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Showing posts with label Organised Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Organised Crime. Show all posts

April 23, 2024

When a money launderer's art collection comes up for auction

Photo Credit ANP

Once upon a time, the individual pictured above, Jan-Dirk Paarlberg had a prominent place in the Quote 500, with a fortune according to business publications that at its peak reached 280 million euros.  A buyer and seller of works of art, his collection is said to have included works on canvas and paper by Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, Kees van Dongen, Pierre Bonnard, Karel Appel, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to name a few, as well a at least one sculpture, a statue by Feranando Botero. 

Forty-one objects from his collection have been consigned for auction and will be sold off today (and tomorrow) at Sotheby's Modern and Contemporary Art auction in Paris. 

To show the interesting way the legal art market documents artwork ownership, shielding potential buyers from distasteful facts in publicly available auction records, its worth looking at one Paarlberg-owned painting.  This hotly contested (for unrelated reasons) Portrait of Jeanne, c 1901, was painted by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Its sales advertisement makes no mention of Paarlberg in its provenance, only mentioning that the painting's last owner purchased the work from Kunsthandel Frans Jacobs in Amsterdam.  

Instead this oil on canvas artwork, with a presales estimate of 500,000 - 700,000 EUR, lists an innocuous phrase in the text of the sale's page, which discretely states:  Sale on behalf of the Dutch State.

But who is Jan-Dirk Paarlberg and why are his purchases and this upcoming sale interesting to ARCA?

Paarlberg was the man behind the Euromast in Rotterdam, the restaurants of the Oyster Group and the co-owner of the Merwede Group, which owns a large part of the retail properties in Amsterdam's PC Hooftstraat and on Rotterdam's Lijnbaan.  He also had homes scattered in New York (at the historic Dakota), as well as in London, Portugal, and France, in addition to historic real estate in the Netherlands.  

That is until the real estate magnate's empire collapsed. 

Dutch authorities implicated Paarlberg in a money laundering scheme involving 17 million euros tied to the notorious Dutch penose underworld figure, Willem Frederik Holleeder.  That legal entanglement marked a stark contrast to Paarlberg's previous stature, and underscores the intricate intersections of wealth, power, and criminal influence, and the art that we see in circulation in the art world.  In this instance,  it is not the art itself which is criminal, but the laundered money possibly used for its purchase. 

Money, in part, it was determined by the courts, which had been extorted by Willem Holleeder from Willem Endstra.  Another prominent Dutch real estate developer, known as the "banker of the underworld," Endstra was assassinated by hitmen in 2004.  His death underscored the ruthlessness of Holleeder's organisation and its reign of terror, as well as Paarlberg's role in the perilous consequences of money laundering when it crosses paths with organised crime.

In testimony given on 19 April 2010, Jan-Dirk Paarlberg described some of his more suspicious art transactions.  Speaking under oath, in the the Haarlem court, the former wealthy resident of the Maarssen castle Ridderhofstad Bolenstein described how he rounded up eight important artworks from his home, including the statue by Feranando Botero, a painting by Marc Chagall, a canvas by Claude Monet and five works by painter Kees van Dongen, and placed them all in his jeep before driving them to a Belgian dealer where he exchanged the objects for large denomination bills totalling of 8.5 million guilders (roughly 4.5 million euros). 

Paarlberg was extremely vague on details, claiming he couldn't recall exactly which artworks he had sold, nor could he produce evidence of the pieces having ever been in his collection. He claimed he handed everything over to the dealer in Belgium for the new owner, having not saving purchase receipts, shipping documents, or even a single photograph which depicted the works which had once graced his properties. 

Fourteen years ago, at the time of this testimony, Paarlberg's statements were met with skepticism.  Art professionals argued about the feasibility of transporting a heavy Botero sculpture in his jeep, how Paarlberg had failed to use an art shipper, and even questioned the overly large cash sum he claimed to have been received as being excessive relative the value of the artworks and the two intermediaries.  But given what we know about the underworld, and as “traditional” money laundering vehicles, such as real estate, became less attractive to criminals, (given their immovability) one has to wonder if this event could have gone down as the property baron described?

