The Rescue Artist (32 page)

The companies have different business models, but, in theory at least, they can make money in several ways: by charging a fee for listing stolen property in their database, by collecting a finder’s fee if they make a recovery, by charging art dealers for access to their records (dealers are required to exercise “due diligence” to make sure they are not selling stolen goods).

It hasn’t paid off yet. Trace is the pet project of an English billionaire and art collector, who can afford to swallow the considerable losses he has racked up. Art Loss Register says that its own losses will soon come to an end.

Both companies are small, but they are mega-corporations in comparison with the one-man band that is Charley Hill. (When he first left the police, Hill went into business with a partner, another ex-detective. The venture fared as poorly as anyone but Hill would have expected. The only relic of that short-lived era is a sign that Hill brought home and mounted on his bathroom door, identifying “The Charles Hill Partnership Meeting Room.”)

Hill figures that the freedom to set his own priorities is worth the financial risk he is running. Let someone else chase after silverware and stolen clocks. But the flip side of independence is isolation. Crooks are naturally not pleased to have Hill on their tail, and the cops are only marginally cheerier. The police see Hill as trying to show them up, and, in truth, that is not a role that would cause him many sleepless nights. “The police had seven years to get the Titian back. And the simple fact is, they didn’t get it back. Nor did the insurers through their various means. And I went out and cultivated people and got it back.”

This is treacherous territory, pocked with ethical traps, as Hill is quick to acknowledge. Hill’s underworld sources expect to be paid for their help. (The money comes from insurance companies or from the robbery victims.) The problem is getting those payments in the right hands or, more to the point, keeping them out of the wrong ones. Paying a reward to a source who has heard a rumor is one thing; paying a ransom to a criminal to buy back property he himself stole is another.

The police pay informants as a matter of course. The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, for example, dangles rewards on the order of $1 million (and, in the case of Osama Bin Laden, $25 million). But in the case of stolen property, tradition held that money was paid only if arrests were made. Many police officials believe that rule should apply to stolen art. Do that, Hill insists, and stolen paintings will never be seen again. The police may talk about integrity, he says, but their real credo is indifference.

Hill’s view, which is that in today’s world freelancers will have to do what the police cannot trouble to do, has won him slews of enemies. Who is he to authorize rewards? More important, how can Hill know if his “informant”—whose own hands are supposedly clean—was in truth one of the thieves who stole the painting in the first place or, almost as bad, a fence who bought it from the thieves?

Despite his swashbuckling ways, Hill steps carefully here. He consulted Sir John Smith, the University of Nottingham law professor who was Britain’s leading authority on the laws governing stolen property, and he has the great man’s imprimatur. The two key principles, as spelled out by Smith, are that Hill must act on behalf of the owner of the stolen painting—he cannot go running around the country on his own authority—and he can’t interfere with the police—he cannot make a deal where a crook hands over a painting in return for a Get Out of Jail Free card.

The black-and-white moralist has landed in a world of grays, but Hill lives with that contradiction as happily as with all the others. Far from waiting for a go-ahead signal from the police, he has his eye fixed, at any one time, on half a dozen major cases. At Christmas 2003, for example, he was looking for Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s
White Duck
, stolen from Lord Cholmondeley and worth £5 million, and Leonardo’s
Madonna of the Yarn-winder
, worth perhaps £50 million, and Cellini’s gold and ebony saltcellar, worth $57 million, and a variety of treasures in Belgrade and Sicily.

Always lurking in the background—often shoving its way into the foreground—are the $300 million worth of paintings stolen from the Gardner Museum. Hill has pondered the theft since the news broke, on March 18, 1990. He believes he knows who took the paintings, and why, and what they did with them. Most important, he believes Vermeer’s
Concert
, Rembrandt’s
Storm on the Sea of Galilee
, Manet’s
Chez Tortoni
, and the others, are still intact and unhurt.

In search of the Gardner paintings, Hill has spent endless hours cultivating contacts and chasing leads and pursuing men who very much do not want to be pursued. He is up against formidable competition; the advertised reward for finding the Gardner paintings (put up by Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Chubb Insurance) is $5 million.

The FBI is by far the most prominent player in the hunt. The bureau has already followed up 2,000 leads in the Gardner case, it says, and has sent agents to Japan, South America, Mexico, and Europe. To no avail. At the ten-year mark, the FBI supervisor in charge of the case acknowledged that “we haven’t got a clue.” Today, another three years on, the picture is just as grim. “All logical leads have been followed through to conclusion,” the FBI admits, through clenched teeth, “with no positive investigative results.”

For a proud loner like Hill, no triumph could be sweeter than outwitting scores of rule-following, memo-writing FBI agents, all dutifully following “logical leads.” In the end, it may not happen. Hill’s efforts could all end in fiasco. It’s happened before.

But, then again, it might work. Hill has thought it through a thousand times. First a proper drink and a long, private look at the pictures. Then it will be a matter of picking up the phone and calling the director of the Gardner.

“It’s Charley Hill,” he’ll say. The tone will be light, casual, all in a day’s work. “I believe I’ve found some things you’ve been missing.”

AFTERWORD

SEPTEMBER, 2004

A
month after I’d sent the manuscript of this book to my publisher, I sat in a Manhattan taxi stuck in traffic. It was a Sunday afternoon in August, and an idyllic day if not for the blaring of horns and the dentist-drill whine of the music on the taxi radio. “It’s 2:00. This hour’s top story. In Norway, thieves have stolen one of the world’s best-known paintings,
The Scream
. Experts say the painting could be worth as much as $100 million. Police say they have no suspects.”

I sat back stunned, but I should have known better. The story hadn’t ended when I turned in my manuscript. Art and art thieves aren’t history; they’re headlines.

