The Rescue Artist

by Edward Dolnick

  Williams, Paul, 67

  Wilson, Peter, 129

  Wilton House, England, Rembrandt painting stolen from, 192

  Woman Reading a Letter (Metsu), 69, 244

  Woman with a Pearl Necklace (Vermeer), 62

  Worth, Adam, art thefts perpetrated by, 150-151

  Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company, 129

  Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (Vermeer), 62

  Young Woman Standing at a Virginal (Vermeer), 62

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The cops and robbers who specialize in art crime are few in number and wary of strangers. My guide to their ranks was Charley Hill. In a life marked by unlikely choices, Hill’s decision to take an outsider behind the scenes ranks as one of the most surprising. The most important access Hill provided was to his own thoughts. I pestered him with questions in long interviews in London, New York, and Washington, D.C.; in short stints on the Staten Island ferry, a double-decker bus in London, and at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington; and in endless e-mails. For his patience in putting up with so intrusive a visitor, and for his forbearance in agreeing from the start that he would have no say in whatever I eventually wrote, I’m deeply grateful.

  I had wanted to write about thieves who steal art and the detectives who chase them since 1990, when two crooks snatched $300 million of art from the Gardner Museum in Boston, my hometown. Two of my good friends, Reed Hundt and Bill Young, helped me turn that vague hope into a specific plan. At every stage of the process, from the earliest outline through draft after draft, Bill and Reed served as unpaid but overworked advisers.

  No writer can have better colleagues than grown children who are writers themselves. My two formidably talented sons, Sam and Ben, labored mightily to round their father’s prose into shape.

  Michele Missner, a researcher who is herself a precious find, cheerfully unraveled countless mysteries both large and small. Katerina Barry, an artist and a computer savant, took time from her own projects to gather and arrange pictures from around the globe. Pat Barry, a writer and historian with an encyclopedic knowledge of English (as opposed to American) slang and usage, labored valiantly to help me dodge the pitfalls that bedevil an innocent abroad.

  Rafe Sagalyn, my agent and my friend, shepherded this project along from the beginning. Hugh Van Dusen is as superlative an editor as his reputation would imply, and that is high praise indeed.

  For Lynn, for bottomless reserves of inspiration, insight, and encouragement, my fervent and inadequate gratitude.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  PRAISE FOR

  The Rescue Artist

  “Dolnick raises good questions about museum responsibility, the complexities of criminal motivation and the sheer madness of the human drive to attach obscene price tags to objects that were created for loftier purposes.”

  —John Loughery, Washington Post

  “Art theft generates between four and six billion dollars a year in revenues, according to Interpol. That makes it number three in illicit commerce, behind drugs and illegal arms. An engaging tour of this little known world is found in Edward Dolnick’s Rescue Artist.”

  —Monica Gagnier, BusinessWeek

  “Riveting. … Readers entering the little-known world of Hill with Dolnick as guide are unlikely to exit willingly.”

  —Steve Weinberg, Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “A masterful portrait of the ‘rescue artist.’ “

  —Karen Algeo Krizman, Rocky Mountain News

  “The Rescue Artist is an action-packed investigation of the whole sordid history of art crime. … Dolnick, with his seasoned journalistic background, writes with a crisp, breezy style that runs with the speed of thieves purloining stolen canvases.”

  —Donald Harington, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “[A] fascinating, stranger-than-fiction story. … The prose is quick, witty, wildly intriguing, and Dolnick’s voice really shines through as he reports the story with a contagious excitement for the topic. … Dolnick pieces together an exceptional book of art thieves, art detectives, artists, and their works, and even after the first chapter it is hard to put the book down and not feel slightly more refined and sophisticated with all the acquired art knowledge.”

  —Ben Taylor, Albuquerque Journal

  “A highly accessible and well-written book that often evokes a crime novel rather than a work of nonfiction…. The Rescue Artist will satisfy both the reader who would like a good mystery yarn to enliven his or her summer reading as well as someone who wants a crash course in art theft, art recovery, police undercover work, museum security (or the lack thereof), and even a primer on many of the world’s great works of art and the lives of the artists who created them.”

  —Lawrence M. Kaye and Howard N. Spiegler,

  New York Law Journal

  “Edward Dolnick has given us much more than an outstanding detective story that happens to be taken from real life. He has provided us with an insider’s view of the hidden world of art theft, where paintings by old masters are used to settle gambling debts and priceless canvases are rolled up carelessly in the trunk. This is a fascinating tale, expertly told with characters as crisply drawn as any Rembrandt and the sort of intrigue generally found only in a thriller.”

  —Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha

  “The Rescue Artist is a masterpiece. Engrossing, entertaining, often surreally hilarious. In all, a feat no less impressive than the heist of The Scream in under a minute using nothing but a ladder.”

  —Mary Roach, author of

  Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

  “A lively and literate romp through the world of big-time art crime, led by Scotland Yard’s rumpled undercover ace, Charley Hill. … A rollicking good ride.”