Fast forward to today.  We now know and accept that art money laundering – often at inflated prices – to disguise the origins of illegally-obtained funds in order to reintroduce them into the legitimate economy, is in fact a thing.  So much so that the FATF includes “cultural objects” in its sector-specific guidance as a potential vehicle to launder funds, or to finance organised crime, terrorist groups, or their related activities. 

But none of this seems to be getting much coverage in Modern and Contemporary art market publications, nor with regards to today's sale, which, by the way, involves some 41 artworks seized by the Dutch authorities from Paarlberg's estate. 

Who are the Penose?

While most of us have heard of Italy's 'Ndrangheta from Calabria, the Cosa Nostra from Sicily, and the Camorra based in Campania, few people outside of the Netherlands have heard of the Penose. Coming from Bargoens, a form of Dutch slang, the name is traditionally used to describe networks predominantly headed by ethnic Dutch crime lords, mostly known to operate in the underworld of Amsterdam, but also in other big cities in the Netherlands such as The Hague, Rotterdam or Eindhoven.  

In addition to money laundering, members of the Penose have been associated with and convicted of activities such as drug trafficking, armed robbery, chop shops, illegal gambling, illegal slot machine vending, and, lest we forget, even contract killing. 

To be clear, having been seized by the Dutch state, the proceeds from these upcoming auctions of Paarlberg's paintings won't support organised crime. But let them serve as an illustration that it is just as important to know who the names and backgrounds of former artwork owners are, as it is to know the names and backgrounds of the individuals who have sold work of art you are interested in.

Happy shopping, don't let the tricksters get ya. 

By Lynda Albertson


May 25, 2022

Justice Rendered: The final confiscation of properties and business enterprises of Gianfranco Becchina has been confirmed.

DIA Seizing Gianfranco Becchina assets in 2017

Italy's Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, the country's Anti-Mafia Investigation Department has issued a confirmation confiscation decree based upon a request from the Public Prosecutor's Office of Palermo.  As per this decree, this action finalises the 2017 confiscation of a significant portion of movable, real estate and corporate assets "attributable to a well-known international trader of works of art art and artefacts of historical-archaeological value" long suspected to have links with the Sicilian mafia, in and around the port town of Trapani. 

While the DIA's announcement didn't name the, now, 83 year old dealer living in Castelvetrano, the regional newspapers in Sicily, and the national newspaper in Rome, did. 

For decades the Trapani branch of the Cosa Nostra is believed to have accumulated at least some portions of its wealth through the proceeds of illicit archaeological finds.  Some of which, according to Italy's DIA may have been procured through grave robbers working at the isolated Archaeological Park of Selinunte, one of Sicily's great ancient Greek cities, located near Castelvetrano probably in the service of the Cosa Nostra.  This archaeological site covers some 40 hectares and includes Greek temples, ancient town walls, and the ruins of residential and commercial buildings from Italy's past.  Given its remote location, much of the site has not been formally excavated, and it has been prey to opportunistic looters for decades.

To further dismantle the mafia's operational funding in and around Trapani, in November 2017 Italy's Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate, through the Court of Trapani's penal and preventive measures section, filed an initial seizure order for all movable assets, including real estate and corporate enterprises attributable to Gianfranco Becchina on the basis of an order issued from the District Attorney of Palermo based upon investigations conducted by the DIA, under the coordination of the Palermo Public Prosecutor's Office on the basis that much of Becchina's accumulated wealth was generated through the proceeds of trafficked antiquities. 

Palazzo dei Principi Tagliavia-Aragona-Pignatelli

The preliminary 2017 order included the seizure of Becchina's cement trade business, Atlas Cements Ltd., Olio Verde srl., his signature olive oil production company, Demetra srl., Becchina & company srl.  Real estate holdings confiscated included some 38 buildings as well as Becchina's portions of Palazzo dei Principi Tagliavia-Aragona-Pignatelli, once the noble residence of the family Tagliavia-Aragona-Pignatelli, which is part of the ancient Castello Bellumvider, (an additional part of this palazzo is owned by the city of Castelvetrano and houses the town hall).  Investigators also seized a total of 24 parcels of land belonging to Becchina, and four vehicles.  In total, the value of the seized assets is estimated to be worth more than 10 million euros. 

