Massive and slow-moving, with arms like hams, Duddin is a great Buddha of a man, albeit a Buddha who favors such touches as gold Rolexes and bright red jackets and gleaming red shoes to match. His criminal ambition was as outsized as the man himself. At his peak, Duddin drove a Rolls-Royce (“a Roller”) and gave his wife a BMW as a Christmas present. The judge who sent him away for selling the Rembrandt and a host of other stolen treasures said Duddin was the biggest handler of stolen goods in England and dubbed him “Mr. Big.”
In his early days, Duddin ran a jewelry business. The illegal buying and selling took place in a back room. Duddin presided from behind a large, nearly bare desk. Neatly arrayed atop the desk were a scale and an eyepiece, a Kellogg’s Cornflakes box stuffed with cash, and a shotgun. No one ever mentioned the shotgun, which faced outward, but it did seem to cut down on haggling over the prices Duddin offered his clients for their wares.
He has lived all his life in Newcastle, in the north of England, and he speaks with the thick local accent. “I was blind out of me skull,” he says, fondly recalling one monumental bender, and, to American ears, the stretched-out vowels give his speech the wavery sound of a tape played on a malfunctioning machine: “I was blaind oot of me skool.”
Duddin’s wife, Mary, is always by his side. She is tiny, though she teeters on colossal high heels, and she has bright red hair and a tiny voice, too, pitched in a high squeak. Mary looks as if she has just wandered in from a rehearsal of Guys and Dolls, but she is shrewder than her husband, and far too shrewd to acknowledge that she knows it. As Duddin talks, Mary plays the role of the attorney who whispers a helpful word into her client’s ear while he covers the microphone and turns away from his senatorial prosecutors.
Mary’s family, too, is in the art line. In 1961, in one of the notorious art thefts in recent history, someone stole Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. The theft generated enormous publicity because the museum had purchased the painting only weeks before, after a great kerfuffle. The painting had been in private hands and had sold at auction to an American oilman for £140,000. Furious at the prospect of losing a famous painting of a national hero to a foreign buyer, Parliament and a private foundation came up with £140,000 of their own. The American gave in, the painting stayed home, and the National Gallery put it on exhibit. Eighteen days later, it vanished.
In 1962, with the portrait still missing, the first James Bond movie opened. This was Dr. No, and the plot, such as it was, had to do with a villain who hatched evil schemes at a secret lair in the Caribbean. Dr. No took Bond on a house tour, which led past a portrait mounted on an easel. Lest anyone miss the joke, Bond did a double-take and the camera moved in for a close-up of the Duke of Wellington.
The real portrait finally turned up in 1965, unharmed but without its frame, lying amid a jumble of forgotten suitcases in the lost-luggage office of the train station in Birmingham. Six weeks later, the thief turned himself in, apparently convinced that the world would want to hear his story and that no one would punish a person for stealing something that was back where it belonged. The self-proclaimed thief was an unemployed taxi driver named Kempton Bunton, a Newcastle man who looked a bit like Alfred Hitchcock.
Bunton, a clumsy, eccentric man in his sixties, was Mary’s uncle. “Only an uncle by marriage,” she clarifies, “me auntie’s husband. Well, I don’t know how he got the painting home, but he put it in his cupboard in the bedroom. And Auntie made a joke the night he turned himself in. ‘I’ve been sleeping with the Duke of Wellington for four years,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never even known.’ “
At his trial, Bunton explained that he had stolen the painting as a political protest. He had no interest in commercial gain; his sole aim was to remedy a gross injustice. The government charged everyone who owned a television set a yearly fee, which went to support the BBC. Not even the elderly were exempt. Bunton was beside himself. What kind of government charged its citizens to watch television and then lavished £140,000 on a bloody painting?
Both judge and jury seemed to find Bunton endearing, and they apparently had doubts about whether he really was agile enough to have taken the Goya from the museum by climbing out a window in a men’s bathroom, as he claimed. The jury performed a contortionist’s trick of its own. Bunton was not guilty of stealing the painting, they found, but he was guilty of stealing the frame. The judge imposed a sentence of three months.
