The Rescue Artist (2 page)

2
Easy Pickings

N
orway’s museum officials had made two far-reaching mistakes. The first was a failure to focus on details. Buoyed by lofty thoughts about the glories of great art, the National Gallery had paid too little heed to mundane questions of security. The second mistake was a failure of imagination. No one would be audacious enough, museum higher-ups had assured one another, to steal a painting that any buyer would immediately know was stolen.

It’s not that anyone in the art world denies the existence of thieves. Even the smallest museum hires security guards. But the subject is so unseemly, and the yoking together of the words “art” and “crime” so much a joining of the sublime and the grimy, that the art community tends to avert its eyes and hope that the whole nasty subject will go away. Which is fine with the thieves.

For art crime is a huge and thriving industry. Crime statistics are always dodgy, but Interpol, the international police agency, reckons that the amount of money changing hands in the art underworld comes to between $4 billion and $6 billion a year. On the roster of international illicit trade, art crime is number three, trailing only drugs and illegal arms. In Italy alone, where it is common for a tiny village to boast a church with a fifteenth-century altarpiece, police say that thieves make off with a museum’s worth of art each year.

The bulk of what is stolen is good but not great (since that is easiest to resell), but cherished masterpieces disappear, too, and at an alarming rate. In all the world there are only 36 Vermeers. Of that tiny number, three—
The Concert, The Guitar Player
, and
Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid—
have been stolen in recent years.
^*

Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
was snatched off the wall of a sprawling Irish mansion, found a week later in a cottage 200 miles away and returned to its owner, then stolen from the same owner a second time a dozen years later. In London, thieves have stolen the same Rembrandt portrait four times.

Within the span of a few months in the spring and summer of 2003, thieves stole two sixteenth-century masterpieces, each one worth $50 million or more. In May, thieves clambered up scaffolding outside Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum and made off with an elaborate gold and ebony saltcellar by Benvenuto Cellini—”the Mona Lisa of sculptures,” according to the museum’s distraught director.
^†
In August, two well-dressed, well-spoken thieves in Scotland bought £6 tickets and joined a tour of Drumlanrig Castle, which houses a renowned art collection. A few minutes later they put a knife to the throat of the guide, pulled Leonardo da Vinci’s
Madonna of the Yarnwinder
off the wall, and strolled away with it. A pair of tourists from New Zealand happened to be visiting the castle, video camera in hand. They heard an alarm and then nearly collided with a man climbing over the castle wall. “Don’t worry, love,” one thief said. “We’re the police. This is just practice.”

“When the second man came over the wall,” the couple later told police, “we felt something was going on.” Then came a third man over the wall, “carrying something under his arm.” The thieves ran past the pair of gawking tourists (who filmed the entire encounter), climbed into a VW Golf in the visitors parking lot, and disappeared.

The value of the stolen
Madonna
, one of only a dozen oil paintings by Leonardo, is almost incalculable. The experts’ guesses range from a low of $50 million to a high of $235 million, a figure that more than doubles the current record for the highest price ever paid for a painting.

A museum of stolen masterpieces would rival any of the world’s great treasure houses of art. The Museum of the Missing would fill endless galleries; the collection of paintings and drawings would include 551 Picassos, 43 van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts, and 209 Renoirs. Vermeer would be there, and Caravaggio and van Eyck and Cézanne and Titian and El Greco.

The assaults on art come from every direction. In Paraguay, in July 2002, thieves tunneled for 25 yards beneath the street, surfaced in the National Fine Arts Museum, and disappeared with five old masters with a combined value of well over $1 million. In Oxford, in December 1999, a cat burglar smashed a skylight in the Ashmolean Museum, slithered down a rope, and ran off with a Cézanne worth $4.8 million. In Rome, in May 1998, thieves opted for a “stay-behind,” one of the simplest and most widely employed tactics. Late in the day, three men entered the National Gallery of Modern Art and hid behind an exhibition curtain until after closing time. When the visitors had gone home, the thieves emerged from hiding. Brandishing guns, they grabbed three guards, forced them to shut off the alarms, and tied them up. Fifteen minutes later, the thieves walked out the front door. They carried with them two van Goghs and a Cézanne, with a combined worth of $34 million, as well as $860 in cash, from ticket receipts.

If a stolen painting does reappear, it tends to surface in an incongruously humble setting, like a bewitched princess in a Brothers Grimm story who wakes up in a woodcutter’s cottage. In 1989, for instance, the superintendent of an apartment co-op in Queens found a stolen Manet still life called
Bouquet of Peonies
, valued at up to $5 million, hidden in the basement behind a washing machine.

But most stolen art is gone forever: the overall recovery rate is about ten percent. The lone bit of good news is that the better the painting, the better the odds it will someday be found. For the greatest paintings of all—which are the hardest for thieves to unload, since they can never find legitimate buyers—there is the most reason to hope.