  —Gerard O’Neill, co-author of Black Mass:

  The Irish Mob, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal

  ALSO BY EDWARD DOLNICK

  Madness on the Couch

  Down the Great Unknown

  About the author

  Meet Edward Dolnick

  EDWARD DOLNICK was born in 1952. “I grew up in a little town called Marblehead, on the ocean about twenty miles north of Boston,” he says. “The town was once home to fishermen and sailors. In the Revolutionary War these sailors turned soldiers had been notorious for their rowdy ways. One group of Marblehead fishermen started a snowball fight that grew into a riot, and it took George Washington himself to break it up. But by my day the small town was just another suburb. Dads wore suits and commuted to work; moms cooked dinner. Somehow I missed most of that. I was a dreamy kid fond of tales of derring-do, preferably in exotic and watery settings.”

  Dolnick’s earliest memory of reading and then rereading a book concerns what he dubs “a kind of poor man’s Treasure Island.” That book, Jim Davis, traces the adventures of “a boy who runs off to sea with a gang of thieves and raiders,” says Dolnick. “The tale of smugglers and secret hideaways was perfect for a ten-year-old. Better yet, it actually belonged to my big sister. She had been assigned the book in school and rejected it immediately (‘Pirates!’). This was a hard to beat twofer—an adventure yarn that had been officially deemed suitable only for older readers.”

  As a teenager Dolnick fell lastingly under the spell of Moby-Dick. “The strange and tangled language (‘a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’) and the subversive message were meat and drink for a suburban dreamer marooned in the twentieth century,” he says. “My parents had chosen not to give my sister or me a middle name so that we could eventually pick our own. Now I was ready. Enthralled, and sixteen, I chose: Ishmael.”

  ‘My parents had chosen not to give my sister or me a middle name so that we could eventually pick our own. Now I was ready. Enthralled, and sixteen, I chose: Ishmael.’

  A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, Dolnick has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the
author of Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon.

  Asked to share an anecdote about his days as a cub reporter, Dolnick very quickly unpacks the following: “On my very first day as a reporter they announced that year’s Nobel Prize winners. I was working in Boston, and by coincidence one of the winners for medicine happened to be in town giving a lecture. A veteran reporter knocked out a long, complicated story explaining the great man’s breakthrough. My job, I learned with dismay, was to write a ministory providing a glimpse of the winner’s human side. I squeaked out a question about hobbies. Then I retreated to my desk with a nugget of information—our man liked skiing—and labored over my prose. Hours passed. “His hobbies, which include skiing …” Delete. “Skiing, the pastime that…” Delete. Shifts ended; reporters came and went; editors glowered. Hours after deadline I handed over my opus in all its two-sentence glory.”

  Asked to describe his writing habits, he opens the curtains on a scene of questionable charm. “I write at home,” he says, “in a cluttered office lined floor to ceiling with file drawers, each bearing a scrawled label (‘most expensive paintings,’ ‘recent thefts’) and bursting with clippings and articles. Closer at hand, concentric stacks of paper encircle my chair. The tallest piles, which contain the most consulted references, form the inner circle. A slightly lower ring is next, followed by another one or two rings in descending order. Lined up precariously near my computer keyboard sit half a dozen cups of tea, fetched and then forgotten at about half-hour intervals throughout the day.

  “This sanctum,” he continues, “is off-limits to all visitors with the exceptions of two colossal 125-pound dogs named Blue and Lily. The pure white and immensely friendly Great Pyrenees dogs spend most of their days stretched out like bearskin rugs. At random intervals—when the FedEx man knocks on the door, when a squirrel dares to venture into view, or when an interview subject finally returns my call—they spring to life in a frenzy of barking, toppling stacks of carefully arranged papers in their glee.”

  Dolnick has two grown sons and lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.

  About the book

  Meeting Mr. Hill

  THE FIRST DETECTIVE I EVER MET outside a book was Charley Hill. I didn’t have any idea what to expect, but I didn’t expect much. Nor did Charley, as he made clear at once. He didn’t have a lot of time, he said, by way of introduction. How long did this “goddamned blind date” figure to take?

  We’d met as a favor to a mutual friend. When Charley was sixteen, nearly forty years before, he’d shown up at a Washington, D.C., high school limping and battered from a rock climbing accident in the Rockies. One of his classmates, starstruck by the exotic new kid, had befriended him. Four decades later they were still the best of friends, though one had become a cop and the other a top-tier, top-priced lawyer.

  “I’d never written about art. Charley, curiously, seemed to find that not off-putting, but appealing.”

  The lawyer and I were neighbors in Washington. He knew my books and that I’d just finished one. Now he had an idea for me.

  I muttered something noncommital. Every writer hears a dozen story ideas a week. Casual acquaintances will grab you at the grocery store. “You should write something about my wife’s brother. Guy’s a genius.” I needed something better, stranger, and more engaging than that.

  “Cut it out,” my friend said. “This is for real.”

  Within a few months Charley Hill happened to be passing through Washington. He’s lived in London for decades now but keeps up with American friends with whom he goes back as far as grade school. We met in the borrowed home of one of these old pals. Charley arrived empty-handed; I came weighed down with books I’d written, magazine articles, and even a yellowed newspaper clipping or two. I’d never written about art. Charley, curiously, seemed to find that not off-putting, but appealing.