“Count no man happy before he dies,” the ancient Greeks said, by which they meant that even the most successful life can fall apart in a moment. The same insight holds for great paintings. When it comes to stolen art, no case is ever truly closed.

On Sunday morning, August 22, 2004, the Munch Museum in Oslo was crowded with visitors. August is tourist season, and the museum had been bustling since it opened at 10
A.M
. The collection is devoted entirely to Munch; when the painter died, in 1944 at age 80, he willed his art to the city of Oslo. The museum, nowhere near as large or as imposing as the nearby National Gallery, seems almost to invite its patrons into Munch’s cluttered studio. Many visitors pause at Munch’s austere single bed and its frayed blanket, on exhibit along with the paintings, drawings, and prints.

Sooner or later, and in most cases sooner, everyone who enters the Munch Museum ends up standing before
The Scream
. This is not the same painting that Charley Hill recovered in 1994, but an equally valuable near-twin. Munch painted four versions of
The Scream
in all—he returned obsessively to the themes that haunted him—and the two at Norway’s National Gallery and the Munch Museum are the ones familiar around the world.

At 11:10 on that Sunday morning, two armed men in black ski masks and gloves burst into the museum. One burglar pointed his pistol at the head of an unarmed guard and shouted, in Norwegian, for the guard and the terrified tourists to “Lie down!” In the meantime, his partner strode over to Munch’s
Madonna
, a famous and hugely valuable work in its own right, pulled out a pair of wire cutters, and cut it from the wall. “It looked like he was crazy,” one eyewitness reported. “He was banging it against the wall. Then he got it off the wall, and he was banging it on the floor.” Then he grabbed
The Scream
.

The two thieves ran outside, each clasping a priceless painting. As they neared the getaway car, a black Audi station wagon, a third man threw open its back door. The thieves flung the masterpieces inside, and the three men sped off.

The nearest police station is only half a mile from the museum, and when the thieves cut the paintings from the wall they triggered an alarm connected to the station. The police arrived within minutes. Still, it was too late.

By one o’clock in the afternoon, police had found the getaway car, abandoned, and battered bits of the paintings’ frames. In the case of
The Scream
especially, this further evidence of rough handling was bad news. Munch painted his
Madonna
, an eerie, erotic depiction of a bare-breasted, black-haired woman, in oil on canvas, which makes it relatively robust; but the newly stolen
Scream
, like the version stolen in 1994, is painted on a piece of cardboard, so it could easily be bent or creased.

On the day after the theft, the director of the Munch Museum held an anguished press conference to plead with the thieves. “Whatever they do,” said Gunnar Sorensen, speaking from a position in front of the blank spot on the wall where
The Scream
had hung, “they should take care of the pictures as well as they can.”

That was apparently more than the Munch Museum itself had done. According to indignant accounts in the Norwegian press, four months before the theft the museum had withdrawn from the Norwegian Industry’s Security Board. The board, under the auspices of Norway’s Justice Department, advises its members on issues of crime and security. Its membership includes Norway’s most prominent institutions, including banks, oil companies, the Museum for Contemporary Art, and the National Gallery. A month before it withdrew from the Security Board, the Munch Museum had been given KR500,000, roughly $70,000, to beef up security. It had not spent the money.

Like the National Gallery’s
Scream
, the Munch Museum’s stolen paintings were not insured for theft. “They are irreplaceable works of art,” said the head of the agency that insures assets belonging to the city of Oslo, “and it makes no sense to insure them against theft.”

That is debatable; at the least, an insurance company faced with the possibility of a $50 million or $100 million payout might strive mightily to turn up the heat on the crooks. As it is, the police have found themselves chasing down random leads and praying the thieves will contact them. The obvious suspect, Pal Enger, who had been convicted twice before of stealing paintings by Munch, proclaimed his innocence. “Weapons are not my style,” Enger maintained. “I have always used the methods of a gentleman.”

Frustrated and forlorn, the authorities scarcely try to hide their floundering. “We’re working with the tips we’ve got from the public,” one police official told an interviewer two weeks after the theft. “So far we haven’t tied ourselves to any main theory.”

Charley Hill, whose boiling point is barely above room temperature, rages whenever he contemplates these latest examples of official ineptitude. Even stolid Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective who worked with Hill in 1994, cannot hide his indignation. “Hasn’t the city of Oslo learned anything about security in ten years?” he demands. “I am shocked that once again it was so easy.”

In the best of scenarios, the thieves will realize they cannot sell their paintings and will drop them somewhere where they will be quickly found. Failing that, the robbers may surface with ransom demands. Or, since
The Scream
and
Madonna
will surely retain their value for many decades to come, perhaps the silence will drag on. In the case of the Gardner Museum paintings, for example, the silence now spans fourteen years.

An impasse like that is unlikely. Thieves do not steal paintings in order to stash them in a warehouse. But schemes fall apart and deals dissolve. Yesterday’s trophy can become today’s white elephant. Sometimes a seeming lack of activity means not that a painting has been destroyed or stored away but that it has become a trade item in the criminal underworld, like Metsu’s
Woman Reading a Letter
, stolen in Dublin in 1986 and recovered in Istanbul in 1990 in the hands of a thief trying to barter it for a shipment of heroin.

In the short run, the case is in the Norwegians’ hands. In all art robberies, the local police have first crack at sorting things out. But if months go by without progress and all the obvious leads unravel, Charley Hill’s phone will ring again.

In the meantime, when two weeks had gone by without a word about the whereabouts of its two most valuable paintings, officials from the Munch Museum contacted the press. “We are closed and will be closed for three weeks,” museum officials announced, “to install alarms, among other things.”