Mary does not believe that her uncle stole the portrait. His two sons did, she says, and then he horned in on their glory. (The family, she says, was “all a bit nuts”—“a bit noots.”) It is a convincing if not ringing defense: her uncle was too fat to steal, not too honest.
Duddin’s world and the conventional one are not self-contained. They meet occasionally, as the lion’s world sometimes meets the antelope’s. But in ordinary times the two worlds are isolated from one another, and Duddin betrays surprise when it becomes clear that yet another commonplace feature of his life is strange to an outsider. Mundane questions—How big a bag does it take to hold £20,000 in small bills? How long would it take to count?—throw him off-stride for a moment, as if an earnest visitor had asked him to explain how to make a sandwich or dial a phone.
A broader question that seems absolutely fundamental to a layman—Why steal a masterpiece?—leaves him frustrated and befuddled. Art is worth stealing because it’s valuable; what valuable means is “worth stealing.”
Speaking slowly and emphatically, Duddin strives to make matters clear. “If it’s very easy to take,” he says, “it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a buyer for it or not. If it’s difficult to take, you’re going to make sure there’s a market for it, because you’ve got to put extra work into it.”
But what do you do with it?
Driven to distraction, Duddin resorts almost to baby talk. He has been sipping his drink, but this calls for a pause and a deeper swallow. “Mr. Burglar, all right, goes and steals a painting that he’s got no market for. If he’s a professional burglar, then he deals with people regular. Someone who regularly steals antiques, we’ll say, will have an antique dealer that he deals with. So he goes to that antique dealer and says, ‘I know this isn’t your kind of meat, but I’ve got this’—Duddin lowers his voice to a stage whisper—‘and it’s worth a fortune. All I want is twenty grand on something that’s worth two million.’ “
Here Duddin interrupts himself to add an explanatory note. “All they want is enough money to live on for the next six months, what they call ‘working money.’ Enough money to go and look at other things and do something that’s easier sold.”
“I didn’t realize ‘til I went to prison,” Duddin says, with feigned coyness, “that people that burgle houses for a living consider they’ve got a purpose in life. They consider it their job. It’s a job of work, isn’t it? No different than a doctor going to hospital every day.”
It is not just work but hard work. “It costs money to burgle houses,” Duddin says wearily. “You’ve got to go and look around, you’ve got to set it all up, you’ve got to have transport. It’s like a building contractor, isn’t it?”
Duddin is as disdainful as Hill of the notion that reclusive tycoons commission thieves to steal for them. “Do you honestly think there are people who have millions of pounds, and art collections worth millions, who would risk going to prison for a painting?” he scoffs. “Are you addled? Would you, if you had that sort of money? It doesn’t make sense, does it?
“Freedom’s not worth much if you’ve got nothing,” he says. “If you’re sleeping rough under a tree and thinking somebody’s going to put you in a cell instead, well, that might even be an improvement. But when you’ve got a lot, your freedom’s worth a lot more, isn’t it? If you’re living in palatial surroundings and eating lobster and drinking champagne, you don’t want to go to prison, do you?”
Now Duddin turns his attention from the thief who steals a painting to the middleman he sells it to. �
�A dealer will lend Mr. Burglar £20,000, £50,000, whatever the figure might be, according to the article. It’s no different from a bank, is it, when you think of it? Even though he hasn’t got a use for it, he’s got security for his money, hasn’t he? He might have something worth several million”—Duddin’s voice rises in incredulity—”so it’s good security, isn’t it?”
Wearying of logistics, Duddin raises his sights and turns briefly to philosophy. “Let’s say you’ve got one prize possession, a painting. If someone stole that painting from you, you’ve lost the majority of your possessions. But if someone stole a Rembrandt from the Earl of Pembroke”—as someone did in fact steal the Rembrandt that Duddin tried to fence—”he’s probably got several hundred times that left. So why should it be so important? And that’s the ethics of it.”
Duddin shifts ponderously in his chair and leans back, pleased with the case he’s made. “You understand the difference? You haven’t stolen all of somebody’s wealth, even though you’ve stolen a great deal more wealth. You don’t break into an old lady’s house and take her pension book when that’s all she’s got.”
