The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, Madonna of the Long

  Neck, 1534-40

  oil on panel, 135 × 219 cm

  © Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Italy /Bridgeman Art Library

  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, 1565 oil on panel, 34.4 × 24.1 cm

  © The Samuel Courtauld Trust. Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London

  Photograph of Edvard Munch c.1892

  © Munch Museum, Oslo

  Munch painted his self-portrait in 1895, two years after The Scream. A more tormented man would be hard to imagine. “Disease, insanity, and death were the angels which attended my cradle,” he once wrote, and they chased poor Munch throughout his long life.

  Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait with

  Cigarette, 1895

  oil on canvas, 85.5 × 110.5 cm

  PHOTO: J. Lathion: © National Gallery. Norway/ARS

  Edvard Munch, Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, 1892 oil on canvas, 121 × 84.5 cm

  © Courtesy of the Bergen Art Museum /ARS

  Munch painted this melancholy street scene, Spring Evening on Karl Johan Street, in 1892, a year before The Scream. The skull-like heads and staring eyes would reappear in The Scream.

  The Scream has served as the basis for countless spoofs and cartoons. Munch, a tormented and melancholy man, had hoped that audiences would “understand the holiness” of his images.

  Munch may have seen this Incan mummy at the Palais du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l’Homme) in Paris. Some art historians believe it helped inspire The Scream’s central figure.

  Pål Enger was an ex-soccer star turned crook and a publicity hound. Enger, who had been convicted in 1988 for stealing Munch’s Vampire, was a natural suspect when The Scream vanished. He had an alibi, though, and enjoyed teasing the police. Here he poses next to the spot where The Scream had hung; in the place of the $72-million masterpiece is a poster from the museum’s gift shop, hanging above a label reading “Stolen.”

  The National Gallery, in Oslo. The Scream had been moved from its customary location in the museum to the second floor, so that it would be more convenient for tourists. Not only was the painting moved closer to ground level, but it was hung in a room with easy access from the street and within a few feet of a window. This photo was snapped moments after The Scream vanished. Note the billowing curtains, as the wind blows through the broken window, and the police tape.

  The Scream was stolen on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in 1994. With the world’s attention focused on Norway, the Scream thieves stole the international spotlight as well as a $72-million painting.

  An art dealer named Einar-Tore Ulving found himself mixed up in The Scream case when an ex-convict client told him he had underworld contacts who could arrange for the return of Munch’s masterpiece.

  The first break in the case —following a tip from an anonymous caller, authorities found a piece of The Scream’s ornate frame. The National Gallery’s ID numbers proved that the frame was the real thing.

  Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective in charge of The Scream case.

  John Butler headed up the three-man team that Scotland Yard sent to Norway to find The Scream.

  Charley Hill’s business card, for his role as wheeler-dealer Chris Roberts, “The Man from the Getty.”

  Adam Worth, the renowned Victorian thief, provided the model for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Worth stole one of the most famous paintings of his day, Gainsborough’s Portrait of Georgiana, and kept it with him, secretly, for twenty-five years. Worth is the only undisputed example of a thief who stole a masterpiece and clung to it not for profit but for his own delectation.

  Thomas Gainsborough, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 1787 oil on canvas, 74 × 102 cm

  © The Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees.

  Perugia was arrested in Florence. Though convicted, he was sentenced to only twelve months, reduced on appeal to seven. Perugia, an Italian, argued successfully that he had been motivated by patriotism, not greed, and wanted only to see the Mona Lisa in its homeland. Here officials at the Uffizi examine the painting before returning it to France.

  On a Monday morning in August, 1911, a day when the Louvre was closed to the public, a carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia sneaked out of a closet where he had hidden overnight. He hurried to the Mona Lisa, took the painting off the wall, tucked it inside his coat, and walked out the door. Two years later, when he tried to sell the world-famous work, he was arrested. (Police misspelled his name in this mug shot.)

