by Catherine Schofield Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor
Interpol and UNESCO listed art theft as the fourth-largest black
market in the world (after drugs, money-laundering, and weapons). But
what did that mean? After I’d been following [Bonnie] Czegledi’s career for several
years, one point was clear: don't look at the Hollywood versions of an art thief -- the Myth. This is a bigger game, with more players, and the legitimate
business of art is directly implicated. A lot of the crimes are hidden in
the open. Stealing art is just the beginning. Then the art is
laundered up into the legitimate market, into private collections, into the
world's most renowned museums.
-- Joshua
Knelman, author of Hot Art
Toronto journalist Joshua Knelman, author of Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives Through
the Secret World of Stolen Art (Tin House Books,
2012), introduces to the general
reader the international problem of art crime and the limited resources of
legal authorities in fighting this problem in the first decade of the 21st
century.
In
2003, Knelman was just a 26-year-old researcher for the Canadian magazine Walrus when he stumbled down the rabbit
hole of art theft and recovery. A
gallery owner hesitant to speak about the theft of $250,000 worth of
photographs stolen two years earlier opens up to Knelman after police recover part of the stolen artwork. Knelman eventually contacts the suspect’s lawyer, and that leads to a midnight phone call from the
thief who has been investigating Knelman. The two meet in a café in
Toronto. The aspiring reporter is physically
threatened, given stolen art, and then lectured by the thief about how the
secretive business practices in the legitimate art market actually supports art
crime. Thus begins Knelman’s
adventures through the world of thieves and investigators of looted art.
The journalist befriends Bonnie Czegledi, a Toronto attorney specializing
in art crime, who educates Knelman about the types of stolen art and cultural
property: missing Holocaust-looted artworks; pillaging of antiquities from
source countries such as Egypt, Afghanistan, and Turkey; multi-million dollar
thefts from museums worldwide; and unreported thefts from galleries and
residences. Knelman writes:
The world’s cultural heritage had become one big
department store, and thieves of all kinds, at all levels, were shoplifting
with impunity, as if the one security guard on duty was out on a smoke break.
Stolen art can be laundered through auction houses and art dealers; police aren’t
trained to investigate art theft; and lawyers aren’t trained to prosecute
them. “Meanwhile, the criminal
network is international, sophisticated and organized,” Czegledi says.
Ten years ago when Knelman first met Czegledi,
tools to recover stolen art included Interpol’s stolen art database; the
International Council of Museum’s guidelines for the buying practices of
museums; the International Foundation for Art Research; and the Art Loss
Register.
For example, Knelman relates that a curator at the Royal Ontario
Museum was offered the chance to buy some Iraqi antiquities (the institution declined). This was after the National Museum of Iraq was looted in 2003 and about 25 years after Canada had signed the 1970 Convention barring importing stolen artwork across international borders.
Knelman points out that only a handful of detectives worldwide have
the expertise and training to investigate art thefts – from the pairs of police
officers located in Montreal and Los Angeles to the larger European squads in
England and Italy.
In
2005, Knelman’s published an article in The
Walrus, “Artful Crimes” which highlights art crime in Canada against an
increasingly global and transnational problem. But he wasn’t done with the story. Two years later, Knelman paid his own way to join cultural attorney Czegledi at
the International Ccouncil of Museum’s conference in Cairo. American prosecutor Rick St. Hilaire
guides him through Egyptian history of ancient art crimes and summarizes the
problem of smuggling of antiquities today which Knelman smartly summarizes in
his book. Knelman also meets Alain
Lacoursière, the police officer that initiated the study of art crime in Quebec,
while dodging an Egyptian conference organizer who demands the journalist pay a
higher rate on his hotel room – Knelman sleeps on the floor in another room to
avoid paying the organizer his cut.
By 2008, Knelman has a contract to write an investigative book on the
mysterious and increasingly violent black market for stolen art. He goes online to
find an art thief interviewed by the magazine Foreign Policy. He tracks down Paul
Hendry, a Brighton knocker who graduated to handling millions of dollars in
stolen paintings and antiques. “We
struck up what turned out to be a three-year conversation,” Knelman
writes. “We started to talk once,
twice, sometimes three times a week.”
“It was easy to
make a living from stealing art, according to Paul, if a thief made intelligent
choices, if he stayed below a certain value mark – about $100,000. Less was better. Don’t steal a van Gogh. To someone who knew how to work the
system, the legitimate business of fine art became a giant laundry machine for
stolen art. You could steal a
piece and sell it back into the system without anyone being the wiser.”
“It’s called
‘pass the hot potato,’” Paul told me.
“A dealer sells it on to the next dealer, and the next, until nobody
knows where it came from. It’s a
fantastic system! And that system
is the same wherever you are. It
doesn’t matter if you’re talking about London, New York or New Delhi,” he
explained. “Art is something you
have to think about as a commodity that goes round in circles. The only time it appears in the open is
when someone tries to filter it into the legitimate art market – auctions, art
fairs, gallery sales, dealers.
Otherwise it’s hidden away inside someone’s home.”
Hendry grew up in Brighton and
learned his outlaw trade as a “Knocker” who talked elderly residents out of their art and antiques. Since 1965 Sussex Police had been responding to a high
number of residential burglaries and created England’s first Art and Antiques
Squad that operated until 1989.
According to Paul, in the 1960s
Brighton closed down a large open-air market and built a huge shopping mall,
Churchill Square. Produce vendors
started going door to door, which created opportunities to buy “good
junk.” They became known as “knockers”.
Knockers sold
“junk” to antique dealers at a price higher than they had paid for it. Knocking turned into a devious game
that allowed thieves to peek at the inventory inside the houses of the upper
middle class.’
Hendry tells Knelman of his poor
and chaotic childhood, his training on the streets of crime, and how he hires
local men from the neighborhood bar to break into
homes and steal family treasures that Hendry can then sell.
The second part of this book review continues tomorrow.
illicit antiquities,illicit cultural property,illicit trade in antiquities,illicit trafficking,Rick St. Hilaire
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illicit antiquities,illicit cultural property,illicit trade in antiquities,illicit trafficking,Rick St. Hilaire
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