by Catherine Sezgin, ARCA Blog Editor
In 2008, as economic chaos grips
the bond markets and art prices continue to increase, Knelman interviews Donald Hrycyk of the Los Angeles Police Department; Richard Ellis,
former head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Squad; Julian Radcliffe of the
Art Loss Register; FBI Art Investigator Robert Wittman; Matthew Bogdanos who
led the recovery effort for antiquities looted from the National Museum of Iraq
in 2003; Giles Waterfield, the former director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery
who helped to recover “the Takeaway Rembrandt”; and Bob Combs, head of The Getty’s security.
Knelman finds cooperation with
Detective Hrycyk of the LAPD’s Art Theft Detail,
the nation’s only full-time municipal unit dedicated to investigating art-related
crimes. The detective discusses solved cases, methods of investigation, and takes Knelman to the evidence warehouse. Knelman recounts Hrycyk’s
background from patrolling the streets of South Central Los Angeles to the
detective’s patient and precise work investigating art thefts. In 2008, Hrycyk was training his
partner, Stephanie Lazarus, just as his former boss and mentor, Bill Martin, had
trained Hrycyk 1986 to 1989.
In Los Angeles
in the mid-1980s, art theft was a hidden crime, blending many different worlds. It cut across socio-economic lines and
could move in a heartbeat from blue-collar to white-collar criminals. A thug who knew nothing about art
except that it was valuable could steal a painting; that same afternoon, the
painting could wind up in the possession of an auction house; within the week
or the month, it could be sold to one of the Los Angeles art elite.
In addition to visiting art
galleries, auction houses, and museums, Hrycyk read the 1974 book by Laurie Adams, Art Cop, about the work of a former
undercover New York City narcotics officer, Robert Volpe, who was probably the
first detective in North America to investigate art theft full-time. Knelman writes:
Volpe’s
investigations included burglaries, robberies, and consignment frauds – when an
artist or patron would lend a piece of work to a gallery and the gallery would
vanish or refuse to return the art.
He believed that art theft in New York in the 1970s had reached the same
stage as narcotics a decade earlier.
Hrycyk tells Knelman that the
unregulated art world (just like the drug dealers Hrycyk arrested for years) relied
upon a code of ethics where not asking for information seems to be part of that
world’s business practices. Buyers
and sellers of art use middlemen just as drug dealers do. “It is considered rude to ask questions
about the provenance of an artwork – who owned it, where it came from. Embarrassment is often one of the
leading factors for secrecy,” Hrycyk tells Knelman.
Martin retired in 1992 but it
wasn’t until two years later that Hrycyk returned to the Art Theft Squad to work
with a rotating string of partners until he chose Lazarus to train in
2006. Hot Art opens with a chapter on a ride-a-long with Hrycyk and
Lazarus to the crime scene at an antiques store on La Cienega and recounts the
detectives’ investigation. A year
later, Lazarus would be arrested for the murder of her ex-boyfriend’s wife and
this year she was convicted of the crime.
Hrycyk, one of the most senior officers of the LAPD, has no successor to
continue the investigative work built upon two decades of contacts in the art
market.
Knelman’s sister, a student at
the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, introduces her brother to her thesis
advisor Giles Waterford who had been the curator at the Dulwich Picture Gallery
in 1981 when “the takeaway Rembrant” was stolen for the third time. Rembrant’s very small painting titled Jacob de Gheyn III is an example of
“Headache art” which attracts significant media attention. Waterfield recounts his negotiations
with a German businessman for a “Finder’s Fee” that leads to the recovery of
the painting.
Paul "Turbo" Hendry tells Knelman
that ‘there was one detective in London, in particular, who made his reputation
dealing with headache art cases’, Richard Ellis, the man who re-started
Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad.
As a detective,
Ellis had been involved in a number of high-profile cases, including reclaiming
a Vermeer from a criminal organizer in a chase that lasted seven years and
spanned half a dozen countries.
That case was chronicled thoroughly in The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art, by Mathew Hart.
Ellis’ interest in art theft
began with the burglary of his parents’ home in 1972 and the subsequent
recovery of his family’s property at the Bermondsey Market, London’s
Friday-only open market of junk and antiques. Ironically, Ellis was never allowed to work on the
Philatelic Squad that evolved from investigating crimes in the stamp market to
the unregulated antiques industry that operated as Scotland Yard’s first Art
and Antiques Squad. Knelman recounts
Ellis’ strategy of reopening the department in 1989 after it had been closed
for five years. Ellis cases included the recovery of paintings stolen from the
Russborough house in 1986; the 1994 recovery of Edvard Munch’s The Scream stolen from Norway’s National
Gallery; and Jonathan Tokeley-Parry’s smuggling of antiquities out of Egypt in
the 1990s. Knelman writes:
For Ellis, the
Russborough case provided the link between stolen art and organized crime,
diamond dealers, and a network that stretched across Europe. The Schultz case, which involved 14
countries on four continents, proved that the stolen art network was
sophisticated and involved criminals at all levels of the trade, from the men
who dig in the dirt to the men in the shops and galleries on Madison Avenue.
Ellis retired
from Scotland Yard in 1999. ‘He
told me that his success as a stolen-art detective was primarily due to his
ability to gather information. He
relied on a network of informants to keep him abreast of what was happening in
the criminal underworld. His squad
of detectives paid cash for useful information. “Every Friday the calls would come in. Payday,” Ellis explained.
Book review concludes tomorrow.
Diana Widmaier-Picasso,Robert Wittman
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Diana Widmaier-Picasso,Robert Wittman
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