  David and Mary Duddin. A major-league fence, or seller of stolen goods, Duddin was dubbed “Mr. Big” by an English judge. Duddin once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt. He wasn’t much impressed by the painting. “I wouldn’t hang it on me wall,” he scoffed.

  Kempton Bunton, who was Mary Dud-din’s uncle, was in the art line himself. In 1961 he stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery. (See photo insert p. 5.)

  Rose Dugdale, an ex-debutante turned political radical, stole a Vermeer, a Goya, a Velasquez, and sixteen other paintings from Russborough House, a stately home outside Dublin. The theft was inept and all the paintings were quickly recovered. At her trial in 1974, Dugdale proclaimed herself “proudly and incorruptibly guilty.” She was sentenced to nine years in prison.

  In 1986, a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill robbed Russborough House yet again, pulling off what was then the biggest art theft ever. “The General,” as Cahill was known, was a vicious thug—he once took hammer and nails to the hands of a gang member he suspected of betrayal—who had a strange sense of showmanship. Here Cahill is led to jail; the gangster, who made a fetish of hiding his face, nonetheless flaunts a pair of boxer shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Art thieves have attacked Russborough House four times so far.

  Niall Mulvihill, a Cahill associate. Charley Hill, who recovered the two most valuable paintings stolen by Martin Cahill, negotiated their return with Mulvihill. (See photo insert p. 3.) In 2003 Mulvihill was shot to death by a gunman in Dublin.

  One of the very few thieves who stole art for his own collection, Stéphane Breitwieser was a French waiter arrested in the winter of 2003 for stealing perhaps $1.4 billion worth of paintings and other objects. When the police closed in, his mother sliced many of the paintings in tiny pieces and threw them away in the trash and tossed others into a canal near her home. Here police search the partly drained canal.

  Arkan, a Serbian gangster and accused war criminal, was reportedly involved in the theft of two Turners, worth a total of $80 million, stolen in 1994 while on exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany. Above, on a tank captured by his “Tigers” unit, he poses with a tiger cub. Art thieves were once dashing figures like Adam Worth. Today the swashbucklers have been shoved aside by brutes like Martin Cahill and Arkan.

  Whenever a world-famous painting disappears, police speculate that some master criminal, a real-life Thomas Crown, has ordered the painting for his private collection. Outside of Hollywood, Charley Hill insists, there are only wannabe Thomas Crowns like Stéphane Breitwieser, never outsize figures on a Hollywood scale. One villain who supposedly assembled a collection of paintings stolen to order was the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.

  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was the site of the largest art theft ever—eleven paintings and drawings worth $300 million. The photo above shows the museum courtyard. The robbery, still unsolved, is the holy grail of art crime. The FBI reward in the case is $5 million. Ten years after the theft, the FBI admitted that “we haven’t got a clue,” and, after another four years, the agency remains stymied.

  27

  Front-Row Seat

  Undercover work is not a spectator sport. Almost always, the only eyewitnesses are the participants themselves, and both cops and robbers have biases that distort their view. Dennis Farr, who was director of the Courtauld when thieves stole
its £2 million Bruegel—this was the “Peter Brewgal” affair—is one of the rare laymen who have seen an undercover operation.

  Farr is a tall, thin man with elegant manners. He looks like a fluttery type, a bird-watcher perhaps, the sort of scholar who would go pale at the sight of a typo. As the Bruegel case played out, though, it fell to Farr to string crooks along on the phone (while Art Squad detectives at his elbow listened in and scribbled him instructions). He found he had a flair for the task. “One discovers one has a bit of a thespian bent,” he acknowledges shyly.

  Charley Hill and Dennis Farr hit it off at once. Hill put on his best manners at their first meeting, deferring to “Dr. Farr” and chatting away about the Courtauld collection and art in general. Bruegel was one of Hill’s favorites. He grew animated when he discussed how Bruegel had painted the shaft of light that descends from the left and illuminates Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, the stolen painting. Farr took up the theme, and both men went on to a happy discussion of similar uses of light in Rembrandt and Vermeer.