Most often, thieves leave the pizzazz to Hollywood. The pros go more for brute efficiency than for style. The biggest art theft of modern times could hardly have been simpler. On March 18, 1990, in Boston, two armed men in police uniforms and dime-store black mustaches showed up at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum at 1:20 in the morning. The museum is small and elegant, and maintained today almost precisely as it was a century ago. The thieves pounded on a side door and shouted to the guards that they were investigating reports of a disturbance inside the museum grounds.

The guards opened the door, and the two “policemen” rushed in and overpowered them. It took only a minute. The guards were art school students with scarcely any security training, earning $6.85 an hour. (In the excitement of the moment, they forgot the central lesson they had been taught: “In the middle of the night you don’t open that door for God himself.”) The thieves left the guards handcuffed and gagged in the museum basement. The guards calmed down quickly, so much so that investigators later suspected they were high at the time of the break-in. One guard fell asleep while bound in the basement.

With the guards out of the way, the thieves disabled the alarm system—which was not much of a safeguard in any case, since it sounded only inside the museum itself—and wandered through the galleries for eighty minutes on a private shopping spree. They helped themselves to a dozen paintings and drawings, among them Vermeer’s
Concert;
three Rembrandts, including his only seascape and an exquisite, stamp-sized self-portrait; Manet’s
Chez Tortoni;
and five charcoal sketches and water-colors by Degas. (They stopped a moment to take the video cassette from the security camera, as well.) The choices were eccentric, or ignorant—the thieves snatched a bronze eagle from atop a Napoleonic flagstaff but left Titian’s immensely valuable
Rape of Europa
untouched. Even so, they fled with treasures worth $300 million.

“Tell them you’ll be hearing from us,” the thieves called to the guards as they left, but no one ever has. In the world of art crime, the Gardner paintings are the holy grail.

Thieves are opportunists, always on the lookout for goods lying around unprotected. Museums, churches, art galleries, and isolated country houses make tempting targets, and not only because art connoisseurs respond to art crime with the fluttery dismay of a Victorian hostess whose guests have unaccountably spoken of sex.

The point of museums, the reason they exist, is to display their treasures to as many people as possible. Banks, which safeguard literal treasure, have it far easier. They can hide their money in underground vaults with foot-thick doors and protect it with armed guards and fortress-like security, and no one will complain. In comparison with even middling banks in midsized cities, the world’s best museums are as open as street fairs.

Security is neglected, too, because even the greatest museums face chronic money shortages. In the autumn of 2003, at the Tate Modern, the most popular art museum in Britain, restroom cubicles displayed a notice thanking an anonymous benefactor for the funds to buy toilet paper. Britain’s National Gallery is scarcely better off. “We do not get from government even the basic operating costs of this place, what it costs to open the doors, turn the lights on, and look after the collection,” the director laments. Museums can always choose to invest in more guards and better alarms, but money spent on security is money not available for the museum’s true mission.

In the United States especially, museum guards are poorly paid and poorly trained. One large security company looks at how much McDonald’s pays its employees in a given region and then offers its museum guards fifty cents an hour less than that. “The people protecting our art,” says security specialist Steven Keller, “are the ones who couldn’t get jobs flipping burgers.”

Some museums
have
swallowed hard and installed costly state-of-the-art alarm systems and motion detectors and taken on more guards. But as security has grown more robust, thieves have grown more brazen. If museums are locked and monitored by electronic alarms at night, thieves don’t give up; they simply walk through the front doors during the day. Or, depending on the setting, they smash their way through ground-floor doors in SUVs. They may well carry guns, and horrified visitors and shocked (and unarmed) guards scarcely slow them down.

From a criminal’s point of view, a world-renowned painting is a multimillion-dollar bill framed and mounted on a poorly guarded wall. On a blustery spring day in May 1998, at about lunchtime, a visitor to the Louvre entered room 67 and approached a small oil painting by Corot, a landscape called
Le Chemin de Sèvres
that depicts a quiet country road. Working quickly but calmly in the seldom-visited room, the thief removed the painting from its frame, left the frame and its glass intact on the wall, and hurried off. (For a thief, the size of a painting is crucial. The great majority of stolen paintings are small, because they are easy to hide and to carry.)

About an hour later, a tourist noticed the empty frame and informed a guard. Security ordered all the doors of the sprawling museum shut. Springing that slow-motion trap took ten minutes. Then, with the thief long gone, museum guards searched each of the museum’s thousands of visitors. The thief has never been found.

The daylight theft of the $1.3 million painting spurred an official investigation and the firing of the Louvre’s chief of security. (Two years later, as the bureaucratic battle dragged on, he was still living rent-free in an apartment in the Louvre.)

The investigators’ findings would have made Pollyanna despair. The Louvre had only an approximate idea of how many artworks it owned and how many people it employed. Built 800 years ago as a palace and converted to a museum two centuries ago, the immense complex is an endless and hard-to-patrol maze. Closed-circuit cameras did not cover the entire museum (room 67 was not monitored), and the camera systems in different wings of the museum worked independently and could not be scanned from a central location. Security at the Louvre was so poor, the report noted, that “it would be easier for a thief to steal one of its 32,000 exhibits than it would be to take an item from a department store.”