Hot Art (34 page)

Lacoursière replied, “It's a bronze statue by Riopelle.”

The Riopelle turned out to be worth $75,000, and was one of the most valuable items seized that day. The 2001 raid was the culmination of months of surveillance. The bust resulted in dozens of arrests and convictions. Lacoursière's cases on the Montreal force had attracted the attention of the Sûreté; he'd proved the link between organized crime and stolen art. In 2003, Quebec's provincial police force recruited him to lead an art theft unit. They gave him additional resources, and allowed him to pick a partner. He chose a young detective named Jean-François Talbot. Talbot would be trained as a successor to the new Quebec stolen art unit.

The same year, in 2003, another raid on a biker's house yielded a Cézanne painting locked up in a safe. Lacoursière emailed a picture of the Cézanne to a renowned Swiss-based expert on the artist. The next day, the expert emailed back. He recognized the work; he'd seen it years before and thought it was in Miami. According to him, the painting was one of the most famous forgeries of a Cézanne ever created.

“You need to know the people who know the culture, and most of the time they're not local,” Lacoursière said. “Even though it was a fake, an auction house in New York—and I won't say which one, but it was one of the big ones—had already agreed to put it up for sale. We knew about the Cézanne from wiretaps. The plan was for them to sell it at the New York auction house for $16 million.”

“The way this works is that criminals sell it through the auction house to another criminal buyer in the audience at the auction,” he explained. “It makes sense, because the auction house gets a percentage—say, a million dollars. But the criminal organization has just laundered $15 million. Not bad.” The detective added, “The painting weighs one pound and is sixteen inches wide. That's a lot easier than travelling with cash.”

Another case he worked involved two seventeen-year-olds who were breaking into galleries along Sherbrooke Street. “They broke in eighteen times in a year and a half. They would steal a painting, and they would also steal the price off the wall. I think they were using the art to pay off their drug debt.”

The evidence linking art theft and organized crime piled up. In 2006, in Quebec City, two drug dealers were arrested for being in possession of 50 pounds of cocaine. But the more surprising find was a stash of over 2,500 paintings in their warehouses. “Every month these guys were placing hundreds of paintings in auction houses across Quebec. They were using the system to launder their blood money. Place a man in the audience who inflates the price and buys the painting. Auction house gets its percentage, money is cleaned,” Lacoursière noted.

I had first met the detective on an overcast afternoon in Cairo, in early March 2007, on the trip I took with Bonnie Czegledi. Lacoursière, then forty-seven years old, and his partner, Jean-François Talbot, thirty-five, were about to take the podium in a conference room at the Marriott Hotel, speaking to the specialized audience gathered under the umbrella of the International Council of Museums. Also at that session were two senior investigators with the Netherlands government, Jordan's deputy minister of antiquities, and a handful of others, including Czegledi and New Hampshire county attorney Rick St. Hilaire. We had just come back from touring the Egyptian Museum, and the three of us were sitting together. Czegledi had often mentioned Lacoursière, the only dedicated art detective in Canada. “We have this giant place, and there's one guy,” she pointed out.

Just moments before the Montreal detectives addressed the group, they stood on a terrace overlooking the softly curved swimming pool of the Marriott below, from which wealthy tourists climbed out before a gathering summer storm. Lacoursière had a messy wave of curly dark hair and dark, fierce eyes. Talbot had an athletic build, shaved head, and a quiet, penetrating gaze—he looked like Lacoursière's bodyguard. In suits they looked like characters out of
Miami Vice,
a rare stormy Egyptian sky and sprawling Cairo as their backdrop.

At the podium, Lacoursière took the lead and outlined the unit's victories and frustrations. He said that smuggling art from one country to another was far easier than smuggling bank notes or drafts. Customs officials weren't properly trained to identify stolen art, and paintings were a breeze to move across the world. That was good news for organized crime groups, he said, because paintings were being used more frequently as currency for the purchase of drugs and as payment on loans.

The detective made it clear that paintings were being used to launder money through auction houses; one person traded paintings for drugs, and the recipient could simply auction off the painting for the cash value. Lacoursière also noted that money from drugs was being used to buy paintings. Art, it turned out, was an efficient way to funnel blood and drug money through a legitimate source, so it worked both ways.

The detective said that, in general, all crimes where art was involved were on the rise, and yet, from his experience interviewing art dealers, most dealers still saw almost no benefit in talking to the police, because it was “one-way information.” What the detective meant was that art dealers found that if they reported a crime or suspect behaviour or a stolen painting, the police often took that information but gave none in return. The dealers also complained that the police showed a lack of understanding when it came to the art world—the delicate relationships that dealers formed with clients, the value of being discreet, and a basic respect for the artwork itself.

In some cases, Lacoursière said, paintings suspected of being stolen were seized from a dealer or gallery by police but the police provided no way for the merchant to recoup the loss. There was also often little or no follow-up from police. On the subject of provenance, dealers and art galleries stated that they did not have the resources to conduct proper searches on work in their galleries. In the end this was about money and reputation, and police didn't understand that.

Lacoursière's summary of the relationship between stolen art and larger institutions, such as museums, was similar. Even with all the global media coverage of art thefts, museums were still reticent to report when a piece from their collection was stolen. There were many good reasons for that, he said, and they were similar to those of art galleries and dealers: attracting attention to the crime eroded the trust of donors or artists who gave their work to the museum to safeguard. This cult of secrecy, Lacoursière noted, was encouraged by some insurance companies, which struck quiet deals with museums, advising that going public after a theft damaged the museum's claim and harmed the institution's reputation. Some insurers even suggested that to reveal the criminal act encouraged art thieves. More importantly, it frightened away future donors.