  Farr is no snob, and he had been taken with the other Art Squad detectives, too, but Hill intrigued him. “As soon as I met him,” Farr recalls, “I saw there was a maverick quality in Charles Hill. I said to myself, ‘He’s either going to end up commissioner of the metropolitan police, or he’ll quit the force altogether.’ “

  The second time they met, Farr found Hill considerably changed. The plan was to rendezvous with the crooks, and Hill was in character. “I was a loudmouthed ‘Hey there, you old son of a bitch’ kind of guy,” Hill recalls. For this role, the point was not to come across as an art connoisseur but as someone so smug and ignorant that he was ripe for the plucking. “I wasn’t arty, but I was a trophy art type, some J. Ralston Ridgeway type from Dallas, Texas. Those guys are legion. They’re the ones who buy fakes and spend big bucks on overpriced paintings. They’re extremely wealthy chumps who see art as a way to establish their bona fides in society. So that was me, some asshole who’s got more money than sense.”

  The meeting with the crooks was set for the Savoy, a grand old hotel on the Strand, overlooking the Thames. Ideally, the thieves would produce the painting, Hill would hand over a ransom, and a gang of cops would burst from hiding to make the arrests.

  Farr was thrilled with his insider’s peek at all the planning and deception. Hill and Farr walked into Hill’s hotel room—a large and handsome suite, with a river view—and Hill started yelling almost at once. He’d been in a foul mood all day Hill was a big-picture thinker, not a detail man, he liked to say, but sometimes details did catch his eye. The police had showed up earlier in the day with the ransom money, £100,000 in £20 notes, stuffed in “a crappy police cardboard kind of thing.” Any crook would immediately start wondering what kind of high-roller he was dealing with. Hill insisted the police buy him a proper leather bag. Hill had won that battle, but his superiors had been horrified at the cost of a leather case intended as a one-time prop.

  Now, in the suite, he saw at once that the carpet had been tamped down by the cops in the surveillance team. Size 12 footprints were everywhere, because the cops had been stuffing wires down every crevice they could find. “It looks like the Serengeti after the gnus have gone thundering past,” Hill complained to Farr.

  Hill called for the cops. “Get somebody in here to get rid of these fucking footprints,” he shouted. “Those guys are going to come in here and see that, and then we’re all fucked!”

  Once the telltale footprints had been vacuumed away, Hill relaxed. He picked up the phone and ordered a bottle of champagne and a tray of smoked salmon sandwiches. Farr scanned the room to decide which sofa would be the best to hide behind, if anyone started shooting. (“Now, dear,” his wife had told him that morning, “don’t come home perforated.”) In the meantime, he rehearsed his assigned line time after time. “This is what we’re after,” Farr was to shout, and on that signal the cops in the next room would rush in.

  Hill asked Farr if he had ever seen £100,000 in cash.

  “No, let’s have a look.”

  Hill unlatched his new case, which burst open, spilling money everywhere. The maid knocked on the door, with the smoked salmon. “And Charles Hill and I were sitting on this bloody briefcase,” Farr says, “trying to squash it flat.”

  “The whole thing was marvelous,” Farr bubbles. “Hill was totally convincing. He dressed elegantly, not flashily, but he exuded money, shall we say. He just had this presence. You’ve met Charles Hill? So you know he’s a big, broad-shouldered chap, and he just… well, when he chooses, he can throw his weight about.”

  Bullies like the one Hill was playing were new in Farr’s experience. He himself was fond of expressions seldom heard outside a boy’s adventure magazine of the type popular three-quarters of a century ago—his stories are full of “blighters” and “frightful chaps” and even “four-flushing swine”—and he watched Hill’s performance goggle-eyed.

