The Rescue Artist (18 page)

20
“This Is Peter Brewgal”

G
reat paintings will disappear, as well, because when thieves steal great art some of the luster of the masterpieces spills onto the thieves themselves. This gilt by association is almost entirely undeserved, but the notion of the dashing thief is so appealing that it thrives even without any evidence to support it. Art thieves look like Pierce Brosnan or Sean Connery, Hollywood tells us; they are an “elite, artsy SWAT brigade,” the
Chicago Tribune
informs its readers, a “highly daring and, let’s admit it, cultured coterie of malefactors.”

In real life, nearly all art thieves fall into two categories, both of them decidedly nonelegant. Either they are bumblers out of an Elmore Leonard novel or gangsters like Martin Cahill. The gangsters are far more dangerous, but the two categories can bleed into one another as stolen paintings pass from criminal to criminal.

“The commercial dealings can become quite labyrinthine,” says Mark Dalrymple, an insurance investigator based in London who specializes in art cases. “It needn’t always be a cash purchase. The thief might swap the painting for a shipment of drugs, or for a share in another, bigger deal. Or the thief might
owe
£10,000 and say, ‘Take the picture and we’ll clear the debt.’ “

Dalrymple is a thin man with a world-weary manner and deep bags under his eyes. He peeks out at the world from inside a swirl of cigarette smoke and delivers his judgments in a syrupy drawl that seems to imply that humanity is, for all its foibles, undeniably amusing.

“I have great respect for many criminals,” he remarks. “They’re very clever, very clever indeed, very streetwise in their dealings with their colleagues. They’ll buy a mobile phone and throw it away the next day [to foil eavesdroppers]. They can smell your standard undercover cop a mile away.

“But when it comes to these big-time paintings, they smell money and a profit and they get a hard-on, as we say”—Dalrymple raises his eyebrows as if to acknowledge the lapse in taste—”and the streetwise approach goes right out the window.

“These people come up with the most extraordinary ideas,” Dalrymple marvels. “They’ll think they can sell the painting to a drug baron in South America, or to a friend who’s in with some mafioso in Miami. Or they’ll think, Ah, well, I know some Albanians who like this sort of stuff, and they’ve got some handguns. Maybe we can do a deal.’ Or they might try to ransom the painting back to the original owner. Or keep it for a year and then see if they can collect from the insurance company. Or they may be in it for the reward.”

Dalrymple affects a tough guy accent. “‘If they’re offering 100,000 quid, I’ll tell ‘em where it is, and I get the reward, and they get their bleedin’ painting back.’

“Even so,” Dalrymple continues, “many of them get away with it. Along the line, there
are
people making money. There are always going to be people making money. That’s why they do it.”

Cops and their allies, like Dalrymple, prefer the bumblers to the pros. They love to swap tales of hapless amateurs, especially if they are meeting colleagues from far-off jurisdictions. Sitting over drinks in crowded bars, the cops play can-you-top-this. They tell true stories like the one about the Los Angeles thief who, in 1998, stole a $10,000 abstract metal sculpture and ended up selling it to a scrap dealer for $9.10.

The police tell the stories for laughs, but the laughter is bittersweet because the underlying message is so dismaying. Art theft is such an easy game and the penalties for getting caught are so low, the stories make plain, that the most hopeless sap can play. Take Anthony Daisley, who, one fine December day in 1991, staggered into the Birmingham [England] Museum and Art Gallery almost too drunk to walk. He pulled Henry Wallis’s
Death of Chatterton
off the wall, stuck the six-inch-by-ten-inch painting under his arm, and reeled out the door with a £75,000 prize. (The museum had recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on electronic security, but the alarms were designed mainly to foil thefts at night, when the building was empty.) Another museum visitor saw the theft and called a guard, but it was too late.