Giovanni Franco Becchina (b. 1939) was born in Sicily. In the 1970s, he established a business, Palladion Antike Kunst, in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife Ursula.  For almost forty years Becchina headed one of Italy's most notorious “cordata” (a trafficking cell) in a lucrative criminal enterprise that used gangs of tombaroli to loot carefully chosen and insufficiently guarded archaeological sites throughout southern Italy.

It is well-documented that Becchina and other traffickers like him, laundered their looted antiquities through exhibitions at museums and in private collections with manufactured provenance, providing a thin veneer of respectability to material removed from Italy and laundered through the ancient art market. 

In 2001, Becchina was arrested in Italy and charged with receiving stolen goods, illegally exporting goods, and conspiring to traffic goods. In May 2002, the Swiss and Italian authorities raided Palladion Antike Kunst and three of Becchina’s located storage facilities.  A fourth was raided in 2005. 

In 2011, Judge Rosalba Liso dismissed the charges of receiving stolen goods, illegally exporting goods, and conspiring to traffic goods, due to the expiration of the statute of limitations.  However, the Judge in the case confirmed the seizure order for the 5,919 antiquities Becchina had in stock at the time the 2002 and 2005 search warrants were executed.  Material evidence obtained during these seizures confirmed that Becchina bought antiquities directly from tombaroli. Over 90% came from a single source: convicted tombarolo (and later a capo squadra in his own right) Raffaele Monticelli.

August 27, 2021

The lifestyles of Cocainenomics: Dubai Police release video footage of Raffaele Imperiale and announce the arrest of another fugitive Raffaele Mauriello

The General Department of Criminal Investigation of the Dubai Police has released a somewhat dramatic video that shows the capture and arrest of fugitive Raffaele Imperiale, the Camorra affiliated boss of the international drug trafficking Amato-Pagano clan which supplied cocaine to Amato and Scarpa, who, years back and already on the run in Dubai, admitted to purchasing two stolen Van Gogh paintings and to his illegal operations in letters to the Italian prosecuting authorities.  Sentenced in absentia, Imperiale is known to have continued working in the illegal drug trade, even after his conviction and despite being named as a fugitive wanted for prosecution in a 27 January 2016 red list notice. 

Living under the assumed name, Antonio Rocco, mafia boss Imperiale continued to meet and transact underworld business with affiliates of his crime syndicate in various locations in the UAE city.  Video images of his arrest released by the Dubai police attest that the Italian drug lord was using a Federation of Russia driving license and passport, as at least one means of staying below law enforcement radar.  

Scenes in the three-minute video released by police give us a sanitised look at policework in the UAE, as well as a voyeur's peep show inside Imperiale's Dubai digs, complete with luxury cars, a villa, duffle bags containing hundreds of dollars, and boxes of unopened phones, which may have been used to impede wiretaps.  One of the most bizarre images on the film was a rather ironic Avengers artwork hanging on Imperiale's wall.  Hanging next to an elevator, the painting or poster depicts a maniacally grinning Pablo Escobar, recreating the Colombian narcoterrorist's mug shot photo by Colombia's Cárcel del Distrito Judicial de Medellín during Escobar's years of Argento O Piombo. The irony here is not lost as it was with the use of bribes (silver) with a not-so-subtle threat of violence (lead), that allowed the Medellín Cartel drug lord to pump an endless supply of cocaine into the market while remaining free from justice for as long as he did. 

Major General Khalil Ibrahim Al Mansouri, Assistant Commander-in-Chief for Criminal Investigation Affairs at the Dubai Police, told UAE news services that police had also arrested fellow Camorrista Raffaele Mauriello, also known as 'o Chiatto', another prominent member of the Amato-Pagano clan.  Like Imperiale, 31-year-old Mauriello, was a fugitive on the run from Italian justice for almost three years.  