  Years later, he could still recite many of the exotically ugly phrases Hill had thrown around so casually. “I remember, he leaned over and tapped the case with the marked bills and said. ‘This money will stick to ‘em like dog shit,’ “Farr says gleefully. The line holds such appeal that he tries it a second time, like a mischievous schoolboy reading aloud a smutty scribble on the wall.

  “Charles Hill knew just how to play a big, swaggering, loudmouthed American, if I may say that, saving your grace,” Farr says. “‘I can’t waste my time with this, I’m off to Europe tomorrow, I’ve got business all over the world, I can’t be dealing with little twits like you.’ “

  Farr frets that his cultured accent drains this “good, coarse stuff” of virtually all its menace, but he replays his favorite lines nonetheless. “I’ve had it about up to here with your horseshit,” he growls, mimicking Hill.

  Though Farr didn’t know it, that seemingly offhand line was far from casual. The key was the word “horseshit.” It is an Americanism, first of all, and reinforced Hill’s American persona. In the taxonomy of nonsense, “bullshit” is universal, but “horseshit” is unique to America. Second, the r sound emphasized Hill’s American accent and reminded him to keep hammering those r’s.

  At the Savoy, Hill abused the thieves for the better part of an hour and then threw them out, even though he had yet to see the stolen Bruegel. Dick Ellis was hidden in a hotel room next door, eavesdropping as the tape recorders whirred.

  Even Ellis and his fellow cops, as experienced with scenes like this as Farr was new to them, feared Hill had overdone it. “We were saying, ‘Charley, steady down. We’re gonna lose these guys.’ “

  “He said, ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be back,’ “Ellis recalled.

  “And he was absolutely right. They came back. They came back, they got arrested, and they got convicted.”

  28

  A Crook’s Tale

  Hill’s confidence in his ability to read crooks is a product of endless hours listening to their tales. Many are hard to draw out. Not David Duddin. A flamboyant, 300-pound crook who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, Duddin recounts past misdeeds with the relish of a retired athlete recalling the first time he heard a delirious crowd shout his name.

  The world that Hill navigates is replete with treacherous but useful characters like Duddin. Hill and Duddin go back several years; they met when Hill visited Duddin in prison, after the Rembrandt deal had gone bad. Hill hadn’t been involved in catching Duddin, but he hoped to cultivate him as a source.

  Duddin lies with gusto and without scruple, for the sheer style of it. Convivial and self-absorbed, he talks freely about crime and crooks, with only the most perfunctory nods toward conventional morality. It’s all a bit of a lark. Where’s the harm?

  One of his favorite roles is tour guide to the underworld. “I’ll let you make up your own mind how criminally minded you think I am,” he begins. “I don’t particularly think I am criminally minded, but having said that, I’ve been found guilty of six counts of handli
ng stolen goods, so that’s me criminal record.”

  This seeming confession is in fact closer to a boastful dig in the ribs, an invitation to share in the joke. “Who are you going to believe,” the tone implies, “me or some judge?” In Duddin’s world, the fundamentals of morality—tell the truth, keep your promises, pay your debts, and so on—are not rules to live by but a credo for suckers. To earn your living by the sweat of your brow is to proclaim yourself a sap.

  Duddin is no sap. Straight society is something to plunder, not to join. He explains matter-of-factly, for example, that although art is always easy to steal, stealing from Britain’s grand and stately homes (like Russborough House) is easiest of all. The homes are colossally expensive to keep up, and many of the owners have decided that their only chance of survival is to open up to ticket-buying visitors. “Picture your own house,” Duddin says. “Would you take several thousand people around it, and then think it was secure? You wouldn’t, would you?

  “I’ve spoken with people—and bear in mind that where I’ve been, I’ve been with some of the heavier criminals in the country—and they say, ‘If somebody’s going to show you something and tell you it’s worth millions, well, then, you’re going to take it.’

  “It’s natural. It’s normal. It’s redistribution of wealth.” This last grand phrase is a mocking joke, and Duddin rolls the words around his mouth voluptuously, savoring the syllables.