Daisley pulled himself aboard a passing bus and showed his fellow passengers the painting. He had just stolen it, he explained, and now it could be theirs for a mere £200. The thief asked where the bus was headed. “Selly Oak,” he was told. That was no place for him, Daisley cried out, because his ex-wife lived there. He stumbled off the bus, taking his painting with him. Five days later, police following up a tip found the stolen painting hidden in a house in Birmingham. A judge let Daisley off with a warning to stay out of trouble for twelve months, and the head of the Birmingham Museum issued him a public invitation to come back and visit the art he so clearly admired.

Charley Hill relishes such stories, partly because they buttress his view that the human race is composed largely of ninnies but mainly because he takes personal offense at the widespread belief that art thieves are masterminds who spend their days plotting elaborate heists. “The thieves who steal works of art,” he says, “were usually stealing hubcaps a few years earlier.”

Hill’s hubcap remark was, in one £2 million case, the literal truth. In 1982 a thief ran out of London’s Courtauld Institute Galleries clutching Bruegel’s
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
to his chest. (Bruegel produced a great many paintings, but in the nearly four and a half centuries since his death all but forty have been lost.) For the next eight years, the painting passed from thief to thief.

Somehow it fell into the hands of four small-time crooks. Two were failed businessmen who had run into debt; a third stole cars and credit cards; the fourth stole hubcaps.

One of the four had stumbled on the Bruegel, but he’d had no idea that it was special, no inkling at first that here in his hands was the big ticket he and his mates had all been dreaming of. The painting is an odd one, quite unlike Bruegel’s famous, sprawling, colorful depictions of everyday life.
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
is a small, somber work painted in
grisaille
, entirely in shades of gray. Christ and the other figures look almost like stone carvings. A layman might glance at the dark biblical scene and quickly pass by. “Our great fear during all those years,” recalled the director of the Courtauld, “was that whoever had it would get bored of the whole thing and chuck it into a dustbin.”

The four crooks rounded up an art expert to tell them whether the painting was worth anything. At this point some of the gang had yet to lay eyes on it. One of the four, a car dealer named Bobby Dee, took his first peek. “I picked it up to look at it and said, ‘You got to be joking!’ I was worried because I thought these people would think we were idiots. I thought this picture was nothing, just a wind-up.”

The art expert arrived. “Then this old bloke came in. He was blabbering on about something. He turned round to look at the picture and then he fainted. I thought, ‘Bleeding hell, it must be something proper.’ “

Armed with the delightful knowledge that they had landed something big, the gang recruited a front man to do the talking for them. On a Friday afternoon in April 1990, the director of the Courtauld, Dennis Farr, was working at his desk. The phone rang.

“This is Peter Brewgal,” the caller said. “I’ve got something you haven’t seen in a long while. I think you’ll be interested.”

“Brewgal” rhymed with “bugle.” The caller’s odd name and his south London accent threw Farr for a moment—when Farr tried to mimic the caller later, he sounded like Alistair Cooke impersonating Sylvester Stallone—but then he caught on: Pieter Bruegel.

Mr. Brewgal offered Farr the chance to buy back his own painting. The price was £2 million.

Farr called the Art Squad. They devised an elaborate sting, starring Charley Hill as a rich and loudmouthed boor who wanted to buy himself a “trophy painting.” All such subterfuges proved beside the point. Unbeknown to both the Art Squad and the thieves, a second group of cops had been tipped off as to the painting’s whereabouts. They raided a house outside London. In a bedroom, they found the Bruegel wrapped in a pillowcase on top of a chest of drawers, and undamaged despite its wanderings.

21
Mona Lisa
Smile

N
o matter how he tries, Charley Hill has never managed to dispel the Dr. No stories. What do you expect? People always prefer glamorous bullshit to mundane truth. They still trundle off to Scotland, for Christ’s sake, to look for a sea serpent in Loch Ness.

But a taste for the exotic is not the sole reason that the belief in stolen-to-order art persists. Another is that people are suspicious of naysayers who are, like Hill, perfectly happy to romanticize the good guys but insistent that crooks are nothing more than violent, grubby men. Hill is, after all, a cop. Maybe thieves come in more varieties than he is willing to concede.