The theory of relativity, criminal version.
29
“Can I Interest You in a Rembrandt?”
Charley Hill has dutifully absorbed endless such tales of “life as I see it.” Old acquaintances though he and Duddin are, neither man would believe for a minute that the other is his friend. Instead, the two are rivals in a complicated contest. The game is a free-form quest for information and advantage, and each man takes for granted that he has the other’s measure. With Duddin, Hill plays up his academic side and downplays his menace. For his part, the blustery old crook assumes without question that, as a man of the world, he is miles ahead of a scholar like Hill. He lards his stories with such remarks as, “Here’s another thing that I explained to Charley.”
Mary Duddin shares her husband’s disdain. “Do you know what we call Charley?” she asks, giggling as if she is being naughty. “Rumpole of the Bailey.”
As proud a man as Hill is, he knows better than to defend his record to the likes of Duddin. If crooks take him too lightly, so much the better. Over the years Hill has learned three key lessons from David Duddin. They are not the lessons Duddin meant to impart.
Lesson One: Everything starts with a brand-name. If a painting is to have value to a thief, the artist had better be instantly and universally recognizable. With rare exceptions, anyone more recent than Picasso is strictly for amateurs. Lesson Two: Thieves steal now and ask questions later. No one is as optimistic as a thief. Something will turn up. Lesson Three: Dollars trump everything. An enormously valuable painting is worth stealing by reason of its price tag alone. (Lesson 3 is the hardest for outsiders to grasp. By that reasoning, the baffled but honest citizen objects, the crown jewels would be worth stealing. A thief would agree, in a heartbeat. If the crown jewels were as easy to grab as an old master, they’d be gone tomorrow. In New York City, in the past decade, for example, thieves have stolen Stradivarius violins—far too famous ever to resell—on three occasions.)
For Charley Hill, who has considerable interest in psychology and next to none in logic, what matters is how thieves think, not whether their views hold together. He sums up the thief’s worldview with characteristic impatience. “The big-picture thefts are all motivated by bragging and stupidity The crooks just move the things around until some sap gets landed with them, like the last guy with a chain letter. The paintings will always have great intrinsic value, so the saps will always dream on.”
The Rembrandt story is a case in point. Duddin tells it as a sadly comic tale. Theft is the backdrop, but in Duddin’s eyes the story is less a crime saga than a charming tale of a rogue who took a chance. It didn’t pan out, but nobody was hurt and everyone had a good time. All a bit of fun, and of no deeper significance than a story about an ordinary Joe who somehow ran into a supermodel and, what the hell, asked her out.
The Rembrandt, by some accounts a portrait of the artist’s mother, was stolen in 1994 from Wilton House, a palatial home not far from Stone-henge, where it had hung since 1685. Wilton House and Rembrandt’s portrait belong to the seventeenth Earl of Pembroke; the first earl was a friend of Henry VIII who had the good fortune, when Henry confiscated the church’s property for his own uses, to be given a delectable tract of land and the abbey that stood on it.
As with so many stately homes in Britain, the very factors that make Wilton House remarkable—the size of the house, the immensity of the grounds, the distance from the nearest neighbors—make it a sitting duck for thieves. The Rembrandt vanished on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day, traditionally celebrated with fireworks and bonfires. The thieves made good use of the distractions. “What I was told,” Duddin says, “is that it happened while the Earl of Pembroke and everyone else was at the bonfire. But the earl’s daughter went back to the house, and I’ve been told categorically that she walked straight past one of the burglars. He saw her, but she never saw him.”
The painting was insured for £400,000. Estimates of the amount it would bring at auction range up to £4 million, but the work is unsigned and may be merely School of Rembrandt. It depicts an old woman in a brown dress, sitting down, reading a book that lies open on her lap. Most of the painting is dark, though the book itself glows with light. “No one was more gifted [than Rembrandt] at turning old women into great art,” one historian remarks, but Duddin doesn’t go along. The Granny, as he refers to it, isn’t much. Duddin casts a proprietary eye around his own large house and says, “I certainly wouldn’t have it on me wall.”