Wanted in connection with charges of murder as well as drug trafficking, Mauriello was apprehended in Dubai on 14 August, following closely on investigations coordinated by the Public Prosecutor of Naples, led by Giovanni Melillo, and conducted by the Mobile Squad of the Naples Police Headquarters, led by Alfredo Fabbrocini, with the support of the Central Operational Service of the State Police.

Imperiale's clansman was identified by law enforcement authorities in Italy as having been involved in two mob hits during the violent Third Scampia feud, which resulted in the murders of Fabio Cafasso, killed in Scampia in 2011, and the double murder of Andrea Castello and Antonio Ruggiero, each killed one day after each other in Casandrino in 2014.  Prior to their arrest, Imperiale and Mauriello had been under close surveillance by Dubai investigators from the General Department of Criminal Investigation, aided by analysts working at the Dubai Police Criminal Data Analysis Centre and the “Oyoon” AI Surveillance Programme. The Oyoon (Eyes) project is part of the Dubai 2021 plan to enhance the emirate’s global position in terms of providing a safer living experience for all its (legal) citizens, residents and visitors.

August 19, 2021

No longer a teflon don, Raffaele Imperiale has been arrested in Dubai and is awaiting extradition


In October 2019 the US Drug Enforcement Administration sent documents to the Dutch police documenting a 2017 meeting between drug traffickers held at the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai.  Those in attendance at this convocation are believed to control one of the world's fifty largest drug cartels, holding a virtual monopoly over all Peruvian cocaine and controlling approximately one third of Europe's total cocaine trade. 

The men in attendance included:

  • Raffaele Imperiale, a convicted narco boss to the Camorra and a fugitive from justice on Italy's most wanted list since 2016, 
  • Ridouan Taghi, the alleged head of the Mocro Mafia, a Dutch-Moroccan criminal organisation, 
  • Daniel Kinahan, named in Dublin’s High Court as a senior fugure in the Kinahan cartel, a group involved in attempting to ship €35m of cocaine disguised as charcoal from South America Republic of Ireland in July,
  • and Edin Gačanin, a Bosnian drug trafficker who purportedly heads up the Balkan Tito and Dino Cartel which has a strong footprint in Dubai as well as the Netherlands.

On 19 December 2019 Ridouan Taghi was the first of the four to hear the clang of a cell door.  Expelled from the United Arab Emirates as an undesirable foreigner at the request of the authorities in Dubai, Taghi is currently being held at Nieuw Vosseveld, a maximum-security prison in Vught, as his court case proceeds in the Morengo trail. The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security believe Taghi to be the head of a major cocaine smuggling operation and to have had a hand in at least 11 gangland-related murders as well as a series of attempted murders, one of which, the assassination of journalist Peter R. de Vries, may have been ordered after Taghi was already in custody.

Raffaele Imperiale's arrest, announced officially today, but which actually occurred on the 4th of August, should make Kinahan and Gačanin nervous. 

Imperiale was arrested by Dubai law enforcement authorities, as officers in the Emirates coordinated their actions with Italian investigations initiated by the Naples Public Prosecutor's Office and entrusted to the city's G.I.C.O. (Organized Crime Investigation Group), the Mobile Squad of the Naples Police Headquarters, the Central Services of the Guardia di Finanza and Italy's State Police.  Externally,  international judicial cooperation involved coordination with Italy's Ministry of Justice working closely with the International Police Cooperation Service, Interpol and Europol for the multi-nation police action.

A long term boss who came up in the drug trafficking trade working with the Naples-based Camorra-affiliated Amato-Pagano clan, Raffaele Imperiale, who has lived in Dubai since 2010, is known on ARCA's blog for having purchased two stolen Van Gogh paintings: View of the Sea at Scheveningen, 1882 and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, 1884 - 1885, taken during a brazen nighttime theft at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on December 7, 2002.  