And if Hill has never seen anyone who would qualify as a Dr. No, that’s hardly conclusive. A billionaire who collects stolen paintings would be unlikely to invite the neighbors in. Even so, names do surface occasionally. “Idi Amin was one of the biggest collectors of stolen art,” according to Allen Gore, onetime head of security at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He had a French connection and took stuff out of Marseilles. He commissioned people to do it.”

Maybe. But no one ever produced any evidence to back Gore’s claim. (Masterpieces have occasionally turned up in the homes of South American drug lords, but there is no evidence that they were stolen to order rather than purchased legitimately; the paintings seem to be trophies on a par with the helicopters and hippopotamuses that ornament these private kingdoms.)

Even Hill admits that there have been thieves who were also collectors and who stole art they particularly coveted. The problem is deciding what to make of such tales. We know that (a very few) thieves have stolen paintings for themselves. Does it follow that there are collectors who commission others to steal particular paintings on their behalf?

Consider the case of Stéphane Breitwieser, a French waiter who made headlines around the world in the winter of 2003. Breitwieser was arrested for stealing perhaps $1.4 billion worth of paintings and other art objects for his own pleasure.
^*
Over the course of seven years, he robbed 179 museums in seven countries. He concentrated on small museums, which tended to be poorly guarded, and small objects, which he could tuck inside his coat.

Breitwieser operated in daylight, and his approach could hardly have been simpler. While his girlfriend kept watch or flirted with any guard who happened by, Breitwieser took out his knife, cut a painting from its frame, rolled it up, and walked off with it. The most valuable item in his collection was Lucas Cranach the Elder’s
Sybille of Cleves
, valued at $8 million.

Cranach’s painting showed her as a beauty, with red hair to her waist, in an elegant red gown. Sybille had two younger, unmarried sisters, Anne and Amelia. In 1539, in search of wife number four, Henry VIII sent Hans Holbein, his court painter, to paint the sisters’ portraits. Henry chose Anne; her portrait now hangs in the Louvre. Holbein may have done his work too well. When Anne arrived in England, Henry was horrified by the true appearance of this “Flanders mare.” Only moments before the wedding ceremony, he paused to bemoan his fate. “My lords, if it were not to satisfy the world and my realm, I would not do what I must do this day for any earthly thing.” Six months later Henry had the marriage annulled and pensioned Anne off, notably with a castle that had belonged to Anne Boleyn.

Breitwieser stole Cranach’s portrait on his twenty-fifth birthday, as a gift to himself. He never tried to sell it or anything else he stole. The art-loving thief stored his loot in his mother’s apartment. Often, before he brought his paintings to her, he took them to a local shop where the owner admired Breitwieser’s latest “purchases” and helped him choose new frames.

Breitwieser was finally caught when a museum guard in Lucerne, Switzerland, saw him trying to steal a bugle. To protect her son after his arrest (or, by some accounts, to keep authorities from revoking her work permit), Breitwieser’s mother set out to hide the evidence. She threw 100 objects into a canal and destroyed sixty oil paintings—including the Cranach—by chopping them into tiny pieces and throwing them out with her kitchen garbage, buried under coffee grounds and egg shells.

What about a low-rent Dr. No? Would the existence of a character who ordered up small-time thefts make it more likely that somewhere in the shadows lurks a full-fledged version?

Listen a minute to Jim Hill (no relation to Charley), one of the most respected art detectives in Britain. A soft-spoken Scot, Jim Hill has spent the last 20 years doggedly chasing stolen art. Most of it is good but not spectacular, perhaps in the $10,000 range, but his résumé includes such coups as the recovery of a £100,000 grandfather clock.

In a business full of men who love telling stories—and love most of all telling stories where they themselves play the starring role—Jim Hill is that rare character who shuns the spotlight. (“Jim doesn’t go in for any kind of self-aggrandizing bullshit,” Charley Hill once observed, in a tone of mingled admiration and puzzlement, as if he were describing a cop who drank nothing stronger than ginger ale.) In the old, swashbuckling movies that Charley likes so much, full of cavalry charges and doomed last stands, Jim Hill would be perfectly cast as a soldier in the ranks, true to his mates and steady at his post. He would have only a line or two of dialogue and would manage a tight smile as a medic fished in his shoulder for a bullet. The injury was, he might concede in his gentle burr, “a wee bit of bother.”