Duddin has decided that the story is best told over a meal. He is not a picky eater (“after prison, everything is delicious”), and he orchestrates a trip into town, where he sweeps into a Chinese restaurant, commandeers a table, and orders a pitcher of beer and a plate of spare ribs to tide him over while he studies the menu.
“It began with someone I’d known for quite a while,” Duddin says. “How long was it, Mary, that we’d known Martin?” Martin was a mysterious character who entered Duddin’s life around 1990 and, for half a dozen years, brought him antique silver and antique clocks. “When he first came to me,” Duddin says, “he appeared to be a pukka businessman, dressed in a suit and tie, and the goods he was selling were properly presented, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t in a bag with ‘swag’ marked on it.”
Even so, something was off. “To be perfectly fair and honest”—Duddin drops the phrase into sentence after sentence with cheerful insincerity, like a magician saying “nothing up my sleeve”—”having dealt with him for a while, I began to have me suspicions. But what do you do, if you’ve dealt with somebody for several years and now suddenly you think he may not be straight? Do you take everything you’ve bought off him and try to give it to the police? Of course you don’t. I’d have lost a fortune, wouldn’t I?
“In the meantime,” Duddin goes on, “a diamond merchant that I used to deal with on a regular basis said to me one day, ‘Dave, do you know anybody who wants a Rembrandt?’ Literally like that.
“And I said, ‘Don’t be daft. I don’t know anything about Rembrandt,’ and just left it at that.”
Soon after, Martin turned up again. “Well, when Martin came to see me, it wasn’t unusual for me to belittle what he was bringing us, if you know what I mean. It’s just a means of getting it cheaper. So you rubbish it. He tells you something is wonderful, you tell him it isn’t, so it’s half the price, isn’t it? Nothing wrong in that.
“Anyhow, on this particular account, I was rubbishing what he’d brought, and his response was, ‘Do you ever get anything magnificent yourself?’
“And I said, ‘Well, there’s a Rembrandt, you know’
“And he said, ‘Honestly, a Rembrandt?’
“I said, ‘Yeah.’ “
Duddin had walked into a police sting. Martin was a crook who had gotten himself in trouble; the police had offered to go easy on him in return for his cooper
ation. On Martin’s next visit, he offered to put Duddin in touch with a drug dealer who wanted the Rembrandt. (The story was that the dealer and his cronies had lined up an American buyer.)
Duddin doesn’t bother trying to cast himself as an innocent dragged into a dark alley where he would never have ventured on his own. “Now, if you like, knowing it was a Rembrandt, it couldn’t not be stolen,” he acknowledges cheerfully. “Not many people wander around with one under their arm, if you know what I mean.”
But he hadn’t dreamed up the theft or had anything to do with it. He was just a businessman, perhaps a little more enterprising than most, doing nothing more than greasing the wheels of commerce. “All I wanted was what I would call ‘a drink’ out of it—that would have been five hundred or a thousand quid for putting the different parties together.”
Having fallen into a hole, Duddin began digging it deeper. Word came from the drug dealer and his partners that, before they did the deal, they needed assurance that Duddin was as big a player as he claimed. “They suggested I get some decent quality things and they’d buy them,” Duddin says. “But they had to be cheap—that is, they had to be stolen.”
Duddin started working the phones. “I contacted people that I know in the trade. And I’m not talking about burglars or robbers or anything like that, I’m talking about bona fide people in the antiques trade, some of them with very, very nice, high-quality premises. I told them that I’ve got a buyer who’s interested in anything that’s good quality and cheap. And they all knew what I meant by that. They all understood what ‘It’s got to be cheap’ means. It’s bloody straightforward, isn’t it?”
The loot came rolling in. “There was a collection of pins that had been stolen in Cheshire, worth about £60,000,” says Duddin, “and a gold box that had been stolen from a local museum, worth about £20,000, and a collection of ivory from a private house, and three silver honeypots stolen from Floors Castle that were made by Paul Storr, who’s recognized as one of the finest silversmiths this country’s ever had, and a walking stick made from the sword that killed Captain Cook.”
The Rescue Artist Page 21