This secretive behaviour was the exact opposite of how Lacoursière believed dealers and institutions should react to a theft. Silence, he said, was an advantage to thieves. “It has taken a long time for us to get gallery owners who have had art stolen to talk to us,” he said. “At first they didn't want to. But for the past three years, they've started to. That's why Jean-François and I have opened three hundred new cases in Quebec since 2004.”

Lacoursière had been investigating art thefts and related crimes for long enough that he was confident in his own knowledge and investigation skills. “We have a very good picture of what's happening in the criminal world in terms of art,” he said, nodding. “Criminals use art in many different ways, for many different purposes. And we know who the criminals are. We know the Mafia and biker gangs have specialists for telemarketing, for fraud, for credit cards, and now they have specialists for art too.”

“You have to remember that for the most part police don't have time for this kind of work, and they don't know anything about this world. So the Mafia and biker gangs have been free to operate through galleries and auction houses for many years,” he said. “There are twenty-five full-time art thieves working in this country that I know of,” he added. “I arrested a guy who has been in prison in seven different countries, and he told me, ‘I like Canada. If I get caught here, you have the nicest prisons.'”

I next met Lacoursière on his home turf, on a damp June afternoon in 2007, inside a Montreal courthouse, the Palais de Justice. He was testifying against a con man who had stolen $100,000 worth of art from an artist. The man on trial was the boyfriend of a two-time Olympic gold medal winner, Myriam Bédard. Later that day, he was found guilty. The detective and I sat in the waiting area during a court break, and he looked around at the people leaving the court. “Criminals come here to learn,” he said. “To ask, ‘how did this person get caught?' I saw a well-known art criminal here, at this trial, yesterday.”

When I asked what his most valuable asset is, Lacoursière reached into his suit jacket and extracted his phone. The detective's compact computer held thousands of email addresses, including many of the world's cultural experts, art lawyers, and agents with the
FBI
, Scotland Yard, and Interpol. It also held the email addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases photographs of dozens of criminals he'd arrested or made contact with over the previous fifteen years. “Every time I arrest a guy, I ask, ‘What's your email address?'” His database included hundreds of pictures of stolen and forged artwork—all the information at his fingertips when he needed it. Lacoursière had mirrored Hrycyk's Crime Alert system, independently. Both detectives had spent hours exploring the community and building their databases—gathering information. Lacoursière's name for it even sounded like Hrycyk's.

“This is all part of what I call ‘Art Alert,' an early-warning system,” he said. The idea was, of course, to share as much information as possible with as many people in the art community as possible, fast, in order to keep up with the organized criminal element that was trading in stolen art. One case Lacoursière was tracking at that time involved four men with links to organized crime who had used stolen credit cards to go on a shopping spree, visiting over thirty art galleries across Montreal and buying dozens of paintings with a total value of over $2 million. According to a source, Lacoursière said, some of those paintings had already been smuggled to Israel and Australia. “I can't fly there myself at a given moment. That's what Art Alert is for. It's faster for me to send an email to a contact there. But first I have to have made a contact.”

Lacoursière knew who was running the international operation: a criminal mastermind he'd been hunting for years, someone who moves in global circles. “We can't touch him, though. He's out of reach. Higher up. A collector. We know him well, and he knows us. He calls us by our first names. This man is a distinguished citizen of Montreal, and we've received information about him before, but we can't move on it. It's information that comes from a criminal source, and what's the word of a criminal worth against a distinguished collector?”

Lacoursière and Talbot had tracked their suspect's movements all the way to Costa Rica, but when they contacted the police there they received resistance. “The police in Costa Rica told me, this family you're looking at, they are well known and well respected.” In fact, the hunt for seemingly respectable citizens was a recurring theme for the detective.

Lacoursière remembers serving an arrest warrant once at an opening at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. “I ran into the director of the museum at the party, and he said to me, ‘Hi Alain, what are you doing here?'”

“I came to serve an arrest warrant,” Lacoursière answered.

The director looked surprised and asked to whom. The detective pointed to a man across the room.

“No, no, there must be some mistake,” said the director. “I know him well.”

Just like Hrycyk, Lacoursière invented his Art Alert system as a way to pry open the often-closed world he was trying to clean up. When a painting is stolen he sends an email to everyone in the world he thinks should be aware of the theft, including his roster of international criminals. “So that they know that I know,” he said, and raised an eyebrow.

“You see, we reversed the system. We take it straight to the criminals. We get a tip by email and we get it out there, to all the criminals in my database, as well as the gallery owners and dealers.”

Art Alert emails are accompanied by a message from the detective, in both French and English, that drives home his emphasis on community policing:

Welcome to the new interactive tool implemented by the Sûreté du Québec to support the exchange of information between the art market community and art investigation services. You will receive emails on a regular basis providing up-to-date information on art theft, fraud and forgers, safety precautions for protecting your property, or any other relevant information relating to your functions. In return, we expect full cooperation on the part of all members of the artistic community receiving these messages, enabling us to collect any relevant information relating to our functions. Only by truly cooperating will we manage to reduce art theft, fraud and trafficking, thereby also reducing the impact of these crimes on your activities.

The detective admits that in the murky black market of art, “we are always a few steps behind the criminals. But five years ago we were ten steps behind. Now we're three steps behind,” he said. “We have our own tools now. We go to gallery openings, because that's where you find the crooks.”

Lacoursière continued, “Criminals now have a lot of tools. They use auction houses and art galleries, and they are fast. A painting can be stolen here and sold across the world in a day. In those cases, it doesn't work if I file a report to Interpol and wait for them to send out that information. That can take months. With Art Alert, I can email the auction houses directly. When I want to know something, I email Christie's or Sotheby's in New York and in London. They know me now, and they get back to me immediately.”