So when Jim Hill
does
venture on a story, no one disputes him. Twice in his career, he says, he has seen a collector with a private gallery of stolen art. “One gentleman had a secret room off a big workshop, and only he had access to it. Over the years he’d received a lot of stolen property—silver, bronzes, paintings—and he put them in glass cases all around the room, and he’d sit there, all alone, with nice, quiet music on, in a lovely armchair, and he would just sit amongst all this property, and enjoy having it in his presence. Never used it, never tried to find a buyer. He was quite a wealthy man, and he just enjoyed being in the company of valuable and lovely items.”

What about
six
Dr. No’s, all contemporaries, who were so far from smalltime that each one owned (or so he believed) the world’s best-known painting? Early on the morning of August 21, 1911, an Italian carpenter named Vincenzo Perugia crept out of a storage closet in the Louvre where he had hidden overnight. This was a Monday, the day the museum was closed to the public. Perugia had once been employed by the Louvre, and over his clothes he wore one of the floppy, nearly knee-length tunics issued to the hundreds of workmen who maintained the sprawling museum. The outfit rendered Perugia so innocuous as to be nearly invisible. He walked toward the
Mona Lisa
in the Salon Carré and checked to see that no one was nearby. Then he removed the painting from the wall, tucked it beneath his smock, and walked out of the museum
.

That much is undisputed fact. The rest of the story, depending on the teller, is an illustration of either the perfect crime or perfect nonsense
.

As recounted by Seymour Reit in
The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa
,
Perugia was merely a hired hand. The mastermind behind the
Mona Lisa
theft was an Argentinean con man who called himself the Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno. In tandem with a brilliant French forger named Yves Chaudron, the marqués had made a nice living peddling fake old masters to foolish collectors
.

In Buenos Aires, the two swindlers had moved beyond the simple selling of fakes and had cooked up an elaborate scheme to sell paintings “off the wall” of the national museum. The marqués, who had bribed a guard
to keep away, would lead the dupe to an especially fine painting and ask, in a whisper, if he would like it. He recognized, of course, the marqués would go on, that he was dealing with a savvy businessman who knew a thing or two about how the world worked. And therefore, to make sure there was no funny business—here the marqués drew a handsome pen from his pocket—the customer should take this pen and make some small marks or write some secret cipher on the back of the canvas so that later, when he received his painting, he would know that it was this very one.

One dupe waved the pen aside and instead took out a pocket knife and cut an oddly shaped scrap from the edge of the canvas, in the back, beyond the boundary of the painting proper. When the time came, the man explained, he would check to see if the newly delivered canvas was missing a piece that fit precisely with the one he had just removed. The marqués was struck almost dumb with admiration. Never had he encountered such cunning.

The scam was that Chaudron had already painted his fake before the dupe ever showed up, and Valfierno had mounted the two paintings together, in the same frame. The real one was in front, where visitors to the museum could admire it, and the fake one behind, where gullible strangers could sign (or cut) it.

Out for bigger game, Valfierno and Chaudron had come to Paris. There Chaudron perfected fake
Mona Lisas
while Valfierno cultivated new clients. When he had six suckers with big enough bankrolls and small enough brainpans, Valfierno made his pitch: What would you think of owning the greatest painting in the world? It went without saying, the marqués went on, that no one but you could ever see the masterpiece, but, on the other hand, you would know that you alone possessed what no one else could ever own. So the marqués said, six times, to six customers.

Then Valfierno told Perugia, the carpenter, that it was time for him to do his bit. (The theft itself was so easy because the Louvre in 1911 was focused on vandals, not thieves. The Louvre was heavily guarded during visiting hours and virtually defenseless after hours.) Spooked by an attacker who had slashed an Ingres in 1907, the Louvre had decided to build a glass-fronted box to house the
Mona Lisa
. Perugia knew his way around the Louvre because he had been one of the workmen who built the box.