Over the weekend, a second arrest was made in connection to the stolen art found in the possession of a New Haven drug dealer. Police said David Maluk, 53, would trade pieces of art for "$30 to $40 worth of heroin" with dealer Bruno Nestir. The stolen art was recovered from Nestir's apartment at 24 Sylvan Ave. in New Haven, CT. Those unfamiliar to the city of New Haven, will find it interesting that the 24 Sylvan Ave. apartment is located about a mile, or a twenty minute walk, from Yale's Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life and the New Haven Free Public Library -both sites where thefts had occurred. Evidently, Maluk did not overexert himself in satisfying his heroin fix.
This recent art theft left me with a curiosity for learning more about Connecticut art thefts. An interesting case that comes to mind involved the theft of Thomas Gainsborough's Woody Landscape "carefully" cut from its frame, February 6, 1975 from Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum. The Atheneum is the country's oldest public art museum, and was "the first American museum to acquire works by Caravaggio, Frederic Church, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Balthus, Joseph Cornell, and many others." The thief, Spencer Wolff, was caught two days later, but then "to the apparent dismay of the prosecutor and judge" was not prosecuted for it. James Elliott, museum director at the time, said of their decision, "we made it clear to police that our total interest in this was the return for this picture." Regardless, the decision to nolle the charges left the courtroom perplexed. A year later, Wolff in an article in that appeared in the Hartford Courant claimed that he had worked with the thieves in orchestrating the return of the painting for the $5,000 reward that the museum was offering and for his freedom from prosecution.
Possibly, these thieves were inspired by the theft of Dalí's Paranoic-astral Image from the Atheneum in April 1970. Less than a week later, the painting was returned. It was rumored that in the process, the museum had doled out a $1,000 reward.
*Original Post at Art Theft Central
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