  He only explained his reasoning a year or two later. First of all, a lack of art credentials was no drawback. The art world was full of crooks and creeps. If anybody was going to get it right it would be an outsider. My first book, a critique of Freud called Madness on the Couch, was on psychology. Charley read it delightedly; what better preparation could a writer have for a venture into a world of self-delusion and colossal egos? Down the Great Unknown, my next book and an account of the first expedition through the Grand Canyon, suited him even better. The hero ofthat true tale was a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell, a vain, brave explorer who succeeded in an adventure he had no business even considering. Hill, a swashbuckler himself, found a soul mate.

  Art was less of a stretch for me than it sounded. Though I’d never written about art, I had grown up in an art-saturated home. In my parents’ house near Boston no objects were as important as paintings; no people were as revered as artists. My mother, an art school graduate and a talented painter and sculptor, was seldom without a brush or a chisel in her hand. I’d been dragged through countless museums as a kid; maybe a little had sunk in. Many of those excursions had ended up at one of the most alluring of all such institutions: Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  “When thieves struck the Gardner in 1990… I knew at once that I wanted to write about it.”

  When thieves struck the Gardner in 1990— a serene little gem of a museum suddenly became the site of the biggest art theft ever— I knew at once that I wanted to write about it.

  The problem was that the books I like best tell a story. Many fine books are essentially long essays, but I wanted something with a beginning, middle, and end. The Gardner story had a superb beginning—a knock on the museum door in the middle of the night, thieves disguised as policemen, a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and other treasures snatched from the Gardner’s walls—but then … nothing.

  “Challenged, Charley relaxed a bit. ‘Who can’t stand me?’ He pondered the question and rattled off a list of names.”

  How do you tell a story that ends almost as soon as it begins? Stymied by the Gardner story, I put art crime on a back burner and turned to other things.

  About a decade would pass before I met Charley Hill. It quickly became clear that the story of The Scream had several of the elements I needed—a world-famous painting, first of all. Nobody would care much about a hunt for a painting they had never heard of. Second, the Scream saga began with a bold break-in, moved on to a satisfying tangle of loose ends and false leads, and ended with a confrontation in an empty house. If that wouldn’t do as beginning, middle, and end, then nothing would.

  That left one obstacle, but it was a daunting one. The first editor I ever met had explained to me years before that for every writer considering a new book one question was key. The magic question: “Who do we root for?”

  Every story needs a character at its core, and the richer and more complicated, the better. When I met with Charley, my mission was to sort out whether he had enough meat on his bones to carry a book. We sized each other up warily. We weren’t much alike, but that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t need a new friend, and Charley took for granted from long experience that almost no one was much like him. He told war stories about old cases and I asked rude questions—Who doesn’t like you? Whom can I call who’ll tell me you’re a bag of wind?

  Challenged, Charley relaxed a bit. “Who can’t stand me?” He pondered the question and rattled off a list of names. The war stories hadn’t really engaged him; he’d told them clearly but without animation. (I would learn to recognize these rote performances. In Charley’s grumpy view, the world is full of ignoramuses and he has better things to do than explain the ABCs to them.)

  But thinking about old friends and enemies, or friends turned enemies and vice versa, cheered Charley up. I liked that orneriness. I began to think that maybe this gruff, scholarly cop would prove a satisfactorily complex character. I cheered up too.

  Travails with Charley: Edward Dolnick on Frequently Asked Questions

  THE FUN IN WORKIN
G on The Rescue Artist was that art crime brought such different worlds into collision. Those collisions didn’t stop after the book had been published. I gave a talk about the book at Harvard’s Sackler Museum. As I made my way out afterward, weaving past the professors and art curators in their academic tweeds, someone whispered— or growled—at me, “Give my best to Chollie.”

  “A hulking figure grinned down at me like an Easter Island statue come to life. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.”

  I looked around. A hulking figure grinned down at me like an Easter Island statue come to life. “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m Rocky.”

  Rocky was one of Charley Hill’s Art Squad colleagues, a legendary wild man and a much admired, much feared undercover cop. He tended to play crooks, convincingly. We’d never met. Rocky’s fellow cops loved telling stories about him, but even in mid-anecdote they’d hesitate and peer around the room as if making sure that the man himself would not appear and grab them in a headlock. The odds that anyone at the Sackler mistook Rocky for an art historian were pretty low.

  When I give talks about The Rescue Artist, surprises like Rocky’s visit are rare. I do know I can count on being asked several questions.

  What was it like working with Charley Hill?

  It wasn’t dull. “Your other books,” Charley said at our first meeting, “are about dead people. I guess it’s harder when you write about people who are still alive.” Good point. To write a book about someone you don’t know is to take a long journey with a stranger in a small and overheated car.

  By and large Charley was a good traveling companion. But I got on his nerves when I kept circling back to material we’d already covered a dozen times in search of ever more detail. “Was it your car or a rented car? What were you wearing? But was the suit old or one you’d bought for that role? I thought you said you were wearing a bow tie?”