In 2016, as if to underscore his wealth, as well as his sense of impunity while sitting comfortable in Dubai, Imperiale wrote a six-page written statement/confession which he then sent from the UAE to Naples prosecutors, Vincenza Marra, Stefania Castaldi and Maurizio De Marco, along with the deputy prosecutor Filippo Beatrice and the prosecutor of the National Anti-Mafia Directorate, Maria Vittoria De Simone.   In his lengthy missive, Imperiale implied that he had decided to collaborate with justice by agreeing to give up his "treasure" to the state and outlining various aspects of his organization's early involvement in the drug trade.  In an extract of that letter, Imperiale says:


In addition to giving up the location of the stolen paintings, Imperiale's property, which would later be confiscated, included thirteen terraced villas in Terracina, as well as twelve villas in Giugliano, five of which were, ironically, subleased out to NATO under a shell corporation.  In addition to the real estate, Imperiale jokingly added that he planned to leave the Italian state with a fleet of expensive cars: 

"to be allocated to law enforcement agencies for the fight against organized crime."  

While the stolen Van Goghs were successfully recovered in September 2016 in a villa occupied by Imperiale's parents in Castellamare di Stabia, it would be less than a year later, when the DEA had intel on the 2017 meeting held at the Dubai five-star hotel.  Imperiale was still in the business of underworld dealing and banked on the fact that no extradition treaty between Italy and the UAE had been entered into force. Despite his letter to the Italian prosecutors, he displayed no real intent at leaving behind a criminal career build on the multinational trade in illegal drugs.

If anything, with two of his Dubai-based cartel friends, Taghi and Kinahan, settling down in the country with him, Imperiale seemed to have upped his game in the gulf,  even as the Italian courts sentenced him in abstensia to 18 years behind bars for drug trafficking and money laundering [19 January 2017].

In April 2019, still on the lam in Dubai, Imperiale's sentence of 18 years in prison was reduced to less than half that, purportedly because of a miscalculation by the Italian sentencing judge, given that the fugitive don had "voluntarily" relinquished twenty million euros in assets (the value of the Van Goghs excluded).  

More recently, investigators have evidence that seems to show that Raffaele Imperiale had a business relationship with a brutal enforcer working for the Mocro Mafia in their brutal turf war; a Chilean criminal by the name of Richard Eduardo Riquelme Vega, who was arrested in Santiago in December 2017 after arriving from Dubai and extradited to the Netherlands.  Vega, known as "El Rico" (the rich one) is believed to be responsible for the beheading of Nabil Amzieb, whose severed head was left in front Café Fayrouz in Amsterdam in 2016.

Since then, Vega has been convicted of operating an assassination ring and laundering the proceeds of crime.  It was from "El Rico" Vega's phone that investigators extracted a video that showed the enforcer with Imperiale and Daniel Kinahan together in Dubai as well as a large number of encrypted messages between the South American and Ridouan, among others, in which there is said to have been communication about the liquidation of rivals. 

Gathering evidence in their investigation into Vega's role in the Mocro organisation, law enforcement officers were also able to retrieve encrypted messages between Vega and Imperiale.  In one conversation it is alleged that the pair discussed business in Amsterdam. In another, how to eliminate an inconvenient rival broker in Dubai.

In the meanwhile, the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty in criminal matters between the Government of the Italian Republic and the Government of the United Arab Emirates, done in Abu Dhabi on 16 September 2015 and the extradition treaty between the governments of Italy and the UAE, moved forward. Ultimately, and after ratification was authorized by law n. 125 of October11, 2018, the bilateral agreements entered into force on April 17, 2019.

For now, it's unclear if additional criminal charges will be filed against Imperiale in Italy, aside from the ones he has already been convicted and sentenced for.   It does seem likely, that as law enforcement compare evidence in connection to these mult-nation investigations that new charges, in addition to his previous Italian convictions, may likely be on Imperiale's horizon. 

Until then, today's press release, issued by the delegation of the Public Prosecutor of Naples, shows us that Imperiale's carefree life of drug and art crime has finally come to a halt, as the Italian Ministry of Justice has announced that it is finalizing the agreements to complete his extradition procedure.

By:  Lynda Albertson