all he’d been doing was having a crap in the bushes.”

  Hill’s dislike of guns also reflects hostility toward technology in general. He can manage a cell phone or send an e-mail, but that is as far as he goes. The function of mechanical contrivances is to betray their user at the worst possible moment.

  In the Czech case that featured a crew of ex-secret police turned art thieves, Hill had no choice but to trust his life to gadgetry. The good guys—the German counterparts of the FBI—had given him a briefcase rigged up so that when Hill pressed a button it sent out an electronic “come quick” signal. In a parking garage beneath a hotel in Wurzburg, Germany, Hill met with the Czech gangsters and perused the stolen paintings they proposed to sell him. The Germans were poised to race in when they got Hill’s signal. Hill pressed the button. Nothing happened. Maybe the problem had to do with being underground, or perhaps there was a mechanical failure. He tried again. Still nothing.

  For half an hour, Hill studied and restudied the paintings, playing for time and rambling on about Lucas Cranach and Veronese and Reni as best he could, to an audience made up of cops gone bad, at least one of them a killer. When he could manage to do it inconspicuously, he tried again to send the help signal. Nothing. Finally the Germans acted on their own, bursting in brandishing Dirty Harry handguns and arresting everyone. Hill and the Czech gang leader ended up sprawled next to one another face-down on the concrete floor. A cop bent low to handcuff Hill’s arms behind his back and whispered into his ear, “Goot verk!”

  Charley Hill, on the grounds of Blenheim Palace. The pose was a subtle homage to one of Hill’s favorite paintings, Gilbert Stuart’s The Skater. A man of action with a connoisseur’s eye, Hill liked to think of himself as spiritual kin to Stuart�
�s skating scholar.

  Gilbert Stuart, The Skater. 1782 oil on canvas, 147.4 × 245.5 cm

  © National Gallery of Art. Washington DC, USA /Bridgeman Art Library

  Hill’s passport photo, taken in 1969 in Saigon.

  A memorial service for the eleven men of Bravo Company’s Lima Platoon, killed in an ambush on Easter Monday, 1969.

  Zita Hill, Charley’s mother. An elegant, high-spirited woman, Zita trained as a ballerina but joined Bluebell Kelly’s troupe of high-kicking dancers for a European tour just before the outbreak of World War II.

  Landon Hill, Charley’s father, in Air Force uniform.

  Hill is proud of his dual ancestry, “log cabin on one side and knight of the realm on the other.” His mother grew up in a glamorous English household where the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells were frequent visitors. His father’s family hailed from the American west. Here several of Hill’s relatives (the boy who would become his grandfather is sixth from the left) pose in front of the family homestead in Oklahoma in the 1890s.

  In Charley Hill’s first case as an undercover detective, two crooks tried to sell him a painting by the 16th-century Italian Parmigianino. The painter’s most famous work, often called the Madonna of the Long Neck because of its exaggerated proportions, is at left. Hill examined the crooks’ painting and told them he thought their prize was a fake.

  Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery was stolen from London’s Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery by a thief who tucked it under his arm and ran out the door. The painting, by Bruegel, was valued at £2 million. The painting eventually made its way to a gang of small-time thieves, who showed it to an expert to find out if it had any value. The expert took a look and fainted.